Chapter Text
This is how it is for the Sylvan Elves:
In the year 2167 of the Third Age, Lythienne of the Bright Blade, who was the finest of the Greenwood's archers, went into seclusion for almost a year. When she left, fingers stained with ink and with a long hot-metal burn across her right arm, she was carrying a gift. She brought it to Thranduil who was King of those halls and gave to him a set of daggers. Their leaflike blades were long and pale, near-perfect in form and function, beautiful in their simplicity.
He took them graciously, for he was a man well-accustomed to receiving fine gifts, and she was a close friend, and apart from the masterwork quality, nothing about this was remarkable. He thanked her profusely, and noted her skill, and she smiled and said "They are the finest things that I have ever made."
He was quiet, then, and soon they were married. There are many ways for an Elf to show such a sentiment, and the old ways are falling out of favour now, but the Sylvan Elves, like everyone else, build rituals to make it easier to bare one's soul before another. It is the oldest and grandest of them to present another with the best and most beautiful work of one's hands, and to name it such.
It is not said aloud, but in the Greenwood they understand.
//
The delegation had the rudeness to arrive while Gimli was still up to his beard in meetings, and so when he was able to wrest himself free with the threat of setting up a committee the Ithilien elves had been shown to their quarters already. He was jogging over the to the wing with as much dignity as he could muster without loosing his breath when he saw Legolas, not in his quarters but leaning up against a pillar in the Open Halls, still in his travelling cloak. Gimli stopped on the bridge over the hall, and found that he had lost his breath after all.
Legolas looked up, and, beaming, pushed his hair out of his face and waved; Gimli smiled back, and with a series of obscure gestures attempted to communicate that he was coming down to the hall. Legolas, in return, made some wide gestures that were just as unintelligible, but he was grinning still, and Gimli couldn't muster any annoyance at the Elves for not having a sensible system like Inglishmek.
"Welcome back!" he shouted, as soon as he was in earshot, taking the steps many at a time, but though Legolas was threading through the crowd with his usual enthusiasm, for some reason he stayed his usual exuberant affection and did not sweep Gimli into a hug.
Instead, he knelt delicately, and rested his hands on Gimli's shoulders with something resembling hesitance, head tilted to the side.
"I find it much changed since my last visit. You, also."
"The works have been extensive—I am very proud—but I am not so different. It has not been so long."
"Too long!" There, at last was the hug, forceful and familiar. He found he agreed rather more than he had expected.
"You are changed, too, you know," he murmured into Legolas' shoulder, hoping it would conceal how he was almost choked up.
"What? How so?"
"You have shrunk."
Legolas drew back with an expression of outrage, standing straight as if to prove that he hadn't. "Not so! Why do you say so—"
"But the last time you were here, my friend, did you not have to stoop to protect your head from the ceiling?"
"I did."
"And now you stand straight. Hence, you have shrunk."
"You have raised the ceilings! You— you mock me, of course. I see."
"I do. But are my works here not impressive?"
Legolas's face softened he looked up at the vaulted ceilings, and it was suddenly very important that he agree.
"They are. They are indeed. This is— They would not recognise it, would they? But it is still remarkably like the hall at Moria."
Gimli swallowed. "Underneath the Orcs, it was beautiful. I wished to . . . Well, to pay tribute, I suppose."
"But this is brighter, I think. There is more light to it."
"Aye— a function of the stone used for the pillars, which is almost translucent, like a very strong quartz, and I put in skylights, and mirrors sometimes, to bring the sun inside . . ."
He spoke of stone and sunlight for far too long, because Legolas had the trick of asking the interesting questions, of assuring him that someone was listening to him. They moved through the city together, and under Legolas' gaze it turned from hewn stone back to the dreams he had once had, the ghosts of grand architecture in his head shining in the torchlight again.
It was like coming home again, in some delicate way that he couldn't quite place.
They found their way, slowly, meandering and frequently finding themselves lost, to Gimli's quarters, his new anteroom with the prized south-facing window, and as the evening set golden over the valley outside they sat on the window-seat and talked of things of little importance that must none-the-less be discussed.
The conversation slowed, quite naturally, into a pleasant peace as the sun grew large and blurred outside, trees dark against the sky. Red leaves glowed like rubies as the shadow of the rain evaporated. Legolas looked out over it, turning a cup of hot tea in his hands, in thought. Pleasant thoughts, Gimli hoped, pretending that he was also watching the view.
