echoes of mine

by flwrhye

Summary:

Legolas learns to live on unfamiliar shores amongst those she once feared - healing is slow, family is complicated, and reunion waits on the tide.

Notes:

nothing revealed (everything to lose) the squeakquel first chapter just dropped

Chapter 1: The Havens

The ship's moorings gave a low, sighing creak - a final breath of wood and wind - and then fell still. The sail, slackened by the dying wind, fluttered once and then for a terse moment, nothing moved. Not the ship. Not the sea. Not even the light. It was as though the world itself had drawn in a breath and forgotten how to let it go.

Legolas stood unmoving upon the deck, her legs braced out of habit more than anything resembling strength. Her arms wrapped around the slight weight of her infant daughter, Ýrwen's head tucked against the hollow of her throat as the shroud of mist began to lift from the shoreline. The elfling stirred against her chest, fretful and uneasy in that way only elven children could be - feeling too much, sensing too deeply.

The waves, which had raged and howled during their long crossing, no longer broke with torment or violence. But they had not calmed either. There was a hush in the tide now, low and keening, as if it mourned with her. As if it too, bore witness to what had been lost in the journey. In the silence, she heard a sorrow not wholly her own as if even Ulmo himself grieved the cost of carrying her here.

Her fingers had long since numbed around Ýrwen's blanket, knuckles bloodless where they clenched. Ýrwen's small body trembling faintly as though trying to mirror her naneth's pain, or perhaps absorb it. Legolas could scarcely soother her. Her voice had frayed to silence hours ago, songs reduced to broken hums in a cracked throat. Her mouth tasted of salt and copper, and her bones felt whittled - scraped hollow by wind and longing.

Valinor.

She hadn't truly believed they would arrive, not really.

The land before her was bright, but not with the light of a sunlit noon. It wasn't harsh, nor brilliant, nor was it warm in the way she had known it in Middle-earth. This was the light of something else entirely; something older, something deeper. It didn't shine so much as it glowed. It seeped into her skin and nestled between it like fire trapped beneath ice, humming with the memory of trees long since felled. It made the hairs along her arms rise, made her feel seen in a way that left no place for shame to hide.

The shore itself was too perfect, too pristine; pale as pearl and entirely still. Not a single broken shell or piece of driftwood marred it, no gull's cry to break the peace. Even the air smelled uncanny - too sweet, too soft, too untouched. The Havens beyond stretched wide and far, shaped by elven hands undoubtedly, but they bore no sign of time having ever passed. It was too unnatural to be comforting.

Legolas' stomach churned and the elfling whimpered again, more sharply now. Legolas shifted her weight, tried to rock her gently, but her limbs felt too heavy. Her arms ached from holding Ýrwen for so long, her back burned and her spine felt as though it was turning to glass. The scent of the sea lingered in her hair, in her skin. She did not feel like she belonged in this place. She felt like something half-drowned; a piece of debris washed ashore and mistaken for someone whole.

Beside her, Maglor said nothing, but she could feel his gaze. He had not approached her in hours - he knew better - but he watched her closely; each breath she took, each tremor of her legs as the deck swayed beneath their feet. She had not told him how close she had come to collapsing during the night, how she had whispered to the sea to take her, to ease the ache inside her chest.

Though she needn't have bothered, he already knew.

"Legolas." Maglor prompted, "It's time."

He seemed smaller, somehow - reduced and hollowed out by centuries of grief and exile. This was the land he had forsaken, the land that had cast him out. And now he returned: the kinslayer, with the daughter he barely knew - both strangers in a home never shared.

Legolas shifted her weight with painful care. Even the simple act of walking felt like wading through deep water. Her legs trembled and her vision blurred at the edges, every step echoing too loudly in her ears. Yet still, she followed, because to remain on the ship was worse.

It was behind her now, Middle-earth, the woods and the stars she had known nothing but all her life - left like spectres upon the tide.

Legolas took the first step. Then another, and another. The salt air was sharp in her throat and her breath came too quickly, too shallow. It had done so since before the crossing, but now it felt as if she could not fill her lungs at all.

Her grip tightened around Ýrwen, whether to steady herself of the elfling, she couldn't tell.

When she reached the shore, she froze instinctively. The sand was warm beneath her feet - too warm - and the breeze too soft. Her skin itched as if her body itself knew she did not belong.

But they were already there, waiting. Five figures ahead, outlined in the golden haze like memories half-remembered and too sharply real.

Even if she had never seen them with her own eyes, even if no name had been offered, still she would have known. Her blood told her. Her fear told her.

Maedhros.

Caranthir.

Their names sang in her bones like the tolling of a war horn. The kinslayers. Oath-bound. Bright and ruinous in equal measure. Those whose legacy had hunted her people like wolves through the ruins of Beleriand. The ones she had thought cast into the void - consumed by oath and fire and the ruin they had sown. And yet here they stood, solid and living and unbearably real.

Beside them stood Finrod - her aramillë's brother - fair of both hair and heart, once the king of lost Nargothrond. Among the Galadhrim, his name was still spoken in reverence, softened by sorrow. Finrod was mourned not merely as a fallen lord, but as a rare beacon of kindness and sacrifice in an age of ruin.

Fingon the valiant stood at Maedhros' side, steadfast and unflinching, as if no fire nor fate could separate them. There was something in the way their presence intertwined that made her pause. She found herself remembering the whispered tales and quiet speculations, rarely voiced aloud, of loyalty deep enough to outlast even death, of love buried beneath the ashes of war.

And there, a little apart, stood Nerdanel; her grandmother by blood, though that word felt strange upon her tongue. A sculptor whose hands had shaped legends, whose likeness lived only in the slope of Maglor's brow and the quiet regret in his voice when he spoke of her.

Their presence alone summoned the stories - the old blood-wrapped songs sung in the treetops of Lothlórien and the Greenwood alike - half-whispered warnings in the hush before sleep, the cautionary names woven into Silvan lullabies and Doriathrim laments. Names that were not meant to be spoken under starlight for fear of calling doom down upon their forests.

And now they waited to welcome her.

Legolas' pulse stuttered. She felt herself drawn taut like a bowstring too long under strain. It was Maedhros and Caranthir that unsettled her the most. They were the ones who stood at the edge of her nightmares, the ones who had burned and killed and bled the world dry in their pursuit of cursed light. She had learnt those names before she scarcely knew her own.

Maedhros stepped forward first, slow and deliberate. For a breathless moment, it felt like watching a reflection rise from the depths of mirky water. A ghost of herself - older, harder, and weathered by fire.

The cruelest part was how true the rumours had been.

Legolas' life had been marred by cruel jest and whispered spite telling her that she looked like him. And now, seeing him, her uncle, she understood. Maedhros was taller, yes. Broader, certainly. And his gaze carried a weight hers had not yet learned to bear. But the flame of his curls, the shape of his cheekbones, the cut of his jaw. Even down to the last freckle, it was all there.

Her stomach clenched again, with something sharp and cold. Not fear or even awe. Something more visceral. Like standing in the presence of a truth she had never asked to carry. She didn't know what to do with the sight of him - tall and straight despite the weight of millennia, the stump of his arm folded close to his chest where his hand had once been.

He was not beautiful - not in the way the Noldor sang of their princes at least. There was nothing soft in Maedhros. No gentleness or comfort. His beauty was of a different sort, forged in fire and honed in grief. It was the beauty of a blade drawn in the dark. All edge and danger. His presence alone felt like a cut. Even his eyes - deep, grey, and older than anything she had known - looked not at her, but through her, as though seeing not what stood before him, but all the echoes she unwittingly carried.

Legolas couldn't look at them, wouldn't.

Her gaze fell to the sand, and the warmth of her elfling's small body against her chest was the only anchor she had.

She should have spoken. Said something. Introduced herself. Given a greeting, a name, anything. But her tongue would not obey, it felt as though it had been caught and bound behind her teeth. Words were things that belonged to steadier people. To those who had not nearly faded. To those whose blood did not scream from the pressure of being in too many places at once - past and present, blood and bone, Middle-earth and Valinor. The Greenwood and the House of Fëanor.

So she stood silent, said nothing, and desperately tried to ignore the longing for Elrohir at her side and the way her body swayed.

Maglor was at her side in a heartbeat, his hand on her arm, steadying - not pulling, just there. Quiet and constant.

"Legolas." He said, barely above a breath. "Breathe."

Her chest spasmed with the attempt, and the air refused to come easily. The sea had taken too much from her. The longing still gnawed at her ribs, still tried deceitfully to draw her gaze back toward the waves - still whispered to her even now.

"You need to breathe, iell nín." Maglor whispered again, even gentler this time. It was not a command, but a plea, shaped by worry, by guilt, by the aching hope that his words might somehow hold her together. "You are safe. They are not what you fear, I promise."

But no promise, no gentle voice, could unmake the bone deep truth of what she carried. Because they were what she feared.

Not in form, perhaps - not in the quiet stance of five waiting figures, or in the way their hands did not reach for weapons. But in every way that mattered, they were the monsters from her childhood. She had grown up with their shadows stitched into her dreams, tales told to her, spoken low and bitter by those who had lived through the bloodshed. Survivors, refugees, wandering remnants of ruined realms who looked at fire and remembered death. Even her lullabies had ended in warnings, her cradle rocked by hands that shook when they spoke of Doriath, of Sirion.

No gentle truth could unmake that kind of inheritance.

And now here they were - no longer shadows but flesh, standing before her like a reckoning and she felt like glass.

Ýrwen began to fuss again, tiny fingers clutching at the fabric of her dress, her breath catching in unspoken distress. The elfling was far away from being able to speak yet - not in words - but she felt. Too much. Too Deeply. Just like her Naneth.

No matter how tightly Legolas wrapped herself in Maglor's voice, in the safety he insisted was hers; she could not find solid ground. Because there was no safety in the presence of names that had once burned the world down. No safety in the blood that bound her to the very hands that had spilled so much of it.

Legolas rocked Ýrwen gently, a slow and instinctive motion, though her arms ached from the effort. She had no words to offer these strangers. No greetings in Quenya, no Noldorin courtesies. She had nothing but the silence that wrapped around her throat, and the name she barely dared speak aloud. Fëanorian.

And then, at last, the silence broke.

"Makalaurë."

The name was spoken tentatively, but it struck the air like a sword ringing against armour. It came from Maedhros, and it was less a question as it was the cracking open of something long buried. A voice roughened not by hostility, but disbelief - by a hope so long denied it had cemented into silence.

