Spoilery snippet of introspection

[roselightfairy]

I'm starting to think about Valinor. I have many headcanons for Valinor, but I'm starting to try to put some of them in words.

Also, this just in: I have never known how to write about friendship in a non-romantic way.

Eleniel gets ten more years with Gimli before he dies.

Legolas has gotten two hundred more, she learns when she sails, and she is grateful for it – as tiny a chunk as that is, in comparison to the years of loneliness that will stretch out before him, it is still more than he had hoped for – more than any of them had dared to dream of.

And who is this dwarf, she wonders, to have shaped elfkind in such a manner, to have so many lives hanging off of his own brief mortal instant? He is not bound to her soul the way he is to her friend’s, but he has changed it: eternally and irrevocably; he has made her different, and she will never be the same elf again.

It is Legolas’s fault: it has always been Legolas’s fault, since they were young together and in the same novice training unit: it must have been his fault that her eyes fell upon him, royal but not at all regal, bashful and unwilling to meet anyone’s gaze – it must have been his fault that she looked upon him and thought, that one. Mine.

He resisted for a long time, more for her sake, she knows, than for his own – but always she has wanted him; always she has been drawn to his spirit; always she would follow him anywhere, before he even asked. She has never wished to wed, but she has married her soul to Legolas’s in all the ways that matter –

And thus, now, to Gimli’s as well.

None of them realized, in Ithilien, how much the dwarf was changing them – how much mortality was changing them, after so long watching it from afar. They are no strangers to death, they who hail from Lasgalen, but this is a different kind of death: this is an aging, a changing, that has worn its way through their spirit – one they did not notice until Legolas left and took Gimli with him and they were without a center.

Eleniel and Celair were to lead together; it had been the plan for a hundred years, but Legolas departed and took their soul with them and suddenly no one could stay. The men were all dying, the men and dwarves who had been their friends and partners, and with Legolas gone none of them could stop seeing it.

Eleniel is the first to give in and sail – but she will not, she suspects, be the last.

I JUST HAVE LOTS OF FRIENDSHIP FEELINGS OKAY