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Legolas is walking to fifth period with some of his friends from the track team, only to be thwarted by a group of loitering kids blocking the way to his classroom. They’re all wearing mostly black, which, to Legolas just means that they’re neither jocks nor preps. He couldn’t tell the difference between a goth and a punk if his life depended on it. He does, however, know three things: that these kids are sort of standing in his way, that they’re going to be late for class if they kept standing around like that, and that he will be backed up in whatever he decides to do by his friends beside him and by his father—the teacher whose classroom these kids are likely scratching knife marks into the door of.
Shrugging his backpack higher up on his shoulder and puffing his chest up as big as a sophomore track star’s chest can get, he says, “You guys are going to be late to class.” It’s the biggest insult he could think of.
Suddenly, from the center of the swarm emerges Thorin Oakenshield: the notorious senior bad boy whom Legolas vaguely knew was in his class but has never interacted with. Only now, he’s looking at Legolas. With his sharp blue eyes. Which are either amused or angry. Legolas’s heart stops. All he can feel are his heels digging into the ground, the only thing keeping him from being knocked down by that intense gaze.
“I know,” Thorin says evenly. His voice is so deep. He has a stubbly beard all across his jaw. He’s shorter than Legolas, but more built than he could hope to be. His hair is long, dark, curly, and well kept, like he takes pride in it and is confident enough to pull it off. The group of people around him erupt into giggles, clearly entranced by his swoonworthiness into doing whatever he bids them. “Are you going to run to daddy about it?”
For some reason, this feels like the gravitational center of Legolas’s entire existence. It’s unlike any other time he has ever confronted a non-jock. He feels like his life didn’t have meaning before Thorin looked him straight in the eye and insulted him. He feels like he suddenly understood the secrets of the universe: this is chemistry.
And that’s the end of it. Legolas’s friends go wandering toward their respective classrooms, because he’s the only one of them foolish enough to take AP History two years early. Everyone else either scatters or files into Legolas’s dad’s classroom, and Thorin smiles at his own friends and never meets Legolas’s eyes again.
~~~
That’s the start of Legolas figuring out he’s gay. Maybe he should have figured it out sooner. Maybe there were clues: the way he liked the smell of the locker room; the hair braiding thing; the obsession with professional wrestling; the fact that his only friend was a girl; the fact that he told his dad he was unrequitedly in love with his only friend because it was a convenient way to avoid further questions about dating.
But those are only the pieces that start falling into place later, after many weeks of resentfully studying Thorin’s profile and trying to understand why it makes him feel so intensely, and then many moons of drawing portraits of Thorin’s profile from the back row of seats in the classroom, and then a lot of time in the shower thinking about the way certain words might sound in Thorin’s voice. Thorin tells their teacher—Legolas’s father—to “go fuck himself” quite often, and it’s enough to fuel dozens of fantasies, about Thorin rescuing him from his controlling father and taking him for a romantic drive into the city, or about Thorin just saying the word “fuck.”
~~~
Legolas certainly never confronts Thorin and his friends again, even if they’re loitering around the classroom or disrupting classroom time. Thorin is very good at disrupting classroom time. He’s always tearing apart the teacher’s curriculum choices, or interrupting with questionably relevant questions.
For example, in the middle of a lesson on the Constitution, Thorin—without even raising his hand—interrupts the lecture five times to ask, “And how many slaves did he own?”
Legolas watches his father’s eyes threaten to bulge out of his skull when he’s asked these questions, which he’s clearly not used to being asked. “That won’t be on the test,” he tries answering once.
“But don’t you think it should be? Isn’t that relevant to the story of this attempt at democracy?” Legolas almost swoons when he hears Thorin talk, sometimes. He adds a couple of lines to the portrait of him he’s working on in his notebook.
Of course, this all ends up in Thorin being given detention.
Some of Legolas’s fantasies may involve being sent to detention with Thorin, who is always in detention, and getting an after-school lesson in how to give a blow job.
~~~
Legolas Oakenshield.
