Author's Notes: Hi all! Hope the beginning of summer finds you well! Here's a new chapter for you! Just a gentle reminder: this story has been tagged with "Graphic Depictions of Violence" for a reason. This chapter, in particular, deals with moderately detailed arrow extraction.

Chapter 24: The Grey Road

Ori led him for what felt like leagues—through a warren of passages Elrohir, continually reining in his pace to match his host's, noted nothing of—until they came to a less lofty hall. Arches of white stone fanned upward like swans' wings. A spray of flameless lamps pressed away the shadows, blushing their pillars in a rosy glow. The floor was veined and threaded with marble of an unusual seagreen.

Elrohir hated it at once and violently.

The Hall of Heroes in Imladris had been built of such stone. So, too, Ráth Dínen in Gondor. White was vile in a place of healing. He could not forgive its dedication to elegy.

At a door halfway down Ori halted. "Your companion is in better hands than could have been hoped. We had not had a healer in some time. Our folk are adept at many things, but mending hurts… We were fortunate to stumble across a wanderer who was willing to lend his skill for shelter. I am told he is of some consequence away West…"

Elrohir, the words washing without meaning over him, made some noise of acknowledgement and waited until Ori's footsteps had faded back the way they had come.

For all the light in the hall without, shadows encroached the chamber within: a lone brazier guttering in a corner.

Haldir had been settled in a low bed, still in his boots—they had obeyed Elrohir's order at least and left the arrow. He lay quiet, his gaze vacant and out of focus. Every so often one of his legs would give a swimming sort of twitch, and his breathing labored so heavily, had he been a stranger on the battlefield, Elrohir would have covered him over and let him slip, untroubled, into Mandos' care.

Rammas was sitting by the bedside, wringing a cloth into a bowl, as if the act alone might shackle Haldir's spirit to its damaged house. "I didn't want to leave him by himself."

"Why was he left at all?" Elrohir thundered, pinched by the entombing silence. "Where's the Dwarves' leech?"

"He's only just—"

"I'm here," said a voice at his shoulder.

A familiar voice.

Aragorn brushed past with a bundle in his arms. He hung a lamp beside the bed and spread an array of instruments on a table. Tools and tinctures he arranged side by side, each within easy reach, in exactly the order they might be needed.

No apparition had ever left Elrohir reeling so off-balance. He leaned against the doorframe to reassure himself of its solidity.

"Estel. You're here."

Aragorn lifted his gaze from his work and, for a moment, the brother looked at him out of the healer's face. "Elrohir. I am gladder than I can say to see you on your legs. I will need your help." His attention was all for Haldir. Reunions would wait.

"We have been searching for you."

"I know."

"Have you been here? All this time? What happened after the dale?"

"I know you have questions. But right now." He gestured to the instruments. "We are well-equipped to extract the arrow even if the Dwarves' herbalism leaves much to be desired. The poppy's not—"

A touch at his wrist—though utterly forceless—cut off Aragorn's words as if he himself had been arrow-struck. Haldir was aware and struggling to speak though the tightness about his lips betrayed the effort it cost him.

"—moss on your face."

"And hail and well-met to you, gwador." Grinning, Aragorn brushed the scruff at his chin. Better that than the instruments with their viscera-splitting edges. "What? I thought you found me fetching with a bit of beard."

Haldir's wandering gaze focused, hardened. "You fool. Stupid…thoughtless…chasing Raguk and—"

"You can chide me later, my dear. You mustn't talk now."

"Rocheryn is dead…betrayed…The Eyrie…We're running out of time."

Aragorn gave him a swift, furtive look under his lids. Some scale between them was weighed and discarded. "What would you have me do?"

"Elrohir. Protect him. He needs…more looking after… than he…knows..." He coughed, spattering rose-tinged spittle across the pillow. "You must promise me."

"You will see to that promise yourself. I'll make none if it contents you. Now: be silent. That's an order."

Haldir subsided. His skin had gone the mottled color of wet marble, and a blue shadow lurked at his lips. His face was full of waiting.

"I promise," Aragorn murmured in a voice that sought level ground. "Of course, I promise. So long as you remember the words you spoke to me on the deck of the Arnarak. Remember? Good."

Elrohir cleared his throat, breaking the sacred quiet. "He's not wrong. Time is pressing."

"Yes." Aragorn fetched up a pair of shears then paused with a sidelong glance across the bed.

Rammas snorted at such delicacy. "I have seen men without their modesty, Dúnadan—including this man. They hold no terror for me. Besides you may have need of more hands."

As they slit him free of tunic and breeches, even she of the iron stomach sucked in a low breath. The arrow wound was the worst of it, but he was cut in a hundred places, bruised in all the rest. The offhand was a mess from elbow to wrist.

