Scars

[roselightfairy]

For day 15 of Whumptober. A little OC exploration, because how could I not? Legolas guest stars. Warnings for the aftermath of traumatic scarring and burn wounds.

“Your hair is growing.”

It is Legolas who says it, as it would be. None of the others here know her well enough to remark upon it, and Gimli would not think of it as unusual. Even Eleniel herself –

She blinks at his words and reaches up to finger the strands of hair that she just flicked away from her face. It is growing – the ends are long enough now to tickle her chin, where for the last two hundred years they have barely brushed her cheekbones. How did she not notice?

“So it is,” she says faintly.
…

Later she sits at the edge of a spring, staring down at her reflection into the water. Her hair is growing – the hair that was burned away over two yeni ago, the hair she thought would take her an age and a half to grow back.

Perhaps she ought not to be surprised. Her vision cleared within her first days of being here; over those first weeks she noticed that her motions were smoother, her right hand stronger; that she breathed easier than she had in years. It does seem to follow that her hair would also begin to grow again.

Then why . . .

A second reflection comes into view in the water as Legolas settles himself beside her. “You might ask Lord Elrond,” he suggests quietly. “Or Mithrandir. Someone who knows the laws of this place.”

He knows what she wonders – of course he does. She looks up at him, and watches her own head turn out of the corner of her eye. “It is not important,” she says. “You know that.”

“Maybe.” He catches her hand, though – her right one – and she lets him. “But I think if you do not ask, you will always wonder.”
…

“Mithrandir?”

It is not the name he goes by, not anymore, but he answers to it still – and is patient enough to allow them to use it, those who knew him by it once. “What is it?”

“I had a question,” she ventures, “about – the nature of this place. It is said that – that all wounds are healed here.”

“So it is,” he says. “And so they are.”

“Even” – She clutches her right hand in her left, a nervous habit developed early on, when the wounds still pained her every day. Gimli teases her about it now, tells her she is taking after Legolas. “Even scars?”

He gives her a piercing look, and she cannot help flushing. It is obvious what she means to ask, she supposes – but he does not oblige her by giving her a straight answer.

“All wounds and pains,” he repeats, “sooner or later, are healed here.”

And he will not speak another word.
…

“All wounds and pains,” she says, rolling her eyes. “Sooner or later. So he may mean that it is simply not time yet, or” –

“Or,” Legolas says when she hesitates, “perhaps it is no longer a wound to you.”

She takes her right hand in her left again, slower this time, contemplative. Traces the marks on her skin, the patterns of flame and forest that have become so familiar to her – that once upon a time she would have done anything to remove. And then her hand ventures higher, to finger the tickling ends of her growing hair.

Her other hand closes around the blade of her knife.
…

The other elves cry out when they see her the next day: her hair cropped once more to her cheekbones, the shortest covering of black over the rest of her head.

But when her friends see it, they only smile.