He writes it in the very inner margin of his notebook, tucked away next to the spiral binding where it’s less likely to be seen. Once it’s done, he touches his thumb to the words, picking up the led from the very nice .5 mechanical pencil Thorin left in his seat after class one day, which Legolas took and has since used for many special uses, such as this.
He’s happy enough with these fantasies, and the thought that they might eventually drift into reality, because apparently he’s just a big gay nerd, and not an intellectual athlete like he thought all these years. He even considers joining the drama club just to have more in common with Thorin, but their meetings interfere with his duties as president of both the environmental club and the archery club.
But things start getting complicated when Tauriel—his supposed best friend—starts upsetting the balance.
One day, after Thorin has interrupted a lecture on the manifest destiny by repeatedly asking the number and names of the Native American Nations that were present in each territory they were learning about, and has subsequently been given detention, Tauriel, the traitor, stands up and defends him.
“No, he’s right, and he should not be punished for pointing out that this is all stolen land.”
Legolas goes red in his seat, ashamed on so many different levels. He’s ashamed that his dad is glaring at him as if he is responsible for his friend’s behavior, since he’s the one who convinced her to take AP History with him. He’s ashamed that in all these months of admiring Thorin’s bold tongue, he has never once thought of coming to stand in his defense.
Most of all, he’s ashamed that even now, with the boy he loves and his best friend both standing up to his father, Legolas can’t even think of a single intelligent thing to say that might support their cause.
He just sits silently, rolling Thorin’s pencil between his palms under the desk, while Tauriel gets handed a detention slip.
~~~
After that, Tauriel starts spending a lot of time in detention. It almost seems like she likes it there. She says there’s usually a guy there who’s cute enough to make the time pass quickly.
Legolas isn’t sure why it bothers him so much that she spends so much time in detention, but he thinks it might have something to do with his shame, and the fact that he feels a pull on some level to be the one serving detention in defence of Thorin’s honor.
But maybe that’s the problem. Maybe Tauriel’s not defending Thorin’s honor, and she actually agrees with what he’s saying. Legolas wishes he could figure out what it all means. He’d like to understand the reasons (beyond the obvious, stomach-dropping ones) that it’s important for Thorin to constantly bring up which historical figures were gay.
Maybe there’s a reason he was supposed to wait two years to take this class in his senior year.
He walks over to the detention room one day after school, just to catch a glimpse of what goes on there. Do they talk about politics the whole time?
When he peeks his head in through the door, they are not talking about politics. Tauriel is giggling and shouting, while some boy in a trench coat with greasy black hair draws on her hand with a pen. That must be the guy she’s talking about. They look at each other with a disgusting level of affection. Legolas has never seen Tauriel blush so hard. It’s weird.
And there, on the other side of the room, Thorin sits brooding, drumming his fingers on the textbook he’s reading and occasionally rolling his eyes at his two detention-mates. Thorin doesn’t have anybody drawing on his hand with a pen, and Legolas feels bitter regret sink in his stomach.
He could belong here. He could be giggling and blushing like Tauriel, if only he wasn’t too scared to stand up to his father, or too ignorant to know how.
~~~
Halfway through the 1930s, Legolas heads to class only to find Tauriel walking away from it—with Thorin Oakenshield at her side.
“What are you doing?” he asks her, panting from his sprint to catch up. Now that he’s close, he notices the boy she likes, Kili, is there, too, like the three of them are some kind of trio. Now that he’s close, he also notices that talking to Tauriel will inevitably put him in Thorin’s line of sight, which is—perhaps counterproductively—something he generally avoids.
Thorin’s gaze pins to the spot, and his silence pushes all the air out of his lungs.
“Cutting class,” Kili says, awfully chipper for someone who wears a black leather trench coat every day.
“It’s an intervention.” Tauriel’s smiling, too, as if Kili’s enthusiasm, or Kili himself, is infectious.
Thorin’s voice rattles through Legolas’s skeleton. “They don’t trust me not to rip your father’s head off, given today’s subject matter.”
Legolas grits his teeth, trying to bear Thorin’s dismissive look. He had hoped enough time had passed that Thorin had sort of forgotten who he was, so they could start from scratch some day—some day, in the remaining three months of school before Thorin graduates.
