Chapter Fifteen

Thranduil sat up against the headboard for an age, staring out into the empty, silent room, but his mind was far away. Every time he watched Galadriel's vision unfold in his mind, he saw another face he recognized, another fallen comrade. He raged at his own lifeless body as Aradess tried to wake him. He tried to bargain for a way back to that moment, to stay bloody and dying against that tree if he could trade for her life. If he had died the moment that knife went through him, Aradess might have let go of her fight, she might have escaped to Legolas' side to keep him safe, and both of them away from danger. He would have gladly given his life for that.

The cool air and the winter rain made Thranduil's skin prickle and brought him back to his dim room in Imladris. His cave of exile, empty of visitors for hours now at his own command. He expected Galadriel kept her omniscient gaze on him somehow; it was a credit to Elrond that he was letting someone suffer and die under his own roof—or a credit to Thranduil that he had pushed to the bottom of Elrond's patience and obligation to his healing arts. Legolas had comfort somewhere and Thranduil was certain that it would never cease to be given, not here in the Last Homely House.

Feeling the cold was like being pricked with a thousand needles, though that may have been the work of Thranduil's anguished mind. Physical pain was more bearable than his breaking heart, his fading grace. The cold hurt his bare skin, his throat as he breathed it in. Reflexes that had sustained thousands of years of life because enormous tasks, each breath, each heartbeat more difficult than the last. Galadriel had restored his glamour in her last moments in his presence, but he could gaze down at his immaculate flesh and see the truth. He could hear his own screams when he thought of his burns. The slash from Dagorlad conjured the screams of a hundred other voices, a battlefield of slaughter. But the single mark that should have scarred his palm brought his mind to silence—Aradess' silence, never to speak or sing or laugh ever again. A silence that echoed on as far as Thranduil could comprehend.

He should have died when he found Aradess' body, just lay down beside her and let go. He should have died pinned to that tree, the morgul poison drowning his heart. He should have died at his father's side, or in that dragon's cave far from home, long before he had ever met Aradess, before he could corrupt her life with his miserable fate. She could have been someone else's wife. Legolas could have been someone else's son. Alive. Happy.

Thranduil pressed the back of his hand against his mouth, but the cry escaped anyway, squeezed from his throat, from his eyes in tears. He wilted against the headboard, tilted his face to the ceiling. The gods, fate, mortality, whatever it was would not strike him down.

He watched Aradess' battle again. He watched her touch his face, his chest, kiss him, but he could not feel it. He could not imagine all the touches and kisses from the centuries before, as if she had only been a ghost then too. Every memory was tainted with the knowledge that she was doomed to die. She was gone to where he could never reach her, not unless...

A dark night fell and Thranduil rose from his bed. He was unsteady on weak legs and even his Elven sight was failing him now. At last he reached the robe lying across the foot of the bed and heaved it onto his shoulders. The heavy wool and velvet could not pierce the cold that had settled inside him.

He limped towards the far corner of the room where his effects had been kept after being stripped from him the night of his arrival. He picked through the rings collected in the bowl on the worktable, past the silver and gold filigree and the great aquamarine stone to a simple band forged of mithril. Thranduil slid it onto his right forefinger, watched it glitter even in the dark against his pale skin. He wore the silver and Aradess the gold. The two trees of Valinor, the moon and the sun, the night and the day, the cold king and his golden queen. The living and the dead.

Thranduil picked up the long, thin knife Elrond kept at hand for creating his medicines and stole out into the corridor.

It was a long way from the infirmary to the sanctuary, but Imladris seemed to have gone still in its grief. Guards and the occasional wandering Elf were easy to avoid. All his winding through the back passages finally brought him to the stairs. Thranduil climbed up, one hand gripping the railing, the other, the knife. He fortified himself to be quick, before Galadriel's or Elrond's intuitions could alert them to his intentions. He could not come back down these stairs, could not go back to that bed, could never go home again. They called it Mirkwood now. The great Greenwood had fallen to corruption and darkness. It did not need a king.

The catafalque shone like a pillar of moonlight, and upon it was Aradess, just as Galadriel had shown him. Pale and pure, nothing of the mud or blood of her final battle. Thranduil closed his hand around hers, their silver and gold bands sliding across each other.

"Forgive me, melui-nín," he whispered as he bent to kiss her forehead. He brushed his hand against her red hair. She was cold, but so was he. He could barely feel himself touching her, but soon they would not be a world apart.

Thranduil poised the knife above his heart and gazed down at Aradess' face. A moment of darkness and then he would see her alive again, never to be parted, their eternal vows never to be broken.

Aradess' emerald pendant glittered on her shrouded breast, a small leaf on a long chain of delicate silver. Legolas had given it to her on his one-hundredth birthday, the same day he had given Thranduil the aquamarine ring. Thranduil had marvelled then at how one hundred years had passed; now it had been three hundred since Thranduil had held his tiny prince in his arms. He felt the weight, the warmth of holding his infant son; the memory was the first whole one he had conjured, somehow untouched by his heartbreak. Legolas sitting on his knee as a child, his golden hair like the sun itself. Legolas chasing through the woods on too-long adolescent legs after some quarry, the smile on his face as he raised his first bow.

Thranduil braced himself against the stone altar as he remembered with painful clarity the day he had had to take his grown son into his arms. Legolas had separated from the hunting party and been attacked by a spider—the evil spawn of Shelob were rare in the forest then. Father and son had fought and killed it together, and then Legolas had collapsed, twin punctures on his shoulders bleeding. Thranduil had picked him up and started to run back to the palace, but it was too far. The bleeding did not stop and Legolas took a fever. His lips turned white. When Thranduil stopped and laid him on the ground, Legolas started to convulse with pain.

Thranduil sat Legolas up and tore open the back of his shirt to expose the bite marks on either side of his neck. Legolas screamed when Thranduil cut him, careful slits on either side of the wounds with his hunting knife. If Thranduil had thought about his son's precious blood in his mouth he could not have done it; he drew and spat as quickly as he could. Legolas' cries grew thinner, he grew weaker and Thranduil had to clutch the front of him to keep him upright while he sucked out the spider venom. When the wounds had stopped bleeding, Thranduil pressed the crown of his head to his son's back, felt his even breathing, and wept with relief.

The sound of Legolas' cry out in the woods had ripped his heart from him. The sight of his blue eyes as he woke up healed and well had brought Thranduil back to life again.

"Ada."

The knife Thranduil held clattered loudly to the stone floor of the sanctuary.

"Legolas—"

Legolas threw his arms around him, the front of Thranduil's robe caught tight in his fists. He pressed his forehead between his father's shoulders and cried, half-screaming with grief.

His own face burning, Thranduil stared into Aradess' face for guidance. Her cold fingers still held his, but did not have the beckoning gravity they did before. Legolas clutched him as if he might fall from the earth without his father.

"Ada! Please stay with me. Tell me what to do and I will do it, but please… Please!"

Thranduil squeezed Aradess' hand one last time and turned around to catch his son in his arms.