Actions

Work Header

Rating:
Archive Warning:
Category:
Fandom:
Relationships:
Characters:
Additional Tags:
Language:
English
Series:
Part 18 of Finding a Voice
Stats:
Published:
2019-10-31
Completed:
2019-10-31
Words:
3,844
Chapters:
8/8
Comments:
67
Kudos:
140
Bookmarks:
8
Hits:
2,079

Beneath the Sun

Summary:

“…all things must wear to an end at last.” (Legolas, Fellowship of the Ring)

Begun for Whumptober 2019. Snippets, in no particular order, detailing Gimli’s passing in Valinor, and Legolas’s journey through grief towards recovery afterwards.

Notes:

Well. I've been wanting to write something with this premise for about two years, but have never had any idea how to approach such a difficult topic. I still hardly do, but when Whumptober rolled around this year and about ten of the prompts were perfect for my purposes, I decided to try it in short snippets, each dealing with a different aspect of Gimli's death and Legolas's loss.

This is all based heavily in the setup for my "Finding a Voice" series: there are a few headcanons in this that I've had for a long time and only just found a way to express, and there is occasional OC focus. I mean, I spent so long building Legolas a support system - I ought to get to use it, right?

Anyway, I don't know if enjoy is the right word, but... if you read it, I hope you find what you want from it.

Chapter 1: based on the prompt "Shaky hands."

(See the end of the work for other works inspired by this one.)

Chapter 1: Shaky Hands

Chapter Text

He remembers a time when he had steady hands.

The thread of his memory no longer runs in clear patterns; the tapestry of his past has come unwoven, bundled into uneven piles of knotted string – but when he tries, he can sort through the piles to find memories of sure hands at the draw of a bow, the pull at the shoulder and balance of the arrow on a hand that did not waver.

He remembers the feel of cold steel warmed against his palm, the heft of a knife and the knowing, before striking, exactly where the blow would land.  He remembers a time when his body was his to command.

It was only ever fear that betrayed him; he remembers that, too – remembers a storm that would sweep over his spirit until he knew no longer who he was or what he dared.  He remembers that in those moments his hands could never stay still, that they moved with the rhythm of the tide tossing his soul into shambles, tearing at one another because he could not reach inside himself to claw there instead.

And he remembers another pair of hands, hearth-warm and stone-solid, closing around his and bringing him back to the world.  Giving his body back to him, with nothing more than a touch – with nothing less than a promise.  Reminding him that there were things beyond fear.

He remembers the fear, but he will never feel it again.

There are things beyond fear; he has learned it for himself – because the worst has come to pass, and still he is here.  Still he is here, though those hands are not and never will be again.

There is no fear any longer, but his hands shake all the time, and no one is here to steady them.

Chapter 2: Stay with Me

Notes:

Based on the prompt "stay with me."

Chapter Text

It is the last thing Gimli says, the last coherent string of words he can force past his clumsy lips.

“Stay.”

Legolas clutches at his own hands because he dares not crush Gimli’s in his agitated grip.  Shakes his head.  Not in refusal so much as denial – it is no request he will need to heed, because it is not Gimli’s last.  Cannot be.

“Stay,” Gimli repeats, his voice no stronger than a whisper, than a breath against the wind of infinity.  “Stay for them.  Stay for me.”

“No,” Legolas retorts.  There is a hot poker in his chest, and he is lucky when the words that come forth are sparks of anger rather than cries of agony.  “No, you stay.”

Gimli lets out a soft wheeze of laughter.  “If I only could,” he sighs, “love, you know I would.”

“Please.”  He is not above begging, not for this; the anger flares out with a hiss in the vast ocean of grief that is all he can see – broader and crueler by far than the one that carried them here.  There is an other side – so the stories swear – but he believes it less than he could believe in the shore they inhabit now.  One endless sea is too many to cross – and how shall he journey this next one alone?  “Please, Gimli, stay with me.”