Legolas felt the shift before she saw it - Maglor stiffening at her side, a breath caught somewhere between his lungs and memory. The sound of his own name upon his brother's lips, spoken aloud after all this time had frozen him. He turned, slowly, away from Legolas and met Maedhros' gaze, wide-eyed and stricken.

For a heartbeat, perhaps more, Maglor looked a far cry from the tragic warrior of legend, nor did he look like the half-shattered ghost she had come to know. No, he looked young and vulnerable - a man teetering on the edge of some long fated precipice, as though one more step toward the past might collapse the very earth beneath his feet. And still, something in him leaned forward.

Maedhros took another step - tentative, halting - as though he expected Maglor to vanish like a mirage if he came any closer. His expression flickered, raw and unguarded, before something within him gave way. A breath fled him in a sudden shuddered exhale, like a dam finally breaking, and then he moved.

In three urgent strides, he closed the space between them. Without pause, he pulled Maglor into his arms - what remained of them at least - and the embrace that followed was not graceful, nor careful, but fierce in the way only life forged through ruin can be. One arm, stronger than it had any right to be after centuries of singular reliance, wrapped around Maglor's shoulders with desperate force, and Maedhros buried his face into the curve of his brother's neck as though seeking something he had feared forever lost.

Maglor stiffened for half a breath, overcome by the suddenness of it - by the reality of being held - before his own arms lifted in return. He was hesitant at first, as if uncertain whether he was allowed this much grace after all he had done. Then, he embraced Maedhros back just as tight.

"I can hardly believe it, Laurë." Maedhros breathed, too low for any but Maglor to hear, "I thought you. I thought we-"

Maglor gave no answer. He only held on tighter.

"Valar, Makalaurë." Nerdanel's voice trembled with wonder when it came, heavy with unshed tears. She stepped toward the pair of them slowly, her hands curled against her chest as if afraid to reach out too soon. "You're alive."

"We feared. We thought-" Nerdanel shook her head and her voice cracked before falling quiet, it took her some time before she was able to steady it enough to continue, "We thought you would never sail. Never come home."

Maglor drew back slowly from Maedhros' embrace, though one of his hands lingered on his brother's shoulder, a wordless assurance - a tether.

When he turned to face his mother, his voice was frayed at the edges, rough with the weight of centuries of grief and a fragile, disbelieving joy. "For a long time." Maglor admitted, the words scraped from somewhere deep within him. "I did not think I ever would, ammë."

The silence that followed was fragile, tender, and even the sea seemed to hush in deference.

It was Fingon who eventually broke it, though his attention was not on Maglor, nor on the reunion unfolding before him. No, his gaze was fixed instead upon Legolas, the unsteady figure lingering a few paces behind his wayward cousin - a child clutched in her arms, and her frame so slight she seemed more shadow than substance.

"And who is your friend?" Fingon asked, his voice firm yet softened by an unmistakable gentleness as his eyes traced the pallor of her face, "She looks as if a breath of wind might take her from us."

He tilted his head, and the frown that shadowed his brow deepened, concern overtaking curiosity. "She can barely stand."

Legolas did not answer, she couldn't.

The voices of the Noldor reached her dimly, as though carried across a great expanse of water - muffled and distorted, distant echoes that never quite resolved into meaning. Legolas could not draw breath properly; it caught high in her throat, shallow and stuttering. Her limbs would not still - each muscle trembling with a tension she could not command - and when she tried to speak, her voice failed her entirely.

In her arms, Ýrwen stirred and a soft, fretful whimper slipped from her lips. She was too new to this place of unnatural light and silent grandeur, too young to understand the weight of all these gazes upon her, eyes that gleamed like burning silver, old and unreadable. The elfling trembled, overwhelmed by it all.

Legolas' arms tightened, drawing her daughter close to the shield of her body. She bowed her head, red hair spilling forward like a curtain between them and the world, and pressed her lips gently to the soft crown of Ýrwen's head. The elfling smelled of salt and the faint trace of the forest she had never seen. Almost without thought, drawn from a place deeper than memory - Legolas began to sing.

It was not a song meant for noble ears or ancient halls, not an elven song as the Noldor knew it, with its precision and artful harmonies. It was older, earthbound, and quietly hers - a silvan lullaby, threadbare and worn soft by generations of mothers. Her voice was ragged and raw with salt and sorrow, but still it came - in soft syllables falling like leaves in still air, lilting and slow. She did not sing for the figures of legends who watched, poised and waiting. She sang for the tiny child in her arms, whose fear reflected her own. She sang to protect, to soothe, to root herself in something known amid the surreal unknown of this shore.

Something shifted when she finished. The wind seemed to still around her and the uneasy murmur of the gathered elves quieted. Even the sea, rustling against the pale shore, softened its voice and Ýrwen gave a small sigh, pressing closer to her naneth's chest.

"That is no Noldorin speech." Caranthir observed, breaking the silence, his brows knit with curiosity more than censure. "What language is that?"

"The tongue of the forest folk." Maedhros answered before Legolas could find the words. His voice was low, gaze fixed upon her - not in suspicion or challenge, but something akin to wistfulness.

"Forgive me," Caranthir straightened slightly, eyes softening as he inclined his head in apology. "I meant no slight. Few of your kin have come to these shores, It is not a tongue one hears often in Valinor."

"No." Maedhros murmured, a faint smile passing across his demeanor, though it was tempered with an undeniable melancholy, "But it is beautiful, and I am glad to hear it once more."

Legolas regarded Caranthir in silence, her expression unreadable - a still, assessing quiet that held neither hostility nor welcome. Then, slowly, she turned to Maedhros. Her eyes did not soften, but neither did they harden; they held a deliberate scrutiny, cool and careful, as though she were taking the measure of a blade. And then, just barely, she inclined her head; a gesture slight enough to be missed, but deliberate all the same.

There was an uneasy pause before Finrod eased himself into the conversation, a spark of teasing familiarity flickering behind his eyes as they flitted between Maedhros, Maglor and Legolas.

"Russo." Finrod addressed Maedhros with his childhood nickname, half-chiding, half-amused. "You didn't happen to leave a daughter unclaimed in Beleriand all these ages, did you?"

Maedhros blinked at him blankly before his brows lifted in an affronted sort of disbelief, "What?"

"Because if not-" Finrod continued, gaze narrowing slightly as he looked again at Legolas - at those russet curls, her face so similar in shape to Maedhros' own. "Then who?"

His question drifted, unfinished, but the answer was already stirring in the air; unspoken but as heavy as the dawn.

Maglor's gaze flicked to Legolas, before settling back upon his brothers, his mother and reembodied cousins - his blood, the past and all its wounds made flesh again. He hesitated, not from shame, but from the gravity of truth. There was no concealing it now, even if Legolas wished it so, her face had already spoken what words could only confirm.

When he spoke, his voice was low and threaded with something like reverence.

"This is Legolas."

He paused, and his next words came out as though they were an offering; to the wind, to the sea, to Varda's hidden stars. Words he had never thought he would speak aloud this side of the sundering sea.

"My daughter."

The shift was subtle, but palpable - as if some unseen force had rippled through the elves, striking them breathless.

Maedhros, who had stood with near unshaken composure from the moment the ship had made landfall, faltered. His spine, so long held in rigid stillness, bent beneath the force of recognition he had not been prepared to feel. His lips parted, soundless at first, then a half-formed declaration cracked from his throat. "Your daughter?"

Anything else withered before it could be spoken, and he scarcely even registered Caranthir's ragged "How can that be?" from his side.

Maedhros' eyes swept back to Legolas, this time not guarded but searching - frantic, even. He studied her face with a fervour that bordered on desperation. But there was no mistaking it; the echo was too precise, too deep. Her features, unmistakably shaped by the same fire-wrought forge as his own: her hair, a more burnished copper than his own, the stance, the ache behind her eyes.

He knew it, all of it, intimately. Another life shaped by the ruin of their own, another soul caught in the tangle of blood and doom that their House had scattered across the world like shards of a broken oath.

And then Nerdanel, who had said nothing in the long silence since embracing her lost son, made a soft sound. Barely a sigh. "A granddaughter-"

The words hung in the air, trembling. Nerdanel's eyes filled with tears as she pressed a gentle hand to her mouth. "Oh, Makalaurë..."

It was not a rebuke, nor was it even surprise. It was grief and joy both tangled into one timid breath. She stepped toward Legolas, cautious but drawn by some invisible pull, her eyes never leaving Legolas and the child now nestled against Legolas' shoulder.

"And this little one?" She asked gently, voice thick with disbelief.

Legolas swallowed. Her mouth was dry, but somehow she found her voice - quieter than the Greenwood's archers, but steady nonetheless.

"Ýrwen." Legolas said, "My daughter."

Something shifted in Nerdanel’s face - not just wonder, but awe. As though the very shape of the world had been redrawn before her. "Your daughter." Nerdanel echoed, and the repetition felt sacred, like saying it aloud might help her believe it. A granddaughter. A great granddaughter.

Caranthir - stood off to one side - gave a short huff of breath, half-laugh and half a sigh. "Well, brother." He said dryly, glancing at Maglor with something that would only have passed for fondness if you knew him well. "You have been busy in these long years."

The levity was small, but not unkind. And for a moment, just a moment, the weight began to loosen. Though that didn’t stop Nerdanel shooting her fourth son an unimpressed glare before her eyes warmed, and her hand lifted toward Ýrwen - not reaching just yet, but asking permission. "May I?"

Legolas hesitated.

She did not know what this woman meant to her aside from blood, not really - just what others had said. But there was something in Nerdanel's expression that did not speak of anything except gentleness. And in that moment, it was enough for Legolas so she nodded - a tired, aching thing.

Nerdanel stepped closer, careful as a soft breeze, and reached out. Her hand hovered for a moment over Ýrwen's sleeping form before brushing back a tiny tuft of dark hair from the elfling's temple.

"She is strong." Nerdanel murmured, entranced by the tiny babe in Legolas' arms. "And spirited. Like you, I imagine. You carry yourself like a warrior."

Legolas gave a faint, uncertain sound. Not quite agreement. Not quite dissent.

"I don't know what I am." She said at last, a whisper, raw with the weight of all that she had lost - all the sea and her heritage had taken from her. She closed her eyes, as if to shut out the unbearable clarity of her own uncertainty. "Not anymore."

There was no judgement in Nerdanel's face. Only a quiet kind of grief, the understanding of a woman who had watched too many of her children become strangers to themselves.

