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The orcs had been driven back to the ridge by the time Aragorn realized they were running out of ground. There were fewer of them now, black shapes moving between the trees, fewer blades catching the late afternoon light through the smoke. Elladan was somewhere to his left, and Elrohir had disappeared into the press ahead of him, but Aragorn had learned long ago that the twins were never truly out of reach. If he needed them, one of them would be there.
An orc came at him from the right.
Aragorn turned in time to catch the descending blade on his own. He drove his sword beneath the creature's guard and pulled it free as the orc staggered backward and fell. He had barely stepped clear when Elrohir's voice came through the noise.
“Behind you!”
Aragorn ducked.
A blade passed over his head. He turned with the movement and struck upward, catching the second orc across the throat. It collapsed at his feet.
“Your left,” Elrohir called.
“I have it.”
He did.
For the next few moments there was nothing but movement: the press of bodies, the stink of blood and sweat and smoke, the constant shifting of weight beneath his boots. Aragorn fought by instinct now, his sword moving almost before thought. He knew where Elladan was without looking. He caught glimpses of Elrohir between the trees, heard his voice once or twice above the shouting, and trusted the space between them.
Then an orc broke through from the side.
Aragorn saw the blade too late. It caught him just above the outside of the knee and tore upward and for one strange second he felt nothing. He saw the blade leave his flesh. Saw the dark smear of his blood along its edge and the orc's face change as it realized it had landed a good blow.
Then the pain arrived. It was bright and immediate, a line of fire from his knee to his hip.
Aragorn stumbled, his left leg nearly folding beneath him. The orc raised its blade again, but Aragorn was already moving. He stepped in rather than back and drove his sword through the creature before it could strike.
He caught himself against the trunk of a tree, breathing hard.
“Estel!”
Elladan's voice.
“I am fine.”
The answer came automatically.
He looked down.
The gash ran from the outside of his left knee nearly to his hip, a long, ugly furrow where the orc blade had caught him mid-stride. Blood was running freely, soaking through the torn cloth and down toward his boot. But it was not pulsing. There was no bright, sudden rush that would have told him the blade had opened something vital.
He knew the difference.
He had known it since he was young enough that such knowledge seemed cruel for a boy to carry.
It was bad.
It was not, he thought, bad enough to stop him.
“Estel!”
Elrohir was closer now. His gaze dropped to the blood and then returned to Aragorn's face.
“I said I am fine.”
Elrohir's expression made it clear what he thought of that.
Another horn sounded from the ridge.
“There are still some ahead,” Aragorn said.
“There are,” Elrohir answered.
“I am going.”
Elrohir caught his arm. “Aragorn—”
He pulled free.
“I can still fight.”
The words came out more sharply than he intended. For a moment Elrohir simply looked at him. Then his expression settled into something calmer.
“Then stay where I can see you.”
Aragorn nodded.
They went back into the fight.
The next stretch was harder, not because the orcs had grown stronger, but because every movement of Aragorn's left leg pulled at the wound. He compensated without thinking, shortening his stride, keeping more of his weight on the right, avoiding unnecessary turns. He fought closer to the ground and let the others take the wider movements, using the pain as information rather than allowing it to dictate what he did.
It worked.
For a while.
Elladan appeared at his side once, sword wet to the hilt.
“You are bleeding.”
“I noticed.”
“You are limping.”
“I noticed that too.”
Elladan looked as though he had several things to say. Instead, he turned and killed an orc coming for Aragorn's blind side.
“Try not to die before I can insult you properly.”
“I will do my best.”
The line broke soon afterward. The remaining orcs fled toward the northern trees, and the men followed them for a short distance before the order came to stop. There was no point pursuing them into unfamiliar ground.
Aragorn lowered his sword.
Only then did he notice how hard he was breathing.
He looked down again. The blood had soaked through the cloth nearly to his boot, and the pain had changed. The sharpness was still there, but beneath it was something heavier now, a deep throbbing that seemed to move with his heartbeat.
Elrohir came toward him.
“Let me see.”
“It is nothing that cannot wait.”
“It has already waited.”
“We should return to the others.”
“We should.”
Elrohir glanced toward the ridge.
“Elladan and I are going to check the eastern path first. You go back to the others.”
“I can come with you.”
“No.”
Aragorn looked at him.
“Elrohir—”
“You are bleeding through your boot.”
Aragorn glanced down.
