Dear One
It is few hours past dawn when the shoes of your mount cross the hush of dust and grass to clatter upon paved stone. The hardness of its path shakes your frame, and you awake from within the woven hood you cast up to hide your face from light. You turn and the forest shape of the horizon changes to points of towers and stacked flats of roofs.
For the first time the draught of summer air has flavors of sour-spiced sweat of men at work. It has the smoke of the meat of beasts so fatty that their greases sizzle in the fire, and the grime of unwashed walls. They flicker on the back of your tongue, which makes you cough slightly. It brings back memories of him. As they merge with your shallow breath, you once again enter the world of men.
---
Barely a fortnight elapses and you are on your back, struggling to cling to your life.
---
The king had you in his private chambers several times that season. It had yawning panels of glass for windows. In the fierce blaze of the day and with the castle the pinnacle of the city, there were sharply lined pieces of light pinned to his walls and bed hangings. There were chairs fashioned by the best carpenters in his kingdom.
But he bade you to take your rest where you liked, and so when he chose the softness of his marriage bed, you joined him. Together you have sat on single narrow bench in tavern and on rock in open air. You have slept with his head pressed to your shoulder for the warmth in it, and had his hands on your shoulders when your bodies outnumbered the horses. So you knew he would not begrudge you a spot beside him on his covers. The two of you had drunk and jested as if the light of the many crafter lanterns of his rooms meant nothing more than the humble light of a campfire or an inn's stumped candles.
And so it was in his rooms that you had the same of knowing the bristled skin by his throat when he has not scraped himself smooth, as men must to keep their faces clean from the darkness of hair. Once again you beheld the voice rasped slightly by pipe smoke and tuned smooth again for song. And he did sing for you when you asked.
But there was more. He no longer wore the dark garb of a ranger meant to keep attention from resting on him, but fair colors cut and decorated for a king demanding all eyes. And you also came to know the hint of perfume trapped in his hair and skin, now mingling with the same earthy human smell of him. It might have come from florals that his wife scattered in their bedclothes.
She too was there. She drifted in and out of your words with the child on her hip. She moved as a moth might, robes fluttering like wings at the edges of your attention. Her brushes of touch are so faint that they might have been accident made in insect's confused flight. You tried not to see her, let her circling be of the same consequence as winged mites drawn to their lamplight. But just as your annoyance might not have been unable to ignore pests by the light, so too did his fond amusement never leave her lovely face when she danced to him in her step, as if he were admiring a pattern in wing.
---.
The last time he consents to your company, it is not in his rooms but before his throne.
You, prince in your own right, are on bended knee and with bowed head. You could not move yourself to look upon his expression, but so dark is the room, you might not have seen it.
"Leogolas, I had wondered why you sent ahead of your arrival. Have I ever made you feel unwelcome in my halls? You knew well that you were as free through to walk my doors as my family."
You let him cajole you, as he will. There is nothing to say.
"Legolas, listen to me…there is urgent word from Osiligoth. I must ride. But never doubt that I love you, for have not your sorrows stayed me this long? Fare thee well, my friend. May you keep safe on your journey home."
When your courage finally coaxes you to raise your head, he is gone. The majestically cavernous room smells of dust and nothing.
"I might die from this." You say in a choked whisper to your hands.
---
"I have wronged you." she relents, rocking the crying babe at her breast. Ah! How many times have you had to content yourself with this very image, the noble queen stepped off her pedestal to beseech your forgiveness? Bricks of men, wood of elf, stars of unclaimed sky—all had closed over a head harboring a painting of a she-villain, and your dry eyes burning covetously on his sleeping form.
"We have wronged you," she whispers. The hair of the child, so like his father's, curls dark and light, soft and rough, on the white of his mother's neck. She presses Eldarion close to the comfort of her bosom. He quiets at the softness of her flesh, the love in her touch.
He is so much like his father.
You stare but a moment at such sublime beauty. Without voice, you curse her with the most damning language in the tongue of her birth and yours—an insult that cuts deeper for its aching hint of home.
