Notes: This fic has become an absolutely unrelenting plotbunny. Let me know what you think, if you like.
T.A. 2460
It has become tradition. Thranduil returns to the seashore every century to commemorate his father's passing. Tauriel always finds him; somehow she knows he is near. When he reaches the coastline, he sees the joyful splash in the distance, knowing it is her.
Whether it is because he returns to the exact place each time or if she is attuned to his presence, Thranduil cannot say. He is certain, however, that she anticipates these meetings as much as he.
"I know you are there." His voice rings out over the waves. The top of her head breaches the surface. Soon enough, she is half out of the water and her long, wet hair hides her torso from his gaze. Rocking sinuously with the ocean, Tauriel meets his gaze directly. He drinks in the vision she presents—in the sunset she burns golden.
"Mae govannen!" She cries. She lets herself be washed ashore where he meets her and scoops her into his arms. He bears her to a spot just past the tideline where they lay beside each other but do not touch. He tells her he is now made king.
"Amon Lanc is the pride of the woodland realm," He says emphatically. Her smile is indulgent, much to his exasperation. He does not know how to make her understand.
Before he can continue, she cuts him off. "Shall I tell you of the forest where I dwell? It is not unlike yours."
Thranduil falls silent. Tauriel has never been one to speak long of the depths from whence she came. In his mind, the ocean floor is a foreboding place that even light cannot reach. He imagines her emerald scales glinting amid the darkness. She says the mighty kelp forests are shelter for a plethora of sea-creatures. There is fondness there. There is also a longing for something more.
It is why she is here with him, gazing at the silver moon.
"…Would you like to see it?" Tauriel whispers eventually. Thranduil frowns.
"It is not possible."
"No harm will come to you." She ghosts the tips of her fingers over his leather vambrace. He restrains the impulse to shiver at her lightest touch. "You know this."
He says nothing for a long while. The Edain who make their living at sea have many a song about sirens that lure Men to their deaths, his kin too are familiar with these songs. In all the time he has known Tauriel, never once did he fear for his life; yet there are times when her eyes flash and her smile becomes sharper than a knife's edge. She is not one to cross. Perhaps no harm will come to him because she is in fact the most dangerous thing in the entire ocean.
He trusts her. Perhaps it is folly to believe her claim.
"Whither shall thou lead?" His pulse leaps with sudden panic. Why does he obey her without question?
Once he brings her back to the water, Tauriel disappears into the waves. He disrobes as he walks toward his rucksack to leave his garments in a heap there. The night wind is cold against his bare skin and the water even colder when he takes his first tentative steps in.
Submerged to the waist, outright shaking and half-numb, Thranduil has no time to gasp before he is yanked roughly downward. The sensation of full immersion is jarring and he flails before he realizes that she is holding his hand and laughing at his reaction.
He glares at her but she does not see it. Together they make their way to the edge where the sand drops into a bottomless abyss. It is precisely what he imagined and not—he did not expect the silence to comfort him. He is entranced by the way her body navigates the currents, by the graceful arch of her back as she swims ahead of him.
As they descend, the filtered moonlight continually lessens until he cannot see at all. In the darkness, he relinquishes his kingship and its thousand burdens. Take it from me, please. It travels from his closed lips pressed against hers in a kiss. He can only feel her as she draws him closer in her arms. They are suspended in the obscurity—straddling the line between reality and imagination.
When they part, he pulls away with a gasp.
Thranduil finds himself on the shore, his naked chest heaving with the memory of the way the nymph's lips felt upon his. He returns to the Greenwood and the life he knows, to Glawardis and her constancy. She is the embodiment of the most precious starlight. They are wed not long after. It is quite some time before he thinks of glittering emerald scales and the elegant sweep of auburn hair beneath the water.
He does not travel west for centuries. His son is born and he cannot bear to leave the Eryn Galen, not even to mourn his father. There is life in the Greenwood now, Thranduil rejoices in it. The encroaching Shadow from the south has not yet taken root, though he feels its inevitability. He loves Glawardis, and their child, but sometimes in the lonely hours of the night, he hears the song of the sea.
On the brink of sleep, Thranduil holds his wife close but dreams of auburn hair with strings of gleaming pearls woven through it and knife-edge smiles. Of a kiss half-realized and forgotten. He wonders if she mourns his absence—if he haunts her as she does him.
His son is born that year. They name him Legolas and raise him among the beauty of the woodland. It is a long time before he remembers who awaits him on the other edge of the world. He goes to the river alone when time allows and bends to dip his palm into the rushing water.
Nên vêr a lalaith veren n'i a-govenim.
The words are carried by the river from the Greenwood into the West, where he hopes she will catch them as they drift into the raging seas.
Sindarin translations (from realelvish dot net)
Nên vêr a lalaith veren n'i a-govenim – Sweet water and joyous laughter until we next meet.