Chapter Text
He wakes suddenly when there is a loud noise somewhere close by, struggling against the heavy covers, trying to sit up for a moment on instinct before remembering that he can only use one arm: he pulls himself slowly, painfully upright, listening carefully. Someone has come in, whilst he was sleeping, and has cleared the fire, relaying and lighting it. so the room is warm again, so alien to all that he has known in the last few years.
There is a knock at the door, but before he can work out whether he is supposed to call out or not it is pushed open, revealing the faces of all three of his children.
“Da!” Bain calls out, leaping across the room on long, gangly legs.
Sigrid smiles at him. “Thranduil told us that you wouldn’t be arriving until tomorrow,” she admits, “to stop us from staying up all night waiting for you, I think.”
He reaches for her, and she leans closer, letting him kiss her cheek.
“Good,” Bard said, only then noticing that Tilda is very carefully carrying a tray. He feels his heart sink in his chest as they rest it across his knees and sit around the bed, chattering away about all the things they have to show him, and all the places in their new life that they want to take him to see. There is a panic building in his chest as he looks down at the bowl of oatmeal, drizzled with honey. It’s in a blue-patterned china bowl, far better than anything they have ever owned, and there is a spoon by its side.
He swallows, but they are watching him expectantly, and he picks up the spoon awkwardly with his left arm. It’s strong enough to push himself up with, and so he thinks of it as his good arm, but whenever he tries to do anything with it starts to shake, against his will.
He tries to eat, because they've tried and they’re smiling and they are so happy to see him here, but he’s ashamed. He can barely manage, the oatmeal falling from the spoon across the tray.
He drops his spoon several times, against his will, but perseveres, because they are watching.
Shell shock, they call it, but all Bard knows is that it feels like hell: as if it wasn’t bad enough that he couldn’t use one arm, his other had become virtually redundant thanks to his own mind.
He can’t look up at them; he feels tears of frustration building in the corners of his eyes. The oatmeal tastes of ashes in his mouth.
The kids are staring at him, growing visibly more upset the longer that they watch.
Bard wants to disappear.
What use do they have for a father that can’t even feed himself?
But before he has a chance to work out what is best to do, Thranduil marches into the room, an elegant cane in one hand keeping him propped up today. It’s made of some dark, polished wood, and there are silver vines wound around the top, leading up to a curved handle. It looks strong; far stronger than Bard is feeling him right now.
“Off you go,” he tells the three of them, the corner of his mouth curving up slightly in as close to a smile as he seems able to manage. “Your father and I need to talk. Tauriel and Legolas are in the library, waiting for you. I believe that they would like to try building more of the treehouse this morning.”
Bard wants to ask about this treehouse, but finds that he doesn’t even have the energy to do so. He kisses Tilda’s head, smiles at Bain and Sigrid, and watches them go; Thranduil takes the tray off him, not commenting on the mess, and leaves it on the side table. He sits down, apparently waiting for something, and soon enough and older woman knocks and enters, dragging in a large, tin bath.
She returns several times as the pair of them sit in silence, slowly filling it with great copper kettles that must have been heating for hours down in the kitchen. It is close enough to the fire to remain warm, and he tries to move his legs.
They barely listen to him.
Thranduil stands, once she is finally done.
“My housekeeper,” he tells Bard, his voice low and quiet. “Mrs Price.”
She checks the bathwater, and then throws another log on the fire. Bard watches this feeling strangely distant from the entire affair, not really reacting as Thranduil comes to the bed. He leaves his cane on the floor, and throws the covers back, pulling Bard’s legs around, and sitting beside him, slowly turning him, before he loops Bard’s good arm around his shoulders.
When Thranduil stands, he takes most of Bard’s own weight, half-carrying him across the room. It's a slow move, Thranduil staggering a little at one point, but Bard can't quite find the part of himself that would resent this treatment, would resent people acting this way around him. The sheets are ruined, as Bard knew that they would be, and he tries to apologise to both of them, but the housekeeper just clucks her tongue at him and begins stripping them off. She leaves them, shutting the door behind her with her arms full of laundry, just as Thranduil eases him down into a chair.
He doesn’t ask Bard if he needs help, and Bard doesn’t protest the treatment. Even when Thranduil begins stripping him of the remnants of his uniform, leaving him bare and shivering, he can hardly bring himself to feel anything, as if this is no longer his body, and if none of this has anything to do with him.
Thranduil pauses at every half-healed laceration, tuts at every rat and flea bite, sighs quietly at every scar, though he says nothing. There is something comforting about his lack of condolences, that he doesn’t feel the need to tell Bard how brave he must have been, how proud the country is of him, or any of the many pointless niceties that have been thrown his way, kind words that mean nothing.
This, this means something.
Thranduil helps him to his feet again, one still a little strange and swollen looking from the break, and half-lifts him into the bath.
The water is so warm, and for a moment Bard wants to sink beneath it, and never surface again.
But then Thranduil is talking, his voice still quiet, as he takes off his jacket and rolls up his shirt sleeves, only to kneel beside the bathtub.
“When I first came back from war, I could barely move from the pain of my leg.”
There is a tray beside the bath that Bard hadn’t noticed until then, and Thranduil lifts a piece of flannel from it. He takes Bard’s good arm from the water, and begins cleaning it, with thorough, firm strokes.
The soap smells of lavender.
Bard closes his eyes.
“I couldn’t even bring myself to talk.” Thranduil’s voice is calm, quiet, as if he isn’t talking about him, but some distant acquaintance, whose story he has happened to overhear at a party, and is now repeating to another friend. “My son was a baby, and they brought him in to see me, and I couldn’t feel anything.”
Bard looks at his injured arm, still wrapped in dirty bandages. It has been weeks since he has seen the skin beneath it, since he had first been set to the second hospital.
“Why are you helping me?”
Thranduil looks at him.
“Why wouldn’t I?”
Bard doesn’t know how to reply to that. He’s a damned old soldier, who has killed men that didn’t deserve to die, with an arm that doesn’t work and three children that he doesn’t know how to provide for. He isn’t from a world that would normally help men like him.
“I have enough to go around,” Thranduil says, and he scrubs Bard’s nails, and his voice is even quieter now. “You’re a good man, and you love your children, and I have enough to tend to an injured old solider, one just like I have been.”
They say nothing more, for very long time. Thranduil is as thorough as any nurse, and soon enough it is the water that is black with mire, and Bard who is clean. The dirt is scrubbed from his nails, the filth from what is left of his hair. He closes his eyes, and wonders that he isn’t embarrassed by this treatment, by some stranger caring for him as if he were a babe. But this is no longer his body, he feels now. This is the body of a stranger, a stranger who has killed and served the time he has owed his King and country. This is not the body of Bard, father and canal man. No, and so how could he feel embarrassed about this whole thing?
Still, Thranduil lets him deal with certain parts of himself alone, and when he finally lifts Bard from the tub the fire has burnt low, and the morning has reached the afternoon, and he is finally clean.
He is wrapped in towels, large and thick, and settled back down into the chair, as Thranduil sets about drying his skin, rubbing it down until it is pink; Bard’s host is wincing now whenever he shifts, as if kneeling for so long as exacerbated the old injury, but he brushes off Bard’s concern, and refuses to stop.
The housekeeper returns, with aid this time: several men help her empty and carry out the tub, the task much quicker done in reverse. She brings a basin of hot water next, and Thranduil soaks Bard’s bandaged arm, until he can peel off the caked-on fabric.
It feels strange, but the sight isn’t as bad as Bard had feared. He can still barely move it for the pain, and his fingers feel oddly numb: it is a ruin of scar tissue and healing lacerations, a twisting mess of destruction, a badge that he will wear for the rest of his life. He spares a moment to wonder what Thranduil’s own leg looks like, if it is a similar landscape of war.
But it is clean, at least, and relatively whole. Thranduil seems to approve, but leaves it to soak for a little while. There is a strange smell about the water, something sharp, but he trusts that Thranduil isn’t trying to hurt him. Besides, what worse could be done to this arm?
“How did you find me?” he tries, at last, because that is at least a question that Thranduil should be able to answer.
“Sigrid,” is the reply, and it comes with the curve of the mouth that is almost a smile. “She never gave up on you, you know. She kept calling around all the hospitals around your base, every military hospital in the north in the end, looking for you.”
Bard nodded.
“You’d lost your dog tags, in the accident, apparently. They were only able to identify you by the letters that you were carrying. The nurse Sigrid eventually spoke to said that you had put up quite a fight, making sure that you were not parted from them.”
Bard laughed, as Thranduil begin to re-bandage his arm.
“The only envelope I was carrying,” he said, feeling suddenly very tired, “was one written by you, I think.”
It was Thranduil’s letter that had identified him. He had been too incoherent to ever give his name; he had never even thought about the fact that they had known his regiment, known where to send him. He owed his strange host even more, and he had not even realised it.
Thranduil lead him back to the bed, which the housekeeper had remade. The sheets were clean, and fresh, and he smelt of lavender soap.
“Sleep,” Thranduil told him, as he eased Bard down. “Sleep.”
And sleep he did, restfully for a while, until the dreams came back to him.