“I can still walk.”
“I know.”
There was no argument in Elrohir's voice. Somehow, that made it worse.
“Go back,” he said. “We will catch up.”
Aragorn hesitated, then nodded.
He started down the trail.
He told himself he preferred it that way. The others were waiting at the camp, and there was no reason for the twins to waste time watching him walk when there might still be orcs somewhere along the eastern path.
The truth was that he did not want either of them watching him. Not yet.
The first few hundred yards were easy enough. The adrenaline was still in him, and pain was something he knew how to put aside. He had done it before. He would do it again. The ridge was less than a mile away. He could manage a mile.
The trees passed slowly as he made his way down the trail. His left foot began to feel strangely distant from the rest of him, as though he had to think about each step before taking it. He concentrated on placing it properly, heel then toe, shifting his weight carefully before moving on.
He had made it perhaps half a mile when the edges of his vision softened.
Aragorn blinked. The trees sharpened again. He kept walking.
A few minutes later they grayed once more, this time lingering at the edges. He stopped and put one hand against a tree, waiting for the sensation to pass.
It did. Slowly.
He took a breath and straightened. He could still walk. That was what mattered.
He continued down the trail.
By the time the twins caught up with him, he had gone nearly a mile.
The blood had soaked his leggings to the boot, and the edges of his vision were doing something he did not care for—a slow graying, a softness at the periphery that meant his body was beginning to have opinions he could not overrule.
“Down,” Elladan said, catching his arm. “Now.”
“I can—”
“You cannot.”
Elladan steered him off the trail to a flat stretch of ground between the roots of a great beech.
“Lie down before you fall down and I have to stitch your head as well.”
Aragorn lay down.
The earth was cool and slightly damp beneath his back. He stared up at the canopy, breathing carefully, waiting for the gray to recede.
It did, slowly.
The leaves came back into focus—green and particular, each one distinct. His leg throbbed with every heartbeat, a heavy, insistent pulse.
Elrohir knelt beside him and cut the ruined cloth away with a short knife, baring the wound from knee to hip. The air hit the raw flesh and Aragorn's jaw tightened.
He said nothing.
“It needs closing,” Elrohir said, glancing at his brother.
“I can see that.”
“I was not telling you. I was telling him.”
Elrohir looked down at Aragorn with that particular expression the twins shared—something between affection and the grim practicality of people who had been tending wounds longer than Aragorn had been alive.
“It is long, Estel. The stitching will not be quick. But first we clean it, and that will be worse.”
“I know what cleaning is,” Aragorn said.
“He knows what cleaning is,” Elladan repeated flatly.
He was already uncorking the flask of clear spirits. The smell reached Aragorn before anything else—sharp, astringent, promising nothing good.
Elrohir soaked a folded cloth and began at the lower end, near the knee. He did not dab gently. He could not afford to. He pressed the soaked cloth into the wound and scrubbed, working dirt and grit and the black residue of the orc blade out of the raw flesh with a thoroughness that was not cruel, but was not kind.
It was simply necessary.
Aragorn's entire body went rigid.
A sound tore out of him—low, guttural, bitten off between clenched teeth. His hands found the root of the beech beside him and locked on, and his back arched off the ground before he could stop it.
The pain was enormous, bright and immediate, filling his whole leg and climbing his spine. His vision grayed again, worse this time, and for a terrible moment he thought he might be sick.
“Hold him,” Elrohir said calmly.
Elladan put a hand on Aragorn's shoulder and pressed him flat.
“Breathe, Estel.”
He breathed.
It came in ragged gasps that he fought to slow, to control, to make even. The cloth moved up the wound another inch and he made a sound behind his teeth that he would never have made in front of anyone but them—a thin, desperate hiss, almost a whine, the noise of a body being pushed past what it wanted to bear.
“Give me something,” he said. His voice was hoarse. “To bite.”
Elladan pulled the leather strap from the kit without hesitation and folded it twice. He held it to Aragorn's mouth.
Aragorn took it between his teeth and bit down hard.
It helped. Not with the pain, but with the need to be silent. It gave his body something to do with the force that wanted to become sound.
Elrohir continued. He worked his way up the full length of the wound with terrible patience, pausing only to resoak the cloth. Each pass was its own small devastation.
Aragorn lay with his teeth sunk in the leather and his hands clamped on the root and breathed and breathed and did not move.
