Chapter Text
Living is like licking honey off a thorn. - Louis Adamic
He had first realised that something was wrong the morning he woke to hear Thranduil’s heart skip a beat.
He had blinked awake, as he so often did, with his head resting against Thranduil’s chest, his cheek pressed to bare skin, their bodies warm against each other, the habitual resonance of the clockwork heart ticking out its rhythm deep beneath Thranduil’s ribcage a comforting sound: but the familiarity of the moment was distorted, as Bard slowly blinked, as that ticking faltered, for just a moment.
Not a fancy idiom, you understand - no, lying there in the dim light of an early morning, he he heard a literal falter in a rhythm that had always been so sure, so clear, so singularly unchanging.
It was enough to startle any lover from their sleep - even more so if the heart in question was not one that should ever have lost its timing.
Bard had thought, at first, that he had misheard, for how could his strange and eternal lover waver so? But then he had felt Thranduil tense against him, and he realised that he had heard – or, more likely, felt – it too.
It had been some days before Thranduil had been willing to talk about it, his hair falling across his face whenever Bard tried to bring it up, but when they heard it again, late one night in their bed again, it could no longer be denied.
Thranduil - timeless, immortal - was dying.
Bard had not believed in the stories of clockwork men before he had met Thranduil.
Those tales whispered by mothers were for childhood, not the grim reality of adult life: they were not to be believed anymore, not by reasonable men. There was no proof, anyway, nothing to suggest that those stories of great immortals who acted as guardians of this world had ever existed. No one really believed that clockwork men had ever really been made. Like the Cogsmiths, those mythical figures who had first brought their living clockwork to the world, the clockwork men were a fable, something to entertain children, for old men to talk about in bars when deep in their drink.
Once, Gods walked among us, when we were just primitive things, hiding from the predators of the world. Fourteen of them, great and powerful beings beyond anything that we could ever understand, noble and tall with hands of creation.
Stories, nothing more.
Once, they had created marvels, and lifted us from the dirt to the airy heights of Gods.
Once, they built an army of clockwork men to protect us, armed them and set them the task to keep us safe, before they left us to our own devices.
Once, these clockwork men had walked among us.
Once, this world had been full of marvels.
But not anymore. No one really believed those stories, and they did not even make that much sense, varied too much across the world. He had never thought much on them, before he had come to the Factory City all those years ago, and first met Thranduil in the stinking alleys and dilapidated apartments in the great smog-spewing hive of factories that was the capital of the formerly-Great Britain.
For all intents and purposes, Thranduil appeared as a man, and it had been years before Bard had found the truth out about his friend: there was a strange grace about his movement, a coolness to his skin, a distance in his eyes and a set rhythm to his breathing, but none of that would really give him away. He certainly wore no armour, nor did cogs visibly move beneath his skin; though Bard found his eyes constantly following the strange and quiet man, there was no reason that he would ever have believed that he were anything other than mortal. He had not even believed Thranduil when first he had confessed the truth of his story, the two of them sitting close together in the dim oil-lamp light of the tiny apartment that Bard lived in, the machinery in the factory below never quite silent. It had only been when he had removed his shirt (something that Bard at the time had hoped would happen after all those months of longing, though he had thought it would happen in a different context) and shown him the faint depressions in his skin over his sternum, a perfect square in the flawless expanse of his chest, which, with just a gentle touch of Thranduil’s fingers, opened, revealing beneath not flesh or bone or blood, but slowly ticking metal, glowing strangely.
It had taken him a long time to understand, to believe, but Thranduil had been patient, and gentle, as one might be with a startled animal.
What he had learned then was minimal, when he thought back to it later, though at the time it had felt like more than he could ever hope to conceive: once, Cogsmiths walked among us, and he did not know what had happened to them. Fourteen of them, great and powerful beings beyond anything that we could ever understand, noble and tall with hands of creation. Once, they had created marvels, and they had given them to mankind for reasons of their own. Once, an army of clockwork men had been built, used and then left to their own devices.
These clockwork men had walked among mankind for many centuries.