Caranthir stepped forward then, just a little - enough to catch Legolas' uneasy eye, but not so much as to threaten. There was no sharpness in his bearing, only the cautious courtesy of one who had once been feared and had learned the cost of it.

"You are wary, Legolas." he said, his voice low and steady. "That is fair."

Legolas met his gaze - barely, her spine held straight by force of will alone. But Caranthir did not look away. He did not flinch from what her expression held - exhaustion, suspicion, fear even.

"We are strangers to you." Caranthir continued, meeting her gaze openly - dark-eyed but far from cold. "And you to us. I understand that. And I would not fault you for mistrusting us."

He inclined his head, solemn, with the shadow of an old sadness behind his eyes. "But we mean you no harm. That much I hope you can see."

It was not an appeal, nor an apology so much as it was a statement shaped by a hardworn humility. Legolas could hear the truth in it - the sort that was born not from innocence, but from long and bitter reflection. But still, she could not relax.

"I know the stories." She began, her voice scarcely above a murmur, but every word was precise in its delivery; carved from old scars.

Legolas' fingers moved subconsciously, smoothing Ýrwen's smattering of hair - though the gesture did little in the way of steadying her. "Of oath-breakers. Of kinslayers."

She didn't raise her voice. She didn't need to. The titles she invoked carried weight enough on their own, and the words hung in the air like unsheathed blades.

"My aramillë frightened me to sleep with tales of your deeds." She looked past Fingon and Finrod, to direct her gaze on Maedhros and Caranthir, her voice sharpening as she spoke. "I was raised among what was left of the Doriathrim."

They stilled. That name still held weight, even here in this place.

"You were the monsters at the edge of the dark." Legolas admitted and the wind caught those words and carried them, unadorned and unflinching across the Havens. The silence that followed held no outrage, no indignant protest - only the weight of being seen straight through.

It was Fingon who was ultimately the first to move, shifting his stance as if the stillness had become too much to bear. His gaze flitted sharply to Maglor, and the tension behind his jaw betrayed his unease.

"Makalaurë." He said with something near incredulity, "Why would you send a child of Fëanorian blood to live amongst-"

"Finno." Maglor's voice cut in, firm, final.

"Not now." Maglor's expression did not invite argument, "I shall explain it, in time."

Fingon held his gaze a moment longer, but said nothing more.

Maedhros, silent until now, stepped forward once again, his voice coming quiet and steady like low thunder beneath the wind. "And yet here you are." He said, gaze fixed on Legolas. "A child of both our blood, and the blood of those harmed by us."

"That is a hard place to stand, I do not envy you." Maedhros didn't look away from her, nor soften the truth. There was no denial in him, no self pity. Only the bleak recognition of what they had wrought.

"You have every right." He continued, his words deliberate, and heavy with the burden of their past, "To judge us as you see fit, to hold our names in caution as you do. We have earned no forgiveness, and we will not ask it of you."

The pause that followed was sharp-edged, full of things that could not be said aloud. There was something raw in Maedhros' face - an openness that felt unfamiliar. No defiance, no defence. Only the bare bones of truth.

"But perhaps." He said, voice gentling just slightly, "We can show you who we are now, if not who we were."

Legolas stood silent, the wind tugging gently at the edges of her cloak, the salt laden air brushing against her skin like the ghost of the sea-longing that still refused to loosen its grip on her. Maedhros' words hung between them, sharp and solemn, spoken without any ornament or plea.

You have every right to judge us as you see fit.

And she did. Her entire life - the lives of all elves still residing in Middle-earth - had been shaped in the shadow of the tales whispered beneath green boughs and behind closed doors; names spoken like curses, legends steeped in blood and sorrow. The sons of Fëanor were monsters, cruel beyond comprehension. And yet, in her fractured existence, where little had remained certain, their savagery had been one of the few constants. No matter how her world had shifted, how kingdoms rose and fell, their merciless nature endured as unchanging as the shadow following a setting sun.

But now, here they stood, not as legends, but men. Scarred, burned, reembodied, but impossibly real. There was no rage in Maedhros' face. No arrogance. Only a quiet, raw sincerity, and something far older than pride - regret worn so long it has become a part of him.

Her arms tightened unconsciously around Ýrwen. The elfling had settled once more, but the tremor in her naneth's chest had not. Legolas drew in a slow breath, feeling the weight of it gather like stones in her ribs.

"You cannot undo what was done." She said at last. Her voice was quiet, but it carried. Not cold, nor cruel, just certain.

Maedhros inclined his head, his one hand falling loose at his side. "No." He agreed. No protest, no plea, just one word laced with more sorrow than Legolas could even begin to comprehend.

"But perhaps." He said after a moment, softer still. "We can help heal what remains."

Legolas turned slightly at the shift in voice and met the gaze of Nerdanel. Her grandmother's eyes were steady, unflinching, but warm in a way that surprised her.

"You are not bound by our past, child." Nerdanel said gently, and Legolas felt her throat tighten. "Not theirs, not your father's. You are your own. And you are welcome here as you are."

Something in her words cracked the defenses around Legolas' chest. It shouldn't have been a revelation, but it was. Her life had been shaped by so many discordant hands - Galadriel's soft guidance, Thranduil's silences, Maglor's ghosts. Her children's needs. Her people's fears. Always carrying a legacy that was never wholly hers, but one that shaped her all the same.

And yet, this - this moment, this choice - was hers alone to make.

She looked down at Ýrwen, unaware of the weight her naneth bore. Then she looked back up - at Maedhros, at Nerdanel, at Caranthir, at Fingon and Finrod. Her gaze moved over them slowly, as if committing them to memory - these legends whose names had once filled her with dread and now stood before her as strangers offering a kind of peace.

"I will try." She said at last. Though the words were simple, they cost her more than she had anticipated. Not a promise, but a willingness. It was all she could give.

Fingon, who had remained still and watchful, let a faint smile touch his lips. It was a weary thing - no triumph in it, only quiet acknowledgement of the weight such words carried. "A beginning, then." He asserted quietly. "And all beginnings are fragile."

Silence stretched again, but it was no longer brittle. Instead, it felt tentative, and for the first time since she set foot on the shore, she let herself believe that perhaps - perhaps - fragility was not the same as futility.

Legolas fussed Ýrwen in her arms. The child murmured, not fully waking, but restless. Her limbs twitched beneath the fine blanket wrapped around her, and her brow furrowed with a quiet discomfort.

"She-" Legolas began, then stopped, her throat closing up unexpectedly. She tried again hesitantly, "She is unsettled from the crossing. I'm sorry. I am not what I should be."

Her voice cracked slightly on the last word. Not out of weakness, but the sheer weight of all that had brought her here - the long grief, the unraveling, the ship westward not out of hope, but in retreat of fading.

Maglor, who had remained close at her side, placed a delicate hand upon Legolas' shoulder and his voice came low and coaxing, "You need to rest, Legolas."

She opened her mouth to argue, but nothing came. She had no strength left for defiance.

"I know this." Finrod said quietly, mournfully even, as he stepped closer and his eyes softened in remembrance. "The sea-longing. I have seen it before - in my niece when she first came to these shores. That same hollowing ache in her eyes, that same pull that drains the spirit and leaves only sorrow in its wake."

Legolas turned her head slightly, as if to hide the flicker of pain that passed over her countenance. Her aramillë's brother's words struck close, too close.

Maglor's voice followed, gentler than she had ever heard it before. "It has nearly undone her. She was on the cusp of fading before we sailed, and the crossing-" He shook his head softly as if attempting to dispel the images his mind conjured. "The crossing was crueler than I imagined it would be."

Legolas said nothing, but the muscles in her jaw tightened imperceptibly. She had held herself together for so long - for her children, for Elrohir, for the sake of a lineage that was no longer hers to claim.

"Poor child." Nerdanel murmured, with the kind of softness only a mother could muster. "We must not keep you standing in this wind. Come, rest."

There was no command in her words, no expectation - only care. And something in Legolas' shoulders, taut for so long, eased ever so slightly at the sound of it.

"Lean on us if you will. We are no threat to you, Legolas. Let us help." Maedhros spoke, his tone stripped of any lingering grandeur or distance, and Legolas was caught off guard by the sincerity she found in his ancient gaze.

"If there is one kindness we may give." Caranthir finally spoke from where he had thus far been brooding at the edge of it all. "Let it be this."

Something gave way inside her then - not loudly, not visibly. No tears. No collapse. But something quiet and profound shifted nonetheless. A breath she had not known she'd been holding slipped free and she nodded. Just one - slow and deliberate - and without ceremony they moved toward her.

Nerdanel's hand came first, warm and firm at the small of her back, guiding without pressing. Maglor stepped forward next, and with an unspoken question in his eyes, reached for Ýrwen.

Legolas hesitated for no more than a heartbeat before allowing him to take his granddaughter from her arms. His hands, calloused from harp strings and centuries of bloodshed, cradled the child with a gentleness that startled her to her core.

Then, Maedhros, silent but steady, extended his remaining arm. Not with pity but with purpose, an offer rather than a demand. And Legolas, trembling beneath the weight of too much memory and too little rest, ignored her better judgement and let herself lean into the support.

It was not peace, but it was, perhaps, the beginning of something akin to it.

Chapter 2: Nerdanel

Summary:

Conversations in kitchens

The mornings in Valinor were too still.

Even now, days after her arrival, Legolas found herself listening out for sounds that never came - the creak of trees shifting in the wind, the distant patter of running feet in the woods, the calls of linnets from high branches. But the air here was different. Unmoving, timeless. And in that strange stillness, she often felt more like a ghost than a guest.

The sun had not yet climbed fully over the hills when Legolas descended the stairs, Ýrwen cradled in the crook of her arm, still drowsy with sleep. The child made a small sound, somewhere in between a sigh and a murmur, before she curled closer into her mother's shoulder.

The kitchen was warm with early light, slanting through the windows in long golden tendrils, illuminating the soft dust that floated in the air like pollen. Nerdanel's house sat at the edge of Tirion, quiet and removed, wrapped in gardens and stone as though time had forgotten it deliberately. Though Legolas had come to learn that it was by design.

Nerdanel had chosen this place long ago, when the cracks in her marriage had widened into fault lines. She had left Tirion and Formenos both behind, tired of walls that echoed with memory, and built something quieter, smaller - a space for beginning again. It was evident in every corner of the room, that she had shaped the place with her own hands.

Her home did not wear its grandeur openly, it was modest by the measure of Tirion; low-roofed, ivy-laced, and far from the marble grace of the city proper. Instead, it was made of quieter things - wood worn smooth by years of use, shelves lined with earthen jars and handmade bowls, a hearth that still smelled faintly of ash and herbs. It was the first place in Valinor that hadn't made Legolas feel like she was intruding.

