At first, Thorin would not speak to him, for in his eyes all elves were alike, all traitors and liars; and he pierced Legolas with narrowed eyes as though the prince of Mirkwood had come here, to this small dry cell with its bed and ewer, to demand that Thorin return the Silmaril of Thingol to his hand.

Nor did Legolas dare to open his conversation with the things that truly preoccupied his thoughts. He dismissed the guards, citing his own curiosity, showing them the knife upon his hip as assurance for his safety; and he sat on the guard-bench and stretched out his long legs. There he waited, watching his father's prisoner closely as he rested in the corner, noting how Thorin's pensive air took on a sullen cast at this unwanted company.

"I have not set foot beyond Mirkwood in six hundred years," said Legolas at last, to break the silence. "If you will forgive me, I am very hungry to hear news from abroad; news that my father has not chosen for me to hear."

"You ask the wrong dwarf," muttered Thorin, but did not elaborate.

Legolas pressed on as though he had not spoken. "I suspect that the world is much changed since my father closed his borders. He tells me that the world beyond the trees is fallen, that the old kings and the ancient thrones are dying; and he must speak some truth, for you to be housed in such… splendor… as my father's guest. Are you not heir to one of these fallen kingdoms, Thorin Oakenshield?"

"I am heir to nothing but misery," growled Thorin, "and a wild scattering of dwarves who now serve in the forges and stables of Men, where once they were lords beneath the mountain. If you crave news," he continued, sitting upright to lean forward, fixing Legolas with a bitter gaze, "here is your news: it is a hard and desolate world, the harder if you have no home, the worse if tall folk with fair faces tell lies, and call you thief to any ear that listens."

"And I have called you nothing," countered Legolas, "except the heir to an empty hall."

"Nor did you lift a finger to help, when my people wandered hungry." Thorin rose from his cot now to approach the bars, and Legolas watched the movement of his limbs uneasily; broader of shoulder than any elf, and indeed most dwarves in his memory, and with sinew such as only gained by the hammer and anvil, warlike in his stance, with dark and perceptive eyes.

"As I said," and Legolas stood, to gain the full advantage of his height, and to deliberately set his knife aside behind the low table; "I have not set my foot beyond Mirkwood for many years, neither to aid another nor to slake my own curiosity. Though my curiosity has been great," he admitted, approaching the bars, wary as a mouse with a sleeping cat and yet compelled to step closer, to see and be seen.

"Great indeed," observed Thorin, "if you will come in secret to interrogate an impoverished prisoner, unarmed and apparently witless-" and with this his hand struck out, and he grasped Legolas by his green doublet and pulled him hard against the bars, buckling Legolas's knees so that he sagged and fell; and reaching up with his other hand he wound it in Legolas's hair, dragging his face forward until he was pressed hissing against the metal with Thorin's beard scraping his face.

"You are a reckless child, for all your centuries of life," snarled Thorin, "and your father was wise to keep you locked away, though it might have gone better for you if you had seen what the world is capable of. Will your father be proud, when the guards return and find you my hostage?"

Legolas gasped with the pain in his scalp, the dull throb of new bruises, and he replied: "Why do you assume I crave my father's pride?"

In his mind, Legolas had spoken this thought a thousand times; the words spilled out of him like a confession of guilt, heavy with the echo of centuries of thought. To him, this was absolution, and the hope of finally gaining a secret to keep from his father; to Thorin, whose eyes narrowed and whose lips tightened, this was a tactical advantage, a weakness exposed.

"What is it then," hissed Thorin in his ear, and the touch of his breath on Legolas's skin set a shudder twisting in him that could not be disguised, "that you do crave?"

To be a hostage, he did not say: to be held by my hair, to see the power of someone who is not my father. "The guards will not return for an hour," he said, "nor will my father know what passes in this cell, save for what the guards see when they return. I am at your mercy, son of Thrain; will you satisfy my curiosity?"

Now the meaning of his words took root in Thorin, and Legolas felt the shift in his hands and his breath, and then Thorin turned him loose and let him fall. "You will have me flogged before your father's throne," growled Thorin, but he did not retreat from the bars.

"And the punishment for opening your cell is harsher than flogging," said Legolas, rising gracefully; then he laid his hand on the lock, and felt it answer to his blood, so that the door swung open.

Thorin's eyes darted from the opened door to the heavy oak gate of the guard-room, and Legolas smiled and inclined his head. "The guards will not return for an hour," he repeated, "but they are outside that door."

"That will not protect you," snarled Thorin, and launched himself from his cell with battle-fury on his face, and for a moment Legolas regretted his choice; but Thorin did not go for the knife where it lay behind the table. Instead he struck Legolas, a grappling weight that dragged him to the floor; and though Legolas was lithe and supple, Thorin threw him in a hold that craned his back against Thorin's knee and left his one free arm scrabbling for purchase on the flagstones.