The weeks passed, slowly, and Bard began to recover himself a little, at least physically.
A doctor comes, and prescribes him more pills, great chalky things that hurt to swallow. He doesn’t pay for them, and can’t bring himself to ask Thranduil if he did, because he knows the answer.
There still wasn’t much that he could do with his arm, much to his irritation. At first he could barely walk, could hardly even stand without aid, but he has always been one to push himself, and so he does his best to stretch, to move, as much as he is able. There is no form or finesse to his recovery, much to his irritation, but what he does seems to work, at least a least a little, and so he perseveres.
Thranduil found a wheelchair for him, an old metal-framed thing that Bard suspects his host might have used in his own recovery, because the un-cushioned leather seat is a little worn, the body of it well oiled but obviously old.
It means that he can leave his room though, leave his bed at least, and that in itself is enough of a novelty that the high it gives him lasts a few days.
He can’t push it himself, not with only one shaking arm, but his children seem happy to wheel him about, though he can’t help but think of himself as something of a burden to them. He is their father, not their responsibility: parenthood should be the other way around, and there is a resentment that gnaws at him for his self-perceived uselessness, an irritation that he tries not to let out in the form of snapping anger, biting words. His children would understand, he thinks, but he can’t do that to them, not on top of everything else, and so he bottles it up instead, until he feels as if he is about to burst with his anger at the whole situation.
Everything hurts, and the pain doesn’t seem to ease even though he finds it easier each day to move his tired legs again. There is progress, but it isn’t enough when the bite of injuries do not lessen.
His children seem to love having him back, though, and he does love being around them again.
They follow him around like ducklings, he thinks, Sigrid pushing the chair and the other two trailing behind them, laughing and pointing out each thing in the house that they have come to know and love. Legolas and Tauriel follow too, and he gets to know them a little better. Legolas is a bright young thing, funny and perhaps a little older than he should be, but he is strangely distant when it comes to his father: Thranduil comes up often in conversation though he rarely appears in person, and every time he does Legolas seems to shrink back into himself a little, as if he is afraid of saying anything much. Tauriel, Bard learns, is another fostered child that has not been with them long, which explains why Bard has not heard stories about her before. Apparently (according to Sigrid, who has taken it upon herself to be his guide, and who whispers explanations in his ear every few minutes, so he doesn’t feel lost) her father was in the same regiment as Thranduil when he was in the armed forces, and re-enlisted in Bard’s war. He died, and her mother followed soon after from grief: she had no family and no friends close enough to take her in, and so Thranduil had stepped forward.
Thranduil seems to be the kind of man who takes in strays, Bard thinks, a little bitterly. Lost, lonely things in need of shelter.
He feels like a starving dog that their host has taken pity on, and resentfully reminds himself that a dog should never bite the hand that feeds. Thranduil is a cold man, a distant man, but not really a bad one, for all of it. He should hate him, he still wants to hate him, but Bard still can’t find a well of dark inside himself deep enough to draw that hatred from, despite himself.
He keeps thinking of it as ‘his war’, he realises with a start one afternoon when he is brooding about such things, sat on the patio outside the house in his wheelchair, a blanket around his knees as if he is some sort of invalid (which he is, he has to keep reminding himself). ‘His war’, as if he holds all the blame for it himself, as if he was the only one that fought and lost out there. He wonders if it is a little selfish of him, but he can’t bring himself to think of it in any other way, not yet.
The house itself isn’t really as grand as Bard had once supposed.
Oh, it is far bigger than anything he has ever lived in, of course, but hardly the stuff reserved for the greatest of Lords in the country. It is set back in wide gardens, sprawling land around them, but the house itself is almost modest, in terms of size and staff. There are kitchens and servants quarters below, which he has not been to yet (despite the fact that he feels as if he might belong better down there, the stairs are beyond his ability, and the wheelchair far too awkward to make it down the narrow, twisting steps). The ground floor boasts a dining room, with a wide oak table to sit at least twelve, a table for entertaining: when Bard and his wife’s friends used to come over, they would sprawl around his small living room, no room in their house for a table that size. He tries to imagine them in Thranduil’s house, and can’t quite picture it.
There is a parlour that he avoids, the furniture too smart and beautiful for the likes of him, and a sitting room too, which at least looks a little more comfortable. There is a playroom at the back, a long room with windows that overlook twisting old cherry trees that are stark this time of year. The room is full of toys that Legolas has accumulated over the years, and he is happy to share, the children spending long hours playing with toy airplanes, and trains. He spends a lot of time in there, watching his children read or play on the days when the weather is too inclement to be outdoors. His children don’t need the ghost of his father looming over them, but he is loathe to sit in another room: he can’t quite stand the thought of being apart from them, even if they are still in the same house. When he does he finds himself nervous, wondering what might be happening to them in his absence.
War is over, but he has never been as scared for his children as he is now. They are together but not in a place he knows, and he worries irrationally that someone might come and take them away whilst he is not looking.
There is the room that has been turned into his, too, in a quiet corner of the ground floor. Though there is a bed in it now he suspects that it wasn’t always there, and wonders if Thranduil convalesced in the same place.
A wide sprawling hall, and Thranduil’s library and study (another room into which he does not step, despite the fact that Sigrid often wanders in there searching for a new book to read) make up the rest of the ground floor. The whole place is spacious and beautiful and feeds the fires of his temper, the wooden panelling old and expensive, the leather of the armchairs fine and dark with well-tended age, the ornaments relics of generations past. The only thing Bard ever had from his father was his old desk, and even that has been destroyed.
There is his pocket watch too, he supposes, although that belongs to Sigrid now.
He doesn’t tell the children that their home is gone: he doesn’t have the words for it.
Above is another floor, then a smaller one and then the attic, but they are all beyond Bard’s reach until he relearns the use of his legs fully. His children describe it to him though, trying to get him used to the place. There are four large bedrooms above, indoor bathrooms too (and all they had ever had growing up was an outhouse, drafts blowing in in the summer and bitterly cold in the winter). One of those rooms is Thranduil’s, another belongs to Legolas. Another is spare, and a third was given to Bain, when he arrived. The next floor has just two bedrooms, a little smaller, in which the girls sleep: one for each of them, though Sigrid admits that that hadn't been long before Tilda had crept into hers. All three girls sleep in one room, now: Thranduil had had a bed moved into Sigrid’s for Tilda, but neither of them had adjusted to great double beds after a childhood of sharing ones much more narrow, and the second had stood empty until Tauriel had arrived. She had been given the Tilda's old, now empty bedroom, but after hearing her crying Sigrid had invited her into theirs, and now all three girls slept in one room, together.
His children have hearts the size of stars, he thinks, and he can’t help but be proud of them.
It is quiet in the house, too. There is a housekeeper and a cook, a couple of gardeners who rarely venture inside, and a pair of younger girls who do the sweeping and lay the fires. It is enough to keep the house ticking over without it being too much of an extravagance – though such a thing would be far and above the means of anyone that Bard has ever known.
The servants avoid him mostly, and he wishes that wasn’t the case. It would be nice to talk, even a little, to people closer to him.
The month drags on, and he says and does very little. By the time Christmas rolls around he is walking again, although he can only manage about the length of the house before the ache of his legs becomes too much and he is forced to sit down, rubbing at the scar on his thigh through the fabric of the clothes that Thranduil has provided for him.
Christmas is a strange affair: they are included as if they were family, but he supposes that the children have had several Christmases here, by now. He grudgingly asks Thranduil to write to the bank on his behalf, neither of his arms good enough yet to manage a pen – it is one of the few conversations he has with Thranduil in those first few weeks, the two doing their best, it seems, to avoid each other – and when the small amount he requests comes through he asks one of the maids to pick up presents for the children in the village with it. All of the children, too – they are only small things, all that he can afford. New pencils for Sigrid, toy soldiers for Tilda, and he re-gifts his binoculars to Bain, the army-issued pair that he had barely had a cause to use, one of the few things that made it from the trenches to here with him. For Legolas he orders a wooden RAF plane, the kind that comes in parts that you can build and paint yourself, and he is stuck for a while on Tauriel, before the main kindly suggests a slinky, apparently a popular toy this year that Bard hasn’t ever heard of.
He agonises for an age over what to get for Thranduil, barely knowing the man but feeling too uncomfortable not to get him anything, and in the end he asks Sigrid, who confesses that Thranduil has a secret weakness for sweets, and has been rather grumpy since rations were stretched even further and they became hard to find. Bard talks to the cook, feeling uncomfortable as he does so, and buys the small number of ingredients she needs to make the master of the house a batch of fudge on Bard’s behalf. The sugar costs as much as the presents for his children, and he feels a burning irritation at that, but knows that he must do something. He hands over the last of the money the bank sent him, balking at the extravagance of it all.
He has little money in his bank account now: he doesn’t need to read the letter from the bank to know that, but they are here, after all, purely out of Thranduil’s notion of charity. He must be repaid, in some small way.