Elrohir, shrugging out of his own surcoat and cuffing up his sleeves, strode to the washbasin in the corner. "She stays. Work enough for all."

For hours, they labored, the room thickening with sweat, the reek of poppy syrup, and the sickly iron tang of blood until their heads swam. Not only was the shaft itself embedded deep in a tricky place, the broadhead had hooked barbs that resisted them at every turn.

At first Aragorn had taken up the instruments, but he had stood so long and turned ashen as the one under their care, Elrohir plucked them from his fingers and bid him hold the light steady. Not for the first time he wished for Elladan's peerless presence. His brother had ever been their father's better pupil. Elrohir's own skill extended to splinting Elladan's shin once when his horse threw him or stitching his own wounds if had both hands free or triaging men in field tents where half were expected to die of their wounds anyway and helplessness, expected. Here, wreathed in the astringent sting of herbs and tinctures, he felt far out of his depth and did not dare tell Aragorn the last person he had attempted to save who had taken such a wound in so vital a place had been Aragorn's own father.

When longing for news overmastered their fear, the others came, flitting along the periphery of Elrohir's awareness: Calen, with arm splinted, set a cup of tea at his elbow where it went cold by degrees, undrunk. Angren asked for a report after midnight that Aragorn gave at the door in murmurs. Taereth did not enter but lingered like a sentry at the threshold. Rammas proved herself invaluable: fetching more coal for the brazier, wrapping probes in purified linen and rolling them in honey, lending her weight and strength when the poppy ran short.

At last Elrohir worked the final barb free, sawed it off a fingers breath below the shaft and dropped it into the cloth Aragorn held waiting. Arming sweat from his brow, he firmed his grip on a pair of pincers and squeezed them around the splintered ends of the shaft protruding from Haldir's back.

"Be ready."

He tugged.

Haldir made a strangled, grating noise and, blessedly, fainted.

As the shaft eased free, Aragorn thrust a cushion of tightly packed moss beneath Haldir's shoulder blades, and they eased him onto it, repeating the motion for the hole in his chest. Elrohir braced a knee on the bed and leaned down with all his weight. Warm wet squeezed up between his fingers. His palms slipped, and the thick coppery reek churned in his throat. A bead of sweat itched down the line of his neck, another trailing cold down his ribs.

"Hold pressure."

"I am."

The last tinge of color leeched from Haldir's skin. From the sheet beneath his shoulder a creeping crimson began to spread.

"It's not slowing."

"I know."

Aragorn fetched up the cloth that held the broadhead, brought it briefly to his nose and grimaced. "Dung. The arrow's tainted."

"What?" Elrohir lifted his head to meet Aragorn's horrified eyes—for half a breath—and the heartbeat laboring against his fingers stuttered then stopped.

No. No. No-no-no-no. Clenching his fingers into a fist, Elrohir delivered a single, sharp blow to Haldir's sternum then groped for a clammy wrist. Only a cool rush met his seeking fingers. For a rocking, dizzying moment, like the drop between wake and sleep, the hair spilling across the pillow glinted with more silver amid the gold. The strong-jawed face softened. The bones curved delicate. The hands, lying loose on top of the counterpane, lost their calluses, shaped to ply themselves to harpstrings and embroidery over the sword.

The house stood empty, its inhabitant loosed.

Aragorn was looking at him, waiting. "Why did you stop?"

"Estel."

"No. Do not say my name like that."

"He is dead."

The word dropped from his lips like a stone into a still pool, the ripple of it slow to reach across the bed where Aragorn stood. As it broke over him, he blinked and shook his head as if Elrohir had swung a weight into his jaw. "But…that cannot be."

"It is, I'm afraid."

"He gave his word. You heard him. He would not go back on his word." The lamp lurched wildly as Aragorn leaned over the bed. "Do you hear me? You will not break your word to me."

"Estel—"

Neither words nor reason would reach him. He shouldered Elrohir aside, pressing hard over the soaked linen even though the bleeding had already stopped. Whirling, he snatched an ember from the brazier and thrust it against Haldir's ribs, sending up a stench of scorched linen and flesh. Then he simply cradled the limp cheek against his own, whispering a linnod over and over.

The figure on the bed did not rise to provocation or plea. It lay in its blood-soaked sheets, defiantly inert, a sliver of iris darkening beneath a drooping, pallid lid. It would resist corruption long—the hroar of Elves always did, for better or worse—but the essence, the fëa, had gone where they could not follow.

Borne down at last by the echoing, endless silence, Aragorn sank into a chair.

Elrohir disentangled the Captain's surcoat and gathered it over his arm. He left the tarnished instruments. He had no wish to touch anything with an edge. He walked out into the hall. The sweat under his arms and on his brow chilled almost at once.

He breathed. He walked.

