Chapter Text
I. On the Way out of Moria
They were running through the dark. Running with barely enough air, gasping, stumbling, searching for that slit of lesser dark that meant escape. They were fleeing. Pippin ran with them, small and fast, eyes forward so as not to see the goblins who screeched and chattered at their prey. Eyes forward and he wouldn’t see the blow when it came. A hand grabbed his shoulder and he was pulled behind a crumbling column. The company ran ahead.
“Help me with this,” said Legolas, fast and low, on his knees and unstrapping his quiver and pack. His voice left no room for questions and Pippin didn’t ask any. He’d learned, this past while, to be helpful first and frightened second. Do what was asked, do it well, and for the love of holy light do not freeze at the sight of an arrow sticking out of your friend’s arm.
It had come from the back. A shot made of chance rather than aim. Pippin gulped and moved his hands. Cloth that was torn from somewhere, fold some, strip the rest. Legolas jerked as he pulled the arrow free and Pippin pressed cloth to wound. His throat burned from the smoke, from the bile he forced back.
“Tighter,” said Legolas, as they passed cloth strips back and around. Pippin pulled tighter. The roar of fear and danger stretching in his ears as the world narrowed to this simple task: treat the wound, use what help you can, don’t die. And in that narrowness of time where everything in the immediate space grew sharp and the rest fell to low relief, Pippin noticed the change.
There, where the fabric of the sleeve was torn wider, he saw that Legolas’ arm was marked. Not just with the ink whorls that Pippin had seen before and adored for in their gentle glow they seemed to breathe and shift as leaves did in a moonlit breeze — which they weren’t doing now — but with scars. Many and varied. He was sure that this wasn’t usually the case and certainly not when, from what he retained of elf-lore, that arm should have been as the rest of him: unblemished and eternal.
And above that he caught the edge of a face in profile. It was entirely concentrated in turn on the cloth they were hastily wrapping, and on the dark beyond, and on the sounds that were not distant enough. It was not the face Pippin had spent months growing used to, even admiring from a polite distance. It was narrower. Plainer. Drawn tight around the eyes. And, Pippin thought, uncomfortably like his own might look if he were lost in the dark and someone had just shot him. Frightened, and young, and doing his best not to show either.
Legolas did not seem to notice the shift. They finished their task and he stood. Everything back in place but for the torn sleeve and the knotted cloth. The face that looked down at Pippin was the right one, the sure one, stern with quick concerned eyes.
“Are you well?”
“Yes,” said Pippin, though his legs quavered from fear and from the exhaustion of having run so far and still needing to reach safety. He wasn’t sure of his ability to overcome either.
“Then run,” said Legolas, pushing him out of their shared hiding place and back on the treacherous path.
Pippin ran as he had before, feet hitting the ground hard, eyes forward, racing to make up the space they had lost. The screeches and yelps were closer, or louder and he didn’t like it either way. He let everything fall behind, willed it to fall and release its grip on his heart. All except for the one stubborn thought that settled in the fertile soil of his curious mind, tenacious as a weed. It was the thought that, somewhere under all that height and grace and centuries, might be a person who was, in all the ways that counted at least, not much older than Pippin himself and just as terrified. And stranger still was the notion that this person had appeared unbidden and unnoticed by Legolas himself.
He might have let it be. He ought to have, really. But that was not the shape of Pippin’s mind. A thing once noticed was like a splinter and it worked its way further in the more he left it alone, until asking about it seemed the lesser of the two discomforts.
Pippin managed to hold off asking until that evening when the company paused, holding the space between immediate grief at the loss of Gandalf and the apprehension that their trials had not ended. He found Aragorn. He’d meant to ask carefully. Instead it came out like this:
"Does Legolas — I mean, is there something about him that isn't — that he doesn't always look like he — "
“No,” said Aragorn, before Pippin managed to form the question. He said it in the manner of a door closing against the night. Not unkind but firmly, ensuring that nothing more could be made of this. “You are tired, Master Took. And you are grieving. It was a trick on your eyes played by the dark. Nothing more. Get some rest.”