Christmas is gentle enough, though. There is a meal, and he hardly eats any of it, the food too rich for him still, but the cook sends up a bowl of the broth that he has been eating since he arrived when she hears, and he appreciates that. For the first time he manages to eat without spilling his food, the shake in his good hand slowly coming back under his control: he has to focus, and everyone else is long done eating by the time he is through, though they sit around the table and wait without comment. The girls are wearing paper crowns, and he startles a little at the sound of the crackers they pull snapping, but it doesn’t make him wince the way it might have done even a few weeks before. They retire to the sitting room afterwards, forgoing the more formal parlour: there is a small spruce tree set up in here, decorated with paper chains that the children have made, and painted pine cones. Bard has never had a Christmas tree before, and he finds that he quite likes the sight of it. There are some delicate glass decorations hung in it too, a contrast to the gaudy things the children have made together, but they catch the warm light of the candles lit around the hearth and don’t irritate him with their elegance today.
Thranduil had bought new books and toys for all the children, but Bard feels a small and irrational stab of pride when Tauriel spends hours with her slinky over her other gifts. He knows it is petty, and Thranduil seems not to mind in the slightest, but it is a small victory after what feels to him like months of a long, continuous defeat.
The children have three or four presents each, Legolas no more from his father than the other children, no favouritism shown, and it eases his spite a little.
They have been cared for, he reminds himself, and almost smiles as he passes Thranduil the package of fudge, despite himself. They have been loved, in your absence.
The children have made things for him and Thranduil too, all five of them. There are cards and drawings and little animals made out of folded paper, and he stands each of them along the mantelpiece in his room before he goes to bed that night, wondering at how little anger he feels that evening compared to others.
Thranduil doesn’t get him anything, but Bard wasn’t expecting him too. He isn’t a child, after all, and Thranduil letting him stay here is more than many others would give.
The man does seem to look a little sad that evening though, when they part ways, the children barging ahead on the stairs, laughing and happy and tired from a joyful day. He rests a fleeting hand on Bard’s shoulder, as Bard turns to go back to his own room, Thranduil’s gaze blank but something flickering about his eyes that makes Bard think, for a moment, that he is about to say something.
He doesn’t, and they each retire without saying anything more.
New Year comes next, and he falls asleep by the fire long before the clock chimes the change. He wakes in a dim room the next morning, Sigrid’s blanket thrown over him, his oldest always worrying.
It is better than his last few New Years, he supposes, but for a moment he misses the bitter taste of Mickey’s stinging liquor. He remembers then that they are all dead, those men that he drank the old year in with, and weeps for a while quietly before the smoking embers of the fire, for all that has been lost.
They are still with him though, but not in the way the Church services might tell him. They are still in his dreams, and in them, they are angry.
How dare he live, when they did not?
Those dreams still follow him, and they are quick to take the joy of life away from him. Twisting shapes and broken bodies crawl after him as he runs down the corridors of sleep, and in the dark mornings he barely feels rested at all, lying on his bed and forcing himself to wake properly, not to waste the day in bed as he would like. The dreams haven’t gotten any better, but he supposes that it is something that they haven’t gotten any worse, either.
He muffles his screams against the pillow when he wakes up, too afraid of waking up the rest of the house, and the next morning he can barely use his one good hand for the way it shakes. His legs, back under his control now even if they are weak, tap an endless broken rhythm when he sits, as if tapping along to the sounds of gun fire and explosions that he still thinks he can hear, sometimes, somewhere in the distance.
Shell shock, the nurses in the hospitals had muttered to each other, over and over again, so the words are embedded in his mind now.
Completely natural, so many men had come back with it this time around.
Bard doesn’t know what it is supposed to mean, those words. Shell shock.
They don’t sound right, not to describe the way that it feels as if the war is still with him, not to describe the unshifting fear that this is all some great and beautiful dream. He doesn’t feel shocked.
He feels tired.
He feels empty.
Most of all, he just does not feel like himself.
The winter doesn’t keep its hold too long, this year. They have snow here, which Bard rarely saw in Manchester, making it all look like a proper Christmas card outside, even though the holiday has long passed. He sits on the wooden bench on the stone-flagged patio and watches the children throw snowballs at each other, wishing for a while that he was well enough to join in, before reminding himself that he is lucky enough just to be here, watching. He’s reminding himself to do that more often, now. Thankfulness is coming slowly, and some days it is still beaten by his anger, but he is doing his best.
That’s all he really can do, he has come to realise. He has always been a man that makes the best of what he can, and perhaps now he can find that man again, the Bard that he once was: a father, and a hard worker, a man who provided even when it seemed that he could not, a man that loved his children and was wary of strangers. A man who rose with the dawn after a restful night without nightmares, a man who worked on the canal and ate simple food and was happy with his life, for what it was. It wasn’t a perfect man, but it was a good man, and a better man than the solider and killer that the war made him into.
He wonders, sometimes, what Thranduil was like before his war, before his injury, before his loss. The picture that he begins to paint himself strikes a strange dichotomy in his mind with the man he knows now, but it helps, in an odd way. Perhaps he is allowed to change, just a little, as long as the core of who he is remains the same.
January goes by in that fashion, before February begins to slowly warm: it’ll be an early Spring this year, he thinks to himself, and feels the stirring of something in his chest, some frost that he didn’t realise he was carrying begin to slowly thaw.
His children wear knitted clothes that Thranduil bought them, and their cheeks are rosy with good health. He’s still clumsy when it comes to feeding himself, but he’s better than he was, even if he can still barely move the fingers on his right, injured arm.
He thinks more about Thranduil as the Spring arrives, begins to realise that his anger has been a little unfair, a little undeserving, at times. It is hard to remember that when so much seems dark in his own life, when Thranduil has so much, but is that really his fault?
Perhaps it might be time to make some overture of friendship, but he doesn’t know how to begin.
There are days when he tries to go for a walk, through the dead leaves that still line the narrow pathways, dark and decaying now after the winter. There was frost decorating them the first few times he tries, but soon enough that passes too. He rarely gets far, his legs still tiring quickly, but sometimes he manages to get to the end of the long garden path, to the gate, which he props himself up against to rest for a while before he returns, but it is at least a small amount of freedom.
It’s beautiful out here, he is coming to realise. From the gate all he can see are rolling fields and the twisting fingers of bare trees, stark against the grey of the sky. In a distant field are horses, their breath steaming in the air. No wonder his children have found a peace here.
Perhaps, he wonders sometimes, he might be able to as well.
But that, of course, is a stupid thought: he’s not going to be staying here long enough to find any sense of peace.
There are nights when he hears Thranduil’s cane pad around the night, late into the early morning, and he supposes that at least he isn’t the only one who can’t sleep well anymore. He stops taking the pills: they don’t help the pain, and they just make him feel tired throughout the day, when he is with his children.
Besides, when he is tired, the dreams come quicker.
And oh, the dreams.
The fire, and the shadows, and the great beasts that scream his name in the voices of the friends he has lost. Sometimes they come when he is awake, when he is watching the shadows flickering in the fireplace, or the growing dark as the sun sinks lower in the afternoon. Those ones are the worst of all, because for brief moments he can’t remember what is real and what isn’t, and he reaches for weapons he no longer has.
Then one night he is lying awake, his mind sparking with memories that he can’t escape, and he hears the now-familiar sound of Thranduil’s cane, coming first along the upstairs landing, and then down the stairs. He lies in the dark until the sound has faded, and without quite knowing why, rolls over, using his shaking arm to lift himself, slowly and awkwardly. It still hurts to get out of bed, but he knows that the only sleep he will get tonight will be full of memories that he does not want to think of, ember-bright with the dragon of war.
He pads out of his room, still limping a little on his scarred leg, and down the darkened hall. He hesitates for a moment in front of the library door, wondering whether or not he should knock.
It would be polite to, he knows, but it somehow feels wrong, somehow forced, to do so.
There is a light on in there, a thin bar of golden light shining underneath and across the dark wooden floorboards, across his bare feet, scarred and calloused. He rests his head against the door for a moment instead, trying to steel his nerves, before he remembers that he has faced far worse than a library and a quiet, distant host in the last few years – he pushes open the door, and clears his throat.
Thranduil is sat in an armchair in front of the fire, a pipe resting in his hand, already burnt low. He glances up when Bard enters, and for a long moment they watch each other, silently and carefully, until Thranduil nods in the direction of the other chair.
“Why are you still awake?” Bard asks as he sinks awkwardly into it. The fire has been stoked up again, the flames licking at the fresh log recently thrown onto the embers, and for once the sight of the fire doesn’t bring up bad memories for him. Instead he watches Thranduil, really studies him, as the man turns those strangely pale-blue eyes towards him.
“The same reason as you,” Thranduil replies, in a measured tone, collected and careful.
Bard feels a little uncomfortable, concerned that they might be playing some game that he doesn’t quite understand. He doesn’t know how to join in, either, so remains blunt, ignoring Thranduil’s disconcerting ambiguity.
“And what reason is that?”
Thranduil smiles at that, a small flicker of a smile that is gone almost as soon as it appears.
There is a scar, Bard realises suddenly, running along Thranduil’s hairline, curving almost the length of his face, down to his jaw. It is old, and pale now, almost silver against his skin (so much paler than Bard’s has ever been). He has never looked closely enough, before now, to notice it.