Once, there had been hundreds of them, but now as far as Thranduil knew there was only him left, the others having followed the Cogsmiths elsewhere.
“Where did they go?” Bard had asked, but Thranduil was unwilling to say much more, tracing the curve of Bard’s mouth with his fingertips, his eyes full of grief.
“Do not make me speak of it,” he had whispered in the dark, and Bard had nodded.
Over the many years that they had spent together he had told Bard little more about those times centuries before, and Bard had never pressed him for more than he gave. He knew enough to be content, and he loved Thranduil, loved him enough to never want to make him think on that which might hurt him.
God how he loved him.
And now, his heart was failing.
“I have lived many thousands of years, my love,” Thranduil had told him, his voice a little tired, when Bard had finally managed to make him talk. “And nothing is eternal, no matter what we might think. My body is a machine, which has had no maintenance since first I walked this earth – its decay, in the end, is inevitable.”
But Bard could not believe that.
The thought of Thranduil dying – he could not contemplate it, did not want to. Thranduil was not meant to die, he had believed that for the longest time, and the concept of him being wrong was not one that he could accept so easily.
There would be a way to save him, Bard was sure, and he would not rest until they had found it.
So he had convinced Thranduil to try: they had set up appointments first with the best clocksmiths in the Factory City, then all across Britain when those failed to come up with any answer: it was a lengthy and tedious process, though no way near as expensive as Bard had feared: when the tired old clocksmiths realised that what Thranduil was saying was true, when he opened the cavity in his chest to show them the delicate clockwork that made him live, most of them were too awed at the truth of his existence to want to charge them. But most, too, were unwilling to even touch him, too afraid of damaging him, too afraid of what they did not know.
“If I break a watch,” one told them, shaking his head. “Or even one of the great factory machines, then I can make it work again. It may take time, and effort, and money, but I can do it. If I break you – well, I do not know how to make you live again.”
They were sworn to secrecy, though Bard suspected that soon enough others would hear the stories, even if they did not believe (for who would?). Their hands, stained with oil and years of labour, were all shaking by the time that they left the workshops, the men and women often pale, still blinking in bemusement, everything that they had once believed been proved wrong. Bard took some amusement in the knowledge that he and Thranduil would soon become something of a myth themselves in the world of clocksmithing - no doubt they would be whispering these stories between each other for years to come.
Thranduil took the news that none of them knew how to fix - or even how to examine - his mechanisms graciously, without any real surprise, but Bard could not: that was why, after several of them mentioned the same clocksmith, considering him to be the best of any of them, he booked tickets on the next airship to Tallinn, where his small shop was located, in the heart of the old city.
“He’s booked years in advance,” one clocksmith told them, wiping his hands on a rag. “But he’ll drop everything, when he realises that what you are saying is true.”
Thranduil’s eyes, silver-grey and tired, had been warm when Bard had presented the tickets to him, and he had kissed Bard’s palms with all the same tender gentleness that those awed clocksmiths had touched Thranduil, presented with the miracle of living clockwork.
“You touch me as if I were something special,” Bard had said to him once, early on, stretched out naked against each other under sheets.
“You are,” Thranduil had answered, his mouth finding the curve of his ribcage. “Rare and precious, more so than you will ever know.”
Tallinn was a beautiful city, and perhaps one day Bard would wish that he had spent more time admiring and exploring it, but there was a nervous agitation in his chest that stopped him from even considering it - he did not know how much time they had, half-convinced that he might only have minutes left - which of course, was not the case. It had taken them hours to find the workshop, unmarked and half hidden in the cobbled streets of Tallinn’s old town. He had expected clocksmiths to be better advertised, when first they had set out on their journey, but he was learning differently now: more often than not they were run down, shabby places, half-forgotten.
The art of clockwork was dying, Bard knew: the knowledge, passed on hand to hand, was slowly dying away as people chose to run old tech to the point of collapse rather than paying to have it restored, cared for.
The same could be said for much of the world, really.