And with nothing more to trade, you turn from her and part ways. In the barest glimpse of her fair face you glean a stricken look. Though no empath like her lady grandmother, the Evenstar is pure. So much that her mind has been rung like a bell by the screaming hatred in yours.
As you walk, you beg the calm of the night in the windows to ease the rage within you. Your face is hot and too slow to cool from the confrontation. You worry.
In truth, you thought her no monster before—it was the poison of your own envy that fed you delusion when your heart was most dark and despairing.
You have long known that you are the foul one. You are the one with unnatural desires, the one with cruel hopes set against such a loving creature--the Evenstar, so proud, but so painfully bright and kind as to deserve such pride.
Your fantasies of her being broken by your selfish love for him were born from the darkness of your loneliness.
You knew this.
But never, not once, had you ever imagined her in her regret to be so small framed and frightened before you. And never was she with the child, their dearly beloved firstborn encircled him protectively in her arms. Never had the false Arwen of your thoughts meekly apologized for an innocent babe incapable of causing harm or granting apology.
Never had she asked your forgiveness for the very life of their son.
--
It is this duplicitous one who finds you slumped in a window, utterly listless. She thinks you asleep at first when you do not move, but your eyes are not cast down in sightless rest. They are fixed in the direction of the city he has rode to. When she calls your name you shut your eyes and will not open them.
--
There are hands on your face, feeling for you. Ah, you tell yourself vaguely. He is here, for was he not your healer in darker times when arrows and ax blades struck bodies mere paces away from him? He would not leave you to bleed out on the battleground. Would he abandon you in times of splendor, left to wither in a bed and from simple soreness of heart? He would not. Not when he has resolutely dug knees in blood and chaos to bind your life to your body. He is feeling himself to check that you are not overwarm from the sick.
Are we of the same heat, love? you wish to ask him.
---
Since she has been ensnared by a mortal's love and damned herself to it, the queen no longer wears the raiment of her people. Tied to Gondor by vow to husband and child, she is weighted to Middle Earth with the rich gowns and adornments of a mother queen.
But now free from the heavy dresses for men's company and the child about her neck, she is lightened like a ghost. She is clad in gossamer silks that tremble about her pale skin in faint wind, like a bud of a dandelion lightly dons its down. An elf is just that, a thistle; held to first home by but a single foot. No, only by toepoint, and at beckon of wind, some disturbance in the air, will lift away to sail so it will not die with plant that raised it with such dear love.
Released from mud of death from bodies bound for rot, she will escape from this place that has become like a tree taken by decomposers. She will flee, like you. You will both be free from wet weight of men's blood and bone that collapse in greater and greater piles before your eyes and blot out the scent of trees and tang of sea.
Her otherworldly words to you are agonizingly gentle as she traces your face for fever. "Sweet Legolas. You are not fading." She tells you with the pain of one who knows.
Fading is a draining, no angry heat of your body moiling in refusal to pass—it is trying to boil away the sickness. You know fading to be cool and dry, that sensation that still lingers in the hands that now stroke your brow. The lady is always chilled, as though grief will never truly leave her.
She is still fading, you realize. But slower, for the sake of love and child. She will continue until she is done, and then no more.
The Evenstar has the truest love, she has sweetness and all that she desires—but never does she cease mourning.
Her whisper has the sweetness of home, borne from the same kind of flower and by nectar of the same sugar. It slides away from you as the light leaves your eyes.
"Be well and rid yourself of this illness, gwadoren."
--
You are cold. You are expiring.
You are the king's body laid upon the altar hands folded on burial coat. You are the lady before she was queen, sleeping on stone with face paled by despair.
You are naught but a gathered sack of blood and bone coming apart.
But.
---
It is not so long ago. Elrond has taken in a new babe that does little harm but whose wails of discontent drive all from his halls. The human mother is disconsolate from loss of husband and will do nothing to comfort her own babe. The elf lord himself is sleepless and paces away nights with his anxiety.