“Dreams,” Thranduil answers him. “Dreams of war.”
Bard swallows, and looks down at his hands, before back up at Thranduil as soon as the other man turns back to the fire.
Thranduil’s hair must once have been the same ash blonde as Legolas’, only it is even lighter now, threaded through with silver-white – but here, in the firelight, it looks almost gold. He’s wearing a velvet dressing gown, so elegant that Bard’s familiar resentment rears its head for a moment. But before the anger follows, Thranduil glances back at him, his gaze tired – perhaps as tired as Bard himself was feeling – and in the face of such a relatable exhaustion Bard backs down, for the first time finds himself relaxing in the presence of his host, leaning back in his chair with a sigh that is only pained because of the ache in his arm, nothing more.
“Will they ever go away?” he asks, and Thranduil looks at him for the longest time, until Bard begins to shift, wondering what that look means. When he does Thranduil looks away, and shrugs, something elegant even in that motion.
“I don’t know.”
Bard nods, and knows that another person might have lied, and told him that that they would, that the dreams would pass, that he definitely would fully recover. But there was no guarantee that that would ever happen, and there is a comfort in that truth, in the lack of dishonesty in Thranduil’s reply.
Bard finds himself smiling a little in reply.
He might not ever get better, he realises, he finally accepts.
Thranduil still has dreams, still walks with a cane, still stays up in these dark and lonely nights, alone in the dark. But despite that, there is a confidence about him, a sense of calm.
And perhaps it, all this, is okay.
They watch each other for a moment longer, and then Thranduil nods again, as if seeing something in Bard’s gaze that he was waiting for. He pushes himself to his feet with his cane, and walks slowly over to a side table, pouring two glasses from a decanter of red wine. He must have called for it before Bard arrived, he thinks, but that doesn’t explain why there are two glasses there, delicate crystal that feels strange in his hand when Thranduil brings one over to him. He can only carry one at a time, the cane in hand, so Thranduil has to go back for his own, but Bard doesn’t offer to help. There is nothing worse, he has learnt, than someone offering a healing man aid – it only builds up the resentment, the frustration.
They are not helpless, they are not invalids.
They are a little scarred, and hurting still. But though they are bruised, even a little broken in places, that doesn’t mean they are worthless.
Far from it, really: everything he has ever used has been second-hand, hand-me-down, scuffed around the edges or patched up. It never made them any less useful.
They’re just cracked, his mother had told him once, when he had asked why all of their plates were old, when he was young enough not to know any better. And, well, a crack – or even several – doesn’t make it any less of a plate, does it, lad?
Thranduil sits back down, eyes Bard, who is still holding the glass with some degree of discomfort, worrying that he might break it.
“Drink your wine,” he tells Bard, who does.
He doesn’t know good wine from piss poor, if he’s being honest with himself, but it doesn’t taste as awful as the stuff they were drinking in those villages on the western front, and so he takes another mouthful.
Thranduil’s watching him still, and something warm flares in Bard’s chest, something that he has a name for but has never considered in the context of his host before now.
“I’ve never really thanked you for all of this.”
Thranduil doesn’t say anything to that, just shakes his head and flicks that almost-smile at Bard again, and the two sit in silence for a while. Thranduil’s pipe is still resting on the arm of his chair, where he left it, and though it has long burnt out the smell of the tobacco remains sweet in the air, the wine a bitter bloom of unidentifiable fruit on his tongue, the ease of this moment enough to make Bard feel tired, but the right sort of tired this time. He could sleep, he thinks to himself, and perhaps even sleep well, but he can’t bring himself to rise, to leave this quiet and unexpected intimacy, this warmth.
Eventually Thranduil began to hum, some strange and lonely song that Bard didn’t know.
It’s a sad sound, and a good sound too.
The flicker in his chest is still there, but it has gentled now, into something that should probably have made him stop a moment and think, but for now he feels too good to worry, and that is such a rare feeling these days that he doesn’t want to fight it.
And so he doesn’t.
The leather is soft beneath his back, the room warm and quiet, the gentle sounds of the creaking house settling around him – his children are safe and warm in the rooms above him, dreaming of horse rides and plum pies and golden summers that Bard has never seen, summers in the country, surrounded by the haze of wildflowers and distant clouds. Eventually he falls asleep in the armchair, too comfortable and unprecedentedly content to stay awake any longer, drifting off in the low light and the comfort of the moment, the empty glass resting against his chest. He doesn’t wake as Thranduil rises, some hours later, even though the cane taps lightly against the floor as it comes close to the chair and takes the glass from him.
And for the first time in so long, he didn’t dream.
He woke just before dawn, the sky peering in through the heavy curtains a dark grey, hazy with the promise of the sunrise. His back is sore and there is a crick in his neck from the awkward position, but he is warm, and feels rested, feels alive. The air against his face is cool, smelling of sandalwood and wood polish and pipe smoke, and it was only as he forced his eyes open that he realised he was alone in the library, the looming bookshelves his only company.
He felt, for a moment, almost like himself again.
He sat up carefully, slowly willing himself to stand and return to his bed (where he thought he might be able to sleep again, for even longer) that he realised the warmth had come from Thranduil’s velvet dressing gown, draped across him at some point in the night, when his host must have retired to his own room.
He hesitates for a moment, before standing, and folding it perhaps a little more gently than he needed to, leaving it on the chair.
Things have changed between them, even though Bard isn’t sure that he would be able to explain why, or how. But the unspoken tension that had been there before has gone, dissipating almost overnight. Thranduil joins them a little more often than he did before, occasionally sitting beside Bard on the bench on the patio on warmer days, watching the children run around, or else joining them in the sitting room in the evening rather than shutting himself away in his rooms or his library, brooding in the dark. He doesn’t join in the conversation all that much, but neither does Bard, really: Thranduil sits and reads whilst Bard drifts off, his mind in a distant place, mud and gunfire.
The spectre of his anger no longer feels directed at Thranduil – it is formless now, meaningless, and in some ways he thinks that makes it harder, having no one that he can direct his rage towards.
Spring comes slowly, despite what he had expected, forcing its way through the lingering damp of winter that you can still feel, on the air, on days when the sun does not make its way out from behind the clouds.
There are buds of leaves appearing on some of the trees now, green shoots pushing through the dark dirt, the promise of flowers to come in their twisting stems. Bard still wonders when he is supposed to be leaving this place, at what point Thranduil is going to finally have enough of Bard and his children’s presence in his house.
But somehow it doesn’t bother him in quite the way that it should.
He watches Legolas teach the other children how to make flower crowns out of the first of the crocuses, the late snowdrops, the early daffodils: they never had flowers in abundance like this back in Manchester, just the occasional bank of earth between the mills and the terraced workhouses, from which ill-looking grass and the occasional daisy would peek if the weather was good. Sigrid looks beautiful, sat there in the long grass with flowers in her hair, laughing at the way that Legolas is blushing as Tauriel passes him a handful of clover flowers.
She’s grown up, he realises, with a sudden and bittersweet clarity – she’s turned sixteen whilst he’s been away, is on the cusp of womanhood. No wonder she has boys trying to court her already.
She doesn’t seem that interested, although he’s starting to suspect that the most determined of her suitors – the one that Thranduil first wrote to him about – might actually be in with a shot. He is the nephew of some other landowner across the valley, a couple of years older than Sigrid, his fair hair a little messy and the scruff of stubble promising to grow into a proper moustache soon. Bard doesn’t know what to think of him, but trusts his daughter’s sense and wisdom enough to know that she’ll make a good decision.
He’s shaken from his thoughts as Tilda rests a flower crown on his head, too, and he smiles at her before pulling her close, pressing a rough kiss against her cheek, the scratch of his stubble making her laugh, both of their crowns knocked askew on their heads. She laughs at him, but doesn’t push him away the way she might have done before the war.
He lets her go, and she runs back to her siblings and friends, and he settles back against the bench, straightening the flower crown with his shaking hand.
When Thranduil comes out to join them he huffs something that might have been a laugh at the sight of Bard’s crown, good humour curling around his mouth for a moment as he settles in beside Bard.
In front of the patio, one of the twisting trees has bloomed, the bare branches suddenly heavy with huge white flowers, tinged with pink and beautiful. It is a good contrast, Bard thinks, to the pale blue of the Spring sky. Tilda had told him that the tree was a magnolia – he likes that word, and the tree itself, the sight of it making him irrationally gratified with life. The breeze almost feels warm, and Bard closes his eyes against it, opening them only to see Thranduil looking at him, something unreadable in his gaze that flushes that same heat in his chest.
He feels content.
It is unexpected, and it feels good.
March arrives, and with it Tilda’s birthday. The weeks seem to fly by, now, far quicker than he ever remembers them doing when he was on the front. He watches Tilda throw her arms around Thranduil when he gives her his gift, and unlike Christmas Bard feels less resentful, less angry, at the extravagance of the event compared to how they once celebrated birthdays at home. The cook has made her a cake, soft sponge with buttercream piped into roses on the top, jam that Tilda herself helped the cook make last year out of the produce from the raspberry canes and lane-side blackberries in the middle.
