Elrohir

I am not meant for boats.

While Elladan is completely at home on them, I am all at sea, literally. Tense, awkward, in the way, it is as well he enjoys this for if it was left to me I would have us lost or sunk.

He has been transformed since we launched ourselves on the waves. Long has he been burdened, the sea-longing slowly but surely wearing him down, bit by bit, until we had no choice but to leave, even though Eldarion was not quite ready for it. Truth be told, would he ever be ready? It was a painful forever parting, the last of those children of Elros we would see, the last connection to our sister. It nearly broke me. It was only Elladan urging me on, the sea longing pushing him across the waves that made it possible. And Legolas, always Legolas.

I wonder how he is? What has his life been like all these years? Who was waiting for him on the other side? Is he happy? Does he remember us?

He did not when he left.

Scattered, manic, wild, he laughed as my heart broke, seemingly not caring about our separation. I know he did, underneath the chaos the sea-longing had unleashed upon him. I know he did. I have been clinging to that all these years.

And at the back of my mind there is a whisper, what if he did not?

"Stop wallowing, Elrohir," Elladan breaks into my thoughts, "it is not that bad." He looks so well. Eyes bright, he stands tall and confident, smiling in the breeze. It is a joy to see. Truly I had begun to forget what an unburdened Elladan was like.

"See," he says, "We pass Tol Eressëa. We are nearly there."

I see, and it is a strange thing to look upon that thing of legend, an island we have only studied in books. Elves line the shore and watch us as we pass. I wonder if we know them?

"We shall have to visit one day," Elladan says, "I wonder if they will let us? Imagine, Elrohir, a whole new world for us to explore!" His eyes dance. He is in his element. Elladan, the more Elven of us, has been looking forward to Valinor.

But I have not—not the idea of living in Valinor itself.

I love Arda with all my heart. My soul sings there. The cities of Men, the freeness I find with the Rangers, all those things are what make my heart beat and give me joy. I do not want to leave them. If my life was just me, if there was no Elladan, and no Legolas, Arda is where I would stay. But there is Legolas and Elladan and as much as I love Arda, I love them more.

And they choose Valinor.

Elladan tells me it is not that bad, but to me leaving Arda is as if I lose my soul.

If it was not completely ludicrous I would dive over the side of this boat and take my chances swimming back the way we have come. This whole journey I have battled against the desire to do just that.

When we finally spot the shore we are aiming for all I feel is nerves.

Elladan, on the other-hand is elated.

"I wonder who will be there, " he says, peering into distance, trying to pick them out. "Do you think they even know we come? Perhaps we will arrive to no welcome at all."

"Perhaps." That is what I worry about. That he is not there.

"Legolas will be there for you, of course," Elladan smiles gently, but he is more confident about that than I am. "Imagine, Elrohir, not many minutes more and you will see him."

But I remember the scattered, wild Legolas who left me. The one who laughed when I tried to tell him how much I loved him at our goodbye. I have tried to ignore him and remember only the Legolas who was tender and adoring, who told me often how much he dreaded our inevitable temporary separation between worlds. But as time has gone on that Legolas has faded. The wild one has taken over, and I am afraid.

What is Legolas like now? Has his sea-longing left him as Elladan's seems to have, the minute our journey began? If it has, what is he like without it? I realise I have never been with a sea-longing free Legolas. Perhaps we will no longer work at all? Perhaps we needed the sea-longing so he needed me?

We can see them now, lining up on the shore. Elladan's theory of no welcome is a false one for there is a crowd. My stomach churns just looking at them, but Elladan is glowing,

"Father!" He exclaims at the very instant I see him too. Unmistakably our father. It almost stops my heart, the sight of him. It has been so long.

Elladan is over the side then. He can wait no longer. Waist deep in water he hauls the boat in to the shore and I have to join him. How odd would it be otherwise?

And all of a sudden we are surrounded. Out of nowhere a familiar smiling face appears, taking the rope from my hands.

"Go Elrohir," he says, "go meet your family, let us do this."

He takes me completely by surprise for it has been years since I last saw him.

"Gildor?"

And I turn to the one next to him, who is just as familiar,

"Erestor?"

Even though I was expecting to see them It is so completely startling.

"Go cousin," Gildor slaps me on the back as I stand numbly, pushing me forward. "Go. They have been waiting so long for you."

Cousin?

That makes no sense but I stagger forward anyway, Elladan beside me, into the arms of my father.

My father, who I have never been quite enough for, wraps his arms around me much as Estel might have, or Arathorn when I knew him. As if he were a mortal man and not Elrond of Imladris. It confuses me. Confusion heaps upon confusion and I am utterly bewildered.

