The War of Light and Shadow

By Freddie23

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Disclaimer: I own nothing Tolkien created.

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Chapter 39 – Recapturing The Light

"You need to try to eat this," Aragorn persisted for the third time, holding out the wooden bowl and spoon he had been handed just moments before by a Man of Rohan who'd been rather annoyed that he'd been reduced to serving the young Ranger and his irritable guardian.

Legolas let his head fall back to rest against the soft pile of jackets propped up against the wall acting as a pillow and wearily objected, "I'm really not hungry."

"Maybe not but you still have to eat to regain your strength. Legolas, come on, you haven't eaten anything for days."

The Elf sighed, his eyes falling closed for a beat. He was so very tired. What Aragorn said made sense logically but he just didn't feel like he had enough energy to do much of anything. He just wanted to sleep, or in lieu of that he would settle for simply lying there immobile until the bad feeling passed over him and he felt more like himself again.

Aragorn seemed to have other ideas for the duration of his recovery though. Ever since Legolas had finally woken and croakily requested a sip of water, the man had done nothing but fuss over him. Feeling drained as he did, Legolas really just wanted to be left alone in spite of all of Aragorn's good intentions. And eating was certainly not on his mind. Nausea still fluttered faintly in the pit of his stomach, increased by the mere prospect of consuming the dark broth the Rohan cooks had prepared.

"Legolas, would you please stop being stubborn and take a bite of this."

The Elf smiled weakly as Aragorn held out some of the thick broth on a spoon for him. Then he gently pushed the man's hand back down, ignoring the frustrated sigh his ward released at the action. In a whisper, Legolas confessed, "I'm not sure I could keep anything down right now. Maybe later."

Giving in at last, Aragorn laid the bowl down on the floor. He couldn't force Legolas into doing something he obviously really didn't want to do. "Alright."

"Is he being a nuisance again?" Kinnale grinned knowingly, coming over to the pair.

"I'm only repaying the favour," Aragorn smiled in return. "Remember how he fussed over me the last time I was injured? Never left my side. Made sure I did all the things I hated to aid my recovery."

"Ah, now he does have a valid point there, Legolas."

The Elf nodded shortly, regretting his previous overprotectiveness towards his young ward now. "I suppose this is all my own fault then."

"Seems like," Kinnale chuckled as he crouched down at Legolas' side. Turning slightly more serious, the Ranger asked him, "How do you feel?"

"Much better, thank you."

"Glad to hear it. We've missed your expertise overseeing the clean-up." Legolas smiled again, his eyes blinking more lethargically now. "But the important thing is that you get yourself well again," the man added quickly as though suspecting that the Elf was planning to leap up from his bed and begin hauling supplies around the Deep. He patted Legolas on the shoulder gently, wary of causing discomfort.

"I'll try my very best to get back to it as quickly as possible," Legolas breathed weakly in response.

"Right." Kinnale seemed relieved that his slip had been covered, for the way Aragorn was glaring at him made him uneasy. "Well, there's lots to do still around the Keep. Come on, Aragorn, let's leave your weary guardian to sleep in peace for a while."

"But I was going to stay for…" Aragorn started but was silenced when Kinnale clapped him hard on the back.

"Yes, come on. Time to go."

"Go, Aragorn. You have been cooped up in here for days. Go out and get some fresh air," Legolas encouraged with a pathetic attempt at a smile.

Unsure, Aragorn looked to Kinnale and the Ranger rolled his eyes at the boy. "I'll get Janor to pop by in a few minutes, how's that?"

Legolas smiled again as he shifted to get more comfortable. This small look of reassurance from his injured guardian was enough to convince Aragorn – even though he really was not given any other choice – and he nodded.

"Alright, fine." Aragorn too got to his feet, taking with him the untouched food – waste could not be abided when supplies were woefully scarce. "You'll shout if you need anything at all?"

"Yes."

"Promise?"

Another faint smile crossed Legolas' pale lips and he answered, "Yes, Aragorn. I promise," without bothering to open his eyes this time.

"Sleep well," Kinnale called behind him almost cheerfully as he herded Aragorn out the door before he could change his mind and turn back to his vigil.

Alone now, Legolas let awareness slide away from him in the silence. Aside from still being desperately weary, there was also a part of him that believed – or rather, hoped – that if he could just get back to that state of pure rest then he could regain that wonderfully peaceful feeling he had experienced once before. He so badly wanted to look again upon that cosy room he had dreamt of, to feel that ethereal presence close by that had brought him so much peace for such a brief amount of time. Even though he wasn't honestly expecting to experience such a wonderful dream again, he clung to the hope as he fell asleep and slipped away from the cold, cruel world of Arda.