The others had arranged themselves in a side room where a bright fire had been laid. Glasses. Food. Barely touched. Rammas was holding a damp cloth to Angren's cheek, the silgol sat with eyes averted and hands clasped loose between his knees. At Elrohir's appearance they all rose, faces lifted in silent, anxious expectation. The cloth slipped from Rammas' fingers and spattered her boots with droplets, darkening the leather. She did not bend to retrieve it.

He walked. The world was all snowfall, blanketed in quiet. He could not summon words through it. If he moved too fast in one direction or the other, he would slip and cut himself on some unseen edge. He lived still, he reminded himself sternly. He did not have to follow the departed into the dark.

A water closet stood at the end of the corridor. A wonder of Dwarvish invention Elrohir was too exhausted to appreciate properly save for its closed door. Wishing for work that was not keeping life in an ebbing body, he filled the tub from the pump, took up a sliver of lard soap, and commenced scrubbing the bloodstains from the surcoat.

Flecks of red drying brown crusted his hands and underneath his nails. He scrubbed at them, then his knuckles and wrists and forearms—the wool sinking from his grasp—until they were scoured raw.

In the wake of the surcoat, the water lapped and curled around the edges of the tub, smoothing, wave by wave, into a sheet of silver glass.

Come, he willed. You are not gone. Not like that, damn you. I'm not finished being angry.

But the water kept its own council. Only Elrohir's own face gazed back at him, hollow-eyed and forlorn.

He fetched up the ewer and heaved it with all his strength. It burst against the wall in a shower of splinters and spent runnels. He wanted to crack the tiles. To dam and drown the room. He pressed his hot and aching forehead against the lip of the tub and waited for the roof to tumble down, longing for the release of tears that would not come.

Someone tapped on the door, but he did not answer, and they did not enter.

Eventually, he gathered up the remains of the ewer. He kept finding shards, in and under the hip bath, between the gap of wall and door. One of his fingers slipped, and a spark of pain lanced along the pad of his thumb. A bead of blood welled up, grounding him.

He sat back on his heels, aching from cuts seen and unseen. The indemmar's warnings always came too late.

The indemmar…

Porcelain scattered under his heels as he jerked the door open and hurtled down the corridor.

Haldir's body had been composed, the blankets drawn up. Someone had pressed his eyelids closed. It looked strange and wrong, almost as much as the absolute stillness of a face that, even at its most guarded, had retained its liveliness: the boldness of a wild idea sparking in his eyes; his lip curling in that silent laugh; his head canting to tease or challenge…

Aragorn had not stirred from his vigil. At the sound of Elrohir's step, he clutched tighter at the sheets as if fearing someone might drag him away. So, too, had the little boy clutched at his mother's cloak as he crossed the Bruinen all those years ago: fatherless, hunted, caught off-guard by the world's unjust caprice. He would take root there, if allowed.

"Move," Elrohir said.

Unkind to hurry him at such an hour, but the one thing a soldier could be relied upon to heed was a direct order.

Aragorn moved. He was a good soldier.

Elrohir took his place, gathered up one of the limp, still-warm hands in one of his own. The other he rested on the waxy brow. What he sought to attempt now was unheard of, impossible. To say nothing of how dangerously it flirted with what the Law allowed, he had only ever seen it done with the Elessar augmenting the healer's native power. But the ember burning in the back of his mind would not be extinguished by doubt. He shut his eyes and let out a long, slow, deep breath.

Almost at once, he grew light and airy, his flesh loosed, as if he were a leaf fluttering from a bough and skirting the skin of a wide river. The current snatched and tumbled him along farther from shore…

…then farther…

When he opened his eyes, he stood in a woodland glade.

All about and above him branches, laden with the fullness of summer leaves, heaved and danced, dappling the ground with an interplay of feinting light and darting shadow. The sun did not warm his face. A dove alighted on a branch within an owl's silence. He had slipped over the boundary between the Seen and Unseen, himself the indemma, the spirit inhabiting, but unable to touch the world he found himself in.

He was not alone.

A young elf-man and woman stood together where the ground cover had risen almost to their knees. The woman, whose hair gave back the light in glints like tree-shaded water, was wearing a rut through the niphredil, her skirts whipping off their blowsy heads, fists clenched at her girdle against some hidden pain.

For his part, the youth stood almost at attention, the oak to her windy rushing. He was clad all in grey; his boots and belt buckle gleamed. Though he strove to put forth a soldierly bearing, his face lacked the authoritative chiseling maturity would bestow, and uncertainty revealed itself in the fingers worrying the uncreased leather of his swordbelt.

A greenling soldier, then, fresh from enlistment and eager to display the change in fortunes to his—

Elrohir gaped.