She is laughing, and she kisses him and Thranduil both, a smear of jam across her cheek and love and happiness in her eyes as she delights over her gifts, over the twists of sherbet lemons and the crème caramels. She has had several birthdays here – this is normal to her now.
And strangely, it is starting to feel normal to him, as well. That thought is almost comforting.
“Love you, Da,” Tilda tells him as she dances over to him, wired and happy and so alive.
“I love you, little bird,” he tells her, an old nickname from childhood that he hasn’t used in years. She laughs, and picks up his injured arm to wrap around her with his shaking one in an embrace. He doesn’t even mind that it hurts like hell, because her flyaway hair is tickling his neck, her body is warm, and as he glances up he catches Thranduil’s eye, something sad and almost regretful passing through his host’s gaze as it drifts from Bard and Tilda to Legolas.
Bard still doesn’t know what to think of those two and their strange relationship, but later that evening Legolas stops Bard in the hallway, when they are alone.
“I’m glad that you all came here, you know,” he tells Bard without preamble, with the forthrightness that only a fifteen year old who has never been told that he is wrong can have. Bard isn’t sure what to say, so just nods down at Legolas with something of a smile, unsure and thrown by the unexpected opening.
“That’s… good?” he ventures, his uninjured hand beginning to shake: he clenches it to try and stop the quaking, and Legolas pretends not to notice.
“It’s just…” he continues, shuffling a little now. Bard feels a little guilty, though he isn’t sure why, and places his shaking hand on Legolas’ shoulder. To his surprise, the boy swallows, and for a moment turns his face to his shoulder and presses the side of his jaw against Bard’s hand, an unexpected desire for comfort.
Both father and son, Bard thinks, are so distant, so strange – is it just that both of them were longing for affection, for relief, for attention?
“It’s just that before you came,” Legolas finally continues, quieter now. “Before Sigrid and Tilda and Bain and Tauriel were here, Father never smiled, never really seemed that happy at all. And now you’re here, too, and he seems even happier because of that.”
Bard frowns, not really understanding: Legolas bites his lip.
“Please don’t go,” he blurts out, turning and dashing off in the direction of the sitting room, leaving Bard standing in the corridor for a moment, before following. By the time he catches up and sinks into an armchair Legolas is sat on the floor around a board game with the other children, and he glances up and smiles at Bard, as if they are sharing some secret between the two of them. Bard can only smile back, half-hearted and a little sad.
He can’t promise to stay – children don’t understand the way that adults work. Thranduil is not here to support Bard and his family indefinitely. Bard already owes him too much to let him, even if he wanted to.
How can he ever hope to repay him?
He asks Thranduil that, one day soon after, when the Spring has finally taken a proper hold and the wildflowers have finally begun to appear, alongside the fresh green of new leaves that have finally unfurled. The weak sunlight is spilling through those new leaves in the orchard as they walk through it, Thranduil’s cane sinking slightly into the moss and grass underfoot, Bard occasionally having to prop himself up against a tree and rest for a moment.
It’s a struggle for both of them, walking across twisting roots without a path, but they persevere, even though there is a sheen of sweat growing across Bard’s forehead.
Above them the apple trees are starting to bloom, ready to start growing fruit eventually.
He’s spent more time with Thranduil in the last couple of months: as the winter has slowly thawed so has Bard, towards his host. Now they spend their evenings together in silence, reading or just staring off into the distance, neither of them needing to fill the quiet with conversation. But sometimes they do speak, during long afternoons like this, strange meandering conversations that can lead to anywhere.
Thranduil laughs at Bard’s question, for the first time since Bard has arrived: his hair is lit up in the sunlight and his face is pale from the pain of walking, and something in Bard’s chest tightens, that same warmth that he is beginning to recognise for what it is.
His laughter is unfamiliar, and genuine.
“You haven’t answered the question,” Bard reminds him after a moment, and Thranduil just shook his head.
“There is no answer to give,” Thranduil tells him, his rare smile staying a little longer on his face now than it did when he and Bard first met. “Do not talk of repayment.”
But it is not enough of an answer for him, not really. Not talking about something does not mean that it ceases to exist, nor that the problem is miraculously solved: he doesn’t have a place to go, still hasn’t confided that weight to anyone. When Thranduil eventually asks them to leave, he doesn’t know what he’ll do. Who will hire a man with a crippled arm, a man who screams through the night, who struggles to walk?
How will he care for them?
His fears must have been more obvious than he thought, because a few days later Sigrid asked him to go for a walk with her. They make it out of Thranduil’s gardens this time, though Bard has to stop and pause every now and again, and Sigrid leads him down narrow pathways, winding along the drystone walls that mark the boundaries of the farm land. In the distance someone is ploughing a field, ready for planting, and there is a haze of warmth, a distant drone of some kind of machinery that he isn’t familiar with. There are forget-me-nots growing along the banks of the path, bright blues and pinks spilling from the grass and the brown twists of dried out blackberry brambles.
“Something’s wrong,” she says, shooting him a glance out of the corner of her eye, and he sighs at her, reaching down to pull a spring of the blue flowers from the grass, tucking it behind Sigrid’s ear.
“You worry too much,” he told her, gently, and she shook her head.
“I know about the house, Da,” she tells him, shrugging a little as he stared at her in surprise. They had come to a gate, and she stood on the crossbar and swung back and forwards as Bard caught his breath and tried to think of what to say, what to do in the face of this new information.
“How?” he asks eventually, and she gives him a slightly disparaging look.
“I’m not an idiot, Da,” she tells him. “I knew something was wrong when you never mentioned going home, or at least going to pick up some things.” She pulls his father’s watch from her pocket, turning it over in her fingers for a moment, before tucking it back away. Bard’s eye is drawn to the movement, but Sigrid doesn’t even seem to notice that she is doing it, reaching for the one piece of home that she has left.
She shrugs, and looks so much like her mother that for a moment Bard wants to sink to the ground and never rise again, faced with the thought of the people he has loved and lost, the years of his children’s youth that he didn’t see and can never reclaim.
“I wrote to some of our neighbours,” she says, “And none of them wrote back, so I asked Mr Thranduil to find out the list of destroyed property in our area. And of course, our house was on there.”
She doesn’t tell him off for not admitting the truth to her: there is no recrimination in her tone, no anger or disapproval, and in a way that almost makes it worse. She has shouldered this burden like an adult, and that is the last thing that he had wanted her to do. She is a child, for heaven’s sake, will always be his child, and it is supposed to be his responsibility to make sure that she never has to carry more than her load.
“I’m sorry,” he tells her, but she waves him off.
“Bain and Tilda don’t know,” she says, and Bard sighs, thankful at least for some small mercy. “But Mr Thranduil does.”
That causes Bard to pause, and Sigrid swings on the gate again, her eyes on the distant haze of clouds forming over the horizon – not dark enough to bring rain, but certainly enough to block out the sun by the time they reach them. It is probably time to turn back, anyway, but Bard cannot bring himself to move. Thranduil knows that they have nowhere to go – no wonder he hasn’t asked Bard to leave yet.
“What are we going to do, Da?” she asks, and he holds out an arm. She jumps down and presses herself against his side, a brief embrace that leaves him feeling inexplicably calmer – she’s started wearing her hair up in the latest fashion, but he nuzzles against it anyway, laughing as she pushes him away in mock protest.
“I’ll sort it out,” he promises, though he doesn’t know how he is going to do that.
But he will, he knows that he will, somehow.
For her, for them.
They take a slow pace back to the house as the wind cools a little tugging at their light jumpers. There are still old leaves mulching underneath the hedgerows, but it smells like Spring, damp and warm and pleasant, the distant dust from the ploughing fields a gentle addition to air.
“How are your nightmares?” she asks as they reach the gate to Thranduil’s gardens, pushing it open to let Bard through: he takes a moment to lean against the wall, but his shaking hand moves just as he rests his weight against it, scraping the skin off his palm. He hisses at the pain, his injured arm closing, in reflex, into a fist against the sting, making the pain even worse. Sigrid takes his scraped hand and kisses the knuckles, looking up at him knowingly.
“I don’t have any,” he lies, as they start up the path again, and now she’s looking at him as if he is a fool, making him feel even worse than before.
How does she know? He wondered to himself as Tauriel calls down to them from a tree she has climbed. Is it the tired bags under his eyes, the shadows of exhaustion, the haunted way he checks the shadows in a room in the evening as if he is expecting something to leap from them? Or have his screams at night not been as muffled as he thought they were?
“You should talk to Mr Thranduil,” she tells him, as they follow the meandering path to the patio.
He nods, not quite agreeing, and wondered if he has ever felt this helpless before.
“Something troubles you,” Thranduil states, a few nights later, when once again they find themselves in front of the fire in the library, late into the night. They meet here more and more often now, though Bard doesn’t bother going in when the light is off, when it is empty.
It is their wounds that have left them here, the old and the new, both aching and in the process of healing – Bard has taken to flexing the hand of his injured arm, a painful movement. Sometimes it makes his eyes sting with how much it hurts to do, but he relishes in the fact that finally he can move it again, even though it can do little else.