This man’s fame was enough to keep him busy, but those who hired him knew how to find him, and it was a long time before they stumbled across him, quite by accident in the end. The old man had been unwilling to see them at all at first, his workshop piled high with other commissions, but in the end Thranduil, with all his calm patience (like water against stone, Bard had always thought, gentle but determined, until whatever stood against him was worn away) finally convinced the man to let them in.
After that, it did not take long to catch his attention, and Bard huffed a sigh as the clocksmith turned a small but bright worktable light on to better see the dying heart of the man he loved, Thranduil stretched out across the workbench, staring up at the dim rafters above them, as if not really there at all.
There had been hope flickering still in Bard’s chest, until the old man had shook his head.
“I can see why they sent you to me,” he wheezed, sitting back on his stool. “And perhaps once man had the skill to repair you, when we still made things of our own, rather than scavenging the scraps left behind by former generations. But now? No. Those gifts are long lost to time.”
He sounded genuinely aggrieved to admit it, and Bard swallowed down his frustration, taking Thranduil’s hand in his.
“There is no way?” he asked, biting hard at his lower lip to keep himself from yelling.
The old man hesitated, for just a moment, watching them carefully. His voice, when he spoke, was quiet, as if he were afraid of someone hearing them, though they were the only three in the workshop, full of oily and broken bits of machinery and strange, intricate tools whose functions Bard could have only guessed at.
“Of course, there are stories,” he said, eventually. “There have always been stories, and perhaps some of them are true – I wouldn’t know. I have only collected them, as and when they have been whispered to me. Stories of strange creatures and tech, from around the world, things that man has never had the ability to create. Things that exist still, legacies of a past that we have no record of. No one understands them, not even now, and many have forgotten what they truly are, but…”
“The legacies of the Cogsmiths,” Thranduil continued, as the clocksmith trailed off.
“Were they real?”
Bard swallowed, his eyes on Thranduil’s face, calm, giving nothing away. The other clocksmiths had asked him similar questions, and he had always refused to say anything more, refused to answer how his gears had first been set into place, why he had been placed on this earth, whether all the stories were true or not. But now there was defeat in the line of his shoulders, and an acceptance too, and after a long moment, he nodded.
“Aye,” he said, a colloquialism that he had picked up from Bard. “I never met them, for I rose later, but they were real. The stories – they all came from truth. And there is much still that has been forgotten, that I never knew myself. We… we were not told anything more than we needed to know.”
“What happened to them, to the Cogsmiths? Did they truly leave, as the story goes?”
Thranduil shook his head.
“I do not know. They may have left, or died, or hidden away – there has never been an answer.”
The clocksmith’s eyes were closed, the corners of his mouth curved upwards, just a little.
Thranduil sighed, as if with his breath were expelling his secrets from his chest, and the clocksmith continued, his voice half-wild with longing.
“It is said that only they knew how to create life from nothing, that only they knew the secrets of keeping tech working for millennia, perhaps even indefinitely. And we do not know what happened to them – indeed, for many years I did not believe that they ever really existed, but I see you now before me, and I wonder now if they did, what truth there is in these stories that I have heard, in the strange pieces of tech that have been brought to me over the years.”
Something hard and unforgiving fluttered in Bard’s chest.
“Do you think,” he said, his eyes on Thranduil, before either of the other two could say anything more. “Do you think that, if we searched, we might find one of them? Or something that they left behind, something to fix you?
“Bard-” Thranduil began, his voice a little pained.
But he shook his head, unwilling to listen to any protests.
“It doesn’t matter the time it takes, Thranduil, or the places we may have to go – we’ll follow every lead, we’ll track one of them down, we’ll find out what we need to do to…”
And then Thranduil sighed, and for a moment Bard thought that they would argue, but then Thranduil smiled, just a little, and shook his head.
“You’re a determined creature,” he said, fondly, and Bard squeezed Thranduil’s cool fingers with his own.
“Aye,” he answered, the corner of his own mouth twitching upwards. “That’s why you love me.”
They stared at each other for a long moment, Bard’s eyes never leaving Thranduil’s, searching for those almost imperceptible lines of gold that threaded through the silver-grey. The clocksmith was watching them, his brow still furrowed, and pity in his eyes.