"Elrohir," he murmurs, and he holds me back at arms length to look at me. Oh he has changed! How young he looks, how happy. "It really is you! I never dared believe I would ever see you here my precious boy." He says my name but he must mean Elladan. Has it been so long he has us confused? Is that possible? Elladan is the precious one. Why has he greeted me first?

"I told you I would drag him here," Elladan laughs beside me.

"I sent the dwarf with a message. Did you not receive it?" I ask him. I told Gimli to let him know I would be coming. How can he have thought otherwise?

A terrifying thought forces it's way in to my mind. Is Legolas actually here? What if some catastrophe befell them, they never made it, and that is why the dwarf did not deliver the message? The sudden rush of fear sucks my breath away.

"Yes he delivered it," my father says softly—so they are here, "but I dared not believe it was true. So long have I feared Men would claim you in the end."

Did Gimli not tell him of Legolas and I? Did Legolas not tell him?

Looking past my father I search in desperation. He must be here, somewhere.

But it is not Legolas I find. It is her.

"Mother." Elladan murmurs it beside me as we see her at the exact same moment and my Father lets me go.

"She has been waiting for you," he says.

She comes to me for I am rooted to the spot, unable to move, frozen in time.

"Darling Elrohir," she says, her hand brushing away strands of hair the wind blows across my face. "My strong one."

She is on her feet, she is smiling, she is whole. Gone is the terror, the fear, the shame, all of it gone.

I cannot breathe.

All is chaos then.

They whisk us away, my brother and I, to a hall, a house? I know not where, and there are crowds of them. Parents, Grandparents, Great Grandparents, Uncles, Aunts, I am surrounded. Faces that are both familiar and not, old friends and strangers, crowd around us. Some of them—many of them—people stepped straight from the pages of history books.

But no Legolas.

Elladan is giddy with it. Laughing, dancing, eyes shining he weaves his way from one group to the next. He is euphoric in a way I have never seen him. Not me, I am numb.

The noise deafens me, the buzz of conversation annoys me, the smiling faces, one after the other wanting my attention frustrate me. It is a relief when I stagger into Gildor and with a smile he steers me to the door.

"Get some fresh air, cousin. You look as if you need it." he grins. "I will cover for you."

There it is again.

"Why do you call me that?" I ask him.

"Because it is what we are." he smiles. "Now do you want an escape or not?"

I do. I desperately want out and so I take up his offer, putting aside his nonsense for later. He always did talk in riddles.

The air outside is fresh and cold. It brings with it the sea so that is where I head. The sea that I distrust, the waves I wished so recently to see the back of. And yet at the first opportunity my feet lead me there, for over the sea is the land I love.

Legolas is not here. He has not come for me. Elladan is happy now. Would anyone notice if I swam into the waves and returned to Arda? I stand amongst the sand dunes, blinking away the salt and sand the breeze throws at me and wonder exactly that. Perhaps I will try.

I have taken but a handful of steps when a voice floats out of the dark behind me.

"Elrohir."

It is just a name. My name. But the voice that speaks it . . . Oh!

And I spin on my heels.

He is there.

He stands arms folded, tall, beautiful, glowing . . . Legolas.

"You took your time." he says.

"I took my time?" I can barely speak. So long it has been since I laid eyes on him and he is so, so, breathtaking with his beauty.

"Magnificent as always, my Elrohir," he says softly. "I thought you would never get here."

My Elrohir, something about the way he says it smooths my nerves and loosens my tongue.

"Where have you been?"

"I have been here," he says smoothly, "waiting for you."

"But I arrived hours ago. I looked for you. Why were you not down there . . . there where I needed you?" I wave a hand towards the shore.

"Elrohir," he says gently, "Your parents . . . your mother, there was no place for me there. It was not right. We watched you arrive, Gimli and I, and let them welcome you."

Perhaps he is right. It seems logical now he would let my mother greet me first. He knows how I have longed to see her and the pain her torment caused me. But this is not the welcome I imagined.

"I have been trapped in that crowd," I complain. "Why did you not come and find me? I have been searching for you. I thought—"

"In there? With all those self important Noldor? I knew Gildor would send you to me."

"You knew?"

He knew?

"Because we had arranged it. But he took his own sweet time. I had to send Gimli home when it got dark."

He is so different.

The Legolas who left me could not sit still, even long before Aragorn's death he was a fidgeting ball of perpetual motion. This Legolas is poised and calm. The Legolas I knew was a whirlwind of emotion driven endlessly by the sea. This Legolas seems controlled and logical.

Where is my Legolas?

