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Word of Thorin’s quest to reclaim Erebor reaches Thranduil’s ears long before the dwarven company crosses into Mirkwood. So when his march-wardens drag the exiled king through his doors, hands bound and stripped of weapons and armor, Thranduil’s face betrays nothing. Only the tightening of his hands around the seat of his throne gives any indication of an old sentiment creeping forth, stirring memories better left untouched.
Thorin is made to kneel, hair wild about his shoulders, obscuring his features.
“What business do you have disturbing the peace in my forest, Thorin, son of Thráin?”
When the dwarf lifts his head, Thranduil is nearly caught off his guard. He expected a show of anger, festering resentment, but never this fire in Thorin’s eyes, of such heat and violence it threatens to raze his forest to the ground, and with it everything he holds dear. It burns with a will bent on making him suffer as Thorin suffered, making him watch with impotent despair as his kingdom is laid to waste, bereft of allies.
“It is no business of yours.” The years have deepened Thorin’s voice, and in it Thranduil hears the echoes of long, bleak winters, of the kind of loneliness borne by a king.
“You travel with thirteen companions. Where are they now?”
“I can only hope they have strayed far enough to escape your treachery,” Thorin spits with ill-disguised contempt.
“Hold your tongue, dwarf.” The guard to his left jerks at his bonds, eliciting a grunt of pain before Thranduil notes the wound staining Thorin’s tunic and raises a hand.
“Nothing passes unseen through the Woodland Realm. Or unhindered unless I wish it so.”
He steps down from his seat and bends slowly forward until their eyes align before grasping Thorin’s jaw with a firm hand. Warmth assaults his skin, cutting swiftly through flesh and bone, and he takes a perverse pleasure from it as he does from the hiss that escapes through Thorin’s teeth, a sound for his ears alone. He studies the tumult twisting darkly in Thorin’s eyes, pupils dilated with fury, lust, and self-loathing. He sees little of the Thorin he once knew, and yet this forgotten king on his knees would bring about his end just as surely.
He releases Thorin from his grasp and straightens.
“Take him to the dungeons. There he will sit until he learns the folly of his silence.”
*
The hour is late when Thranduil appears before Thorin’s cell and finds him asleep, body tense and curled defensively, a hand fisted against his chest as if around his sword, battling demons in the deep.
Thranduil enters without a sound and kneels beside the dwarf, paying no heed to the dirt soiling his robes. He lays a hand on Thorin’s shoulder and measures the depth of his breathing, observing the shifting of his eyelids and the twitching of his limbs until he’s satisfied that Thorin sleeps soundly, though more fitfully than he remembers.
It takes him but a moment to tend to Thorin’s wound, which marks a shallow but ugly path from his collarbone across the breadth of his shoulder. Thranduil’s cool hands against feverish skin draw a sigh from Thorin that sounds too softly to linger in the dank air of his prison.
When his work is done, he finds himself loath to pull away and instead remains bent over Thorin, hair brushing an exposed cheek, drawing breaths in time to the rise and fall of the chest beneath. Whatever Thorin has lost and endured over the years, he smells the same—of sweat and steel and beneath that, the unspoiled sweetness of the earth. Thranduil brushes a thumb over Thorin’s mouth and conjures the taste of it, the unrelenting heat that once set fire to his blood as though he could be remade under Thorin’s hands, and his beauty would be both glorious and terrible to behold.
Then he shudders and stands abruptly, retreating to the far end of the cell to stay the thundering of his heart, painful and disorienting yet familiar still.
“What would you have me do?” he murmurs, and this question like all the others remains unanswered. “You seek vengeance and glory on this quest, yet I fear you will find only death.”
Thranduil knows what Elrond has foreseen. A battle waged senselessly over gold, blood painting the mountainside, and a line of kings broken. He would keep Thorin here and turn his path away from this fate, relinquish all hope of reconciliation. But he also knows that he can no more contain Thorin within these walls than he can hold back the floodwaters of the Forest River.
“I have seen thousands of years unfold before my eyes, the rise and fall of kings a hundred times over. There are truths I have gathered that most do not come by in a single lifetime, and yet I cannot deny I have made mistakes.” He turns towards Thorin and studies the vulnerable curve of his body. “Mistakes I wish could be undone. But I do not regret sparing my people from the ugliness of war. They look to their king for guidance, for wisdom, and I would not so blindly lead them to their deaths. As king, I would do right by my people, as you by yours. In your heart you know this, and you would admit it were it not for your pride.”
His words taste of bitterness and hypocrisy. He watches Thorin, who stirs but does not wake, and lingers for a moment longer before taking his leave, at once fearing and hardening his heart against all that remains unspoken.
He seeks the forest, the wild and winding paths made light by daybreak, and there he embraces the loneliness that kings were made to endure.