“My mother used to tell me about Vaire,” he said, eventually, running a hand through his fine, white hair. “Strange to think of it now.”
“Which one was Vaire?” Bard whispered. Though once his mother had told him of the fourteen Cogsmiths, he did not think that even she had remembered all the names, and he did not recall much of what she had said, just vague recollections and the feeling of warm safety that always came to him, unbidden, when he remembered being in his mother’s arms.
“They called her the Weaver,” the clocksmith told them. “But she was a lot more than that, you know – she made the great looms from which industry first blossomed in this world. She was the first, apparently, to offer us her gifts, and it was said that when she showed the people of the world how to use those looms the history of the world was written in the fabric that she created.
“My mother was a weaver,” he continued, his voice slow and soothing. “They still exist, you know – weavers. The great factories hadn’t gotten rid of quite all of them, not back then, anyway. There used to be a shrine to Vaire, many years ago, just a small thing in the heart of the city. It is gone now. But the weavers worshipped her still, despite the fact that I don’t think many of them even really knew what she did. We’ve all forgotten, but there were traces of them once, spread out across the world. I've been investigating those stories, in an off-hand way, for most of my life, and I can promise you that whilst most of the world has forgotten, there are traces still to be followed, and if you did want to follow them, then- well, I know where you should start.”
The journey south to Athens was not a long one, not compared to many that they would make in the coming months – just one long, winding pathway along the iron road that had crossed Europe for as long as anyone could remember, the roaring engine of the great belching steam train leaving Bard with a painful headache by the time they finally disembarked, many days after they had first settled in their narrow cabin in the station in Tallinn.
“Do you think we’ll find anything?” he had whispered into Thranduil’s hair that first night, pressed together in a tiny bunk, legs tangled, so close he could hear the faltering clockwork of his chest. It was the first time he asked that question, and it would not be the last. Thranduil hadn’t answered, that time – he never answered that question.
The clocksmith at Tallinn had shown them the old photographs he had, stored away in the back, of the great statue in front of the Medicine Hall, hidden deep in the heart of the city. It was one of the three leads that they had finally concluded were actually viable, the ones that they might have actually been able to follow up on, and when they finally made their way through the warm, early morning streets of the Plaka to its great and columned entrance, they had stopped for a moment, staring up at the serene and weathered face cut into marble towering above them.
“Do you think she really looked like that?” Bard whispered, taking Thranduil’s hand, stroking his fingers along the soft skin of his palm. Thranduil smiled, just a little.
“I doubt it,” he answered.
The Medicine Hall’s historians were happy to show them to the great library, to tell them all that they knew about Nienna - which, it emerged, was not all that much at all. The legend was that it was she who had founded this guild so many centuries ago, though the historians said this with pleasant little smiles, as if they were certain that this was mere fable – and Bard could not be irritated at that, for it was not so long ago that he had believed the exact same thing. She had come to the learned men of Athens, it was told, with great machines of healing, with things to explore and cure the frailties of the human body that mankind had not even conceived at that point. She had brought her gifts and given them freely, and man had embraced and advanced them, learning to cure that which had not even been discovered.
The historians showed them the museum of old mechanisms and the books listing the long history of advancements: they showed them the early machines, huge and cumbersome, whose clockwork mechanisms had long since slowed to a stop, and after a while Bard’s enthusiasm began to wane in favour of a deep fear, a longing sadness.
“We’re so fragile,” he whispered, pressed close against Thranduil’s side so that the dusty old men with their long beards could not hear him. Thranduil moved closer to, as if sensing in that instinctive way of his that Bard needed comfort, not distance, now.
“As am I,” he replied. “Just in a different way, I think.”
But Bard shook his head, unwilling to hear that.
“You’re not,” he hissed, through his teeth, his voice tainted a little with frustration. “You’re the most incredible thing that I have ever known.”
Thranduil halted them then, the old historian carrying on ahead of them, not noticing. Thranduil pressed a kiss to the corner of his mouth, his voice so low that Bard could barely hear it.