They are the last words he will speak for all the almost-eternity of the lonely crossing.  Gimli sighs, and says no more, and every labored breath is a wave in the ocean, a tide drawing nearer and nearer until Gimli breathes no more, and the waters close over Legolas’s head.

When next he surfaces, he knows only silence.

Chapter 3: Dragged Away

Notes:

Prompt: "dragged away"

Chapter Text

Eleniel knows as soon as she opens the door that Gimli is gone.

It is not only the stillness of the body on the bed, but the . . . emptiness.  There is no life in this room, no spirit.  Nothing.

Her heart collides with the gasp that spikes into her throat. Nothing.

“Legolas?”

He sits huddled on the floor beside the bed, black hair pooling around him on the floor, one of Gimli’s lifeless hands clasped in one of his.  He does not move.

“Legolas?”

Not even a flinch at the sound of her voice.  Eleniel’s chest contracts in an icy fist.  To lose such a dear friend as Gimli is wound enough; she could not bear it if – if –

“Legolas!”  She claps a hand onto his shoulder and pulls with enough force to draw a longbow, as though she might draw his spirit back to her, even if it has already fled – but no.  He does not react to her touch, but his body is rigid under her hand – and when she tugs at him, he does not move.

He is still here.  One sob escapes her at that, one choked sound she cannot hold back, and she falls to her knees beside him.  “Legolas,” she whispers.  “I am so sorry.”

Still he says nothing, but this close, she can feel blood and spirit still pulsing through him.  Still here, still here.  It is a task beyond her to keep him thus, but she may be the only one who can manage it – and she will keep spirit in his body if it takes the last breath of her own.

Outside, songs of lament begin, but Legolas does not move or speak, or give any sign of joining in.  So Eleniel stays with him.

Time fades to a blur around them; she knows not if minutes or hours or days have passed before at last the door opens and Mithrandir – Olorin – stands in the doorway.

He gives her the slightest of understanding nods, but speaks only to her friend.  “Legolas.”

Legolas does not react.

“Legolas,” Olorin says again: still gentle, but firmer now, uncompromising.  “We must prepare the body.”

No reaction – not even to the word body, which made Eleniel flinch despite herself.  Olorin takes a deep breath, lets it out in a heavy sigh, and clamps a hand on Legolas’s shoulder.

He pulls with more strength than Eleniel let herself use, after the first shock – and at last, Legolas moves.  First he flinches against the wizard’s touch; then, when it does not release him, he wrenches his whole body forward in an attempt to escape.  It is horrible to watch – he bursts into a frenzy of motion, like some trapped beast: yanking and writhing, twisting this way and that, jerking his whole body as if to throw off the body of an attacker rather than the grip of a single hand.  But the eeriness of it all is the silence with which he moves: not word nor grunt nor cry of rage escapes his throat – only tight, hissing breaths.

Eleniel rises tentatively, as though to catch his flailing arm – but she does not need to.  In that moment, Legolas jerks his body too hard, and Gimli’s limp hand slides out of his own and drops back onto the bed with a soft and final thud.

Legolas freezes, rigid and solid, and stares at it.  The room falls dead silent, but for the sharp rasp of his quickening breath.

And then he dissolves.

Eleniel catches him when he crumples, pulls his head against her shoulder and wraps her arms around his waist to keep him from sliding to the floor.  His sobs are loud in the quiet room, loud and harsh and abandoned; his body quakes with them, and Eleniel blinks uselessly against floods of her own tears and holds him up.

Olorin catches her eye, over his head.  Through the blur of tears, she can see him jerking his head to the side – towards the door.  Take him out of here.

This time, when she guides him away, Legolas does not resist.

Chapter 4: Broken Voice

Notes:

This is a headcanon I've had for over a year, based heavily on the way I've characterized Legolas in my personal universe, and when the prompt "broken voice" came up, I was thrilled to finally have a place to write it!

Chapter Text

He does not know when his silence ceased to be a choice.

