A/N: I love the complexity of Thranduil's character, and his relationship to Legolas-and decided to write this. It is movie canon, mainly.
"They differed from the High Elves of the West, and were more dangerous and less wise." -J.R.R. Tolkien, The Hobbit
Legolas does not understand.
He is still a child, in the ways of your people—six thousand years have passed since you first knew the world, and he has yet to achieve a third as many. He longs for your approval, but he also longs for freedom, and you watch the centuries guide him ever closer to the latter.
Freedom. You longed for it once, too, before you knew what it was to be king.
Legolas does not understand.
He does not seek the glory of war, as men do, or the vengeance that burns fierce within the hearts of dwarves. But justice flames in him, the call to be guardian of all that is good, and you—you who turned your back on Erebor—you can only forbid, for you have relinquished the right to persuade.
Your father fell in the Last Alliance, your beloved at Gundabad. You remain and remember, but you have wearied of wars. War leads to many ends, but never to peace.
Legolas does not understand.
He would befriend strangers, seek the kinship of your kind to north and south and west. To him, you are distant and cold, knowing little of the lands outside your borders, caring little for the lives of those not of your kin.
You would walk with him amid the forest, showing him how sick the trees have become. How there is nothing left that is not fading, nothing but him…
Legolas does not understand.
To him, love is breathing, love is being, love is memory. He loves what he remembers of his mother and he loves the green leaves for which he is named. Perhaps he even loves you, still, though it must ever now be less.
You would turn his gaze to stars and the tall, uplifted branches of the forest, that he might see your love for him in the framing of the world, where, by duty of your lordship, it still lives. You do not have the heart to tell him—and he does not know to ask—that the greater part of your love has gone down into the earth, that you have refined and distilled it to diamonds, pure and hard.
When he turns from you, as he does so often now, obeying your commands without believing in them, doubting the throne he bows before, you are silent, though you long to speak.
You would tell him all that you know, all that you fear. You would beg him to stay, for he is your son, and all you have left to love. You would say that he must bear your burdens as well as his own, for one day, he, too, will be king.
You would say all of this, and more, but you do not.
He would not understand.