“I’ll come with you,” Legolas says breathlessly.
Thorin’s perfectly shaped eyebrow lifts just a touch before he turns away. Legolas tells himself it might be a good thing. Maybe, just maybe, he’ll unexpectedly surprise Thorin Oakenshield and prove he’s perfect boyfriend material.
~~~
Cutting class is weird. They just go to Subway, and discuss plans to go to In-N-Out after school. Legolas chooses to focus on the fact that he’s not not-invited to these In-N-Out plans.
It’s also weird seeing Tauriel so lost in someone else, even with Legolas, her supposed best friend around. He feels kind of guilty for noticing the absence of her attention, but he also feels guilty for bringing it about; he hasn’t exactly been the most forthcoming with her this whole school year. He sort of came out to her, in a vague, “I think I might be gay,” way, but they’ve never talked specifics and she has no idea about the I <3 Thorin Oakenshields written all over his notebooks. She doesn’t know the private thrill of pride that shivers through him every time he hears his dad complain about Thorin and Tauriel at the dinner table. She has no idea he’s struggling with trying to understand what she and Thorin get so up in arms about in class. In fact, she probably thinks he doesn’t care at all.
No wonder Thorin thinks he’s not worth looking at over a footlong meatball sub.
(Legolas definitely thinks Thorin is worth looking at over a footlong veggie delight.)
“So,” Legolas sighs, throwing his fate into the wind. He might die. It would be safer to never try to talk to Thorin than to flat-out learn they could never be. But still. This is kind of like a double-date. “Was it the Holocaust you wanted to avoid in class?”
Thorin stops chewing for the briefest of pauses, but it’s enough to make Legolas’s heat stop in anticipation. Then he starts chewing again, looks up at Legolas with scrutinizing eyes until Legolas feels himself turn pink. Then Thorin looks down again. When he finishes chewing, he starts explaining.
And Legolas tries to listen.
Half an hour later, he goes to sixth period still reeling from such long exposure to Thorin’s eyes and voice all being directed at him.
~~~
In-N-Out is even better. It seems like they’ve spent enough time together now that Thorin is actually starting to wonder about him, to wonder why a jock like him is hanging out with this raucous group of guys with long hair at In-N-Out. Thorin asks him a couple of questions about himself—even if the questions are peppered with the occasional joking suggestion that Legolas is just his father’s spy.
“I’m not like the other… guys on the track team.” Legolas has no gay friends or relatives, so he’s struggling to find a way to make it clear to Thorin that he’s available without just throwing himself at his feet.
“You’re not like the other jocks,” Thorin repeats in a musical, mocking tone.
Legolas is working on a response to that when Thorin stands abruptly and walks to the entrance, where a mousy, curly-haired marching band nerd has just appeared.
Thorin takes the guy’s jacket.
Thorin laughs openly and without mockery at every joke the guy makes.
Thorin doesn’t talk to Legolas again that night.
But he doesn’t kiss the guy. They hardly touch at all, actually. Nobody treats them like a couple.
There is still hope.
That night, Legolas falls asleep to the thought of sweeping in and saving Thorin from an unrequited love, of being the shoulder for Thorin’s beautiful hair to drape across as he cries until he looks up and sees that Legolas has been there, waiting, all along.
~~~
“Pop quiz.”
The dreaded words set off a chorus of groans around the room. Legolas usually doesn’t panic, because he usually gets a glimpse of the tests as his father is printing them. Judging by the icy stare his father is giving him as he passes these out, this particular pop quiz might have something to do with Legolas cutting class yesterday.
Legolas tries to keep a stiff upper lip about it.
In the seat in front of him—because Legolas has dared to sit so close, today—Thorin is turning from side to side, his long locks brushing elegantly against Legolas’s desk. Then Thorin bends deeply toward the floor, and Legolas realizes he’s looking for something. After quickly taking inventory of Thorin’s desk, he concludes that he must need a pencil.