She is no elf, but as guest you are treated to the notion that humans too may fade. You have been told that the race of men is more resilient to sadness, for death is thick in their lives—hunger, disease, and carelessness takes them by the likes that would stagger an elf to hear. It is whispered that she is an exceptional specimen, her condition harkening to her ancestry, but you think this a unique effect. Though young, she ages swifter and swifter—her hair becomes grizzled like an old woman's, her face is dragged down as if hooked to stones despite her constant rest.
By the time she gives up her last breath, you have decided that elves, though quicker to succumb to true heartbreak, are blessed to suffer no ugliness in grief. You have seen several elves who have passed for parted love. So beautiful were they in their stillness, and so pure the mask of longing still cast in features, you thought them statues carved for art.
---
But.
You are no dead king of mortal men. You are no elf maiden tasked with the tragedy of dying for love.
You are the guardian prince of a forest slowly going mad. Your love is a healer from light, his medicine that of living sun shone on wound through the carriers of plant and herb. But you heal with darkness. You swiftly kill illness that would put a whole body to death by severing that which festers.
Monsters and foulness coursing the veins of your home, they are punctured like pustules with arrow point or cut away clean by blade of double knife.
And so you must also cleanse yourself of this.
You rise and you walk.
--
When you entered the city, you were not received with his opens arms at the gate as you might have been but a short while ago. Without ritual or ceremony, you were sent to his chamber, where you were free make your own entrance and spy at him candid in his life.
Fatherhood and sovereignty had changed the countenance of the ranger. Patience and serenity waited for him at end of the many years between now and a time when his kingdom would be grown and peaceful, and his children the same. But now both cried and scratched at him with dusty fingers, demanding attention.
In his chamber was the ornate desk that had once been commissioned by a steward several ages ago and does not suit him. Outside his windows, the sound of hammers and saws gnawed at the nerves relentlessly. Not so long ago, the man's senses had been so keen as to detect even the soundless tread of an approaching elf. Not so any more with the noise of rebirth singing in every corner of his kingdom. Nor was his attention helped by a small boy troubling the work on the table, pulling on the sleeve of the arm holding the pen.
You were incredulous at the need, but he did not lift his head from the combined burden of child and record until you uttered his name. It had made him jerk suddenly in alarm, his old warrior's instinct bothered by the surprise. But seeing your face, the challenge in his visage was kneaded back into the muscles of his face now vaguely lined around the eyes. With a warm smile of a welcome and a word of greeting waiting for you, he directed his son elsewhere with a scolding swat to the nape of his neck.
"Off with you! Run to the stables and ask our guests from Rohan how to groom the beasts, you insufferable hellion!"
Without a look at the visitor calling upon his father, Eldarion obeyed, flying through too quick through the opened doors for you, the interloper, to know whether he was joyful for the task or tearful for the reprimand. Woodland animals and ancient wood lay bare their souls to you. You have been able scent to orcs' and spiders' bloodlust or wariness by small changes in the wind. But you have never been able to read the child well.
"Well, Legolas? Is this sweetheart of yours young enough so that the time of your shared love will amount to more than wink's span? Smitten with you?" the king demanded of you and the contents of your missive. He did not rise.
You had only looked at him, taken aback. There was a trace of gray fingering his hair that had not been there before. It coursed across his cheek like the white path of a salt tear. And in his voice, there was a new shortness—time has become acute to him.
"Nay. My love has lived for many years, or at least for as many years as needed for mortal men to call one old. And…there is another." you said slowly.
"Another?"
"The one I love has long cherished another." You repeated.
He had turned to you, and you could see the concern chasing amusement. They were so close together that no human perception would have held them apart; but it was not because of your race that you knew so well the meaning of every movement he makes.
He was thinking, how could you, of divinely beautiful blood, desire a shriveled human nag? And what plain mortal wretch could outshine you in any heart? He was thinking of your beauty. He has always thought you beautiful, in face and spirit. This you knew.