"I think of you more than you might suppose."
Before Gimli could respond to that statement— which had hit him quite out of left field like a vaguely pink florally-scented Orc ambush— Legolas continued, looking down at his hands with uncharacteristic reticence, his hair falling around his face.
"I have had very many close friends, you know," he said softly, as though confessing to something awful, "But not for very long. For some time I am very dear to someone and they are very dear to me, and then the circumstances that pushed us together are over and so, slowly, trailing away for all that I might fight it, is the friendship. I have never had the skill at holding on to people.
"I had thought, though I dreaded it, that it would be the same with you, and with the rest of the Fellowship— though I had feared growing away from you the most. But you are unlike the friends that I have had before, I think. When you came with me to Fangorn I was quite beside myself, though I didn't say it, and when you wrote to me faithfully while I was in Ithilien— well. I find you surprise me at every turn."
Gimli took a deep breath, and then another, and found that while he was busy thinking of things to say his hand had found Legolas' and was speaking for him.
Was there any point in risking this, he wondered absently, in the full knowledge that his mind was already made; was there sense in staking his heart out on a hope when he was already so happy with the situation exactly as it was?
No. No, there wasn't. He was content, here. More so than he could recall being for some time.
//
Legolas watched a single leaf fall to the ground from behind glass, the sun warm on his skin, and pretended that he himself was warmed by that and not by Gimli's hand on his own. His father had spoken of the peace of Valinor, how it was supposed to feel like one was an overflowing chalice of something warm and honeyed, and now he felt as though he might understand some of that— and then he pushed all thoughts of Valinor aside, hard though it was, and let himself live in the present and the here.
No, he would not cast this aside for the Blessed Lands, not on any persuasion.
Gimli had remarkable hands, broad and calloused and steady, made for delicate work though they might look otherwise. Like the rest of him, perhaps.
Gimli smiled at him—and he did smile with a focus, as though if the rest of the world was mist he would still smile at Legolas alone— and said, almost in a rush as though he were nervous, "You mentioned Fangorn—I was thinking of it, recently, and I have something for you, if you would like to see it."
"Well, of course, before the light is gone, what is it?"
"Perhaps it'd better wait until tomorrow, if you are so insistent on the light!"
"I am curious, now, you will not be rid of me until I know. I shall feel it out with my hands, if you stall until the sun sets."
"Fear not, fear not, I jest . . ." He stood, and with a sigh of some emotion Legolas did not know he opened a box on his desk. He drew out what looked from a distance to be a river-smooth rock until a stray beam of light bent through the glass and shattered itself upon it, breaking into a captured rainbow in greens and blues and golds.
Legolas felt his own intake of breath before he commanded it from his body, and Gimli beamed up at him in poorly concealed smugness. He took it with the sort of care he had only previously given to fragile living things, though it was solid and cold against his hand, the underside smooth. The upper side, though—he raised it to the window to see better how it shifted in the golden light—was like a moment captured. The veins in the rock had been outlined and raised, like tree-trunks, and clouds of leaves seemed to drift in a non-existent wind. There he was, carved into the image, his silhouette picked out in gold-leaf gilding, with Gimli beside him in copper.
It was . . . He was torn between marvelling at the beauty of it as an image, and marvelling at the sheer skill of the carving, and at how perfectly it captured the early morning in Fangorn, the whole canopy translucent and glowing. He could not have painted it if he were the finest artist of the Age, but the stone had it brighter and sharper than memory.
"Shall I take it that you like it, then?"
Legolas blinked at him for a moment, the question far too small for the thing just now coming into bloom that had taken root in his chest.
"You might say that, yes," he said, and pretended that he was convincing. "How was it made?"
A branch in the foreground was no thicker than a ridge of his finger-print, and the stone was crystalline; he had learned enough to know it wouldn't have been simple to carve. A masterpiece, a museum-piece, perhaps.
"Well," Gimli started, relief plain in his voice, "I found the stone by chance, and the relief came fairly easily, working from life— it's these vertical inclusions that make the pattern possible, you see—"
"You made this?"
Gimli blinked, and laughed gently. "I did. Usually I work in jade, of course, so I had to learn rather a lot."
"It is a masterpiece." His voice was quieter than conversation usually required, and unsteady.
"Aye, perhaps," said Gimli. He sat beside Legolas again, and his unbound hair fell over his eyes. "I think it might be the finest thing I've ever made."
Legolas' heart beat inside his chest like a caged bird.