OIOI

Unfortunately, by the time Legolas was dragged back from his deep sleep, he only recalled of the hours only darkness; no further dreams of ethereal, enigmatic figures or fine and familiar rooms.

Blinking the remnants of sleep from his eyes, Legolas turned his head just enough to blearily search around the room for whatever noise had disturbed him from his rest. Perhaps not surprisingly given the young man's clinginess, the source of the disturbance was in fact Aragorn moving around none too quietly. Heavy Human footsteps on the flagstones and sensitive Elven hearing did not bode well for sleep.

Legolas shifted up on his makeshift bed, having slipped down from the half-propped-up position he had fallen asleep in, then cleared his throat to announce his waking to his ward.

"You're up!" Aragorn exclaimed when he realised that his guardian was indeed awake and watching him.

"How long did I sleep?" the Elf asked around a wide yawn.

"Quite a while." The man smiled broadly, as though Legolas' waking was more important than whatever inane task he had been distracting himself, and he dutifully abandoned whatever he had been doing so noisily and came to kneel in his now familiar position on the floor beside his guardian. "Did you sleep well?"

"Yes." Thankfully, Legolas didn't feel that his admittedly still rather weak voice betrayed his private disappointment at not being allowed the kind of peace in his dreams that he remembered and subsequently longed for.

"Do you want to try eating something now?"

Although Legolas sighed at the proposition of food, making Aragorn think that he might object again, the Elf nevertheless nodded his consent, however reluctant it may have been.

With a relieved smile at the answer he had been hoping for, the man leapt to his feet without another word and dashed from the room to get some food for his guardian almost as if the task were a matter of life and dead. Meanwhile, Legolas rested, gingerly laying his hand across his stomach, which still churned ominously at the very thought of ingesting food but he didn't want to disappoint his worried young ward any further. Perhaps Aragorn was correct in his assumption that he would feel better after eating something. If he got back even a tiny amount of the energy he had lost through this illness then it would all be worth it. He'd never felt so completely drained before; even the small movements he had been attempting since coming out of his fever-induced sleep were a monumental chore. This lack of strength was by far more incapacitating than the pain caused by his healing wound. In fact, he thought that he would have preferred the pain to the weakness – such was his nature. His lips quirked upwards into a small smile when he imagined how Aragorn would respond to that if ever he heard it. The man would be outraged. But then, Aragorn had never understood him – not really, no matter how hard he had tried to throughout his childhood.

"I just brought you some porridge oats to start with," Aragorn started as he walked back into the room, carrying a shallow wooden bowl filled with steaming hot food. "I thought perhaps a thick broth would be too much too soon, you know, considering..."

"This is fine," Legolas assured softly, taking the bowl Aragorn handed to him.

Eating was, as Legolas had suspected it would be from the very moment Aragorn suggested it, a chore. And yet he ate every last scrap of what was given to him, aware of Aragorn's keen eyes watching his every move.

When finished, he handed Aragorn back the half-empty bowl and told his ward that he was going to sleep for a while longer and closed his eyes while Aragorn left him to rest. Tired and miserable, the Elf laid quietly waiting for sleep to come to him again, once again with the nagging voice in the back of his head that longed for the peaceful scene he had recently enjoyed.

OIOI

"Legolas?" A gentle hand shook Legolas' shoulder just hard enough to wake him. The Elf tried to shuffle away from the annoying disturbance but it was in vain for there was nowhere to go and the hand stubbornly remained on his arm. "Wake up," a distant voice persisted. "Legolas?"

With what seemed like a greater effort than ever before, Legolas eventually managed to open his eyes to find Kinnale leaning over him, concern shining through on his earnest face. Blinking lethargically, Legolas realised that it must now have been night time as only candles lit the small room rather than the dull grey light of the day that had bleached the stone before. "What?" he mumbled grumpily, raising one thin hand to his face, wondering why on earth someone would be shaking him awake in the middle of the night when any civilised person should be tucked up in bed. Unless of course… "Is Aragorn alright?" he asked suddenly, heart pounding hard in his chest at the possibility that something had happened to his ward as he had slept.

"Yes, Aragorn is fine," Kinnale replied quietly, recognising and immediately squashing the Elf's panic. Laying his hand once more on Legolas' shoulder, Kinnale added, "You were talking in your sleep again. You seemed…disturbed."