But it is not because of you that he knows of beauty. He has always known beauty--his first taste was from Undomiel, fed to him young like a mother's sweet milk.
"Then, my friend, in your long life this pain will be like a prick of a needle, or the scratch of sharp rock on your foot. Such a small wound should hardly mar your body, much less your memory."
Ever since he was young, when you find him a fool, you would chastise. Your reproach only has ever spurred him to run faster after folly until the jape of it makes you bite your tongue. It is then you express your faith, but in truth you have always simply given over so that you may see him safely through his brash mortal intrigues, usually in arms. Men call him wise and you steadfast. But Aragorn is merely stubborn.
And you are not loyal. You are protective.
He could not do for you, be a protector, as you do for him. Again, he was being a fool, and you did not hold back your rebuke.
"Is such true for Arwen?" you ask, dry and brittle as a twig in the summer ready for the wood fire.
Rare does his true age reach him, with his elfin blood, but it settled then in his eyes. Such a deep grey, you have long been touched by the manner in which they nevertheless glow with a good humor and live spark. They are live coals alit with dancing embers.
They go cold and deaden when he sorrows, you had sickened to know.
"No." He recanted somberly. "It is not." His marriage hand had clenched into a fist around its gold band before your mourning gaze. You have never wanted his remorse and his apology—not when he means every bit of it to belong to his wife.
"Forgive me for not heeding the gravity of your situation, Legolas. It was hard of me. Feelings of love are to be respected. I have long been fortunate to have you as confidant. To me you have been always wise of heart, steady of mind--I am blessed to have always had your counsel and care. Allow me to return your kindness; I will not misspeak again."
Perpetual innocent he is, he has never seen what you truly do for him. And even then you thought you would protect him again—leave him again to his flourish in his stubborn path, when he will take no better one!—and so say nothing.
He took your hand.
In friendship, nothing more, but you thought you would no longer submit to his will. You thought of making demand of him, to finally yield to reason—that you would break this farce, yours of silence and his of poor decision. You thought of embracing him. You thought of making him yours for what little time is left.
It was a fine time to go mad.
But there was a mighty shout from the stables outside the balcony, and you two started. You hastened to find the disturbance. Before your eyes, a steed thick with muscle burst from its doors, nearly trampling underfoot the attendants who leapt to pull them open. The fine stallion seemed too live to ride, a trait that revealed it as sired from Rohan's stalls. Bearing two riders, it reared as it readied to bolt down the spiraling streets of Minas Tirith. One donned colors marking him as one of Eomer's visiting men. In front, clutching the horse's mane, was a young one too dangerously small to be astride.
"Eldarion!" Aragorn had shouted. The child was laughing, and you saw its joy.
---
A lone rider enters the city with rosy dawn warming his cloaked back and his steed's flank. He mounts the flighted streets of the White City with high, frail birdsong piping into his thoughts.
He finds you with your sweaty brow driven into the forks of his tree's roots, which are colored the same blinding whiteness as trunk and bough. Your fever has broken.
"Dear one," he says softly as he kneels by you, and folds you in his arms.
END
---
Author's note:
During spring break a strange LOTR obsession took hold of me. I rewatched the movies and read an unseemly amount of fanfiction, which planted a desperate need to write something in the fandom. Specifically, something involving Legolas and Aragorn, star characters in the fics I read (and you know how).
The odd thing was that I was very moved by the story of Aragorn and Arwen—which was completely contradictory what I liked in the fanworks. And, a problem; I was in no way qualified to write in the rich language required for a fic canonical in tone (as the fics I read and admired were). But it needed to happen or else I wouldn't be able to concentrate on school.
So here it is, in my own vague, fragmented style, archaic language patched together. I thought enough had been said in the traditional manner of destiny, true love, and breaking of old commitments to pursue one's heart (as beautifully as it has been said already). Legolas just moves on to be himself. And Arwen features heavily. Maybe not very exciting, but I hope someone liked it.