Or, indeed, whether he ever had a choice to speak.  Those first days, weeks, years, he knew nothing of his own mind; he walked where he was guided and moved at the bidding of others, for he could not bear to inhabit his own body, his own soul.  Only the knowledge that the pain would not end there kept them from splitting entirely apart in the first shock of his grief – the knowledge that all he could do was wait, that here or there the only hope for him was the maybe that stretches so far in his future.

Now Valinor numbs him; the tranquility slips between his body and his spirit, a wrapping of wool to keep the sharp edges from awakening his grief anew.  He can see through his own eyes, can even bid his own body to move – but always there is a distance between him and himself, a distance that keeps the pain from the full force of its rawness.

And he cannot speak.

It took them all some time to determine whether it was a choice – Eleniel asking him aloud if he did not answer her because he could not bear to, or because he merely could not – and oh but he is grateful to Eleniel, when he can remember to be grateful.  Eleniel, and Siril, and the mother he is just coming to know – he is glad of them, with the tiny shreds left in him that remember gladness.  Without them he would have been gone instantly, and he wishes he could tell them that – but he cannot form the words.

He knows them, knows what he would say; and nothing has failed in his capacity to make sound – but there is something missing, something between the desire and the words.  Intention, perhaps – as though he has forgotten how to muster the will to force the words forth.  He could speak, perhaps, if he could only make himself wish to, but that desire has gone, perhaps forever.

They wonder aloud about it, but Legolas cannot bring himself to explain – cannot bring himself to tell them that his voice is gone.  That it passed with Gimli, wherever he is, for however long he will remain there – and that only when he has his husband back, in that promised-someday an eternity away, will it return to him as well.

For now it is gone, and he cannot even bring himself to miss it.

Chapter 5: Nightmare

Notes:

Prompt: "nightmare."

(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)

Chapter Text

In his dreams, he is almost happy.

He cannot revisit these memories during the day, not if he is to try – as his family bids him, as Gimli bade him with his last breath – to stay with them, for them, to find some new semblance of life out of the shambles left to him.  But at night, when he drifts into reverie, he steps just far enough away from the world that he does not remember the falseness of the comfort, and he lets himself remember.

He falls into his memories and he lives them again: dancing, laughing in the spacious caverns of Aglarond, with torchlight reflecting off the facets of gem-walls; late evenings around a fire in Ithilien, Gimli dozing off with his head in Legolas’s lap.  Sunrise walks along the beach near their home here; flicking salt water at Gimli when he made jests at Legolas’s expense and laughing when he sputtered.

Or sometimes he chooses to follow the dream-path along memories of their nights together: Gimli’s hands on his body, awakening fire beneath his skin and in his soul.  He remembers when their love was young and Aglarond not yet built, Gimli drawing him down into a private corner to make it their own; remembers laying his love out in sun-dappled forest, beneath the trees of new-made Ithilien.

They are the sweetest dreams, and the cruelest – because always, inevitably, the memory grows stale as it winds to its end, and he is borne into waking with the knowledge that it is only an echo, but a mirror, as Gimli said once.  However sweet the memory, the sharpest pain comes at its end – at the knowledge that there will be no more to make, nothing new.  All he has is inside him already – and it is only in dreaming that he forgets that it is not new.

But when it ends, he must wake – and return to the nightmare of his life.

Notes:

Some of my thoughts on memory and how that must feel were inspired in mood and tone by katajainen's amazing story The Days Have Gone Down In the West, which is so powerful and poignant that I stand in awe. Go read it and weep (literally).

Chapter 6: Touch-Starved

Notes:

Prompt: "touch-starved"

Chapter Text

Legolas has always communicated better with touch than with words.

It is so hard, sometimes, to know what he wishes to say, then to dare to speak it aloud – let alone to trust that it will come out the way he means it.  Only with those he trusts the most has he ever dared to unburden himself in words – but those people have always been the ones to understand him without them.  His body spoke the words his tongue dared not form, and they could read him merely from a squeeze of the hand, a tilt of the head, a comforting brush of the shoulder.  It was enough of a language for them.