Legolas happens to have a pencil in his hand. It is, in fact, the fancy mechanical pencil that he had taken from Thorin’s seat months ago. His heart expands in his chest. This is a crucial moment. It’s his chance to swoop in and save the day. He can give Thorin the pencil, and with that gesture, expose the fact that he has kept it with him all this time.
Or he could dig up another pencil to lend him, but that just isn’t as romantic.
“Here,” he whispers, leaning forward in his seat to slide the pencil up against the flesh of Thorin’s searching palm.
Thorin takes it, then looks at it, then looks at Legolas. He recognizes it. He knows. Legolas tries not to blush too much, but it’s hard to do when he’s just made such a romantic gesture to the boy he dreams about kissing.
“Thanks,” Thorin whispers hotly, turning the pencil over in his hand.
Legolas hopes he can trade in his portrait-drawing for tracing his fingers across Thorin’s beautiful face until he truly learns every line.
~~~
He doesn’t expect Thorin to ask him to the dance or anything. He might dream about it, but he doesn’t expect it.
So he’s definitely not, in any way, shape, or form, disappointed when the day of the dance comes and he still doesn’t have a date.
He doesn’t even have a fake date. Ever since he started attending GSA meetings and calling out other boys in the locker room for using homophobic slurs, he’s been pretty sure there are some rumors spreading around about him. It’s not a big problem. It’s actually nice that he doesn’t have to turn down as many girls asking him out. And he doesn’t mind being included less often in sports team social activities, since he doesn’t even really like those guys anyways. And there’s a chance that Thorin might hear one of these rumors about him, figure everything out, and come running to him.
Dateless, he tags along with Tauriel and Kili to the dance, dressed in a nice green sweater and black jeans. When they get to the gymnasium, they find Thorin leaning against the back wall. He and Legolas exchange a lingering, sincere glance. It truly feels like they’re on the same page, commiserating over being surrounded by the definition of heterosexual culture: illegally drunk teenagers groping each other on the dance floor while bad rock ballads blast from the speakers.
Hope springs to life in his chest, filling his throat up like a rushing river and making it impossible to give voice to the words he wants to say: Do you want to dance?
He never does get the words out.
Nothing could have prepared him for the cold numbness that spreads through his body when the mousy, curly-haired marching band nerd—Bilbo—shows up and Thorin presses him up against the wall and immediately starts making out with him. The ice pierces his heart, freezes over all the hope that had been bubbling in him. He can’t feel his legs. He’s pretty sure his stomach would start heaving in sobs or nausea if it wasn’t frozen solid.
Thorin, who, it is quickly apparent, has been drinking for a while now, brings Bilbo out onto the dancefloor and starts groping and grinding while bad rock ballads blast from the speakers. Legolas can’t watch, but he also can’t look away.
His ears stop ringing when he sees his dad, the reluctant dance chaperone, come up to Thorin and Bilbo, manually separate them, and shake a finger at Thorin and then at the gymnasium door.
He’s kicking Thorin out of the dance.
The ice covering Legolas’s body shatters. His hands start shaking. His senses are sharpened. Even his sinuses feel painfully clear. It’s as if it took having his heart broken for him to finally realize that this entire fight hasn’t been about his breaking heart.
He runs across the floor, avoiding making any eye contact with Thorin or Bilbo, narrowing his gaze at his dad instead. “Hey, you can’t kick them out of a dance just for being gay!”
His dad looks down at him with some hybrid of pity and fury. “This one has been drinking,” he says, pointing in a direction that Legolas guesses, but can’t confirm with a glance, is Thorin.
Every other time Legolas has stood up to his dad’s decisions, that would probably have been the end of it. Tonight, his limbs are rattling too much for him to stop any time soon. “No, that’s not fair! You could kick half the kids here out for being drunk, but nobody notices because they’re not doing anything drunk and gay!”
His father keeps staring at him, looking at him like he doesn’t recognize his own son. Legolas feels tears gathering at the corners of his eyes, byproducts of a hurricane of confused emotions, but they only fuel him onward. “You can’t keep shutting other out people’s lives and opinions just because they don’t fit in with your lesson plan!”