Legolas crossed the room without a word and lowered Ýrwen into a small cradle that sat tucked beneath the window. The crib had been waiting when she arrived - carved and sanded smooth and lined with soft fabric, as if Nerdanel had somehow known that one way or another, a child would grace her house again.

Nerdanel was already seated at the table, sleeves rolled to the elbow, splattered with traces of red clay, and her hair pulled loosely into a braid that hung over one shoulder. She looked up from her mug with a gentle smile - not the bright cheer of a stranger, but the steady, knowing warmth of someone who had begun to care deeply, quietly, and without condition.

"Tea's hot." She said without preamble, nodding toward the teapot on the table. "I made the good kind. The leaves Fingon brings me when he thinks I look too tired."

Legolas nodded, sliding into the seat opposite her. Her movements were slower these days, not from fragility - not any longer - but from a lingering caution, as though each gesture still needed to be measured and tested, as if her body were something unfamiliar she was learning to inhabit again.

She curled her fingers around the ceramic mug and let the warmth of it soak slowly into her palms. Nerdanel watched her from across the table, no urgency, no expectation. The silence between the pair stretched long but unstrained - not empty, but tentative, like a bridge in the first stages of spanning the distance between two foreign shores.

She had been living here since the ship, she hadn't known where else to go. Valinor was a land without urgency but it gave no welcome freely, not to those with hearts still turned to the fading world behind them. And Legolas had not come seeking comfort. She had come because she had no choice left.

Maglor had asked, in his own quiet, wounded way. A hesitant offer, barely more than a breath - You can come with me, if you'd like. He had gone to Maedhros, of course. Even after all the ages adrift - separated by Mandos himself - the two of them orbited each other still; two broken stars clinging to a gravity they could never escape. She had seen the way Maglor's voice softened when he spoke of his brother, the longing unspoken but ever-present. He had missed Maedhros like air. Like he had lost a fundamental part of himself.

But it had been Nerdanel ultimately - calm, grounded, and unapologetically herself - who had reached out with a steady hand. No hesitance, or fear. Her voice had held no tremor when she said it, Come with me, dear. There had been no question in it. Only certainty and welcome.

Legolas had not expected gentleness in this place. She had expected grandeur, judgement, the weight of legend pressing down on her until she cracked. Instead, what she found was a kitchen warm with the scent of herbs and woodsmoke, a cradle already waiting in the corner, and a woman who looked her in the eye as though she were not a puzzle to be solved but a life to be lived. And it startled her, how deeply she had needed that. How long she had gone without it.

Kindness. Simple, unspoken, steady. Not the ceremonial affection of a court. Not the stiff love of a king who had only acknowledged her as a duty more than a daughter. But real kindness - the kind that expected nothing in return.

Nerdanel poured her a second cup and passed it across the table, her hands steady despite the faint bruising of old burns and the faint shimmer of glaze on her wrist. She bore her craft openly, unashamed of its mess. It struck Legolas as oddly brave - to create something with the knowledge it might crack in the fire.

"You look better today." Nerdanel observed gently, her eyes settling on Legolas with the quiet, appraising gaze of something who had spent a lifetime learning to notice what went unspoken.

"Less like you're about to keel over at any moment." She added, with a faint smile tugging at the corners of her mouth - a teasing tinge lightening the words, though her concern was genuine.

Legolas gave a soft huff of breath that might have passed for a laugh if not for how strained it was, "That's a low bar to clear."

"Perhaps." Nerdanel conceded, unfazed. She leaned back slightly in her chair, her tea cradled in hands still dusted faintly with red clay. "But it is good to see regardless. You were far too pale, and I doubt anyone would have trusted you to remain upright for long."

Legolas glanced down at the mug between her hands, watching the faint curls of steam rising from the surface. She didn't deny it. She had felt like it too - half here, half elsewhere, untethered. Even now, she moved carefully through the world, as though something inside her had not yet fully landed on the blessed realm's shores.

"It has been an adjustment." Legolas said finally, the words simple, but heavy with all they did not say.

Nerdanel nodded. "I imagine it has."

A silence settled between them - companionable, but threaded with understanding, and a growing recognition of each other's quiet griefs.

"You didn't want to come here, did you?" Nerdanel asked softly.

Legolas did not answer right away, her gaze instead lingered on the rim of her cup. The truth had sat heavy on her tongue for days now, but in the warmth of this kitchen and the company of the grandmother she had only now come to know, it finally came.

"Not really, no." Legolas admitted, "I fought it for a long time, the sea-longing. I told myself that I could bear it - that I was stronger than it." She gave a small shake of her head, the motion of it weary, almost bitter.

"But I was lying. And once Ýrwen was born-" Her voice faltered, just slightly and she had to swallow against the ache rising in her throat just to continue, "Elrohir saw it before I did. He always did see me more clearly than I saw myself. I thought I was holding on, but I was barely there. If I'd stayed, I would have faded."

Nerdanel did not speak at once, she left Legolas' confession to settle, instead she reached for her mug - lifting it slowly and holding it between her palms as though it too carried a fragile truth. When she did finally speak, her voice came low and sure.

"It is no small thing, choosing to live." She mused, "Even if it means tearing yourself from the soil you loved. A choice between fading and leaving your home is no choice at all."

Nerdanel looked across the worn table at Legolas, her eyes soft with a sorrow that had aged but would never vanish entirely. "The Valar are cruel like that sometimes," She added. "They wrap their mercy in riddles and call it grace."

Legolas' fingers tightened around her mug, knuckles pailing and she let out a quiet breath. "It didn't feel like grace." She muttered, "It felt like drowning."

Her voice hollowed, turned raw at the edges, and she couldn't bring herself to look up. "Sometimes it still does."

Nerdanel reached across the table and laid her hand gently atop of where Legolas' rested - not possessive nor demanding, just there. Steady and warm.

"It will pass." Nerdanel assured. "Slowly, perhaps. Like a tide that doesn't quite know which way it's meant to turn. But you've not set down your roots yet, child. Give yourself time."

Legolas didn't speak, but her shoulders eased beneath the weight of Nerdanel's kindness.

"You loved Middle-earth." Nerdanel observed, softer now, not a question so much as it was recognition.

Legolas lifted her head then, eyes bright and shadowed all at once.

"With all I had." Legolas' voice broke under the weight of her affection. And it was true - not a dramatic confession, but something older, deeper. Primal, even. A love carved through forest paths and ruin, through starlight and song, through war and silence and memory. A love that had not been enough to save her from the sea, but still lived in her like a second heartbeat.

Legolas' gaze drifted toward the window, where the light was beginning to shift, breeze catching on the curve of a hanging wind chime and setting it gently swaying. Her voice when it came was low and even, but it carried a pain Legolas could scarcely put a name to.

"It was my home." She said, "Its wilderness, its ruin, its song - broken though it was - it was mine."

Her hand once again curled instinctively around her mug, as if she could anchor herself in the warmth of it. Though her posture was composed, something inside her flickered, fragile and exposed.

"I left so much behind when I crossed the sea." She continued, "More than names and places. My dearest friends. My husband." Her voice caught, just for a moment, but she pushed through anyway. "My children - three souls I carried and raised and would give anything to hold again. They are the truest parts of me, and I left them behind."

She drew a slow breath, steadying herself. "That grief is its own kind of fading, like being unstitched from the life that made you."

Nerdanel said nothing for a long breath, as if carefully considering each of Legolas' words. Then, with a softness honed not by fragility but by strength long tested, she concluded simply, "You left them for life."

Legolas nodded curtly, "Yes."

A pause followed - not uncertainty, but the silence of one who knew the truth of it well, but hated it all the same.

"But knowing that doesn't make it any easier." She said at last, "I wasn't ready to go. I wasn't ready to leave them."

Nerdanel held her mug with both hands, the rim just below her chin. Her eyes had gone distant, not unfocused, but cast back - not to the hills or pines beyond the window, but further, deeper - to memory she didn't often choose to dwell on.

"No mother ever is." She said quietly.

She set the mug down and rested her hands on the table between them.

"When Fëanor left." She began, voice barely above a breath, "I told myself he would return. That our sons would come home. For years, I believed it - with the sort of stubbornness only grief can breed. I told myself they would tire of exile, or pride, or rage. That love would bring them back."

Nerdanel exhaled slowly, and there was no bitterness in her face - only a kind of hollow understanding that came from time and pain well-worn.

"Some wounds never close." She admitted. "We learn to live around them. But they never unmake their shape in us."

The room went quiet again. Not heavy, but deep - like still water. Legolas lowered her eyes and drew a slow breath, shoulders sagging slightly beneath its weight.

"I'm tired." She said truthfully, "Tired of learning to live around wounds."

Her eyes didn't rise from the tea; she simply stared into it, like it might reveal some truth if she only looked long enough.

"All my life I've done it. Around the absence of a mother I never knew. Around the coldness of the king I believed was my father. And now, this." Her fingers curled tighter around the ceramic mug.

"Every time I look at the sea." She continued, the strain each word took evident across her countenance. "It feels like it's calling me and cutting me open at the same time."

Nerdanel was quiet for a moment before she softly spoke, "Because it asks you to keep walking forward, even when your heart is still looking back."

The words settled like ash between them and Legolas closed her eyes as if to protect herself from them and when she opened them, there was no bitterness, only bone-deep weariness.

"I'm not sure I know how to be whole here." Legolas confessed, "Everything that made me feel real is still there. In Middle-earth. In them."

She glanced toward the cradle in the corner, where Ýrwen still slept, her breath soft and even.

"Even the trees here feel too perfect." Legolas whispered, "Too perfect. Too quiet. As if they've never known struggle, or sorrow. As if they've never had to sing louder just to be heard."

Nerdanel reached for her mug but did not drink. Her gaze remained steady, voice firm with quiet conviction. "You are still yourself, even here." She asserted, "It may take time. But you are not hollow."

Legolas shook her head, expression flickering in disbelief. "It doesn't feel that way."

"Sometimes I feel like a ghost of myself. Or worse - a thief." Legolas said, the words cracking just slightly and she had to pause as her voice caught in her throat. "I brought a child into this world knowing I would leave it behind. I look at Ýrwen, and see all the things her siblings may never know of her - all the things she may never know of them."

There was no rush in Nerdanel's voice when she replied, only a quiet certainty that rang truer than comfort. "And yet." She said, "Ýrwen will still know love. That is not nothing. You have not stolen anything, dear."