Celebrían whirled round and—with a girl's whim—flung herself into her soldier's arms, burying her tears against his neck where his forelocks hung, loose, without the distinction of rank.

Haldir untangled her from him, gently, and stroked the wet from her cheeks, all smiling reassurance.

The glade slipped and changed.

Ramparts loomed out of the mists, jutting against a sour, yellow sky. Every elf-child born after the Third Age, even if they had stepped no further than their own threshold and knew not one day of war, had those battlements engrained in their earliest memories from stories told in the Hall of Fire, by tapestries hanging in the Hall of Heroes. Even dressed in nothing more threatening than linen and embroidery, the Morannon, the gate that guarded the haunted pass into the Enemy's lands, commanded fear.

The massive, iron-tipped gates had been thrown down, twisted out of true.

Haldir sat with his back against them, the uniform in which he had taken such cautious pride fouled with mud, his sleeves sodden to the elbows with gore. The hollow attention he gave his surrounds bespoke a soldier too numb with exhaustion to concern himself overmuch with his peril.

One by one, as the horizon burned away, marsh lights wisped into life.

A silver flame bobbed out of their midst, somehow more real than its neighbors. Wreathed in its halo, Rammas came up the slope, hoisted Haldir to his feet, and with a hand on his shoulder guided him around the fool-fires.

The landscape slipped again and reformed, briefer and farther apart now. The realm of the Unseen obeyed neither the order of time nor distance, following its own trails.

Smoke belched from a black mouth in the face of the mountains, the first wisps extending to the edges of a familiar golden treeline. And wheresoever it touched, mallorn leaf and pale niphredil curled and withered.

Elrohir saw himself and Elladan sparring with wasters a touch too heavy for their yet-weedy limbs. The waters of a nearby fountain glittered with sunlight and recent rains.

Brief but very vivid: two dim figures lay entwined on a bed, moonlight blowing across the woman's bare shoulders and spreading hair as she lifted herself amid the cast-off sheets, Uinen, Lady of the Seas, rising over the torn sails of a shipwreck.

An Orc collapsed in a hollow of snow, lips stretched back in an unheard howl, his hand a pulpy mess of blood and torn flesh and splintered bone. A queer light sprang up at the lip of the hollow behind him: a crimson and emerald storm.

Haldir, again. More recognizable now than the uncertain youth. He knelt in the glade once more, bereft of its summer bounty and fortified by a double rank of trees. A white stair, treacherous with ice, curved up over his shoulder to a platform high amid the boughs. He was alone. Such emptiness did not belong in living eyes. Blood drops dappled the frozen niphredil.

Then sky and ground snapped together like a falling branch. Direction and dimension crumpled into flat nothing. No time. No sense of place. Disoriented, Elrohir groped forward, waiting for the plunge in his stomach that would herald an edge.

He stumbled onto the verge of a road, if it was a road. Its form and shape eluded him as if he were trying to catch a person's face out of the corner of his eye. A current teased his hair, the first thing he had felt in all this wandering landscape. It flowed past him, tugging his weary legs forward. A hollow drone murmured in his ear: come, rest. He longed to obey its gentle command. His next footfall almost settled on the first of the pale grey stones. He lurched back, fighting to anchor himself against the current.

Too far afield, wanderer. Some roads suffered no returning.

But he had found what he sought.

Haldir was standing at its confluence, a silver light falling about him. He gazed down the strange road as one hesitates over a garden path passed many times but never ventured. Where does it lead? To what end?

"Go back," Elrohir called or tried to.

The current whipped the words from his lips and hurled them down the night road. He opened his mouth to call out again, and all at once, without warning, a pressure surged through his head, centered in his chest until his ears rang. He almost collapsed, but a strength that was not his own straightened his shoulders, unbent his spine. He took a firmer step away from the road, out of the current's reach.

"I know you are weary." His words thrust themselves across the emptiness. It sounded like his voice; yet, he did not speak. So might a reed hum in a breeze, merely the instrument from which the air pulled its music. "The Road calls, but it is not your time. Not yet, beloved. Your oath holds you still, and other bonds yet stronger. Not until all has been surrendered will you find your peace. That is the price—and the guerdon."

The pressure lifted. As Elrohir sagged forward, the current surged, catching at his legs. The world lost its definition and edges, paling about him, tinged with foggy-green. Haldir lifted his head towards Elrohir even as his form vanished in a flood of light unfurling like spring leaves.

End Notes: Phew. I feel like after that everybody needs a hug. And after that, I would love to hear any and all thoughts. The emotion was high in this one, and I'm forever trying to find the right balance between emotion and melodrama. How'd it work for you?

We are forging ahead! I plan on using July for Camp NaNo so I can write through the next big chunk. Next chapter, a calmer one, will be coming your way in August. Until then, take care, everybody! See you soon!