When he blinks, his eyes are blurry enough with tears that it feels safe enough to look at Thorin and Bilbo. But they’re gone. They left. They have each other. They’ve fought their battles, and now it’s Legolas’s turn to fight his own.
But instead of fighting more, he runs out the back door—the opposite direction from where he thinks Thorin and Bilbo went—and heaves into the bushes behind the gym. He thinks he’s going to vomit, but all that makes it up through his throat are sobs, regret at how long it took him to take a stand, embarrassment at what Thorin probably thinks of the pitiful stupid jock who followed him around like a creep for half a year, and about a thousand broken pieces of his heart.
To add to his misery, the first face he sees when he’s calmed down enough to breathe normally is his father’s.
“Hey,” his dad says gently. He nudges his fist against Legolas’s shoulder. It’s such a stupid gesture, so outside the realm of anything he would normally do, such an overcompensation—though an overcompensation for what, Legolas is too tired to figure out. He’s so exhausted that the gesture makes him laugh. His dad kind of smiles in return. “I have a student in my Honors World History class who’s in there, without a date.”
It’s such a non sequitur that Legolas has no option but to keep giggling hysterically under his breath. “And?”
“Maybe you should ask him for a dance.”
Legolas closes his eyes to watch the puzzle pieces come together. His dad is trying to set him up with a boy. All his dad got out of his whole speech inside the gym was that his son is gay. Legolas wishes he could stop laughing to communicate how completely sucky his dad’s response is, but all he can manage is to kind of blend his laughter with some pained moans.
His abs are really going to be sore tomorrow from crying and laughing so much.
“Thanks for the tip,” he says, shaking his head. Maybe tomorrow, or the day after, he’ll have the energy to talk more seriously with his dad about listening to his students’ voices when they have something to say about decolonizing the curriculum. Because—oh, god, the day after the day after tomorrow is Monday, and Legolas will have to be back in class with Thorin again, and he really, really doesn’t want to think about that right now.
So he walks away, back into the gym because it’s the only place to go.
He doesn’t want to try to find Tauriel and Kili right now, but they’re also supposed to be his ride home. Maybe he should just walk home and replay his mental images of Thorin making out with Bilbo until he literally runs out of tears. Or maybe he should stay at the dance and stand miserably with the other losers who don’t have dates and try to forget about his own existence. Or maybe he should just go find this miraculous student of his father’s, get drunk, and grind and grope on the dance floor while bad rock ballads blast from the speakers until his dad kicks them both out.
“Hello, there,” chimes a loud, melodic voice.
Legolas whips around to find a boy standing right beside him. He’s around Legolas’s age, quite a bit shorter, with reddish-brown hair that’s neatly combed and slicked back. His cheeks are full, round, and tinted a little red, and they look so soft that Legolas immediately wonders what it would feel like to kiss them. “Hello,” he says cautiously, afraid of the way his exhausted brain is already running haywire and thinking other boys who are not Thorin are cute. It can’t really be that easy to get over heartbreak.
“I was wondering if you would care to join me in a dance,” the boy says.
Answering Yes, please is Legolas’s first instinct, but he suppresses it for a minute, trying not to get ahead of himself when he’s so overwhelmed and exhausted by the night’s events. He looks the boy over again, this time taking in his sharp dark blue suit and his warm brown eyes. His cheeks grow redder the longer Legolas looks, which makes him feel powerful for one moment and guilty the next; more than anybody, he can relate to how much effort and vulnerability it takes to go out on a limb and ask for a dance from someone who might not deem you worthy of even saying goodbye to.
He opens his mouth and starts to extend his hand the way he’s seen princesses do in movies when asked for a dance at a ball, but a suspicious thought stops him in his tracks. “You’re not in Honors World History, are you?”
The boy blinks. He looks almost guilty, but apparently it’s not because he’s only come here on Legolas’s dad’s orders. “No, I must admit, I’m not. But that doesn’t mean I couldn’t admire the way you stood up to that teacher.”
The words wiggle into Legolas’s heart like flattery before he even mentally processes them as a compliment.