Nerdanel tilted her head slightly, regarding Legolas as one might a half-finished sculpture - not to measure imperfections, but to marvel at how much beauty could survive the shaping.

"You have simply loved in both directions." She continued, her tone bordering reverent. "That, Legolas, is its own kind of courage. To love two worlds, and to break for both."

Legolas didn’t reply at once. Her throat was tight, as if the words she might say had lodged there. Her eyes drifted again to the small cradle again, where Ýrwen slept, her chest rising and falling with that effortless trust that only infants carried - unknowing of grief, untouched by the weight of Arda marred.

Nerdanel followed her gaze and smiled faintly. "Besides." She muttered, "I have seen Ýrwen. She shines."

"So did they all." Legolas whispered, the answer pulled from her like a breath drawn too deep. Legolas' eyes softened, lost in memory, and she trailed off before she could say any more.

"Then you must hold fast to what they gave you." Nerdanel said at last. "Let it root you here, even if it aches. Love is never lost, child. Not truly. It lingers, becomes part of the marrow."

"I wish that were enough." Legolas said in quiet defeat.

There was a pause. The light shifted across the floor now, crawling over worn tiles and the legs of the table. It was peaceful, and that, too, unsettled Legolas.

"I think, sometimes." Legolas said at last, her voice soft and uncertain, each word carefully chosen, as if she were laying down a truth she had not dared voice aloud before. "I think the Valar misunderstood us, what we are."

"They believed peace would be our balm. That silence would be our healing." She continued tentatively.

"But peace isn't always what they think it is." Her voice faltered, but she did not stop. "Sometimes peace is not the end of pain, but the absence of everything that gave it meaning. A quiet stretched too wide, too long. And if all you have known is the sharpness of song - of cries in the wildwood, of battle-songs and laments, of friends laughing by firelight even as the world falls to ruin - then silence is not a comfort. It is exile."

A smile graced Nerdanel's demeanor, laced with pity, yes - but also the traces of amusement and fondness. "You speak like a poet."

Legolas let out a soft sound, almost a laugh. "My husband says that too." She mused, "He thinks I'm too dramatic."

"He sounds wise."

"He is." A small smile flickered across her face, real, but only a fleeting thing. "He loved me enough to let me go."

The words were simple, but they hung heavy between them; edged with grief and gratitude in equal measure.

"I just didn't expect it would lead me to-" She stopped herself, but the thought pressed on. "To this. To them."

Nerdanel didn't flinch, her eyes instead remaining warmly on the granddaughter in front of her.

"No." Nerdanel said after a moment, her tone dry with a quiet humour that Legolas hadn't expected. "I imagine not. My sons do tend to have a habit of turning up where they're least wanted."

Legolas blinked, taken aback by Nerdanel's bluntness. "That's one way of putting it."

She glanced down into her tea, fingers absently tracing the ceramic rim. Her voice came softer as she continued, a quiet admission that had been haunting her since her arrival. "I'm not quite sure what to make of them."

The confession was plain, but carried more weight than it appeared on the surface. Not just uncertainty, but unease. The stories she'd grown up with - tales of kinslayings and fire, of stolen silmarils and doomed vows - had painted the sons of Fëanor in stark, fearsome colours. And yet now they stood before her, not as myths, but as broken elves: worn and weathered, sorrowful and strange. Still dangerous, perhaps - but not in the ways she had been raised to believe. Not anymore, at least.

Nerdanel, unbothered by the admission, continued to sip at her tea. "Neither did I, at first."

Legolas looked up at her, startled. "You?"

"When the first of them returned from Mandos." Nerdanel started, setting her mug down with care. "They were familiar, yes. But deeply strange too. Like echoes of the boys I had borne, shaped by time and sorrow into something I no longer recognised. The same eyes, the same voices - and yet, they had been tempered by fire and grief and ruin."

Legolas didn't speak. She simply watched the older woman's face, quietly struck by the way the morning light caught in her copper hair - hair so like her own - and how her expression held a layer of grief that was so unbearably deep but somehow steady, rather than searing.

"I'd heard things." Nerdanel continued. "Fragments passed from the newly re-embodied, whispered over the years. Bits and pieces of what had happened after they left me. But none of it prepared me. Not really. Not for the weight of the truth, when it finally came."

Nerdanel let out a small, breathless laugh; not amused exactly, but bitter and tired. "I wept. I raged. I couldn't reconcile it. Couldn't understand how the children I had held, the ones I had nursed and taught with my own hands, could become what that became - how they possibly could have slaughtered kin and followed their father into madness."

Nerdanel fell quiet for a breath. Her gaze growing distant, fixed somewhere behind the present moment - on memory, perhaps, or on faces that lived now only in fragments of the children she once knew.

"And yet." She admitted softly, "I loved them still. Even then."

Legolas shifted slightly in her chair, the movement small but telling. Her spine, usually so straight with the poise of a seasoned warrior, curved inward as if the question had knocked the air from her lungs. There was a change in her face, subtle, but unmistakable as the quiet composure she so often wore like armour slipped - and beneath it, something raw and aching stirred.

It was not disbelief that haunted her expression, nor envy, not exactly. It was something quieter, a yearning that could not be spoken aloud without cracking. Her eyes searched Nerdanel's face, not in challenge, but in something closer to reverence - desperate and uncertain though it was. There was a wound there, half-healed and aching still, as if in Nerdanel she had glimpsed a path to peace she had never been shown. Not the brittle peace of forgetting or fading, but a gentler stillness earned through pain weathered, a silence filled with memory rather than absence.

"How?" She asked. The word was scarcely more than a breath, rough at the edges, as if torn from the place where grief still flourished in her throat. It was not simply a question, it was a plea.

How had Nerdanel done it - endured all she had lost, all she had borne, and yet not broken? How had she made a home of stillness, when for Legolas it still tasted so much of loss? How did one live with so much love gone, and not let the silence devour them?

Nerdanel turned her gaze back to Legolas, and though her eyes were ancient and lined with sorrows too deep for memory, they held a clarity that cut through the hush.

"Because love." She said softly, but with unshakable conviction, "Is not so fragile a thing as we so pretend it is. It does not shatter at the first blow, nor vanish in the face of horror. It is not erased by pain. Love is stubborn. It lingers where reason says it should not. It persists. It bruises and changes, yes. But it endures."

Nerdanel exhaled slowly, as though releasing something long held. "They carry their guilt with them." She said, her voice lower now, but no less sure. "Not like a memory, not like a shadow that can be outrun. No, It's a heavy, unrelenting thing. It lives in them like stone buried in bone."

"There is no escaping it, not for them. And I have long since stopped trying to untangle what they did from who they were. Or who they are now." Nerdanel's fingers tightened slightly around the mug. "It almost drove me mad when they were first returned to me - searching for the dividing line. Where did my sons end, and the oath begin? But there is no clean break. No simple truth. And perhaps that is what it means to love someone who has fallen: to stop needing clean lines at all."

Her expression did not soften, for it was already impossibly gentle - but something in it grew more resolute. Her gaze held Legolas', steady and unflinching, a fierce tenderness burning behind it like a kiln.

"There are knots that cannot be unwound without snapping the thread. Some things are too tightly bound to ever come apart without destroying what they once held together. And I would never ask that of you, Legolas. Never."

Legolas said nothing, but her throat tightened, and her hands trembled faintly as they tightened around her own cup.

"But you are part of this family now." Nerdanel said, the words tentative but achingly certain. "Whether or not you claim the name. And that matters. To me. To Maglor - though he's too knotted up inside himself to say it aloud."

Legolas regarded Nerdanel in silence, her gaze cautious, almost guarded - as though measuring the weight of her grandmother's words against the brittle truths she had carried for so long. She did not answer at once. Instead, Legolas studied her, not with suspicion but with a wary kind of admiration.

And for the first time since stepping foot on these shores, she felt something inside her begin to soften. It wasn't peace, not yet at least. The ache of absence, the grief of leaving, still lived sharp-edged in her fëa. But it was a quiet settling - the first tendril of root breaking through hardened soil. The beginning of a belonging she had not dared to believe possible.

And for a heart still raw from exile, that was no small thing.

Legolas did not speak for some time, did not trust her voice to carry such fragile realisation. The warmth between her hands had gone tepid, but she hadn't noticed, her gaze had instead drifted toward the cradle once more, where Ýrwen stirred faintly in sleep - a tiny fist pressed to her cheek, her breath soft - and the sight ached in her chest.

"I don't know how to let myself trust them." Legolas admitted quietly, as if confessing to the wind rather than the woman seated across from her. "Especially Maglor."

His name still sat heavily on her tongue - not unfamiliar now, but still foreign in ways that cut deeper than sound. She had spoken it aloud more in the past days than she had in her whole life, and yet every time it passed her lips, it felt like a trespass. A word that belonged to stories, not to her. A title from legend, from horror, lullabies turned to warnings - not something she might one day called father.

"I want to." She said at last, her words raw and pitched somewhere between shame and longing. "Valar, I want to. He's my father, after all. But-"

Her voice faltered, and she looked down into her cup as though she might find a gentler truth there than the one clawing at her ribs.

"But there's a voice in me that still recoils." She looked down then, unable to meet Nerdanel's eyes. "A part of me that remembers everything I was taught to fear. Everything I was taught to hate."

It was true. There was no need to elaborate - not here, not to Nerdanel of all people - but still the memories stirred: names spoken like curses. Mothers in Lothlórien telling their elfling's to behave lest the sons of Fëanor come and steal them away. The grief-stricken songs that never used their names, but always left enough space for the listener to know.

Even so, her throat tightened with something else - something that startled her with its gentleness.

"And yet." She murmured, "He sings to Ýrwen like she is something sacred."

The memory surfaced unrestrained. Maglor bent over her cradle, his fingers trembling faintly as he touched the edge of the blanket, as if afraid she might dissolve under his hand. His voice - raw and old - barely louder than a breath, singing words in an accent Legolas had not recognised until she had met more Fëanorians. His eyes had not moved from the child. There had been awe in him, as if the entire world had stopped for a moment and left only them. And in that moment, he hadn't seemed like a ghost or a kinslayer. He had seemed like a father, a grandfather.

"She is." Nerdanel's voice broke through, quiet and certain. "You both are."

Legolas looked up, taken aback by the surety of it. Her breath caught ever so slightly at the warmth she saw in the elder woman's face - not born of obligation, nor even blood, but something even truer. Love, unlooked for but unmistakable all the same. Recognition.