"My father will know, if you leave signs upon my body," gasped Legolas.

"I thought you wished to defy your father," retorted Thorin, but he relaxed his hold, and seeing that Legolas would not fight him, he sat back on his haunches and let Legolas twist himself onto his back. "Have you had your fill of rebellion now," goaded Thorin, and Legolas knew he must look like a prey animal frozen beneath a hawk, and hated himself for his fear, for the way his bones still remembered his father's tales of dwarvish brutality.

For fear he did, now that he saw how easily Thorin could overcome him, the strength and war-wit of his father's enemy; Thranduil's army had driven the battered shade of Sauron from Dol Goldur not so many centuries ago, and yet those warriors who still ate at his father's table had none of this raw, wicked power and cleverness. Living under the boughs of Mirkwood, Legolas had never known fear like this: fear that spread like warm honey, that filled him with both dread and hunger, that stole his breath and quivered in his belly.

This was a fear he could embrace, and which his father did not know; and Legolas rolled his hips under Thorin where he straddled him, shamelessly accepting his fate.

Thorin's eyes darkened, and his nostrils flared, and Legolas rocked up into him, brazenly stealing his terrified pleasure; he felt Thorin's thighs tightening over him, and then Thorin pinned him to the ground, great hands clasping his shoulders, the unexpected weight of his own arousal digging into Legolas's belly.

"You play a more dangerous game than you know," said Thorin, face low and close to Legolas's own; and Legolas felt his bones turn to water and his heart race, and did not care for the danger so much as for the sin.

"It is my game to play," Legolas defied him, but the lie was plain in his voice, in the length of him outflung under Thorin's weight, and Thorin laughed as he lay closer, mouthing at Legolas's jaw.

"Do not mistake me for your father," said Thorin. "You may escape him by flirting with his enemy; but you will not so easily be done with me."

Cold shocks of fear and anticipation skewered him, lightning-quick spikes of panic, there and gone like a premonition of remorse, half the weight of their sensation in the next second's memory. Legolas was sheltered indeed; he had no experience in this, in the hot friction of flesh and silk and linen, in the hunger duller and richer than mere want of food, and when Thorin rolled his hips against him the sensation was sick spite and wonder.

Elvish, he was, and no mortal flesh; he had lived for six hundred years and counted himself perhaps only a little late in finding a mate. He had watched his fellows and friends consumed by the adoration that overtook the newly wed, seen a few elflings born and grown to majority and become great warriors with long dark hair, beheld their parents moved on into the platonic sweetness of true partnership free from inconvenient lust; and he himself had never felt or imagined or known to dread the burning calamity that now turned his skin incandescent. Surely not even the horns of Ulmo in the deep held such sweet and alluring music; surely no sea-fever could ever match this want.

And yet, even now with Thorin disheveling him, with those strong hands crumpling his doublet until he lay exposed from trews to nipples and seeking still further for his skin; even now it was not quite right, only the first taste of what Legolas knew he would be seeking for the rest of his days. He knew now that he would defy his father, or be lost to him; that he must leave the Greenwood or die for the want of this, the way his hands were free to roam thick knotted muscles and hair-dusted flesh, the way his hunter's heart responded to the body of Aulë's handiwork as it had never risen to all the songs of all the elves.

Had his father ever felt such a passion for his wandering Sindar bride, for the elleth who sang and sang and whose eyes turned ever to the east and who at last slipped away into the sunrise, for whom he had never seen Thranduil weep? Could his father understand what he felt now, the hot and chill of hands and stone as he lifted his hips and let Thorin pull away his trews and stared amazed at the impossible change in his body's shape, or would Thranduil be livid- his infuriatingly still face contorted with rage, his distant voice raw with imprecations?

Or had his father thought him too young for this, too helpless, in need of protection? Did his father suffer from such strange unholy attractions? Did Thranduil wish he were brave enough to descend in the night and take such terrible pleasure?

Thranduil did not care for Legolas's hunting, for his archery and swordsmanship; he rarely appeared to watch Legolas spar or shoot, and would not speak of war with his son. The withholding of his tales, of the old stories of the sack of Doriath and the wars of the Noldor and the ruin of Mordor and the razing of Dol Goldur, gnawed at Legolas cruelly, and he felt that some great glory must lie hidden from him at his father's will, and did not understand what weight damped the sound of his questions into the cold stone when he brought them to his sad-eyed father's throne.

But now- now this was something his father had never tasted, he was sure of it. Surely his father had never lay blown-eyed and gasping as a dwarf prince slicked his own fingers with spit and spread his thighs, never felt the first thunderclap of most intimate touch, the intrusion like a spear in the quarry's gut, the clench and reel of every breath and its ramifications throughout his entire body now that he was thus displaced.