"Oh." Legolas looked down at his hand then with a frown as he saw wetness glistening on his fingers, transferred, it seemed, from his face where it had rested for a moment in his panic. Tears. He had been crying in his sleep. Self-consciously turning his face away from the man at his side, Legolas hastily wiped at the remaining tracks on his face with the sleeve of his shirt. His cheeks flushed with embarrassment at being caught in such a vulnerable state by the Ranger. Never once had he cried before Aragorn and there was no one in this world anymore that he considered himself closer to. If he would not allow Aragorn to see him thusly than Kinnale could not be allowed to either. It infuriated him somewhat that he still could not simply get up and stride away as he was want.

"You were dreaming?" Kinnale asked, seemingly oblivious to the Elf's discomfort at his presence.

"Yes, I suppose so," answered Legolas, blinking his eyes to clear them of the remaining tears then looking back to Kinnale. The man was pouring water from a canteen into a metal cup when Legolas asked hesitantly, "Was I…? Did I say anything…?"

"Don't worry; anything you said I couldn't have understood anyway." Kinnale knew what Legolas was getting at and was quick to put him at ease. And Legolas certainly did look relieved at the assurance. "Here, water," he said as he handed the cup to the Elf.

"Thank you." Legolas drained the cup slowly, grateful for the cool albeit stale water on his dry throat.

"Aragorn has gone to bed, in case you were wondering where he was." Truthfully, Kinnale was quite surprised that so far Legolas seemed not to have noticed the absence of his ward in the room. And, in response to the pre-emptive reassurance, Legolas merely nodded, clearly distracted. "We tired him out earlier with a full and perhaps unnecessarily thorough tour of the Deep."

"Good," was all the Elf came back with.

"Do you need anything else?"

"No thank you." Legolas laid the now empty cup on the floor beside his bed.

"Sure? Aragorn told me to encourage you to eat should you wake."

"I'm fine."

Looking down at the Elf, Kinnale asked after a long silence during which the Elf stared unblinkingly down at the blanket covering his lap, "Are you alright, Legolas?"

"Yes, of course."

"You seem a little distracted."

"No," Legolas smiled thinly, glancing up at the Ranger as if that small action would prove his resolve.

"Would you like me to fetch Aragorn for you?"

"No. Why would I?"

"Because you do not seem yourself, my friend."

Legolas shook his head softly and smiled as he dismissively replied, "My side is hurting a little, that's all."

"Oh. Well, then it is a healer you need."

"I don't need to see a healer," the Elf assured before Kinnale could dash from the room to summon a healer from where they presumably still treated patients in one of the main halls. The man did not look entirely convinced, even though he did stop in his mission to hear the protest out of respect. "Really, Kinnale. They'll just come in here, prod at me for a while then leave again once they have me feeling worse than before their intervention."

The man sighed hard in frustration. He did not like to think that his friend was feeling bad but he also knew that Legolas was most likely correct in his description of the healer's procedure. Whenever they visited, they simply changed the bandage wrapped around the Elf's middle and instructed him to rest; little help in the matter of Legolas' comfort. Not that either Kinnale or Legolas could really say anything too strong against their methods. It was lucky that they at least possessed a few herbs to fight the infection that raged through Legolas' body. Herbs that lessened the pain were non-existent.

"Alright," Kinnale finally conceded with another heavy sigh of displeasure. It was not like there was much else he could really do. Legolas was as comfortable on his pile of bedding as it was possible for him to be and his fussing would do nothing but irritate the already irritable Elf further than ever. "Alright, you just go back to sleep then," he said softly, slightly concerned by the Elf's increased pallor and his apparent detachment from the world and people around him.

Even as his eyes grew heavy again, Legolas quipped, "You are starting to sound like Aragorn."

Kinnale laughed openly at this, patting Legolas softly on the shoulder in a good-natured gesture. "Good to know."

Taking the blanket that had slid down the Elf's thin body so that it only covered his legs, Kinnale gently pulled it back up, preparing to tuck it around Legolas to keep him warm.

At the gesture, Legolas raised his hand wearily to stop the man. "You don't have to do that."

"Just be still and stop complaining," chastised the Ranger before he carefully wrapped the blanket around his friend to keep him warm. "It's killing you, isn't it? Being taken care of in this manner."

Legolas answered simply and truthfully through gritted teeth. "Yes."

"I thought so," Kinnale chuckled.

"You can't say that you wouldn't be the same in my position."

"True enough." Legolas' eyes were already closed by now, the Elf on the verge of sleep. "Rest well, my friend," Kinnale whispered, adjusting the blanket again before he settled in the chair in front of the fire for the rest of the night. Just before dawn, someone would come to relieve him of his watch. Taking turns in looking over the ailing Legolas had been Aragorn's suggestion after Kinnale had told him that he could not remain constantly in the room with the Elf. The Ranger had known that Aragorn would sit up all night, denying himself sleep in order to keep a watchful eye on his guardian. So they had organised shifts. So far though, Legolas had hardly been awake. He'd slept through all Janor's earlier watch, through most of Aragorn's shift and now through Kinnale's time as well. Still, the man thought as he settled down, perhaps that was for the best.