"You speak like you have always known me." The words came out, bewildered, before Legolas could stop them.

Nerdanel gave a faint smile, touched with sorrow but not regret by any measure. "I haven't. Not really. But I know what it is to love someone who is both wounded and wounder. And I know the look of someone trying not to break under the weight of their own name."

She reached across the table and laid her hand over Legolas' own, "That's more than enough for love to start, don't you think?"

The words struck something in Legolas - not like a blade, but like chisel against stone. Shaping rather than wounding.

She didn't answer right away, it didn't feel necessary. She only sat there, suspended between thought and feeling, the warmth of her grandmother's hand anchoring her. The silence in the kitchen was a soft one - not hollow like so much of Valinor had felt, but full, like something waiting to bloom.

And perhaps, Legolas thought to herself, trust didn't come in grand gestures. Maybe it started with this - with choosing to sit at a table you weren't sure you belonged to, with listening even when the old stories howled behind your ears.

Maybe it started by staying.

Chapter 3: Celebrían & Finrod

Summary:

Legolas brings Celebrían news of her family, and the grandchild(ren) she never knew she had.

Notes:

thank you all so much for the support and kudos so far ! i'm so glad you're enjoying this (very self indulgent) fic :)

The houses of Tirion did not resemble homes - at least not in the way Legolas understood the word.

They rose in elegant layers above the streets, all pale marble and burnished gold, poised like monuments rather than places where people lived and laughed and wept. The windows shimmered like polished gemstones, high and arched, set too perfectly into their facades to speak of anything as mundane as daily life. Every structure, from the smallest courtyard to the grandest tower, looked as though it had been built to be admired, not inhabited.

Even Finrod's dwelling - graceful though it was, edged with flowering vines and softened by sun-warmed arches - held the air of ceremony rather than comfort. The house was beautiful, undeniably so. But it was not the kind of beauty one could settle into easily. It didn't invite you in so much as it held you at a respectful distance.

The street beneath her feet too, was unduly clean, unnaturally so - no damp moss, no half-crushed leaves underfoot, not even a stray chipping of bark. Only polished white stone and sunlight filtered through climbing roses. Even the breeze felt measured, as if it had paused at the city's edge and asked permission before stirring her hair.

Still, she moved forward - soft footed out of habit, though no pine needles cracked beneath her steps. Ýrwen lay heavy against her chest, warm and peacefully sleeping in the sling she had fashioned from a swathe of green cloth Caranthir had pressed into her hands days earlier - insistent that she'd find some use for it. The elfling's breath rose and fell with the calm rhythm of trust, her small fingers curled beneath the fold near Legolas' collarbone, as if clinging to the heartbeat beneath.

Legolas adjusted the wrap with one hand, half for comfort and half to steady herself. The carved doorway stood just ahead, silent unmarred - no knocker or bell, just an archway that opened into quiet shadow. The stillness was not threatening, but it held weight all the same.

She hadn't expected to feel nervous. Not here. Not with Finrod. He had never given her cause to fear him, quite the opposite really.

He had always greeted her kindly, with that wry, patient warmth that reminded her of Elrohir more than any royal lineage. Finrod did not behave like a prince of the House of Finwë, not in any way that chafed. And yet - he was of that house, brother of her aramillë, son of the King of the Noldor, uncle and cousin to more legends than she cared to count. To stand on his threshold, daughter of exile that she was, felt strangely like trespassing on a story written long before her part was conceived.

What am I to them she couldn't help but speculate. Daughter of a kinslayer. Wife of the son Celebrían left behind. Stranger and kin both.

The thought made her hesitate. Just briefly - just long enough to feel it.

But before she could raise a hand to knock - or decide if she ought just announce herself instead - the door moved soundlessly open.

And there stood Finrod. He was barefoot, tunic sleeves rolled, and there was a faint smudge of ink along one wrist as though he'd been at a desk, lost in thought. His smile bloomed when he saw her - genuine and delighted - and his eyes drifted at once to Ýrwen, then back to Legolas, before softening further.

"There you are." Finrod said, spreading his hands with mock exasperation. "Another ten minutes and I'd have been knocking on doors across half of Tirion asking if anyone had seen a lost Silvan."

Legolas released a breath she hadn't realised she'd been holding, and stepped forward at last. "I don't know how you all find your way around." She replied, voice dry. "It's a maze. All white stone and no moss. Every turn looks the same. I kept expecting a tree to lean in and show me the right path - or at least something that creaked like one."

Finrod chuckled, stepping aside so she could enter his home. "Everything creaks eventually." He said, "Even marble, if you sit still long enough. The city settles and the stones sigh, but I suppose you'd have to be exceptionally patient - or exceptionally bored - to notice."

"I try not to be either." Legolas muttered.

"Come through." Finrod said, tilting his head toward the open door at the back of the house that led out into the garden. "Celebrían is outside. I'll bring tea."

Legolas hesitated again, not out of fear, only the weight of the moment catching up with her. She nodded once, and let the door ease shut behind her, hand brushing against the smooth grain of the wood. Ýrwen shifted faintly in her sling but didn't wake.

The air inside carried the scent of orange blossom and old parchment and her feet made no sound on the tiled floor as she followed Finrod through his home. Legolas' fingers trailed instinctively along the edge of a curved bannister, trying to feel her way into the space the way she might have a woodland path. The house was full of light, every wall carved and painted in ways that spoke of long memory. Nothing here had been made in haste.

Celebrían's name fluttered in her chest, full of old shadows and unanticipated gravity. Legolas had not seen her for many centuries, not since Lothlórien - when she had been little more than a ward in Galadriel's keeping, silent and proud and clinging to dignity like bark on a young tree. She recalled glimpses of the older elleth through the golden mists of Lórien: silver hair, eyes too kind, movements graceful enough to disappear. Legolas hadn't known how to speak to her at the time, she had been too bruised, too wary of kindness. She hadn't been ready to be seen.

And now she would be seen in full.

And somewhere, twisted within all of that, was the guilt of it. Quiet, persistent and tightly wound.

Legolas had crossed the sea, yes. Had answered the call that hollowed her bones and frayed her fëa. But ultimately she had come west in defiance - to outrun the slow dimming of her light, to choose life before it slipped from her grasp.

Celebrían had come because there had been no other choice.

They had both known the ache of the sea-longing, that relentless pull toward an unseen shore. Both had touched the edges of fading, and bled for it. But where Legolas' journey had been a resistance - one last act of will - Celebrían's had been an escape. Not from duty or love, but from torment too deep to ever heal in Middle-earth.

And now Legolas stood here whole, with her daughter sleeping against her heart, whilst Celebrían had been torn away from her own children far too soon. They were not the same. And yet - when she stepped into the garden, none of that mattered.

The sun fell soft through vines of golden flowers, catching in the curve of Celebrían's silver plaited hair. She was seated beneath a low awning, a half-finished tapestry folded beside her and a small book rested on her lap. Celebrían rose slowly, eyes wide but not unkind, her hands going first to her mouth, and then lowering again.

"Legolas." She exclaimed, her voice soft but sure. "It has been far too long."

Legolas swallowed.

Celebrían was older now, yes, but untouched by time in all the ways that mattered. Gone was the brittle pallor Elrond had once described - the hollowed eyes, the voice that quavered even in calm. In its place stood a woman quietly restored, breath steady, shoulders unburdened. Celebrían almost looked like Galadriel in this light - but lighter, somehow, gentler.

Legolas bowed her head a little. "Lady Celebrían." She said quietly, "I thought it was about time I visit you, and bring news of those you love."

Celebrían's gaze moved carefully from Legolas to the sling around Legolas' chest, where it softened measurably. "And who is this little one?"

Legolas shifted the fabric slightly, revealing Ýrwen's sleeping face nestled against her shoulder.

"This." She said, voice softening without her permission, "Is Ýrwen. My daughter."

Something unreadable passed across Celebrían's countenance. A tremor of emotion deep and sharp and full of things she had long buried. She stepped closer. "You have a child of your own?"

"Four, actually." Legolas admitted. "Three older, still in Middle-earth, and then her."

Celebrían let out a breath that was caught somewhere between a laugh and a sob. "Valar, Legolas. The last I knew of you, you were but an elfling yourself - a ward of my mother's in Lothlórien."

"Not much has changed." Legolas smiled faintly. "Except I'm now the one trying to brush burrs out of someone else's hair."

Celebrían's gaze dropped to the small, slumbering elfling pressed close to Legolas' chest - Ýrwen's breath rising in soft rhythm beneath the folds of green fabric. Her fingers, delicate and steady, brushed a stray brown curl from the child's brow. And then, slowly, she looked up.

Her eyes met Legolas' with a depth that startled - aged by its aching, but clear all the same. And in that moment, Legolas saw it all. The slow erosion of years spent listening for news that never came. The hollow stretch of days made longer by wondering. The weight of love suspended in silence, held taut across leagues of sea no letter could cross. There was untold grief behind Celebrían's eyes - not loud or bitter, but the quiet sorrow of a mother who had been forced to love her children only in memory.

And yet laced within it was something else - only a trembling thing, as if it were scared by its own existence. Something even more fragile and precious. Recognition. Legolas felt it as surely as breath.

Finrod cleared his throat from where he still lingered, just beyond the doorway. "And that someone is blessedly asleep. Which means this conversation might just last more than five minutes."

Celebrían's gaze lingered on Ýrwen, a fond smile curving her lips - soft, but with the kind of knowing warmth that only years and pain could grant.

"She is beautiful, truly." Celebrían mused, her voice low and reverent. "That soft look of hers. She's going to be a quiet little terror."

Legolas exhaled a quiet laugh - low, unguarded, and edged with something almost like relief. It was rare, this ease. But here, beside Celebrían, it came with little effort. There was no need to explain the weight behind her sailing, the hollow ache that still stirred at the sound of waves. Celebrían knew. She had borne the sea-longing not as something distant or poetic, but as a summons carved through bone and fëa. If anything, she had known it more deeply than Legolas ever had.

"She looks just like you, the eyes especially." Celebrían continued. Her tone shifted - just ever so slightly - with a trace of wonder bleeding into her words. "I never saw it when you were small, but now - Valar you've the Fëanorian look about you. It's uncanny."

Legolas tilted her head, both unfazed and unsurprised. "You're far from the first to say so."

"I don't mean it unkindly." Celebrían added quickly, as if worried the words may sting, "Just - the resemblance is striking."

