Author's note: Several OCs are referenced here in passing. Legolas' younger sister can be found in Enough. Ewessel and Alfirinion are the niece and nephew of one of Legolas' dear friends, who he is helping to raise in Ithilien. They can be found in pretty much all of my stories set in the Fourth Age. (And preemptively, again: No, I have not abandoned my other works—I am just healing from intense experiences in my past job, and I need to put some distance between myself and Enough. Oh, and I just started graduate school this month, and have thus written over 40 non-fluff pages about Applied Developmental Science in the past 8 days, so… This is what you get for now!)

Political author's note: Like many people in America currently, I am struggling with the dehumanizing policies of our current administration. I am particularly disturbed as a child abuse professional with a nuanced understanding of child development and the longterm effects of childhood trauma on adult outcocmes. This 3-chapter reflection is my version of therapy at the moment, written when I have no words left for my anger, and no energy left from my protests. A la gente que habían sido—y ya son—afectada por estas situaciones: Te veo, te apoyare—podemos resistir juntos. Basta! Y a la gente todavía viajando por nuestro país: Te doy amor y compasión, siempre—bienvenidos.

Chapter One

Fourth Age
Minas Tirith - Gondor

There was once a time when I would have tried to explain to Aragorn the tears on my cheeks, intermittently falling as I fold towels and cut soap for his care packs. But we are in the Fourth Age now—the age of men—and the time when I would have had the emotional energy to tell him all the things I have felt over the years was long ago. It was so long ago, even, that I had not yet even felt all the things that now bring me to tears in this quiet room, and so long ago that I most certainly did not know him. I have been exhausted by this world—as much as I am invigorated by it—for a long time. Those very same energies that bring us life also bring us down, back and forth like a metronome.

I have been folding and binding these cloths since I woke today, until a gaggle of boys and girls—young men and women, really—showed up with crates full of soap, stacked between layers of parchment—long, thick bars like bricks. They asked if I was Legolas, I told them I was, and then they left the crates and hurried away.

All of those youth who work for Aragorn have been busy, and I do not imagine I looked like very good company, sat off to the side of the large, empty room, staring out the archway with stacked towels piled about me—organized by color—and my hands flying thoughtlessly over cord as I measured and cut and measured and cut.

It is mesmerizing work, and it keeps my thoughts quiet.

You see, yesterday, I started out by helping Arwen with the children—these new children from the Other place—but I found after a day I could not do it. By the end of the night, I had no words left. I tried, but I could not explain it. It was like my voice was gone—flown away from my mouth so my voice could not give name anymore to the horror we had seen. The more people that spoke of it, perhaps, the more real it would become, and the more energy would be given to the horror, and so it would grow.

I know that is nonsense, of course. But sometimes when the pain is so large…

Aragorn did not understand my silence, I think, but Arwen did. Last night at dinner, her shoulder bumped up against mine reassuringly all throughout my silence. I felt Faramir watching me with concern, and I could tell by the way he lurched forward to push his chair back as I leaned away to reach toward the table behind us that he intended to follow if I was rising for bed. I was not yet, though—only reaching for more wine!—and so he did look a bit of a fool. I smiled at him as he seated himself and I heard Arwen laugh softly beside me.

Faramir's heart is so pure, I think, and filled with such grief right now, I imagine, that I really do not understand how he is upright. He is a ranger, yes, and a steward and so he has seen much, but so have I—so have I—and yet this stops me in my tracks.

This morning, Arwen caught me by the elbow as I poked about in the kitchens before sunrise, looking for something to eat before wandering the city. Somehow, though, she managed to surprise me as my thoughts were far away and my hands rummaging in a cupboard towards a bag of nuts. She firmly shut the door of the cupboard and then slid her hand into mine. Lacing our fingers together, she wordlessly pulled me forward, swinging her other arm as she did so, so I could see her picnic basket and would not put up a fight.

We ate breakfast today in the garden, the one I first planted for Eldarion when he was born. And then we sat on the wall to watch the sun give depth to the waking city below. If I looked out and not down, I could focus on the bigness of the world without drowning in the details—the people crammed into the streets on the first level of the city, the long thin trail of them stretched out across the plain like ants—the cries I either heard or imagined before the city came to life.

And once the sun was up and I felt myself connected back to things through my feet and the sturdy ground beneath me, Arwen asked me to just work on supplies today, and so of course I said yes.

She will go back to the children. I do not know how she will do it.

I think perhaps I am not strong enough.

For you see, when I see them, I think of my small sister from so long ago, and of everything I have lost—I think of Alfirinion and Ewessel, and Elboron and Eldarion, and I am frozen. I think of all the horrors that threatened me as a child, the creeping blackness upon our homes that wound like ivy into our hearts—

At so tender an age, when I see their eyes, and their tiny, dirty hands—when they reach for us for contact, for food, for an embrace or direction…

Today I cannot do it, though I do not know why.

Why when I have seen children beaten and murdered can I not stomach this? Why when I have watched those I loved and grew with and tended like flowers…why when I have seen them cut down in front of me—steaming in the snow—do I feel my stomach clench now as I clean the chafed thighs of a child? Why when I have seen so much worse? I have seen children burned to death in our forest—have seen their parents crumple to the ground, clutching them as scorched skin stick to clothes in their desperation for nearness. I did not vomit that time until I was well home and recovered myself. But, yesterday, I spent lunch with my arms wrapped about my abdomen, sipping water as my face flushed over and over, and my ears roared with that feeling you get after diving into the depths and beginning to surface.

It is the largeness of it, I think. The helplessness and the hopelessness with which we are being assaulted. It is like the swim for the surface is never going to end.

All these people, of course—this is not as though it is a problem that just started, though it is one that Gondor is now seeing in full, as Harad is no longer willing to give these people refuge. And we do not even know the name of their land—not in their own tongue, at least—for no one here speaks it, and I hardly think "the land southeast of the Easterlings" is a fair thing to call a people at all.

The sun has reached halfway up the height of the arch beside me, and as a cloud breaks, its light pierces down like I am underwater, caught looking up blindly into the sun like a fish surprised by the light after settling silt.

I blink away my thoughts. I have finished cutting all the twine, and so I pick up a length of thin waxed string and begin cutting through the long bars of soap with it, to make hand-sized squares for packages. I wrap them in the cloth stacked neatly about me, one at a time—carefully—and I tie a bow on top of every one, with so much care, as if that care is enough to mend the horror of whatever it was that drove these children from their homes and brought them to us.

The sun has hidden itself again, and my skin is cold. I peer down the walkway outside my space and I squint, for someone approaches, and their stride looks like that of an elf or one with elven blood, though I am not expecting anyone.

I look back down at my work and pretend I do not see them. The sun is gone and I am swimming upward again.

"It is good you are helping," I have said to Aragorn over and over since the children arrived.

But it is all I can say, because I do not have the heart for the rest of it.