"A cry for help"

[roselightfairy]

An entry for my bingo card! I have now completed a row, but I don't feel like compiling them all right now so I'll do that another time. For now, I just want to post this one, because I wrote it today and I'm very happy with it.

Takes place within my usual LOTR universe. Legolas has returned to Mirkwood after visiting Gimli's family post-Ring-War, and it will be his last extended stretch at home before he leaves for Ithilien. Contains: discussion of/aftermath of traumatic burn wounds; platonic bed-sharing; old, old friendships.

Legolas's chambers felt . . . wrong.

He could not determine precisely why; perhaps it was that they were too large after so many nights sharing rooms in Minas Tirith, or too small after so many weeks of camping under the open sky. They were not as heavy with stone as the chambers in Erebor had been, but there he had been a visitor and known he would leave soon enough. And anyway, he had had Gimli with him then.

Perhaps that was the problem now. He had slept alone in his bed for nearly all his life, and yet after only a few weeks of sleeping with Gimli in his arms, the space felt alarmingly large and empty. The shift in his soul had been so complete that he could no longer fathom the thought of spending the night alone.

Well. He had best grow accustomed to it, for he would not see Gimli for months at least.

Still, he felt restless and impatient, pacing circles in his too-large-too-small rooms. His bags sat against the wall, and he knew he ought to unpack them and put everything away, but he had been traveling so long that the thought of settling in was as foreign as his home. Especially when he knew he would leave again so soon –

There was a tap on his door: two raps of a knuckle, then a staccato rattle of fingernails. Their signal.

"Come in," he called, and Eleniel opened the door.

Eventually he would overcome the startle at seeing her: the blistered skin of her face, the scars twisting up her right arm. The choppy ends of her hair, barely brushing her cheekbones. Eventually it would become normal: the new truth of her appearance, a mere physical alteration above the soul he cherished so dearly. But for now he schooled his face into blankness, a careful mask he had long known how to wear. If he could not yet control the well of pity and sorrow within him, he could at least control it on his face.

Surely she noticed it – she, who knew him as well as anyone – but she made no remark. "You are back," was all she said.

"I am." He gazed over at his pack against the wall, dirty and worn: out of place in the neatly-arranged room. "Forgive me for not alerting you sooner, but I was – I am – not myself."

"I suppose none of us are." She sighed deeply, the rush of air grating over snags and snarls in her throat and ending in a cough. "May I sit?"

"Always." He fought the urge to take her arm and gestured at the end of the bed, where she had always sat on visits since their youth. She had not needed an invitation before, but perhaps she felt that same out-of-placeness, that unfamiliarity born less of their surroundings than the changes wrought within themselves.

She made her way across the room, her gait slow and hesitant, and when she sat down she cradled her right hand within her left. For himself, Legolas remained standing, the nervous energy in his belly still churning too much to let him sit. "What brings you here? Or have you merely come to welcome me back?"

"When have I ever been so selfless?" Even her smile was different, the one side of her mouth lifting while the other twisted down – but it was more the heaviness in her eyes than the changes to her face that marked it. "No, I – wished to ask a favor."

"Anything," Legolas said immediately, "you know that." For all they may have changed in the last months apart, for all the new scars on their bodies and spirits, he did not even need to hesitate in offering whatever he might give.

She blinked hard, and for the first time amidst all the rest he saw the hollow beneath her undamaged eye. "Legolas, I am so tired."

There were words of sympathy he might offer, but he knew she did not want those. He did not know what he would say until he spoke, and to his surprise what came out was, "So am I."

They shared a long look, and all they could not say aloud passed between them in the open space of shared silence. Flames crackled against her soul; waves pounded his own – They were people of the earth, and yet her wounds had been born of fire and his of the sea, and he could see the same shadows of exhaustion and fear in her eyes that he knew danced behind his own . . . the soul-deep tiredness, the lure of sleep . . . the fear of what awaited them there.

"I yearn to sleep," she said, and her voice was a charred log, cracked and ready to crumble, "but I am afraid of what I will dream."

He looked at his bed, which had seemed too large for him alone – the bed they had shared so many times before, after a harrowing mission or a grievous loss, when neither of them could bear to be without friends. "Then you will sleep here," he said, "and I will keep watch over your rest."

She reached out and he came to sit beside her and caught her undamaged hand. Many things had changed, but her grip was as familiar and steadying as it ever had been. "I hope you know," she said, "there is no other I would trust so much with the task."

He could not say the same, not anymore. But in this moment, it mattered not that he had found another – his heart held space enough for all manner of loves. He crawled up the bed to draw back the covers, and when she clambered beneath them, he nestled in beside her. "Whatever horrors plague you, I will be here to see you through them," he promised her. "And no matter how long you sleep, I will not leave until you wake."

She leaned her head against his shoulder, and the cropped ends of her hair tickled his collarbones. "Thank you," she murmured, and closed her eyes.

Another time, he would have gone to sleep beside her – but the time for that would come. For now he lay awake, feeling his friend breathing beside him, thinking that his chambers did not feel so large or lonely any longer.

And when she started out of sleep an hour later with a cry of terror, grasping at nothing and choking on ash that did not exist, he was there to remind her where she was and to soothe her as she wept, until she had calmed enough to sleep once more.

As he had promised, he did not leave her side.