“Aye,” he replies, and he wasn’t planning on saying anything more, but there was something in the way that Thranduil was looking at him, collected and distant but somehow reassuring, as if he already knew the burdens of Bard’s heart and was only waiting for an invitation to take his share of the load.
But he already did know Bard’s burdens, didn’t he?
He clears his throat, and watches the fire.
“I would appreciate,” he says quietly, carefully, “if you would let me know when you want us to leave. If I have a date, I can begin to make arrangements.”
Thranduil looked at him, a strange look that Bard couldn’t place, and for a moment he was afraid that he had overstepped some line between them, had done some irrevocable damage to their tentative friendship, but then he shook his head, and ran a hand through his fine hair, short and slicked back across the crown of his head.
“I have no intention of sending you away.”
Bard sat there, momentarily speechless.
He didn’t know what to think, let alone what to say, and so he remained silent, watching the strangely motionless face of his host as he stared into the fireplace.
“Do you think it is charity, the reason that I will not turn you away?” Thranduil asked, suddenly, and Bard realised that the man had been watching him, studying Bard’s blank expression of surprise. “It isn’t, you know. It has never been.”
“I know how you would feel about that,” he says, before hesitating, a sight which Bard had never thought to see. “At least, I think I know how you would feel about it.”
Bard just nods, still not knowing what to say, and Thranduil bites his lip, for a moment looking so much like his son that Bard blinked, wondering what Thranduil had looked like when he was young.
“I…” Thranduil doesn’t seem to know what to say still, and then he shook his head, looking up at Bard with ill-disguised grief.
He told Bard a story then, one cut short but no less poignant for it. It is a story about a man who married a girl that he loved, and then was sent to war. He thought he would be a hero, but he came home to find that he had lost a wife and gained a son whilst he was away – his house was strange to him now, and he couldn’t walk, could barely even sit up in bed to look at the child that strangers brought in to show him. It was a story about a man who lost and gained in equal measure, but who did not know how to change himself in turn. A man who spent his child’s youth unable to run or play with him, unable even to really speak to him, not knowing how to talk to something so small, not knowing how to express the longing and desperate love he felt for the last remnant of his wife, her last and lingering presence of her on this earth. A man who became a distant father despite himself, never knowing how to talk, how to show his son just how much he cared. The two continued on, growing slowly older and more sad, the house quiet and without life.
Then another war had broken out, and he was sent three children from the city, and suddenly his house was full of laughter again, like it had been years ago, and he had felt finally as if he were able to do something with his life once more. He learnt to love these wild and loud children, was learning slowly how to speak to his own son again through them.
And then a convalescent had come to stay, and Thranduil realised that he finally had a purpose in his life again, even if all it meant was providing food and contentment, a late night fire and company to sit beside.
“So,” he said to Bard, his voice having grown quieter throughout the length of his story, the most he has ever said to Bard in one sitting. “So, this is not a case of you asking to stay – it is me asking you, because if you left then the house will be empty and silent again.”
Bard throat felt tight, and painful.
“And,” Thranduil said, not much more of a whisper now, more vulnerable than Bard could ever have imagined him sounding, “I don’t know how either me or my son could stand it.”
Bard nods, slowly, not knowing what else to say, but he manages to choke out a thank you as Thranduil rises to leave, his cane pressing harder against the floor than normal, a shadow of a grief that Bard is finally beginning to understand across his eyes. Just as Thranduil passes his chair Bard reaches out, his painful arm shaking perhaps for another reason now, and takes hold of his host’s arm. It’s the injured limb, and his grip is weak, barely there, but Thranduil does not pull away, does not shake it off. The sleeve of his dressing gown pulls up as Thranduil lifts his own arm, reaching back, and now Bard can feel the flutter of a pulse under his fingers, quicker than it should be.
He swallows, and it still hurts.
His arm is screaming in agony, but he doesn’t move it, even though it begins to quake.
They watch each other for some strange, singular moment.
Thranduil’s mouth opens, just a little, and Bard’s breath hitches despite himself.
He isn’t sure who moves away first, but one of them must have. He rests his hand against his thigh and watches Thranduil leave, trying to quiet the flurry of warmth in his own chest, the tightness he can’t swallow down, the unexpected rush of feeling.
A nurse arrives, some weeks later, and Bard does not know what to think when he is told that she is here for him. She’s a patient woman, around his own age, and she talks to him as she moves his arm for him, telling him that she lost one of her own brothers in the war, her father and Grandfather in the war before that, the one they called the Great War, that they said would be the last. War is never ending, he has come to realise – there will always be another, despite what the politicians promise, and the memories of ones that are over linger so long in the minds of those who have been touched by it that they might as well still be going on.
She comes three times a week, makes him practise walking without aid and moving both his hands against the pain, and she is patient, even when he is curt with her. She talks to him all the time, never expecting a response, a well of quiet wisdom spilling over.
It surprises him when she tells him that she’s the sister of the other estate owner across the valley, the one built up from mining profits rather than from ancestral right. It was not what he expected– he had thought, from her tone and her forthrightness, that she had come from a background closer to his than to Thranduil’s, but he supposes that the years she had spent as a nurse in war time might have changed her a little, too.
It takes him even longer to realise that she is the mother of the blonde-haired boy that calls over the wall to Sigrid, the one who brings her wildflowers in great, scraggly bunches (and though she would never admit it, she keeps those wildflowers for the day or two that they last, looking after them with some care, unlike the hot-house flowers that other boys bring her, to which she seems to show little regard. Apparently he had learnt his lesson after realising that she threw away the ones grown under grass that be brought her in the first winter after they had met).
He supposes that Thranduil must have arranged for this care, and wonders why, but he cannot bring himself to question it during their late night conversations by the fire.
With her help his motions become smoother, though still painful, and when she asks him about his dreams, he finds himself telling her, admitting despite himself that they haunt him still, those nights of smoke and ash, of dead men walking and everything he loves burning around him. Part dream, part memory, they hurt him far worse than any physical injury ever could.
She rolls up her sleeve when he is done confessing what almost feels like a sin, and shows him her arm, the great burns that wrap around her skin, leaving it puckered and twisted.
“We who see fire, remember fire,” she says, and her voice is so sad that he forces himself to ask what had happened, although he almost doesn’t want to.
“A competitor,” she admits, “to my Grandfather’s company. He took the men of our house being away as an opportunity to try and rid my family of some of their assets.”
He nods, though he is frowning, and she smiles at him, her eyes as warm a blue as Thranduil’s are cold.
“You dream of dead men, and I dream of dragons,” she says, and she runs her gentle hands over the ruin of Bard’s own right one, her fingers soft against his skin, warm with friendship and understanding. “But after that, after the nurses did so much to care for me, I trained with them. I worked out the rest of the war and found myself again. And then it was over, and I found my last brother bleeding and broken in a hospital, and I took him home, and brought back to the world. I found a man that loved me for my scars, not in spite of them, and have beautiful sons that I thank God every day were not old enough to get drawn into another stupid war.”
Bard nods, because the one thing that he can relate to is the all-consuming love that a parent has for their children, the desire to keep them safe above all else.
“We are the sum of everything that has happened to us,” Dis says, far wiser than Bard will ever be despite the fact that they are of a similar age. “The bad and the good. Our job in life is to not let the bad things that we have been through define who we are afterwards.”
He swallows, and it hurts almost as much as his hand, though for entirely different reasons.
Bain comes to find him, one day in late April when spring rain was lashing against the windows and you could almost have believed that it was winter again but for the blossom on the trees outside, the blooms taking such a beating in the rain that Bard wonders if there will be any left by the time the clouds pass, or if they will all just be petals against the ground, shreds of ghosts against the bright grass. His son hovers in the doorway for a time before padding over to his father, his footsteps quiet enough that Bard might not have heard him had he not caught the movement in the doorway out of the corner of his eye.
He pretends not to notice, but just as Bain creeps close enough he reaches out and grabs him around the middle, making his son jump and huff.
It’s a game they used to play, in their old house, much smaller and more prone to creaking than this one, and Bain rarely managed to creep up on his father. They haven’t done it since Bard returned, but it is a familiar and unexpected spark of the home that they have lost.
Bard presses his face against his son’s sternum, smiling against Bain’s shirt, for a moment. Sitting down as he is now, Bain looms above him, and he wonders when his son grew so tall, and how long it will be until he reaches his father’s height, or perhaps even surpasses it.
“What can I do for you?” he asks, as he pulls away, and Bain just shrugs, settling down on the sofa next to his father, not quite close enough so that their shoulders are touching, as if he is unsure. Bard shuffles just a little closer, so the lines of their forearms are pressed together, relishing for a moment that contact.
“What are the rest of them up to?” he asks again when Bain says nothing, just turns his hands over in his lap, the way he used to do when he was a child and felt particularly shy.
“Oh, Sig is reading – she says it’s a book but we know she’s got the letters from that lad across the way hidden in there, ‘cause she keeps blushing – and Legolas is teaching Tilda to make flowers out of paper. Dunno where Tauriel has gone, she disappeared after breakfast.”