And now, it seems, even this language has been stolen from him.

Eleniel and Siril have known the speech of his body and his gestures all his life: Siril from the days of his childhood, from lying beside him in bed until he had fallen asleep; Eleniel from years of guarding one another’s backs, knowing from a sidelong glance how many foes they were facing, a quick brush of the arm all they needed to share all they felt before rushing into battle.  His mother has come to learn it in the years they have spent here together; like him, she welcomes the chance to hold her loved ones close – and not one of them has ever been shy of embraces, a head rested against a shoulder, the firm grip of a hand.

But now even this means nothing.

It means nothing, because the hands he craves the most are not here to touch him, will never touch him again, and his skin is numb to any touch but theirs.  Eleniel greets him in the morning with a touch of the shoulder, trying to remind him of their closeness in a way that does not require him to force words from a resisting throat, and he hardly feels the brush of her hand.  His mother wraps her arm around him in the afternoon, and he feels it as a mere weight over his shoulders, not the warmth of living skin.  He hungers every day for the large, warm hands, hard with calluses, that wrapped so easily around his own – and since they will never come, the grip of any other hand feels unreal, a ghost-touch on his ghost-body, attached still to his spirit only by the slightest thread of will.

Time passes, and the rawness of his pain fades slowly away into a numbness that wraps all his spirit, that holds him apart from all feeling.  And he may still be here – he may be yet in his body – but what is his body when it knows no sensation but that which he will never feel again?

He spends his days hungering for Gimli’s touch, and he has lost all other contact because of it.

Chapter 7: Embrace

Notes:

Prompt: "embrace." Follows closely on the previous chapter - and is also tied to a different OC fic that I've been working on all year and will probably start posting soon, if anyone is interested.

Chapter Text

The word comes in whispers on the wind, in the voice of the sea itself.  It is a voice he will know for the rest of his life – it summons him no longer, not since he at last heeded its call, but it called him so strongly and so long that he knows he will never forget it.

There are always whispers, when a ship arrives, but they never curl into him this way, never take hold of his heart.  Not since Eleniel arrived has he felt so addressed – as though the whispers are for him specifically.  As though this new arrival is for him.

But – he feels it.  Feels it in a part of his heart that has gone numb and distant for so long, nearly as long as – but no, he will not think of that.  The whispers promise that today can be a good day, if he can only keep himself together, keep that wrapping of numbness around the cavity in his soul.

Eleniel does not follow him out of their small hut when he goes, the way she usually does.  (He speaks no word to her, but that is usual.  He wonders if she has forgotten the sound of his voice as surely as he has himself.)  She has come to worry less about him, as time passes, as he learns to keep that wrapping intact – and she must have heard the news just as he did, must know that this arrival is for him.

And when he meets his mother just outside his door, Siril a step ahead of her, he knows – he knows they felt what he did, and he knows.

They see her from the shore: a single ship.  Gone are the days when many would sail in at once – the elves on Middle-earth are fewer and fewer these days, and she is a lone figure in hers, gold hair catching the slant of the sun and reflecting it back at them.

Beside him, Siril sucks in a breath.

Some tiny spark in Legolas’s breast burns hot for half an instant in what he almost thinks is hatred – a flare of envy stronger than anything he has felt in hundreds of years.  How can it be fair – how can it be just – that she is about to be reunited with her wife now, when this last thousand years has been as nothing compared to the eternity that he still has to wait?

But her hand rests on his shoulder for just a moment, and the spark dies in remorse.  How can he ever hate her – how, when he knows all she has given up, when he knows she would give up even more for him?

How, when his sister is clambering over the side of her ship and running towards them?

How, when she does not rush into her wife’s arms, but sweeps him first into her own instead?