“And it is sweet of you to say,” was what he said, his breath warm against Bard’s skin. “But it is not true, you know.”
They did not learn what they wanted from the Medicine Hall, but it was early days, and they did not let themselves feel too frustrated at their failure. The old men shook their heads when Bard had asked whether they had ever studied clockwork life, if their advancements had ever been focused on the expansion of the mechanical – they had looked at him with incredulity, muttering to each other at the strangeness of this request.
“I mean, the mechanical insects I have heard stories about,” Bard tried to clarify, sounding desperate even to his own ears. “Or the birds, those that are left – but once there were more, weren’t there? And perhaps even living men, too? None of your predecessors have ever looked into them?”
They had looked at him as if here were mad: he wondered, for a moment, if he was.
“It has never been our focus,” one had eventually said, looking him up and down, with just a touch of judgement. “Why should we, learned men that we are, look to false life and untrue stories, when there are still so many questions left to answer for the truly living?”
Bard had swallowed his anger and pulled Thranduil from the building, back through the narrow streets to their small apartment from whose narrow windows one could see the lights of the acropolis, and he had pressed kisses along his collarbones until he had fought back his tears, and had whispered to Thranduil over and over again.
“Yours is not a false life,” he told him, his voice catching. “Your life is as true as anyone’s.”
“I know,” Thranduil told him, pulling him up so that Bard’s face was buried in Thranduil’s neck. “I have never doubted that.”
Their next stop was Cairo, the second of the clocksmith’s three leads: they saw the Great Pyramids before they saw anything else, before the sprawl of the vast city came into view, the locomotive chugging slowly through the sand. But the old Gods of man were not their interest – Thranduil half had to drag Bard to see them, towering far above them, for Bard was determined only to follow the leads, to see nothing of the places that they were going.
“My love, we may never be in this place again,” Thranduil told him gently, in the grey light before the dawn, when all was soft and gentle and Bard woke up in excitement, determined to get on with the day. “Let us see what there is of it now, so that we will not regret what we have missed later.”
So Bard relented to a day of sightseeing, despite the itching anxiety in his chest, for he could rarely bring himself to deny Thranduil anything when he asked for it, for he asked for so little. And he had to admit, that he found himself fascinated by the place, the life and noise and hot beauty of it all, and he followed Thranduil quite gladly, sweating through his shirt. They saw those pyramids, so engraved in world fame, and the Sphinx too, and the great old clockwork timepieces that stretched out of the sand at great heights at the outskirts of the city, tall and old and no longer working, but a testament to former glory. But the next day found themselves in an abandoned square on the outskirts of the city, dust in the mouths as they stared up at the broken down façade of a building long since abandoned.
“The clocksmith said that it was still a working temple, didn’t he?” Bard asked, quietly, and Thranduil nodded.
“Perhaps, when he heard the story, it was.”
The door was not locked: the old wood pushed open at their touch with a scream of rusted hinges, and they moved quietly and quickly into the dark interior, dusty and rich with the smell of abandonment. The interior had been stripped of anything of note, just blank walls and some broken furniture – whether the original occupants had taken it all, or thieves and vandals since, they could not be sure.
“It looks like it has been decades since it was abandoned,” Bard said, whispering despite himself. “I thought…”
Thranduil shrugged, moving away to the wall, running fingers along an old and faded fresco – grey cloth, fluttering in the wind, and a distant river was all that Bard could make out.
“Her name was Este,” he said, quietly. “I wonder who she was, and what she gave the world. I had thought that the priestesses might be able to tell us more, but…”
“They’re gone,” Bard finished. “And I am not sure how we would go about tracking them down.”
Thranduil was still looking at the wall, brushing dust from the surface, revealing more of the painting. Beneath his fingers a slender face was appearing, the hint of a smile, a veil falling to the floor, cranes and falling water picked out in pale colours. There was a story there, Bard knew, a history, a tale that spanned for centuries, but there was no way to find it now, no way to trace it.
“The world has mostly forgotten them, hasn’t it?” he said, in the quiet, and Thranduil nodded.
“So it would seem.”