"Breathe, lad," said Thorin, voice heavy with hot amusement; and Legolas breathed, and the pressure became a stretch, and as Thorin discovered the resilience of his elven flesh he found himself riding the edge of pain and opened with overwhelming speed, all the while trembling with new awful urgency and hunger. He knew what would come next; and soon Thorin's cock pressed against his entrance, no longer hesitating now that Thorin had tested the vulnerability, the acceptance of his body- and that terrible searing pressure bore into him, ripping the breath from his throat in tortured moans, hooking his fingers like claws into Thorin's shoulders as he spasmed and settled around the massive shape of Thorin's cock.

He did not think he could have borne it, had he been a creature of mortal flesh; and he wondered, as his body protested its rough preparation and the too-dry friction of Thorin's first thrusts, how anyone withstood such brutal pleasure.

"Ah," groaned Thorin, "you take whatever I give you- your body was made for this-"

But shortly Thorin spat in his hand and slicked himself again, withdrawing halfway to wrap his wet hand about and to probe at Legolas's abused muscle; and after that the pain grew less and the pleasure greater. Legolas felt blood rushing to his face, reddening his lips, and Thorin groaned again to see it, and growled in his ear: silver and mithril, and more, rubies in snow, your father's greatest treasure; and Legolas wanted to laugh, wanted to tell him that for all his father's hoarding he was still a prisoner, that he was his father's disappointment and the weariness of his old age, the Mirkwood prince with a pauper's grace and no experience in war and now a shameful taste for dwarven flesh.

He would say these things; but now Thorin rocked into him at a new angle, and every word shattered away from him in a white inferno of pleasure, and he shuddered and arched and strove to take more of it, feet sliding against the stone. Thorin's words rolled over him now like a balm to his soul, and if he meant them in spite and gloating, reminding Legolas over and over that his father treasured him above all the gems of Erebor and all the trees of Mirkwood, that he who now lay defiled and wanton would be an unbearable scourge to Thranduil if he could see how the pride of his centuries took such a rival into his body; if he meant them to be cruel, they were sweet as honey.

The one thing he has preserved innocent, laughed Thorin, the one precious jewel upon which blood has not been shed, and his cock rode hard against that point of cruel ecstasy like a key against the tumbler of a lock. It was then, in the first shocks of some inner surrender that brought a keen of agony from Legolas's throat, that became a cascade of sensation and convulsion and fire: it was then that Legolas understood how precious had been what he laid aside now, how his father had shielded him from compulsion as merciless as the Oath of Fëanor, which now would expel him into a dark and fallen world on the eve of war. He knew that his father loved him; and he knew that he must leave in search of what he now glimpsed on the horizon; and he spilled silver across his chest and belly, the first seed of the last seed of Doriath, and when Thorin spent into him with a shout of triumph and dark greed he could not respond except to groan, so struck was he with his doom.

But the hour was nigh ended, and if there was victory and satiation writ plain on Thorin's face as he grudgingly re-entered his cell, Legolas set his face into a mask of serenity (oh, how he had seen it done before, how his father had concealed his sorrow for six hundred years) and locked the door with a nod of regard. The guards returned, and Thorin remembered his temper as they regarded him with their arch eyes as mocking as any insult, and snarled at Legolas as he departed.

And Legolas, for his part, only tilted his head in response, preoccupied as he was with the tumult in his breast; thus he departed to meet his fate, to set his plans, to seek the hour of his departure from the Greenwood, and to hope for some chance that might let him have his freedom and keep his father's love besides.

So many unexpected faces here, at the Council of Rivendell; the Noldor kin of Galadriel whose cousins had thrown down Doriath, seated at elbows with Elrond whose mother had thrown herself into the sea to escape those same murderous elves; strange men, fair of face and word, Gondor-men with the shadows of Numenor heavy on their brows; small blithe curly fellows who seemed like an inappropriate jest in such high company; and a dwarf, the kin of one of Thorin's companions, the son of Glóin who had been there when Legolas's first lover fell to an orcish blade and took the memory of his awakening with him.

Legolas shifted in his seat, the least experienced in war of any present save the halflings, the youngest and most rural of the elves; he knew that others looked upon him with interest, the long-hidden son of the last Sindar lord, and wondered at the humble green and brown of his raiment, the quickness and temper of his eyes, the braids at his temples that they speculated must echo some forgotten memory of his past. But he had eyes only for the ruddy beard of Aulë's child, for the snarl of his lip and the pride in his spine; and he wondered, as they volunteered their bodies and the skill of their arms to the service of Frodo and the destruction of the ring, if they would be enemies, if he would carry on the enmity that ate at his father's heart even as he sought the final death of that southern power that had for so long blighted him, that had robbed Legolas of the joy of his father's love.

Or if, at the end of this journey, he might find the thing he burned for, with lust that even the whispers of the Ring could not rival, with longing that came in waves and tides, with hope and sorrow and love.