Chapter Text
The storm had lasted hours. Gimli had stopped counting after eight.
He leaned with his back against the mast, feeling the warmth seep out of him through his sodden shirt. The ship creaked, low and sharp.
Through the shower of fat droplets falling around him, Gimli watched Legolas as he moved back and forth across the ship.
The elf kept looking at the sky as if trying to read an unfamiliar map. Each time, his expression reset to careful blankness before he turned back to whatever needed doing.
The elf was afraid. Gimli had not said anything about that yet.
The storm had gone out of the world sometime earlier, leaving them becalmed in a silence that had no business being so loud. In the storm there had been purpose — rope, and hand, and the next necessary thing. Now the deck moved only with the low swell, swallowing water with an ominous gloop.
Gimli took stock.
One sail, the smaller, mostly intact. The larger was gone, or near enough, strips of it still lashed to the yard, limp in the nothing-wind and sodden. Water casks: two, and one of those had taken a crack he didn't trust. Food enough, if they were careful.
The last items he noted were his own unsteady feet. The storm was over but it still felt like he walked on wet leaves. He separated that item from the rest and didn’t dwell on it.
He began to move rope.
His hands found the places where a line could run — here, along the base of the mast, here between where two cleats used to be — and he followed them, clung to them. The rope was familiar. The work of it was familiar.
Gimli made his way over carefully, one hand grasping the rope he'd run without searching for it.
Legolas was at what remained of the prow, one hand hovering over a splintered gap where a rail once was. The anchor of a line had been wrenched out. The broken wood smelled sharp and wet.
"Two casks," Gimli said, by way of greeting. "One uncertain. Food enough for three weeks if we don't waste. The sail—" he paused, choosing honesty over optimism— "needs canvas we don't have."
Legolas rubbed his eyes, blinking against the salt sting. Then he curled his hand around the back of his neck and pressed, his breath hissing out from behind clenched teeth.
"Is that all," he asked.
"No," said Gimli. "But I started with the big things."
Legolas pulled a shard of wood from his collar. He held it up a moment and then discarded it into the sea with a twist of his hand.
Gimli let out a grunt.
"Do you see that?" said Legolas after a time.
"See what?"
"The pattern." Legolas crouched suddenly, a motion so fluid it made Gimli's knees ache in sympathy, and pressed one hand flat to the hull just above the waterline. "There. It comes from that quarter. Not wind — the wind is nothing. Something else is moving the water."
Gimli saw water and more water.
Time passed. This was not unusual with Legolas.
Gimli had learned, over the years, that the elf's relationship with duration was genuinely different. Legolas could stand and watch for what felt to Gimli like a geological epoch and emerge having collected something.
So Gimli waited. He spliced what rope he could. He resecured the netting over the stores. He gathered up the debris. He did not think about his feet.
When he came back over, Legolas had not moved but his stillness had changed quality — tighter, like he was trying to hold too many things at once.
"Talk," Gimli said.
"It comes from three directions," Legolas said. "Or — not three. Two and a half." He pointed. "There's a primary movement, deep, from the northwest. Then something shallower, from due west, but it's — interrupted. As though it’s having to go around something." He drummed his fingers against the hull, tapping out a pattern. "And then there's a third thing I can't quite—"
"Stop."
Legolas stopped.
Gimli was already reaching into his vest for the thing he kept there out of habit — a piece of charcoal, worn to a nub — and casting around for a surface. The deck was too wet. He pulled his sleeve back and looked at his forearm, thought better of it, then retrieved a piece of broken timber pale enough to take a mark.
"Start again. Slowly. Give me the northwest thing first."
He began to draw.
It was rough but the lines came. They always came. A primary swell indicated by close-set curves. The western interference rendered as a broken line, stuttering as Legolas had rapped on the hull. The third thing, the one the elf couldn't name, Gimli left as a question — a single mark at the edge, waiting.
He held it up.
Legolas smiled. "Yes," he said quietly. "That's it. That's exactly it."
"The interrupted one," Gimli said tapping the board. "Something's breaking it up before it reaches us. Something large and not too far." He traced the lines again with his finger and tapped his foot. "So," he said, after a moment. "Land."
"Possibly."
"Probably." He stabbed the interrupted line on his improvised map. "Something that size doesn't move."
Legolas straightened and stretched his arms above his head. He looked at the slack and torn sail. "We have no wind."
"No."
"And an uncertain rudder."
"We have wood," Gimli said. "And hands."
Legolas looked at the pile of broken timber and then at the water. Gimli watched the arithmetic race behind his eyes. "I could—" Legolas began.
"Don't."
"— I could swim for it," Legolas said. "Reach land, find what we need, bring it back."
Gimli crossed his arms tight over his chest and glared up at his friend. "And leave me here."
"It would be faster than —"
"Legolas." The name, said the way Gimli said it, meant listen to yourself. "You don't know how far. You don't know what's there. You don't know how long. And you'd leave me here."
Legolas closed his mouth.
"Besides," Gimli said, moving toward the stern with his careful unhurried steps, "I've been saving up considerable dwarven propulsion and it would be a shame to waste it."
"Meaning?" Legolas said.
"Dwarven hot air," Gimli announced, "being a largely untapped maritime resource —"
"I'm going to make an oar," Legolas said, as he stepped quickly around Gimli and went to find timber.
As he followed, Gimli noticed the elf pause, once, to look at the sky with that arguing-with-a-map expression. Then he shook his head and continued to the wood pile.