OIOI

His head was spinning dizzyingly and he had to cling to the wall simply to remain upright as he made his way slowly across the room, his legs constantly shaking and threatening to give way beneath him, as if in punishment for such a foolish act as leaving the comfort and safety of his bed whilst still in recovery. With the world shifting dangerously beneath his bare feet and his legs feeling increasingly and disconcertingly weak, Legolas took it slowly. Already his breathing was getting laboured from even the minimal exertion it took to put one foot in front of another in order to cross the small room of Helm's Deep.

"What do you think you are you doing?" an annoyed voice demanded to know from the doorway and Legolas immediately recognised it to be the stern tones of his ward and he sighed at getting caught in the act of such blatant disobedience. "You shouldn't be walking around, Legolas!." The voice trilled in reprimand.

Secretly pleased when Aragorn finally hurried across the room to support him, Legolas breathlessly reasoned, "I know I shouldn't."

Slipping his arm through Legolas' arm to steady him and take some of his weight off his trembling legs, Aragorn asked, "Where are you going then?"

"Bathroom."

"You should have asked someone to help you," the man admonished severely, speaking to his centuries-old mentor as if he was but a child.

"Do you see anyone around?" Legolas braced one hand against the wall to further steady himself as he took another faltering step forward.

Giving in, Aragorn nevertheless rolled his eyes at the stubbornness of his guardian. "Fine. It's just down the hall; I'll help you."

The corridor, deserted as it was, was negotiated with relative ease much to Legolas' relief.

"Alright," Legolas breathed when they reached the door to the bathroom, "wait out here."

"I'm not sure it's wise to leave you alone."

"Don't start with me, Aragorn; I'm fine."

"In case you haven't noticed you can barely stand on your own."

Legolas couldn't help but chuckle at this endlessly frustrating role reversal, remembering how he had insisted on escorting him in a very similar situation not so long ago. He also recalled that Aragorn had won that particular argument.

As if he too had just remembered that as well and thought better of his protestations now, Aragorn sighed in defeat then slowly removed his arm from around Legolas.

"I'll wait out here for you."

By the time Legolas had taken care of his body's demands, he was more than ready to return to his comfortable bed. He allowed Aragorn to support him back to his own room and, once there, sat down with a heavy breath of relief. Such a short walk should not have left him exhausted and gasping for breath. He was an Elf, blessed, supposedly, with the ability to heal faster than any Man and yet now it seemed to be taking him an age to recover. He felt as if he had been trapped within those four small walls for months, although he knew realistically that it hadn't been more than a week since Kinnale had helped him to the room in lieu of finding a healer in the chaos of the after battle.

"The healers reckon that the wound you sustained got infected," Aragorn explained pointlessly as Legolas settled back on his nest of blankets. "They say you'll need to rest for some time before you're fully recovered.

"Yes," Legolas agreed, leaning back gratefully.

"But you are going to be fine."

"I know."

"Just so long as you rest and do as you're told."

Legolas smiled at this and asked, "Are you trying to make a point here, Aragorn?"

Aragorn quirked a frown in his direction and quipped, "Yes, as a matter of fact." He softened the tone with a smile. "I'm only saying that if you want to get better then you have to put that stubborn streak that runs right through your heart out of your mind and let people help you."

"I am doing so already."

"Begrudgingly," Aragorn noted with a glare.

"The manner in which I do it must surely be irrelevant to my recovery. The point is that I am doing it. Following orders."

"Good. But you have to continue. I need you well."

Legolas chuckled softly at the command, hesitant though it was.

"What's so funny?" the young man demanded when he saw the smirk on his mentor's face.

Laughing shortly, Legolas replied, "It's just that you sounded very much like a commander just then."

"Oh." Aragorn's cheeks flared red in embarrassment, unsure as to whether Legolas meant this as a compliment or not.

Sensing his confusion, Legolas smiled again, still not opening his eyes, which had fallen shut almost as soon as he'd laid down. "I meant it as a good thing, Aragorn. Irritating but…good progress."

"Does that mean that you're going to listen to me?"

"As best I can."

"Good enough for me."

By this time though, Legolas had fallen back to sleep. But for the first time, Aragorn felt truly trusted by his guardian. With a proud smile, the boy replaced the blanket over Legolas and moved away.

To Be Continued…

I know, I know, it's short and it's shameless Legolas angst. I just couldn't help myself – getting inside Legolas' head whilst he's lying there helpless… Next chapter will be back on track though. I promise.