The effort of not moving was the hardest physical work he had done in months. His body wanted desperately to twist away, to roll, to curl around the wound and protect it from the thing that was helping it. He would not let it. He locked every muscle into stillness and endured, and sweat ran from his temples into his hair and soaked the back of his tunic.
When Elrohir rinsed the wound a final time with clear water, the relief was so sudden and so vast that Aragorn's breath hitched and his eyes stung.
He blinked hard and stared at the leaves above him.
“The worst is done,” Elrohir said, drying his hands. “You did well.”
The words were simple, spoken in the same calm, practical tone, but something in Aragorn's chest eased at them.
He let the leather fall from his teeth. The strap was marked deep with the shape of his bite. His jaw ached.
“You said the worst is done once before. In the Coldfells. You were lying then too.”
“I was not lying. The stitching is not as bad.”
“The stitching is precisely as bad and you know it.”
Elladan was threading the curved needle. He held it up to what remained of the daylight filtering through the canopy and frowned at it the way their father frowned at it, and for one absurd, fleeting moment Aragorn almost smiled.
“Do you want the leather again?” Elladan asked.
Aragorn considered the length of the wound. The number of stitches it would need. The fact that each one would be a small, specific piercing thing—not as vast as the cleaning, but insistent and repetitive, coming again and again in a slow, deliberate rhythm he could not escape.
“Yes.”
He put the strap between his teeth.
Elladan knelt at his left side and placed a hand just above the wound, pressing the edges together near the knee where he meant to start. His fingers were sure and cool.
Aragorn fixed his gaze on the canopy—on a single leaf, yellow at its edge, trembling faintly in a wind he could not feel from the ground.
“Ready?” Elladan asked, though it was not truly a question.
Aragorn nodded.
The needle went in.
He had been shot, stabbed, burned, had bones broken and set in the field. He had once pulled a splinter of black iron from his own thigh with a pair of tongs because there was no one else to do it.
None of that made the needle easier.
It was a small, bright point of wrongness, the body's most basic protest against being pierced, followed by the dragging pull of the thread. His stomach turned over. His teeth clenched on the leather. His breath came harsh through his nose.
Elladan pulled the thread taut, tied, and moved a finger's width up the wound.
Again.
Aragorn exhaled in a controlled rush.
The yellow-edged leaf blurred and sharpened. His hands ached on the root, but he did not let go. Letting go meant having nothing to hold against, and holding was the only thing keeping him still.
His fingers trembled finely—not enough that anyone standing at a distance would see.
Elrohir saw.
He moved closer, not touching, just there, a wall of steadiness at Aragorn's right side.
“Do you remember,” Elrohir said, in the easy, unhurried tone of someone with nowhere in the world to be, “the time you tried to follow us across the Bruinen in spring melt? You were what—ten? Eleven? You made it halfway before the current took your legs out from under you and you went down the river like a log.”
The needle pierced.
Aragorn's breath stuttered. He bit the leather and rode it out, and Elrohir's voice was there when he surfaced—steady, unbroken, as though nothing had happened.
“Father was furious. Not at you. At us, for not watching you closely enough. As if anyone has ever watched you closely enough.”
A pause, perfectly timed to the space between stitches.
“You came out on the far bank a quarter mile downstream, soaking wet, bleeding from both knees, and the first thing you said was I made it across.”
The needle again.
Aragorn's hands locked on the root. A groan climbed his throat and he crushed it against the leather, his breath coming in short punches through his nose.
“Elladan wanted to carry you back. You refused. You walked the whole way on those bleeding knees and did not make a sound, and when we got home you asked if you could try again tomorrow.”
Elladan snorted softly, not looking up from his work.
“He did try again. I found him at the bank at dawn.”
Elladan positioned the needle at the deepest point of the wound, where the orc's blade had bitten into the muscle.
“Deep breath, Estel,” he said quietly. “This one is deep.”
Aragorn drew breath.
The needle went in.
His back arched off the ground.
A sound escaped him despite the leather—muffled, animal, wrenched from somewhere below will or pride. His hand shot from the root and seized Elrohir's wrist.
He gripped it hard.
His face had gone white beneath the weathering and grime. His eyes were shut tight, and there was moisture at the corners of them that might have been sweat or might not have been.
Neither twin looked at it directly.
Elrohir did not pull away. He did not falter.
Elladan worked the needle through, drew the thread taut, and tied the stitch.