“Ah,” Bard replies unhelpfully, trying not to consider his daughter blushing over reading letters. Tauriel was no surprise, though – she was probably outside, would come home soaked after a day spent by herself in the rain, the long spill of her auburn hair dark with moisture, twisting it around her pale fists to get the water from it. She never seemed to catch a cold from those days out, and it was one of the few times she didn’t ask for company – none of them asked her what passed through her mind on those days spent alone, out who-knows-where. All the children had lost their mother, but she was the only one who understood the totality of loss. For all Thranduil’s distance, for all Bard’s absence for the last few years, the other children still had one parent, here and warm and alive, still had the promise that there would always be someone there to raise them up, to fix their problems large and small, to love them unconditionally.
He should spend more time with Tauriel, he realised. It was easy to forget her need for love, her maturity and her polite smiles leading others to overlook her from time to time, but perhaps in spite of all that she needed a parent – or at least, the warmth of someone willing to fill in the role in everything but name – as much as the rest.
Perhaps even more.
“And you don’t want to join in your sister’s reading, or flower-making?” he asked, already anticipating Bain’s screwed up face.
“Nah,” his boy said, stretching out his long and gangly limbs in front of them. Bard had been just like that at his age – all wire and no bulk, long and awkward without the comfortable heft of broad shoulders and muscle that came later on.
He feels a surge of familiar love, and presses his arm a little more against his son. He’s shaking, slightly, though he hadn’t even really noticed before now, but his son doesn’t really seem bothered by that.
He doesn’t press his son for any more, the two of them sitting in silence for some time. The air is cooler than it has been the last few weeks, and eventually he tugs over the big blanket that one of the girl’s must have left there this morning, shaking it out over the both of them. They could almost have been at home, he thinks, all curled together in the evening because it was too cold not to, but not minding the bitter air that nipped at their fingers because they were all there with each other, love persevering against the weather.
“Does it hurt?” Bain asks eventually, Bard’s arm still shaking between them. It isn’t something his children ask him all that often, and he supposes that they simply try not to think about it.
He shrugged.
“Aye,” he tells his son, not willing to lie. “Though it hurts less than it did even a month ago.”
Bain nods.
“I’ll be grown soon,” he tells his Da, his voice sure and deeper than Bard ever remembers is being. “And when I am, I’ll look after us, you and me and the girls. You don’t have to worry about that.”
His heart feels like his might burst through his chest, but all he knows to do is reach out for his son, his arm sore but not as bad as it might have once been. His finger’s skim his son’s cheek, still smooth, and tucks Bain’s head in against his shoulder, keeping him there with the press of a kiss against his hair.
“You don’t need to worry about any of that, lad,” he tells him, as gentle as he can be. “I’ll always be there, looking after you all.” But then he remembers being this age himself, his mother’s lungs too bad to any real work and his own Da struggling, remembers the helplessness and the confusion that comes from not quite being an adult but wanting to be grown enough to help, the bitterness that comes from parental denial. “But when you do grow up, in many years, I will gladly accept your help, if that is what you want. But before all of that we have to find something that you want to do, not something that you have to do, alright?”
Bain nods, though Bard can only feel it, not see it, and the two of them settle back, tucked under the blanket, watching the rain outside beat its steady course.
Some hours later, as the daylight is beginning to dim a little, Tauriel passes the doorway: she has changed, but her hair is still a damp rope down her back. She catches his eye, and he nods at her, lifting a corner of the blanket.
She hesitates for a while, but does come to them. She doesn’t curl up against Bard’s side like Bain has, who has drifted off to sleep at some point, but she does tuck her legs up, sitting alongside them, and there is something strange in her face, pale and delicate – something that is somehow both close to joy and to sorrow.
More, Bard thinks to himself as he finds himself following his son in drifting into a light doze. I’ll do more for her, from now on. For all of them.
“I know you tell me that it isn’t charity,” Bard blurts out, one late night in early May. The nights are so much shorter now, the dark hours that they share feeling so much more precious because of it, and Thranduil seems to agree, for now they meet more often than they ever have before, and not always in the library. Sometimes he finds Thranduil in the sitting room, or the parlour, and sometimes now it is Thranduil who finds him. Their ease has only grown, tiny steps at a time, but Bard still finds himself embarrassed by how abruptly he had blurted that out.
“I mean,” he continues, trying to right himself as Thranduil’s face begins to pull into something that might develop into a frown, given enough time. “What I mean to say, is that I know you said that me and mine living here isn’t charity, but it still feels like it, to me. I’ve worked all my life, and despite not being… as capable as the man that I was, I cannot simply stay here and rely just on you for the rest of my days.”
Thranduil seems about to protest, but Bard shakes his head, determined for once that it will be him that finishes this conversation, him that steers his, as solidly as he had once steered boats down those old canals, the water brown and filthy, the boats even worse.
“It comes down to pride,” he says, and he feels the bur of his accent thicken as he repeats the words that he had heard his own father say so many times, every time, in fact, that a kindly face had tried to help them in their struggles.
Thranduil sits back in his chair, and there is a tightness around his jaw, something imperceptible in his gaze.
“I have already expressed to you that I would not want you or your children to leave,” he began, but Bard cut him off.
“I’m not saying that we have to go,” he says, and with a strange and burning bitterness he realises that he is saying that because he does not want to go, not in the slightest. “But I need to do something to earn my keep.”
Thranduil glares at him, for just a moment, before the expression softens back to his usual mask.
“Very well,” he replies, though it doesn’t sound anywhere near as calm as he usually does.
Bard begins to suspect that he has crossed a line between them that he had not even known was there, because now Thranduil is forcing himself to his feet, moving over to the low table with the decanter of red wine, pouring himself a glass and standing to take a sip, not nearly as refined as he usually is. This is Thranduil angry, Bard realises distantly as he stands too, not knowing what to do or what there is to say. This is Thranduil at a loss, and bitter too, and it shatters some of the last and lingering feeling of distance that still lies between them.
“Thranduil,” he begins, but then his host turns to look at him, and there is something almost wild in the way his eyes catch the firelight, in the sweep of his fair hair, pushed back from his face, in the way his fist tightens against his cane. It isn’t a wildness that Bard knows or even understands, but he can recognise it – it is the wildness of brambles overtaking stone walls, of tree roots forcing themselves through the earth, of the scream of foxes in the night. It’s a contained wild, so tamed that you might not notice it, but under his calm and his refinement it lingers still, in rage and carelessness, ready to overtake him.
Thranduil, he realises, balances as precariously between the turmoil of his heart and the carefulness of his actions as much as Bard does.
“That is the first time you have ever said my name,” he tells Bard, and there is a deceptive stillness in him now, as if he were some great stag, hovering between fleeing and attacking, antlers raised and eyes alert. “In all this time, you have never said it.”
“I…” Bard begins, and then Thranduil looks away, into the fire.
“I did not mean to offend,” he tries again, and Thranduil says nothing, does nothing but continue to look away.
Bard sighs, but he is starting to feel angry too, not at Thranduil or even at himself, but at this whole thing, at the misunderstanding and the walls that he can almost feel fall back into place between them, the ones that have taken so long to fall down, and its hurts, in a very real way, to feel them go back.
“I want to stay here,” he almost spits out, a flare of anger and desperation and sadness welling up inside him that has to come loose, that he has to put words to, because he is afraid, in that moment, that if he does not they will set him aflame, that he will burn in them. “God knows I never thought I would, but I don’t want to leave.”
Thranduil does look at him now, and that feeling, God, that flurry in his chest that Bard has never wanted to think about is back, and stronger than ever, and he takes a step closer to Thranduil, and then another, to this lonely, angry man that has saved him, that he has saved in turn, though neither of them have words enough to bring that to life between them.
“I’m not going. I can’t go. You’re the…” And he stops, then, because he doesn’t know how he is going to finish that sentence, what even it is that he really means.
What is Thranduil, to him?
He’s the man that took Bard’s children in, and loved them as well as Bard does, that treated them as family rather than guests. He is the man that wrote letters to a stranger on the front, with nothing forcing him to. He’s the man who wrote letters, yes, the letters that kept Bard going when he thought that he was going to die, not from enemy fire but from exhaustion. He’s the man that brought Bard home when he was at his lowest, the man that gave him a bed and food and warmth and shelter. He’s the man who understands Bard’s dreams, who never presses him to speak of them, because he knows how deep those currents of grief run. He’s the man who likes sweets and loves his son, and doesn’t ever have the right words to express that love. He’s the man who found a wounded soldier and took him home, giving him everything that he might ever need to heal. He’s the man who grows fruit trees and orders the gardeners to leave the wildflowers growing. He’s the man who doesn’t care when the boys make flower crowns and the girls climb trees, although there are many parents who wouldn’t stand for either.
He’s the man who bathed a stranger, who washed the blood and death off Bard’s skin until he was as close to being clean as he ever would be again, as close to a redemption as any soldier can hope to find themselves.
He’s just another man – another sad, tired, desperate man, searching for something that he doesn’t even understand.
Just like Bard, really.
“I can’t leave you,” Bard finds himself saying, and his voice is quieter now. “We can’t leave you.”
Because that’s true as well, isn’t it? His children love Thranduil now, and that have already had enough taken from them in their short little lives.