A bitterness welled up inside him, one that he could not quite fight, and he looked down at his fists instead, clenched tight in anger.
“It’s wrong.”
But Thranduil just shrugged, unconcerned. “Perhaps. But there must always be things forgotten, to make way for new things. If we didn’t forget, we would only ever replicate, and things would stay the same.”
The corner of Bard’s mouth twitched upwards, despite himself, and he leant against the back wall, closing his eyes for a moment.
“Stop being so wise,” he said, and he might have said more, but there was a shifting against his shoulder, and a chink of light fell across the floor from a doorway that Bard had not noticed, which he had unintentionally rested against. The light fell against that pale and half-faded face painted on the wall, and for a moment the lines that made up what was left of her eyes seemed to gleam.
Bard shouldered the door again, harder, and it fell open, old dry wood shifting easily. The light was half-blinding after even just a few minutes indoors, and Bard stumbled through the open door, into an internal courtyard.
He blinked, his eyes adjusting to the light.
Before him, a courtyard of dark grey granite, polished and smooth, time having had no effect on the finish; a fountain, long run dry but tall and beautiful in the centre; plants, huge and blooming, growing up all the walls, tall and overgrown and lush and beautiful. Bard started in surprise as Thranduil pressed against his back, his arms wrapping around Bard’s middle, his chin on his shoulder.
“Someone is still watering the plants,” he said, to the curve of Bard’s neck. “Someone is still looking after this place, as best they can. They may not remember why, or what it all once meant, but they have not forgotten – not entirely.”
Bard closed his eyes to the heat, to the glare, to the flowers blooming in an abandoned temple, and breathed.
It was three long weeks by train down the length of Africa, three weeks before they reached their next destination, the last of the clocksmith’s leads that he had been able to give them. They spent the money on a bigger cabin this time, but Bard was still more than ready to leave their confined space by the time the train finally pulled into Cape Town. The cabin was always just a little too warm, and the sound of Thranduil’s faltering heart seemed to echo all the louder in the confined space. It was in these weeks that Bard had begun to realise the length of the task ahead of them – that this was more than just a brief trip with a quick answer.
He had believed, deep down, that the cure for Thranduil’s ailing clockwork would be an easy one to find, buried in a library or deep in the mind of a learned priestess, easy to access once they had found the right person or place.
But his hope was already beginning to falter: he hadn’t expected it to be so difficult, had not expected Thranduil to never want to talk about it – every time Bard tried to raise it with him he would shut it down, just shaking his head or pressing a kiss to Bard’s bare shoulder in the hopes of distracting him.
Cape Town was a bustling as he had expected, and more so - but they spent little time in the city centre. Thranduil was used to cities, it was true, but he never liked to linger, always moving through them to the quieter alleys, to places where eyes would not rest on him for too long. And they were not here for the city, not this time: it was what lay outside the city that interested them.
The old clocksmith hadn’t really known much of the detail, only the story itself, but some reading on their long train ride had been enough to enlighten them of the Cape Floristic Region, the only remaining of the world’s once verdant floristic regions, the rest slowly having been destroyed over the decades by the pollution pouring from the cities. It had only been called that recently, of course – before that, it had been known as Vana’s fields.
But what the clocksmith had told them was the rumour, lingering still, that the reason that they had come into existence in the first place had been the interference of the Cogsmiths, and when they reached their destination, and looked out across the teeming mass of life, the thousands of plants that could no longer be found anywhere else in the world, they were struck with a wonder, and Bard found that he could not believe that anything else could be true.
Their guide showed them briefly around the main pathways of the place, chattering confidently about the variety on display, pointing out the flowers that were extinct everywhere else in the world, the rare insects: at one point a polecat cut across their path, sparing only a moment of interest for them before disappearing into the shrubbery again. It was strange to see an animal so content and unafraid: Bard was used to the rare creatures he had come across in Factory City, the angry dogs and malnourished foxes, creatures tainted by the city, in one way or another. With his back to the smog that lingered over Cape Town, the thick and stinking cloud that covered every city now, Bard was almost able to believe that they were in another time, a better time – a time before mechanics had taken over the minds of man.