He has been so occupied in what he has lost that he has forgotten to miss her, but ah how could he have forgotten this?  She is thinner than she was before, he thinks, her grip harder, and her hair is wild with salt spray – but still she holds him just like she always used to, and in an instant two thousand years of pain and fear shed from him in layers and he is a child again in her arms.  The numbness over his spirit falls away, and the pain flashes anew through his breast – but ah this is what it feels like to be safe.

“Legolas,” she murmurs, “oh, Legolas,” and he trembles in her arms like a branch in a storm, and she holds him tighter.  “I am sorry,” she whispers, and he shudders a silent sob against her shoulder and feels – for an instant – real again.

Chapter 8: Recovery

Notes:

Prompt: "recovery." Follows right on the heels of the last chapter.

(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)

Chapter Text

He does not see Laerwen for the rest of the day, or for that night – and he makes no effort to do so.  How can he justify interrupting her reunion with her wife when he would do anything to see his husband again?

The knowledge of her whereabouts has opened something up in him again, peeled away some of the numbness, and he feels again the raw insides of his unhealed wound exposed to the air.  His mother seems to realize it, and she takes him with her to her own home – small but well-kept, with a bed large enough for two, though she is alone.

He noticed a flicker in her eye, earlier, when they saw that Laerwen stood alone on the deck of her craft – a tiny flash of disappointment amidst the relief and joy.  She had been hoping, Legolas realizes, that his father would come along.

There is something about that knowledge that eases him, strange though it may seem.  She has been alone for longer than he has, and faces the same uncertainty – the same not-knowing.  And still she goes on.

And even the fact that he noticed it – it must mean something.  How long has it been since he has been able to see anyone but himself?  Once upon a time he could, he knew.  Once he was sensitive to the thoughts of others; he could see what pained them, and he would move to ease it.  For so long those senses have been gone from him – and that they seem to be returning gives him a tiny flicker of what he might dare to call hope.

Laerwen rises earlier than he expected her to.  Were he reuniting with his husband, he would have spent far longer closeted away with him – but he hears her singing shortly after dawn the next morning, out in the garden near his home.

And then he knows why she rose so early, knows part of the reason she came here – and he knows it was not for Siril alone, but for him.  And – as though her presence has shaken free emotion he has forgotten how to feel – he feels his gratitude for the first time, the way he has not been able to thank any of the others here, not in hundreds of years.

He takes a deep breath, rises, and goes out to join her.

She sits at the base of an orange tree he planted long ago, the sweet scent of the blossoms rising into the air just like the sweetness of her voice.  She smiles at him when he approaches – a gentle smile not without a trace of sadness – but she does not stop singing.

He has not done this in so long; he feared he had forgotten this along with everything else, but something about her voice calls to him.  He approaches, slow and tentative, and settles himself across from her – and takes a deep breath.

He almost worries that nothing will come out, but Laerwen’s voice weaves harmonies he has known all his life, and his place in them comes more naturally than breathing.  His voice is hoarse with long forgetfulness, but the notes are right, fitting into the low breathy spaces beneath her own – and when they sing together, it is like coming home.

The door opens behind him and Eleniel is running towards him.  She stops a few feet away, her hands rising to cover her mouth, her eyes welling with tears.  But she says nothing – not until he has finished.

“Legolas?” she whispers, her voice soft and broken and hopeful.

He cannot reply – not the way he once would have.  But he rises and takes her hands in his and hums a low note.  He remembers at last what gratitude feels like, what it sounds like, even if the words to speak it have deserted him.  And he knows she understands, for the tears in her eyes spill over, and she joins in.

He is not the elf he once was, and never will be again.  His healing will only go so far, and already he knows it.  But that does not mean he is not still himself – whoever that may be.

He may not be able to speak, and perhaps he never will again . . . but he still has a voice.

Notes:

Well, that's it for the gratuitous angst! I'm sure it doesn't come close to delving into true grief, but it was the best exploration I was able to make, and I hope it wasn't disrespectful to anyone's lived experience. Thank you so much for reading.

Series this work belongs to: