Disclaimer: I do not own/make no money from/am not associated with The Lord of the Rings or The Hobbit.

Warnings: violence and non-graphic character death

The story

Legolas awoke and wished he hadn't.

In his dreams, his mother sang to him and held him and he was loved. The waking world was cold, and silent and pain pulsed in his veins and radiated from his shoulder and from his hip and thigh.

He awoke and he whimpered because the waking world hurt.

He whimpered and he shivered and he reached his hand out for someone. His mother, the broken parts of his heart whispered, but he was awake now and he knew she wasn't there to reach for, and he searched for someone who was. His father. His brothers. Even his friends or a healer. Someone.

No hand reached back. No voice soothed him. Nor did any voice scold him.

Finally, he opened his eyes. They were heavy and didn't want to open, and his eyes didn't want to focus once he did manage. It was strange to open his eyes at all, for he didn't usually lay about with them closed, but they seemed to want to be closed just then.

It took a great deal of effort to make his eyes work properly, and doing so made the pain throbbing in his head worse, and the ache running up and down his arms and legs was worse as well, as though he had needles instead of blood in his veins, needles that burned.

He opened his eyes and he bit back whimpers, and he blinked away tears that only made it harder to see, and he turned his head to find who he knew must be there. Who was always there.

There was no one there.

There was a chair, but it was empty and undisturbed. His father was not sitting in a dream trance, waiting for his young son to awaken. His brother was not reading there. His other brother was not pacing about the floor. There was no one, nor any sign there ever had been. There wasn't even a healer. Not even a healer's apprentice. There was not another person in the room.

Legolas's thoughts felt slow, and he hurt and he was cold. He felt ill, and the world didn't make any sense at all. Someone should have been there. Someone always was.

His thoughts were slow, but the first explanation that finally occurred to him to explain his strange circumstances was a terrifying one that seemed to make the temperature of the room drop another degree, and the room already felt too cold for the elf.

They weren't there, he thought, because something has happened to them. Perhaps…perhaps they are all dead. He survived, and all his family died.

Perhaps everyone died. Perhaps every elf in the entire kingdom died and he was alone in this room.

His soft, pained whimpers turned to fearful sobs. There was no reason to bite back the sound anyway; there was no one there to hear him. He shook and he sobbed and in his heart he begged for someone to come, for his family to return and hold him and assure him they weren't injured or dead.

He cried, and he writhed from the pain inside him, and he shivered in the icy room, and he rolled onto his side and was almost sick on his own pillow but he had enough strength to lean over the side of the bed instead and be sick on the floor. The world spun and his blood burned while his skin froze and no one came with blankets or words of comfort or medicine or to assure him that all was well. No one came.

Legolas awoke.

He was still cold and he was still in pain and he was still alone. He was also thirsty. He hadn't remembered falling asleep and this time there was no dream of nana, only a sense of deep loss.

This time, his mind felt less sluggish, and alternatives presented themselves to him being alone because every other elf in existence was dead.

He was alone because he was no longer an elfling. Or at least (for he was not of age) he was not a baby elfling who needed his hand held and needed his ada to hold him and sing to him and needed his big brothers to check under his bed for monsters. He was old enough to be a warrior himself. Well, old enough to be an apprentice and to stand in a protected stance behind the warriors which was almost the same thing. He wasn't exactly an adult yet, but he was too old to be coddled.

He remembered what had happened to leave him in pain in a bed in the healing ward. There had been spiders, hundreds of spiders. There had been a battle in the forest. The elves were going to exterminate every last nest, they said, but somehow the nest they had gone to exterminate was larger than they had thought, than their scouts had suspected. There had been a hole in the ground, beneath the roots of an old dead tree, and the spiders had poured out and poured out and Legolas had been with the other young apprentices and they had brought new supplies from behind the defensive line and had helped the wounded away and there were so many wounded, so much screaming. The spiders screamed, the wounded screamed, or worse, didn't scream.