He extends his hand the way he’s seen princesses do in movies. The soft insides of their fingers slide together and it feels like electricity bringing all the circuits in Legolas’s body back online.
“My name is Gimli,” the boy announces in the stillness between them finding a vacant spot on the dance floor and them actually starting dancing.
“I’m Legolas.” He has never danced with a boy before. He doesn’t know if he’s supposed to lead, or follow, or whatever. He wasn’t even practiced enough at dancing with girls to have any transferable knowledge.
Gimli takes both his hands in his and starts swaying lightly, clearly not knowing what he’s doing either, but going for it anyways, and somehow making it look good. It’s absurdly gentlemanly. Legolas feels his face soften into a smile. He notices his heart beating in his chest for the first time in what feels like hours.
“I actually knew your name,” Gimli confesses.
“Really?” There’s that flattery feeling again.
“Yes, ah, you yelled at me and my friends the first week of school. I asked around to find out your name, because I thought you were cute.”
A few of Legolas’s good feelings flutter away like anxious butterflies. “I did?” He looks at Gimli’s face again as he nods. It’s possible he sort of recognizes it from that time he had first talked to Thorin Oakenshield, outside his father’s classroom. It’s not like he had noticed anyone but Thorin at the time. Maybe his attention has been misdirected this whole time. Maybe he has lost his chance to date this really nice boy who has apparently been waiting around for months while Legolas had a stupid gay crisis over an unattainable senior. But then he remembers Gimli’s words just a few minutes ago—he noticed, and admired, Legolas standing up against homophobia at school dances. “I’ve changed a lot this year,” he says.
Gimli tilts his chin up, appraising Legolas in a way that makes him feel worth looking at. “Still cute, though,” Gimli says with a smile.
Legolas ducks down low enough to whisper, giving some locks of his hair the privilege of brushing across Gimli’s kissable cheek. “So are you.”
~~~
The dance goes on for hours, but Gimli and Legolas escape out to the sports field to lie in the grass and stare up at the stars. They talk about constellations. They shout increasingly excited ideas at one another as they develop plans for a curriculum development engagement student committee that will make sure diverse voices are heard in the classroom. They belly-laugh about the horrible jazz choir rendition of the national anthem they both remember from last week’s assembly. Gimli tells funny stories about his family, and Legolas complains a little about his. Every once in a while, Legolas remembers that he was crying over Thorin earlier that night, and he starts to wonder if he’s using Gimli as some kind of rebound to make himself feel better. But every time, Legolas turns his head on the grass to look over at Gimli’s stargazing eyes, and what he feels blossoming in his chest is not the warmth of flattery; it’s the heat of true, vivid, startling affection.
In the middle of a story Gimli’s telling about his woodshop class, Legolas decides he can no longer handle them lying side by side, flat on their backs, and not touching. He rolls over onto one elbow so his chest brushes against Gimli’s arm. Sparks fly as he lowers his free hand carefully onto Gimli’s big, soft bicep.
Gimli’s words slow down, which was not Legolas’s intention. He was really enjoying the story; he just wanted to watch Gimli’s pale pink lips and fiery-dark eyes up close while he told it.
The story ends. It makes Legolas laugh. It occurs to him that he’s close enough that his laughter probably smells like his breath, and he hopes he doesn’t have bad breath. But then once he’s thinking about Gimli smelling his breath, he starts thinking about Gimli tasting his breath, and then thinking about kissing Gimli seems like the only natural progression of things.
He moves closer, still balancing on one elbow, but hovering closer to Gimli’s mouth, thinking about kissing it. He wants to. He wants to, so badly, and the words don’t even get smothered in the happy, bubbling stream of his hope: “Can I kiss you?”
Gimli’s hand slides up under his hair and to the back of his head. It’s the most intimate, earth-shattering thing he has ever felt, and that’s even before that hand starts pulling him down, closer and closer to Gimli’s lips, which keep parting in gasps and stuttered breaths that mirror Legolas’s own.
A shooting star falls in a long, shining arc over their heads, but neither of them sees it. In fact, they don’t look up at the stars again for a long, long time.