Thranduil is staring at him again now, and in this light his eyes were almost grey, the grey of heavy clouds waiting to break, and Bard is breathing heavily even though all he’s been doing is standing still, and there is a tightness in his chest that he has a name for, a name he’s only ever used for a tiny collection of people before, a name that makes him think of being undone, of desperation.
“I don’t want you to leave,” Thranduil says, reconfirms. “Stay with us. Stay with all of us. That’s what it means. Not just my house, not just me, but my son, my ward, my life. My nightmares, too.”
“Aye,” Bard replies, not needing to remind Thranduil that he is as much of a package deal as his host is – children and scars and nightmares of his own, too. “Cracked plates,” he adds, and Thranduil blinks at him, temporarily thrown, but he doesn’t explain himself, just shakes his head, and there is that quirk of a smile at the corner of Thranduil’s mouth, the one that appears so rarely but is so beautiful when it does.
And then one of them is moving, and he thinks that it might be him, and his hands are shaking as he reaches for Thranduil, as they move together, caution gone, and he wonders for a moment what a heart attack must feel like, for surely this is it, surely no body was ever made to stand this much raw feeling.
But Thranduil’s mouth finds his, hot and heady and full of the flavour of the wine that he had been drinking, and his ruined arm can only rest against the strong lines of Thranduil’s back: any more would be too much, and already this feels as if it is going to end him. His other hand though – it is still shaking, but not enough to stop Bard from reaching for hair, for the curve of a jaw, for anything that he can.
The sweetness of it, the richness of it, the fulfilment of a want that had been lying so deep that he almost had not understood that it was there: all of it feels so much, perhaps even too much, but he doesn’t stop kissing him, doesn’t move from the warmth where their bodies are pressed together, does not back away.
“God,” he hears himself mutter, his voice thick, but then his shifts, just enough to unbalance them: he hadn’t even realised that Thranduil was resting so much weight on him, the cane limp at their sides, and it is enough to shake the moment, enough for them to draw away from each other – enough for a sudden dart of fear to worm its way through Bard’s haze.
He looks, almost desperate, only to find a silent confirmation in Thranduil’s eyes, a similar question, and all he has to do is nod, and the fear is gone.
Cracked plates, he thinks again as he rests his forehead against Thranduil’s. Lots of weak points, chipped around the edges, lots of places where they might have broken along the way. But still whole, despite that. Still just as much a plate.
He mutters that last part out loud, and Thranduil shakes his head a little, warmth and an understanding passing through his gaze, remembering Bard’s earlier comment.
“I’ll write to some people,” he says, quietly, “make inquiries about work for you.” Bard can feel the warmth of Thranduil’s breath against his collarbone, soft and damp, and he closes his eyes.
“Thank you,” he replies, his voice a little hoarse.
There is a village, out somewhere between moorland and city, nestled in a valley, and it has been there for as long as anyone can remember. There is a post office and a church, and fewer sons that there had been there before the war, before either war.
But the people are hardy, and so they wear their grief with all the dignity that they have to spare, and go about their business.
There is an old house at one end, and in it lives a man with silver threaded through his hair, a man with scars across his face who never used to leave his house much unless his sister made him. He lives with his nephews, bright young things who are always laughing, and now-a-days he does go out more than before, makes the long and winding walk down to the local tea shop. He doesn’t much care for tea, or for cake, though the rations are finally lifting enough to make some truly luscious things. No, he goes for conversation with the man who runs the place, the man with copper-coloured hair and a sad little war orphan at his hip… but that is another story, for another day.
When this man makes his walk in and out of the village, he passes the train station both going and coming. It isn’t a large one – they have trains passing through four times a day, and that is all. He had known the name of the old station master, but he had been sent off to the war, and though he doesn’t know the man who took over some years later, he does nod in recognition when they catch each other’s eyes.
The man has scars running up one arm, just like he does across one side of his face, and these days the new station-master tends to keep his shirtsleeves rolled up, as if they don’t worry him quite as much as they had once done.
His sister had helped the man, some years before, and told him that he was a good man, a man that loved his children, that was just searching for a place in this world that would have him.
He understands that.
He loves his own nephews with an intensity that scares him sometimes, and speaking of those nephews, sometimes they’ll stroll across the valley themselves, to talk and tease with the children of another house – though none of them are quite as much children as they had once been. One of his boy's has his father’s blonde hair and the other his mother’s dark, and they are a striking pair, though both of them will quake still at the glare that tends to be levelled at them from one of the men that acts as the father of those children across the valley– he has a stern look and fine features, and his nephews tend to disappear again pretty quickly when he appears at the door.
The girls think it is funny, know that he does it more because he can than because he feels like he needs to.
There are a pair of boys in that house, too, of a similar age. One loves his father unconditionally, and the other is coming to learn – gradually, as the frost of their lives continues its slow thaw – that his father loves him, too. It might still not be too late to undo the damage that their years of loneliness have caused, not now there are other people here to make sure that the warmth does not pass.
And it is a warmth – that slow and steady warmth that you can feel when you press your hand to the ground in the early days of spring, that warmth that means that the world is coming back to life, that soon the sun will return, the warmth that makes you believe in the turning of the seasons too – because if the dirt can hope for sunlight, then so can you.
And at the end of the day, as that same sun begins to lower itself to the cradle of night, the station master returns home. Most of what he does involves overseeing crates getting loaded and unloaded off the trains, and directing the few weary travellers that need it where to go – though the thing that he enjoys most about his job is the fact that most of the people that get off the trains are people coming home, who light up at the sight of the familiar slate rooftops, the gentle slopes of the valley, the fields and the smell of ploughed earth in the air.
This railway once took his children away from him, took them from the place that they had known, the place that they had loved, to the arms of a stranger.
But now it was home to him too, this land that he could never have imagined.
And so he locks up the station after the last train of every evening, and some days it is hard, because the shaking never quite goes away, and there is one hand that still can’t do all that much, if he is going to be honest with himself. So sometimes he fumbles, and he drops the key, but there doesn’t tend to be anyone around, so he can swear all he likes in the distinctive accent that sets him aside from the rest of the people here, and their gentler lilt. It all gets done in the end, anyway.
He makes his way home.
He likes the sound of that: home.
The pathways lead him along the side of fields, past the old war memorial, through a cluster of trees towards the edge of the village. He’s a little slow going, but he has come to appreciate this time of peace at the end of his day, and he knows that his feet will lead him back eventually. When they do, it is to a large house, sprawling and surrounded by trees – bare boughs kissing the sky in the winter, fat blossoms on the magnolias in the spring, bright green leaves in the summer, that slowly turn to a riot of colour in the autumn.
It should never have been his, and yet, it is.
There are five children, and each day it changes which see him first. What does not change is their greetings – enthusiastic, loud, happy. They’re growing, in height as well as maturity, but they’ll always be his children, whether they want to be or not. His oldest girl is already talking about training to be a nurse: his son is talking about education, something that Bard would never have been able to provide for him before now. His youngest girl is still a riot of laughter and invention, still his singing little bird. Then there is his red-haired dreamer, who still goes out in the rain and sneaks out at night to watch the stars, though he suspects that the dark-haired boy across the valley joins her sometimes, now. And then their blonde boy, so full of sadness that still holds its grip, who talks about being a soldier – he is the one that keeps both father’s up at night.
They’ve seen too much to ever want that life for him, but all the boy has ever seen are victories, and people who return from war. Despite their scars, he doesn’t truly understand, and it is his life to lead, his choices to make, not theirs.
He knows that soon enough first one and then another child will leave, that eventually they will all have gone, and already his chest aches with that knowledge, a parent’s own personal grief.
But for now, they are all here, and even when they are gone, he won’t be alone.
The master of the house nods at him as he arrives. He nods in return.
They eat dinner together, whichever child has the most exciting story to tell dominating the conversation, the two adults sat at either end occasionally catching each other’s eye and sharing a look, something that is part respect and part understanding, but more than that too. And later on in the night, when the house has fallen quiet, the two of them will find each other, perhaps in the library but perhaps elsewhere, too.
They still have nightmares. There is still smoke and the voices of dead men, planes flying overhead to search for his children. There are still bloody hospitals that no one ever arrives to take him from, there are still wreckage and landmines that he stepped first onto, not his friends.
Sometimes they both still wake up screaming. Sometimes it is even on the same night. There are mornings when their old wounds wake them in such pain that they wonder how they will ever rise and see the rest of the day. Not all hurts can be comforted, not all wounds fully healed. They have enough scars between them that they will never forget that.
But they are not alone, not now.
They have each other, they have a family, they have the morning sunshine spilling through the window of a bedroom that they both find themselves in together, more often than not. They have company in the long sleepless nights, the warmth of a body pressed against theirs, the assurance of love that grows not despite scars, but because of them.
Bard wakes with an aching hand most mornings, to the sound of his children slowly rising to greet the day.
There is tea to be drunk downstairs, toast covered in the jam that his children make each autumn.
There are the wisps of fine, blonde hair across his shoulder, tangled in the stubble that he never quite remembers to shave.
There is always a new day, and enough of them are sweet that he knows, without any doubt-
They are home.