And Legolas hadn't disobeyed. He remembered wanting to. He wanted to help. He was young and only an apprentice but he was good with a bow, and bows are ranged weapons so he wouldn't have to enter into the midst of the battle, and he could have done more than to carry supplies of arrows to a more advanced apprentice who would carry them all the way into the battle itself.

But he hadn't, because Legolas wasn't one to disobey. He hadn't snuck into the battle; the battle had snuck in upon him. He had been helping a wounded warrior to stagger to the waiting healers when the spiders had appeared in their midst.

They had come from a hole that had appeared from nowhere. One moment Legolas was in a designated safe zone and the next it was war.

"Run!" the warrior had shouted, trying to push Legolas away, but there was no time, and anyway, Legolas was almost a warrior himself and warriors don't abandon wounded companions. He had arrows, because arrows were always in demand and he'd have passed them on to be taken to the warriors if he hadn't come upon the wounded elf first. He had a bow and his knives too, because elves are sensible and recognize the necessity of arming their young. So Legolas did what any warrior elf would have done in his situation; he planted himself in front of his wounded companion and he started shooting at the enemy.

He was young and inexperienced but his aim was deadly. The spiders were vicious and cruel and attacking where the elves seemed to be weakest, where they were all children and healers and wounded, and they were fast and they were many. Legolas shot eleven spiders. Seven of them died directly. Two ran away, sorely wounded. Two managed to deflect his arrows with their legs.

His knives were sharp but he was young and the spiders were fast and angry. Legolas remembers falling, tripping perhaps, and a shadow descending and his shoulder was in agony and he could hear his own voice screaming. He was screaming like a child, not like a warrior at all, but he couldn't seem to stop and then his leg was on fire and the world turned over and he looked and realized he was dangling from the jaws of a monster, and somehow he still had his knife, and even as he screamed, almost as though someone else guided his hands, his knife was in the spider's eye, and he fell, he remembered falling, but he couldn't remember landing.

And he woke up and he was in this room and he was alone. Spider venom still burned in his veins, and the puncture wounds throbbed, and when he dared to peek beneath his sheet (and why couldn't he have a blanket as well, it was so so cold) he saw bandages red with his blood, so red they were black at the center, or perhaps that was the spider's venom oozing out of him.

He had fought in a mighty battle, but he didn't feel strong or mighty or brave. And his father didn't come, perhaps because he was himself wounded (so many, so many were wounded), or perhaps he didn't come because he was king, and kings must look after their people, and there were many people now to look after. Or he didn't come because one of Legolas's brothers needed him worse. Or because he was dead. Because they were all dead.

Or perhaps they didn't come because they didn't want to come. Perhaps they didn't care much what had become of Legolas.

It was a secret fear, one he could normally recognize as unreasonable, when he wasn't ill and in pain and muddled and alone. It was the sort of fear that crept up in the darkest hours of the night. It was the sort of fear that intertwined itself into truer fears and true pains so that the true and untrue became harder to distinguish.

It was a fear he'd carried since his mother died. Since she had died and it was Legolas's fault.

It wasn't his fault. He knew that, logically. He was too small to fight the orcs, and she told him to stay where she put him, to stay no matter what he heard, no matter what he saw, and he was to stay there until she returned for him.

Sometimes, it felt like he was still waiting for her to come back.

He wasn't quite twenty years old. If he had been a Man, he'd have been big enough, old enough, but he was an elf and never had he felt so small and useless and his nana screamed. And Legolas was a good and obedient son and he stayed and he stayed and he saw and he still stayed.

He didn't move when the orcs called for him. When they promised they'd let them all alone. When they promised they'd let his mother alone if he came out to play. He didn't move when she screamed and screamed and…and he closed his eyes, and maybe he was a coward because he closed his eyes but he couldn't close his ears.

He didn't move when the screaming stopped. Or when the orcs thrashed about, stabbing at the leafy undergrowth or whacking at trees, not even when he could smell their stink, smell blood, and the leaves around his hiding place rattled with their blows.