It was then that Finrod re-emerged through the tall archway that led back into the house, carrying a polished wooden tray in both hands - on it, a delicate silver tea pot with several ornate tea cups. He set the tray down on a low garden table with an exaggerated flourish, glancing between them as he poured with practiced ease.

"You could have easily passed for Maedhros' daughter." He said, tone light but honest as he passed Legolas her tea. "Or Carnistir's. It's in your bearing as much as your looks."

Legolas met his gaze, her expression unreadable for a moment as she accepted the tea. Something in her shifted - not quite discomfort, but the wary acknowledgment of a truth long felt. Her free hand moved instinctively to Ýrwen's back, as if grounding herself.

Legolas didn't smile. Her voice, when she answered, was quieter. "That's what they used to whisper when I was young." She said, softly. "Tainted, they said. Ill-starred. They called it a curse, though never to my face. Just enough that I could feel it in every silence."

Celebrían turned fully toward her, something taut in her expression as she considered Legolas' words - half-questioning, half-apology. "Thranduil never told you?"

Legolas let the question settle for a heartbeat before answering.

"He did." She said at last. "Eventually. During a quarrel at Aragorn's coronation, of all places. After years of silence, years of cold disdain, he finally spat it out like venom. It was as if he couldn't bear the weight of it any longer."

Celebrían's voice softened, cautious, not wanting to tread too close and rip it all open for Legolas again. "What did he say?"

Legolas met her gaze, steady and unflinching like it were something she had finally come to terms with. "That I was never his." She told them honestly. "That my mother had lain with a kinslayer. That Maglor was my true father. And that he wanted nothing to do with me, nothing at all."

The words did not tremble, they had long since lost their power to wound in the speaking - especially without Thranduil's cold dismissal behind them. But they echoed even so, in the still garden air - as sorrowful and sharp as broken glass.

Finrod's voice came low, and carefully measured, though not even that could soften the weight of his words - the weight of his disbelief. "He discarded you?"

Legolas didn't flinch. Though her gaze drifted out over the garden, past the edge of vine-hung stone and toward the sunlight bleeding over the city beyond. "As he always meant to." She admitted quietly. "He had already exiled me long before I learnt the truth. That night was just the moment he chose to let go for good. Or perhaps, the excuse he had been waiting for."

It was Celebrían's voice that broke her out of the haze. "I remember when I first saw you in Lothlórien, under my ammë's care." She recalled, her eyes soft with memory and her voice softer still. "You were so small. So proud, but so guarded. Like a creature half-wild just waiting to be hurt."

"I was." Legolas replied, her mouth twisted faintly, though there was no bitterness in her tone; only the calm clarity of someone who had lived through what she spoke of and had long since stopped expecting it to be different. "And I was right to, in the end."

Finrod had been listening mostly in silence thus far, his presence steady and unobtrusive. Though kin by blood and tied by shared ancestry through many branches, he had lived and died long before most of the griefs now spoken of had begun to unfold. The wars and wounds of Middle-earth had reached him only through songs, and even those arrived softened by time and distance.

When he finally spoke, his voice came low and almost hesitant, wrapped in the kind of gentleness born not of fragility but of immense care. "But you came here with Makalaurë."

"He crossed the sea with you. Stood beside you. Claimed you as his own." He paused, watching her not with scrutiny, but with a quiet, mournful wonder. "He must have said something."

Legolas nodded slowly, her fingers brushing against Ýrwen's fine hair as the child slept. "Not right away. At first, he only looked at me - like he wasn't sure I'd let him speak. Like he was bracing for rejection." Her voice dipped. "I half expected him to deny it. But he didn't."

She paused for a terse moment, as if the memory was replaying itself behind her eyes. "He told me the truth. Not with shame. Just with a quiet sort of sorrow - and love, though I didn't know what to do with it at the time."

Finrod leaned back, bringing his teacup to his lips, the barest hint of a smile crossing his face. "That sounds like him." He murmured fondly.

Legolas let out a tense breath before continuing. "He told me that he had stayed away not because he was ashamed of me, but because he didn't believe he had the right. Not to me. Not to anything. He didn't want to be another wound I was forced to carry."

Celebrían reached out, her fingers brushing Legolas' forearm, grounding - motherly even. "And yet he came west. With you."

Legolas smiled, a tired and soft thing. "He did. He was there when I held Ýrwen for the first time, sang to her in a voice gentler than I've ever heard. I think he knows he can't undo what was done. But he's trying, in his own way. Not to erase the past, but to help me build something better."

Finrod, watching her with something akin to pride, nodded once. "Then perhaps." He concluded, "He's already done more good than he knows."

Celebrían's gaze drifted as the remnants of a memory stirred - faint and half-lost to time and the sea, but not quite gone entirely. "I remember Lithuineth only faintly." She said at last, voice softened by recollection. "She was a quiet thing - clever and observant. Though she always seemed a little apart from the rest of us, like she was listening to something no one else could quite hear."

Legolas let the words settle in the air between them. There was something strangely comforting in hearing her mother spoken of that way - not in myth or condemnation, but with fond gentleness. "I've only ever known her through other people's words." She admitted quietly. "And even those were few and far between."

Celebrían's brow creased, sympathy flickering across her serene features. She looked at Legolas then, not as the grown elleth who had crossed seas and centuries, not as the warrior or the mother or even the Fëanorian daughter - but as the elfling she had once known: proud, brittle, and watchful. For a breath, all the years between seemed to fold in on themselves and Legolas stood before her as that quiet child again, bracing against pain too old for her young face.

"I was sorry to hear of her passing." Celebrían said softly, sympathy practically dripping from each word she spoke, "Truly I was."

"But I never knew." She continued gently, "That she and Maglor-" The words trailed off, unfinished, suspended between doubt and dawning comprehension.

"You wouldn't have." Legolas said, not unkindly. No, her tone was steady now, resigned to the telling. "I don't think anyone did, not really. It was a quiet and stubborn thing that lived between them, hidden where it could be safe. They weren't meant to love each other - not by the rules of courts or kingdoms. But they did. In spite of everything. Enough to bring me into the world."

A silence settled again, this time filled with weight rather than absence. Celebrían looked at her long, and when she spoke again, her voice was hushed. "You've carried so much alone."

"I have." Legolas conceded, but there was far less bitterness in it than Celebrían had expected. "But I have never been without love. I had Galadriel, and later Elrohir. And now I'm learning I have more family than I ever imagined. Even if I don't know what to do with it yet."

The shift in Celebrían's expression was subtle, but there all the same, a flicker of startled recognition passing through her gaze. "Elrohir?" She echoed, "My son?"

Legolas blinked, then offered Celebrían a small, apologetic - if slightly sheepish - smile. "Forgive me, I assumed you knew. We wed quietly, centuries ago in Imladris."

Celebrían sat back slightly, stunned into stillness. "Valar." She breathed, as though it were all she could muster. "I feel as though I've missed an entire age."

As if moved by some deep, wordless instinct, Legolas set down her tea cup with deliberate care, the delicate porcelain giving a faint clink as it met the table. Then, with the same careful deliberation, she loosened the folds of green cloth at her chest and gathered the sleeping child into her arms.

The elfling shifted only slightly, her tiny brow furrowing in some soft dream as she was lifted free. Legolas hesitated for a breath, her hands lingering at the edges of the sling, and then - without ceremony but with untold tenderness - she passed her daughter to Celebrían.

The older woman received the child as though she were something sacred, a holy thing only half-believed in until now. Her arms moved on instinct, cradling the small, sleeping form with the ease of a memory reawakened. The years fell away from her face as she gazed down at the child, wonder and sorrow mingling in her eyes.

A breath hitched in her throat - sharp and sudden. She didn't speak. She only looked, as though trying to memorise this fragile miracle: the weight of her granddaughter in her arms and the soft rise and fall of her breath.

"I remember him and Elladan climbing trees." Celebrían whispered, as though afraid to break the spell. "Falling out of them just as often. They were little more than elflings when I sailed. All scraped knees and wooden swords."

She looked down at Ýrwen, fingers brushing softly over the child's brow. Her voice broke into something akin to a laugh, laced with equal parts joy and disbelief. "And now he's a father? A husband?"

Legolas didn't answer with words, only watched in silence as Celebrían rocked her granddaughter gently, tears rising in her eyes though never quite falling. Celebrían cradled the elfling with the reverence of someone holding a dream finally made flesh. Then, without lifting her eyes, she asked softly, "What's he like now? My son."

Legolas' smile unfurled tentatively, as though drawn from a place not often reached - half memory, half ache, all wrapped in a quiet sort of love.

"Stubborn." She began, the word softened by affection. "Fiercely loyal. Infuriating when he's convinced he's right, which is often. But gentle too, in the quiet ways he won't speak of. He looks at me like I'm whole. Like I'm not broken, even when I am."

There was a silence then - not hollow, but full. The kind that held weight, as though the very air awaited her next words.

"He stood beside me through it all." She continued, her voice dipping with something quieter and tender. "When I was exiled from the Greenwood. When I bore Leithiassel with no name but my own. Through battles where we thought the world might end, and we fought anyway. Even when the Sea came for me, and I couldn't breathe for the sound of it - he stayed. He never once faltered."

She drew a breath, long and slow, as though steadying herself before offering something even more precious.

"He was my first real choice." She admitted at last. "The first person who ever called me brave and meant it. Not because he needed something from me, not because of duty or pity - but simply because he saw me. And still he stayed."

Celebrían's fingers curled slightly, her palm smoothing down the blanket Ýrwen was swaddled in. "I shouldn't be surprised." She murmured fondly, "He always cared more than he let on. Ever the gentler one, between the two of them."

Her eyes lifted then, quiet wonder still lingering in their corners. "And your other children? You said three remain in Middle-earth?"

Legolas nodded. "Leithiassel, our eldest is in the Galadhrim, an archer like me, sure-eyed and proud enough to make even Celeborn raise an eyebrow. Faelher we thought would follow Elrohir to the sword, but his hands were gentler than he knew. He trained as a healer instead, under your husband's own guidance."

At that, Celebrían's brows lifted faintly, and her smile took on a deeper curve.

"And Ialwen." Legolas added, "Ialwen is nearly grown and as stubborn and as loyal as her father. All three stayed behind - for now."

Celebrían's tone softened with understanding. "And he stayed with them."

"He did." Legolas supplied, her voice thick with both gratitude and longing in equal measure. "Said they still needed him, and he wouldn't leave until they didn't. But he'll come, eventually. He promised me."

A light passed through Celebrían's face then - not joy exactly, but something steadier, more reliable. "He always did keep his promises." She said, almost to herself. "Even when no one was looking."