His words were gentle enough that Pippin could not call them a lie, at least not to his face. He did not ask again. But he noticed, turning it over in his mind, that Aragorn had answered awfully fast for a question that had barely been formed.
For a while he doubted his mind. Being the sort of hobbit for whom fancy came as easily dew on a leaf in springtime, it was not impossible that fear had made fools of his eyes. And he had been so afraid.
But watching the company make its slow way from the wreck of Moria into a grief they had yet to embody, Pippin saw the second, larger thing.
Legolas did not weep as the others wept. He stood apart, at the edge of the company like a statue at the garden gate, with his face composed as it always was but with sadness draped upon it. His grief was sublime, something to look at and feel with rather than for. Sorrow suited him.
Then he changed. What he was dissolved like a sigh before sleep. What was left was smaller, and stranger for being smaller. His mouth had gone thin and uncertain. The lines at his eyes, which usually read as some elegant accident of centuries, now just looked tired, and wrong. Wrong specifically because the face they sat on could not have been old, by any measure a man could make of it. Barely twenty years, if he had been mortal. Too young for the care and grief to have taken such deep and merciless root.
It made Pippin wonder that if grief sat on an ageless face, it read as wisdom rather than tragedy, something earned across centuries and worn well. Pain on a face that young was an open wound. Pity struck him as he thought of the elf who looked, for one unguarded moment, like he'd been asked to carry far more than his years, whatever his years actually were, could reasonably hold.
He thought he must look much the same, if how he felt was any marker to gauge.
Tears blurred his vision and when he wiped his eyes clear there stood the same elf as ever, apart and ageless, wrapped in exquisite sorrow.
It had all been quick enough that Pippin doubted he’d seen it at all. A trick upon his eyes played, this time, by despair too deep to name.
Maybe he would ask Legolas directly when he got the chance.
He forgot by the time that chance came.
II. On the Road in the Dark
There were a few things about which Sam was fundamentally sure. That the sun rose in the east, June was the best month for strawberries, Mister Frodo means well and elves were safe to be around. They were safe as a door left unlocked to a friend. Safe as the weather, when the weather was fine and you were glad to be out in it.
When the scream came in the night, it came from the other side of the fire and Sam was up with his blade in his hand before fully waking. He had to give himself credit. He would never been this sort of ready a year before. Now he knew where to be. With Frodo, under cover and looking out for what came next.
Men, or men-shaped things came out of the woods. They howled as no man could, making the skin of Sam’s neck go tight.
Legolas met them at the tree line, his blades in hand and steady, as if violence was just another dance for which he knew the steps. Sam felt relief. And then he didn’t. What he felt in its place was cold and unwelcome but he could not stop it.
The elf grew. He had not changed shape exactly — more like the space around him widened and he filled it, stretched like canvas going taut against a frame, then tighter still. His soft edges became sharp until there was nothing left but rigid, unyielding power.
In the flashing light of their torches, his knives were no longer blades, no longer things made from craft. They were grown things. Curved and wretched as claws, flexing and dripping with gore. Sam’s stomach turned.
And his eyes changed, gold Sam would have said, if asked. Gold like a beast that hunts in the doomed night. Glowing and fixated entirely on your demise. Then he would have said black, also just as sure, but black from edge to edge with none of the white that meant they belong to a person. Black like the bottom of a grave. He would have said both and meant it in truth, if truth was a word that held any meaning. He wasn’t sure.
At one point Legolas smiled. Did he smile? Or was it a scream caught in the fraction of time between flame and the night? But it was terrible, Sam thought. Too wide, too hungry, and the teeth, more and sharper than a mouth ought to hold. Did it scream in pain or shriek with the perverse joy of a hunt turned slaughter? Sam held on to his sword and didn’t cover his face with his hands.