He didn't move when the orc's jeering and laughter turned to screams of pain and rage and fear, when death thundered down upon them. He didn't move when he saw his father find his mother and he screamed in anguish and he held her, and for a long time that was all his father did, and the forest was silent and still, and Legolas was still waiting because his mother was supposed to come and get him and she couldn't and somehow he couldn't move.

His father sat on the forest floor with his wife for the longest time, and then suddenly and all at once he looked away from her, looked around. Somehow his father found at once what the orcs could not and his eyes met his son's.

His father must have moved. He must have moved because he was an elf, not a spirit, and he could not instantly appear from one place to another, but Legolas didn't see the movement. One moment his father was weeping in anguish in the glade and the next Legolas was in his father's arms and the king held his son with all his strength, as though he meant to anchor him to the world somehow, as though he could keep the entire world at bay. He hid his son in his arms and whispered into his hair the same words, over and over, "Thank you, thank you, thank you."

And from that moment the world was in two pieces, the world of Before and the world of After, and the pieces didn't fit together very well but somehow the world wasn't broken entirely and it did go on.

It was a world with less laughter and less music and less everything. It was a world of less. Legolas was still hugged, but not like he was loved so much as he was needed. Sometimes his father and his brothers just needed to touch him, it seemed, and when they didn't need him, they seemed to want him to be away from them because they'd look at him as though looking at him hurt. And those were the times when it was hardest to remember that it wasn't his fault that his mother died and that his family didn't hate him and he knew if he asked they'd tell him, but he never asked because he just knew, somehow, that asking that would hurt his family more than the comfort he'd get from them telling him they still loved him and it wasn't his fault.

And he became a warrior apprentice, as if knowing how to fight now would make any difference to then. He practiced and he practiced and sometimes, when he hit his mark again and again and again, the world felt more right. He wasn't an adult, but he wasn't a child, not anymore, and when the monsters came for his people, for his family, he could fight back.

Except he was still small, and not strong enough and not fast enough and he was hurt. Perhaps his father and his brothers were annoyed with how weak he still was and that was why they left him alone. Or perhaps they were injured too, somewhere else. Or perhaps they were dead.

Or perhaps those secret fears and secret thoughts were the true ones and he'd been tricking himself all this time and they hated him and would be glad if he died.

The fear and the doubt swam through him, as potent and as painful as the spider's venom, and he remembered his mother telling him to stay, to stay until she came, but she never came and she never came and not knowing was so much worse than anything.

The world swam about him and his limbs trembled but he managed to get his feet on the floor. The floor was cold, and he moved like a newborn colt, almost falling with every step while the floor seemed to tilt beneath him. Still, he was an elf and he was used to walking in tilting and moving surfaces and somehow he stumbled to the door and managed to open it.

He heard noises at last, and after the silence they were too loud, too much, like screaming. There were moans of pain, and soft singing, and the clank of implements rattling about, and soft voices, some soothing, some urgent, some desperate, some pained. He was close to the main healing ward, only steps away, but suddenly those steps seemed insurmountable.

"Ada?" he whispered, and with the sound of healing and suffering just feet away, suddenly the fear that his family was hurt or worse, that they were dead, all of them, was almost too great for him to bear. The world around him swayed, and he took a step and the pain in his thigh almost seemed to explode like he was being stabbed anew, and somehow the floor had turned into the wall and he tried to cling to it in case the world turned over again and left him falling, but there was nothing to hold.

"Prince Legolas!" someone's voice shouted. It sounded shocked and horrified and Legolas started to turn to see who was there and he hoped it wasn't nana because he had promised her he'd stay until she came and he had broken that promise and she must hate him, but before he could, the world went out of focus, and there was a noise like a waterfall in his ears and everything went away.

He did not hear the healer calling for aid.

He did not hear his father calling his name.

He did not hear his brother, his voice broken with pain.

He heard nothing but the roar of water rushing violently and then, over the water, his mother was calling for him. He was no longer alone. His mother had come for him at last.