"I thought you had left me," I tell him. "When you did not come, I thought you had forgotten me."

"Forgotten you," he almost breathes it. "How could I ever have forgotten you. Every day I have waited for this moment. Every hour I have imagined the beauty in your face. Every minute I have missed you."

To hear him say it . . . It is a medicine for my very soul.

"How could I forget you, Elrohir? How could anyone forget you?"

"When you left—"

I stop myself before I say the rest for suddenly it seems so foolish. When he left he was ill. When he left he was not this Legolas. When he left he was not even my Legolas. Elladan has been right all along. Of course he would be here. Of course he waited for me.

Of course I have been a fool.

"When I left?"

That poise, that calm, suddenly falters before my eyes. I see it now, the things I missed. Those clenched fists, knuckles gleaming white, the chewing on his lip. He is wound tight as a drum. I am out of practice. I used to be able to read him so well.

"Can you ever forgive me?" he whispers.

"Forgive you? For what Legolas?"

What has he done?

"I left you . . . I left you without any goodbye."

He has worried about that?

"You were unwell."

"I was cruel."

"The sea was cruel."

"It hurt you."

I cannot bring myself to deny that.

"I need you to know, Elrohir," he says, "The moment I landed here, the moment my feet touched the shore and the sea-longing left me I regretted it. I tried to return, to swim back to you through the waves but they would not let me."

Thank goodness for that.

I forget for a moment I was considering doing that very thing myself.

"There is nothing to forgive, Legolas." I tell him. "I understand."

Still we stand apart, still awkward, still ill at ease, and I am not sure where to go from here. I do not like this feeling, or this strangely alien, familiar and yet unfamiliar Legolas.

"Tell me of Eldarion."

It is a change of topic that surprises me and for a second I stumble.

"I left him also," he says by way of explanation when I am silent. "I have lost him forever and those last moments, my last days with him, I cannot remember any of it. Tell me what he has been doing in my absence."

Do I really want to tell him that?

Does he want to know about that lonely boy, grieving for his father, struggling so hard to step into his footsteps. Will that help him? I think not.

"He has his hands full with Tinu," I say instead, voice light. She is stubborn and wilful, refusing to do anything those Lords and Ladies expect of her. They beat a path to Eldarion's door demanding he somehow produce a more decorous sister. He has a delft hand with them that boy, better even than Aragorn, he takes the most disagreeable lord and has them eating out of his hand. I do not know how he does it."

And Legolas laughs. Light, joyful, mischievous, it is perhaps the most perfect sound I have ever heard. It has been so long, so very long since I have heard him laugh like that.

"Eldarion has decided to educate his people." I tell him. "All those ragged children wandering the streets on the lower circles, the ones Aragorn agonised about, he has put them all in school. It has been a huge task and—"

Unbidden my mind is filled with pictures of that young man, bending over his fathers desk, head in his hands as he planned the finances for those schools of his. Arguing with the cantankerous Lords who said it could not, nay should not, be done. My poor quiet, gentle Eldarion. We have abandoned him. We have left him alone. We have walked away.

My sorrow steals the words away.

"And?"

Legolas frowns at me as in the middle of a story I stand silent.

I will never see my boy again.

"I have lost him, Legolas."

There is nothing else to say.

His touch upon my hand as he takes it is like fire. How many years is it since I have felt his skin on mine? That skin is warm. It lights a trail of sparks, from my fingers brushing his, into my heart.

"Come with me." He says. "Come with me, Elrohir."

To the sea?

"You should not go there!" I cry as he leads us to the waves.

But he tosses his hair as if he has not a care in the world.

"I have no sea-longing, remember."

I have never known him without it and every inch of me screams this is dangerous. This should be wrong.

He does not even pause to let us take off our shoes so we stand there, waves swirling around our knees, feet soaking wet, sea spray plastering hair across our faces as he looks toward the way we have come.

"He is not gone," he says to me. "He lives, across that drafted water. He meets with those tedious Lords of Aragorn's in Minas Tirith, he tries to tame his wild sister into some semblance of a princess. We can no longer see him but he is not gone. We have not lost him, Elrohir. He is still there."

He is right. Eldarion is not yet gone as Aragorn is gone. I wonder what he thinks of now. I wonder what he does. I know his daily routine, I could work it out if I tried. I will never know the exact moment he truly leaves us. I can imagine, for eternity if I wish, he is still there.

Then there is a cool wet hand upon my cheek, there are soft warm lips upon my mouth, strong arms encircle me, another's heart beats against my chest, warm breath in my ear.

I thought he was missing,

But finally my Legolas has arrived.

My mercurial, unpredictable, Legolas is here.