“That was the worst one,” he said quietly. “You are through it. The rest are shallower.”
Aragorn nodded, a tight, jerky movement.
He did not let go of Elrohir's wrist.
Elrohir picked up the thread of the story as though he had never set it down.
“That spring—do you remember?—the snowmelt brought down half the footbridge to the south gardens. Glorfindel said it was the worst flooding in a century. Father said Glorfindel said that every century.”
His voice was calm, warm, continuous—a rope thrown across dark water.
“You helped rebuild the bridge. You were too small to carry the timbers, but you carried the pegs, every single one, back and forth all day. Glorfindel called you his quartermaster. You were so proud you did not sleep that night.”
The next stitches came easier with the wound growing shallower, and Aragorn's grip on Elrohir's wrist loosened by small degrees.
Then the eighth stitch went wrong.
The needle slipped in the muscle's edge and had to be repositioned—pulled back and driven through a second time.
Aragorn made a sound behind the leather that was closer to a sob than he would ever admit.
His whole body locked rigid. His breathing fractured into short, desperate bursts through his nose. The trembling in his hands was no longer fine.
It was visible.
“Easy,” Elrohir said.
His voice dropped low, the way one speaks to a horse that is about to bolt—not condescending, simply certain.
“Easy, Estel. Almost done. You are doing well. Just a few more.”
“Two,” Elladan said.
He rested his hand briefly on Aragorn's knee, below the wound. A touch that had nothing to do with the stitching.
“Only two.”
Aragorn breathed.
In through the nose.
Out through the nose.
He found the yellow-edged leaf again. It was still trembling. He held Elrohir's wrist and Elrohir held still, and the world narrowed to that point of contact, the sound of breathing, and the leaf against the sky.
He nodded.
Elladan set the ninth stitch.
It was small, quick, in thinner flesh. Aragorn bore it with a grunt that barely reached the leather.
The tenth was the same.
Small.
Quick.
Over.
Elladan tied the last stitch and cut the thread. He sat back on his heels and looked at his work with a critical eye, the way a craftsman looks at a finished joint.
“It will hold,” he said. “If you do not do anything foolish.”
“When has he ever done anything foolish?” Elrohir said.
Aragorn opened his teeth and let the leather fall.
His jaw ached so deeply it felt bruised. The strap was marked with the crescents of his bite in two places.
He released Elrohir's wrist at last.
There would be bruises there by morning.
Neither of them mentioned it.
He unclenched his hands and lay flat, simply breathing, feeling the pain settle and change shape—spreading from its sharp specifics into the deep, throbbing ache of a wound that had been handled and was now being left alone.
That was bearable.
That he could carry.
He was trembling. The fine, uncontrollable tremor of a body that had spent everything it had on staying still.
He could not stop it.
He did not try.
“Thank you,” he said.
His voice was rough, scraped thin.
Elladan began packing the kit away.
“You could have made more noise, you know. There is no one to hear but us.”
“I made plenty of noise.”
“For anyone else, perhaps. For you I expected stoic silence and an expression of mild inconvenience.”
“I am not made of stone, Elladan.”
“No,” Elladan agreed.
Something shifted briefly in his face—something old and unguarded, gone before it could be named.
“You are not. But you do a very good impression of it.”
Aragorn said nothing.
Elrohir draped a cloak over him.
The shaking was getting worse now, not better—the body's delayed reckoning, tremors running through him in waves. Elrohir tucked the cloak close without comment and put the waterskin in his hand.
“Drink. Then sleep.”
“We should move. If there are more—”
“There are not. We scouted the ridge while you were bleeding your way down the hill with the self-preservation instincts of a young goat. Drink.”
Aragorn drank.
The water was cool and tasted of leather. He drank until his hands were too unsteady to hold the skin, and Elrohir took it from him without being asked.
He lay on the cool earth and stared at the canopy.
The yellow-edged leaf was still there, still trembling.
His leg throbbed steadily, a pulse of pain matched to his heartbeat, and he let it.
He was very tired.
“Rest,” Elrohir said. “We are here.”
The voice was the same one that had carried him through the stitching—steady, warm, asking nothing.
Aragorn closed his eyes.
He could still hear Elrohir talking quietly to Elladan, their voices low and unhurried, and the sound of it settled over him like a second cloak.
He slept. The twins sat on either side of him in the gathering dark, and did not move until morning.