“Why did they call it Vana’s fields?” he asked, after a time, and the guide laughed.
“Just an old tale!” he laughed, flashing the pair of them a smile. “Those old Cogsmith stories, you know? She came here and saw the potential of the land and made for us a beautiful landscape for meditation and peace. Nonsense, of course – although no one scientist has ever been able to agree on why the plants here have been able to thrive here, when they have died in so many other places.”
“Although,” he remarked, after a moment of silence. “There was a professor here, not too long back, asking the same questions – from Buenos Aires, I believe. Apparently she was doing some funny kind of study on these kind of stories. she was telling me all about it, seemed to believe that they were real – can you believe that?”
Bard hummed, and the two of quickly detached themselves from the guide, glancing sidelong at each other as they padded through the shrubbery, avoiding the delicate flowers. Thranduil seemed distracted by something, the longer that they walked through the plants, the flowers all seeming to turn towards them, though Bard could not believe that they really were. After a time, when they were far away enough from the guide that they could not be seen and remote enough to not be interrupted, he stopped, and without explanation lay on the earth, his ear pressed to the ground.
“What are you doing?” Bard asked, frowning a little, but Thranduil put up his hand, his face screwed in concentration.
“There is something deep beneath the earth,” he said, after a long moment of silence. “Some mechanism, working away.”
“What do you think it is doing?” Bard asked, and Thranduil shrugged as he rose to his feet once more.
“Turning the earth, perhaps. Fuelling it. But if I were to guess, I would say that whatever it is doing is responsible for all this growth, for all the flowers and the mosses and the plants that have managed to thrive here, when they are dying all over the world.”
“Vana’s fields,” Bard said, quietly. “A gift with plants, and flowers. And who knows what else was here before?”
Thranduil nodded, as if he were about to say anything else, but he was interrupted by a whirring in the distance, and the two of them froze for a moment as what looked like a small black cloud appeared on the horizon. It took only a moment for it to reach them, too soon for them to do anything, but they did not have to – the small swarm of insects (for that was what it was) enveloped them quickly.
Bard put his hands up to protect his face, but they paid no attention to him – the small creatures ignored him completely, flocking instead around Thranduil. It was only when Bard moved closer that he realised that they were not insects as he knew them, but creatures of clockwork – and such miraculous creatures they were! Their shells seemed to be made of glass, brightly coloured and transparent, and beneath that hard exterior ticked and whirred an array of tiny cogs, so small that Bard could barely make them out.
How many people knew these were here? These tiny insects, hidden among the millions of others, only brought together now by Thranduil’s presence – and Bard wondered how they had known, how they had sensed him, if they had heard his faltering heart on the wind – but then Thranduil laughed, a bright and joyful sound, and it cast all other thoughts from his mind.
“I don’t think I’ve ever seen anything like this,” Thranduil said, his face lighter than Bard had seen it in quite a long time. He held out a hand, and the insects swarmed around it, their touch as light as a kiss against his skin.
“In all your long years?” Bard teased, and Thranduil nodded, glancing at him, the flutter of iridescent wings casting a thousand colours across his pale skin.
“Even in all my long years,” he replied, his voice strangely and suddenly solemn, his voice dropping to something quiet, that Bard almost couldn’t hear over the buzzing of the wings.
“Never enough time, and always too much of it, at the same time.”
The smile he quirked was bitter, and full of a peculiar warmth that Bard had no name for.
“That was the last of what the clocksmith told us,” Thranduil said, in the quiet, later that night when it was just the two of them alone in their small room.
“There is an airship leaving for Buenos Aires in the morning,” Bard whispered to the jut of Thranduil’s hip, in the end, for lack of anything better to say. “A professor, that we can find, if we try, who might be able to tell us more.”
Thranduil didn’t answer, not immediately, and Bard pressed a kiss to the cool skin beneath his mouth.
"Shall we take it?” he asked, as Thranduil's hand carded through his hair.
And Thranduil nodded, slowly and silently, in that dark room, with just the two of them to witness it.