The man, or man-shaped thing, was definitely screaming. He was screaming before Legolas’ blades ever touched him. Scrambling back in the dirt and stone, his features stretched in the rictus of absolute terror. It was the look of a man who had finally seen the thing hunting him in the dark and realized that the thing knew exactly how this was going to end. He was as powerless against that terror as he was against the blade that slashed his throat.
There were more slashes, and they came fast. Cries of triumph turned into wails of fear and pain. Sam was frozen in place, and he felt something he would be ashamed of for the rest of his days: watching Legolas dispatch the man-turned-beast, he was no longer sure whom he feared more. Where there should have been relief that the company was so well-defended there was only a hollow uncertainty.
And then it was over. The screams were gone and only the night remained. A few yards from where Sam still hid, Legolas was crouching in front of Merry, checking him over with gentle hands, speaking to him in the soft voice that had all its old music. Sam felt like he might cry, as he had done when he was younger and nightmare had kicked him unwilling into the waking world.
“Sam,” a voice called and he forced himself back to needs immediately at hand.
And later on, much later, when that night had become lost in the collection of moments both mundane and terrible, Sam heard Legolas laugh at some jest Gimli had made and he was comforted. Likely he had only imagined it. Elves were safe to be around, of that and many things besides Sam was sure.
Mostly.
III. On the Banks of the Anduin
It was not the kind of rain that drove men under cover. It settled as a fine grey mist that beaded on cloaks and turned the Anduin the colour of an old coin, and made the whole company move a little slower, speak a little less. Boromir had gone apart to check the boats. That was the reason he gave. In truth he wanted some distance from the thing that took the noise in his skull and amplified it past the point of reason.
It had been worse since Lothlórien. The Lady had looked at him kindly, which was somehow worse, and he had felt measured, weighed, and unworthy. Since then his father's voice had taken to visiting more often, uncharacteristically patient, laying out all the ways Boromir was failing a city that was dying by inches.
He was sitting on an overturned boat, working a piece of twine loose from where it had snagged, when Legolas came and settled nearby without saying a word. He had a shirt over one knee, Merry's, from the look and size of it, torn at the shoulder seam on some low branch or other, and a needle he'd produced from some secret pocket. He set to mending the tear with the unhurried attention of an elf with nowhere else he needed to be.
Boromir did not feel like company and said nothing to invite it. Legolas offered none of the usual grace that made people want to keep him talking. He simply mended, the needle going in and out in small even movements, and after a while remarked, not particularly to Boromir, that Merry seemed determined to test the durability of every branch between here and Mordor.
It was not a joke, exactly. Boromir found himself smiling anyway.
He could not have said, afterwards, when the noise in his skull had gone quiet. It had not been silenced so much as it appeared to lose interest, the way a fire left untended simply burns lower without anyone to mind it.
Boromir did not see, because he was watching the needle, that Legolas had gone very still with the sustained presence a held note. His eyes, when he looked over the fit of a stitch, shifted the way water finds a new course around a stone — not wrongly, only differently, going from warm to cool, from pale to dark and back again. The lines of him loosened, going soft at edges, the way a watercolour bleeds where the brush lingers too long in one place.
Boromir noticed none of it. He was watching the needle.
"You've a steady hand," he said at last, nodding at the mending, mostly to have said something.
"Practice," Legolas said, not looking up. "And being told to do nothing else."
Boromir chucked. The sound of it surprised him.
So an elf could complain of tedious chores as much as any youth, it seemed. He and Faramir had been much the same. He still was, if he was honest with himself. The thought came to his mind with the ease of fondness.
After a time Legolas rose, shirt mended, and went to see to something else entirely, as though this had been a pleasant stop on an afternoon stroll. He did not say be well, or rest easy, or any of the things men said to each other when they meant to leave comfort behind on purpose. He simply left.
The noise did not come back. Boromir sat a while longer in the thinning rain, turning the loose twine over in his hands, and noticed that he felt, of a sudden, that he could bear the evening in front of him. Later, trying to account for the hour, he would remember only an elf with a needle, and rain that had, for a while, seemed gentle.
To be completed in Part II