Her gaze returned to Ýrwen, but her thoughts stretched far across the sea. "And now I find I have grandchildren." She mused softly. "Four no less, I never thought-"

Finrod gave a small, wistful huff of laughter. "Apparently you've missed quite a bit, dear niece." He said with gentle fondness. "That's the grief of this land. We gain eternity - but not always in the parts of us we thought we would."

Celebrían's arms curved more tightly around Ýrwen - her granddaughter - as if her weight might anchor her in this impossible moment.

She looked down at the child's brow - so smooth, untroubled - and something in her eyes shimmered. When she spoke, her voice was low, almost reverent. "I would've waited another age." She said, gaze still firmly fixed on Ýrwen. "If it meant this. A daughter-in-law. A granddaughter in my arms. You've given me something I didn't dare hope for, Legolas."

She looked up then, meeting Legolas' eyes with quiet awe. "And little Ýrwen is your youngest?"

Legolas nodded gently, moving her hand to rest at the curve of her daughter's back. "Born in the White City." She said, "Just before-"

Celebrían's brows lifted, the question slipping in softly. "Before what?"

Legolas hesitated and the air shifted around them. "Actually, there is something else I should tell you." For a moment, she averted her gaze, lips parting and then closing again, as though the words she sought were too weighty to release into the fragile space between them. "It's about Arwen."

At that, Celebrían sat straighter, breath catching as her fingers unconsciously tightened. "Arwen?" She asked frantically. "What happened - she's safe?"

"She is." Legolas assured her. "Safe and well."

Legolas paused, choosing her words carefully - not to soften the truth, but to offer it kindly. "But she has chosen a mortal life. Taken the gift of men for love."

Celebrían stared, unblinking. Her mouth opened but no words came. When at last she managed something, the best she could do was a straggled, "Whose?"

"Aragorn, son of Arathorn." Legolas replied, voice steady for Celebrían's sake more than it was a reflection of her own stability. "He is of Elros' line. King of Gondor, Arwen is their queen."

She let it settle for a moment before quietly adding, "I know it is of little consolation, but he is a good man. I promise you that. One of my dearest friends and he loves her wholly."

Celebrían's lips parted again, but sound struggled to emerge. Her expression seemed to collapse inward, her face haunted by the collision of grief and joy. "She chose to die."

Finrod, who until now had remained a quiet presence beside his niece, shifted at last. He had watched the exchange with a hesitant sort of stillness, understanding that whilst this was not a grief for him to claim, it was one he could support his beloved niece through all the same. There was compassion in the set of his features, and something older still - a sorrow shaped by long memory, and the wisdom of having once laid down his own life for the love of another.

When he finally spoke, it was not to fill the silence but to honour it. "She chose to love." Finrod said softly, his voice rich and steady. "Fully. Without condition or hesitation. As Lúthien once did before her. As so few ever truly dare."

Legolas turned toward Celebrían, her voice softening, each word offered like a gift that had been carried across a long and weary road just to reach her. "She asked me to carry her memory west." Legolas' gaze remained steady and tender. "She wanted you to know she loves deeply, and without regret. But she grieved for you. She said it never stopped hurting."

Celebrían said nothing at first, lashes trembling as she let silence gather around her like a veil.

"I thought-" She began, and the words felt as fragile as glass. "I thought we would be together again. That I only had wait." Her voice dropped, almost lost beneath the hush of roses stirring in the garden breeze as she brushed her thumb along Ýrwen's cheek with an aching tenderness. "I never imagined - Valar, I never let myself imagine - that any of them would follow in Elros' footsteps."

She opened her eyes then, luminous with unshed tears - but none fell. She held them in with the same strength with which she had once held her children, and later the memory of her children, and now, this grandchild in her arms.

"I knew, somewhere in me." She whispered, "That she would love fiercely. I just never imagined she would love in mortality."

The hush between them had settled into something tender, something honest. Finrod had kept to silence for some time, but now, with the quiet stretching between the three of them, he spoke again - his voice low, warm, and sure. "We are none of us untouched by love." Finrod mourned. "Or grief. It shapes us more than any name or bloodline."

Legolas nodded slowly, the motion small and thoughtful, as if the truth of her words needed space to settle on her tongue. "It was love that carried me here, in the end. Love for Elrohir, for the children I left behind - and the one I brought with me."

"Even Maglor." She added after a breath, quieter still, "In a strange sort of way."

Celebrían lowered her gaze to the child in her arms and her features softened. She held Ýrwen not just with care, but with wonder, as though she cradled not only her granddaughter but equally the fragile, but blooming possibility of healing.

"Love that brought me this sleeping granddaughter." She murmured, voice thick with the ache of years lost. "Love that brought you to me, Legolas."

For a moment, Celebrían simply looked at her as if trying to gather every detail she'd missed over the ages. When she spoke again, her voice was low, almost breaking. "I wish I could have seen it unfold." She said, "Even from a distance."

"For all our immortality, time still outruns us here." Finrod lamented, his voice touched with a quiet grief.

Legolas hesitated, her eyes drifting toward the arching branches beyond the garden's edge, before returning back - a faint, uncertain smile touching her lips. "Truthfully." She admitted, her voice soft, almost fragile. "I wasn't sure if I'd find welcome in this place."

Celebrían didn't flinch from the honesty. She just met Legolas' gaze, calm and certain. "You are." She said, the words achingly simple and yet so sure, spoken without fanfare but ladened with truth. "Always. We've lost too much not to cherish what's returned."

"They cast long shadows, our forebears." Celebrían said after a moment, her voice quieter now, as though speaking to something beyond the surface without Legolas ever having to voice it. "But you're not them, Legolas. You carry echoes, yes, as do we all. But you are your own."

Legolas let out a breath, dry and faintly bitter. "I look like Maedhros." She stated. "I walk into a room, and elves I have never met flinch before they even know my name."

Celebrían's gaze did not waver. "And yet you speak softly." She said, "And when the time came, you chose peace. That's more than can be said for most of Finwë's descendents." Her voice held no rebuke, only quiet admiration.

A crooked smile ghosted across Legolas' lips - wry and self-aware. "Well." She acknowledged, "I've tried very hard not to swear any world-ending oaths."

Finrod gave a soft laugh, the kind that slipped easily from warmth into rue. "Then you are already ahead of your father and uncles."

Legolas lowered her gaze, lashes casting delicate shadows against her cheeks. The garden was quiet around them, and yet still she hesitated, as though the truth might fracture the tentative peace if spoken aloud. "Some days." She said softly, "It still feels like running."

The words hung in the stillness, brittle but true, and in their quiet confession lay a history of grief - of exile and uncertain belonging, of the sea tearing her apart from her fëa outwards.

Celebrían looked down at Ýrwen sleeping soundly in her arms just as a long breath left her lips - almost a sigh though not one of weariness, rather remembrance. When she raised her eyes to meet Legolas', there was no pity - only the mirrored weight of someone who had stood at the same precipice and chosen the same aching escape.

"I know that feeling well." Celebrían said finally, her voice gentled by pain both remembered and endured. "I ran from it as long as I could. It nearly tore me in two."

She inhaled slowly, as if grounding herself in the warmth of the little body she held. Her hand moved to Ýrwen's brow, brushing the child's downy hair tenderly - as though, through that touch, she might learn the shape of all the days she had lost.

"But it isn't running, not really." Celebrían said at last, her voice low, certain. She looked up from Ýrwen's sleeping face, her gaze finding Legolas again. Though it held no trace of sentiment or soft pity, only a steadiness born of long endurance. There was wisdom in her eyes - not the kind written in books or songs, but the kind carved into the fëa by sorrow, by healing that came slowly and painfully, only after its breaking. "It's surviving. Stitching yourself back together however you can. Holding on to what's still gentle in the world."

She looked at Legolas then and saw at once all the hidden fractures beneath the grace, all the endurance it had taken to carry herself this far. Celebrían's voice softened slightly then - not with fragility, but with a fierce kind of respect.

"And sometimes." Celebrían said, "That is the bravest thing of all."

Chapter 4: Fingon & Maglor

Summary:

Legolas seeks solace in the home of Fingon

The path curled gently down from Nerdanel's home, sloping into the olive hued hills that surrounded Tirion's western border. It was narrow and winding, flanked on either side by tall cypresses and spilling wisteria. The air smelled of warm dust and subtle blossom as the heat of the day began to press low against the earth.

Ýrwen was blessedly asleep in her wrap, one small hand curled at Legolas' collarbone, and the other clutching a silken ribbon Nerdanel had tied to her wrist to keep the elfling occupied. She had since drooled on it thoroughly, claiming it as hers under no uncertain terms.

Legolas walked slowly. Not because she was tired - though she was still bone-deep and restless - but because she hadn't intended to come at all. She still wasn't entirely sure why she had, only that Nerdanel had pointed her out the door with the flat of a chisel and the solemn authority of a general in the midst of battle.

"Go." Nerdanel had said, eyes narrowed. "You hover worse than your father. Let her nap in the shade of someone else's temper for a while."

"And try not to scare the baby birds in the eaves on your way out." She had called out after her.

So, Legolas had gone, and without thinking, her feet had brought her here.

Fingon's house lay just a little further down the slope, tucked into a quiet hollow where the hills softened into olive trees and slow, sighing grasses. Modest, at least by the sweeping standards of Tirion's ancient splendour - but Legolas had begun to notice that many of the reembodied preferred such places. Homes with quieter walls, smaller windows, and the kind of silence that didn't echo. Still, it bore the unmistakable signature of Noldorin craft - broad arches framing the doorways, and smooth lines of pale stone, quarried with care, fit together so precisely the joins were nearly invisible.

Ivy climbed the southern wall in a sort of beautiful defiance, trailing over the bricks like something half-tamed. Someone had clearly tried to train it at some point, but it was still far from the orderly kind found in the city proper. No, it was something wilder, allowed to twist and spill where it pleased.

It was a quiet house. A living one. And Legolas had the sense, as she paused at the edge of the path, that it was a place built not to impress, but to endure - to facilitate the endurance of those within.

She didn't knock.

The door stood unlatched, as it usually was - Fingon's quiet rebellion against the long memory of locked gates and war-torn vigilance. Where others might have grown cautious in the aftermath of betrayal and ruin, he had chosen something else. Openness, as if daring the world to meet him with the same.

A breath of warm air met her as she stepped over the threshold, thick with the scent of crushed tea leaves and lemon balm steeping from somewhere beyond, mingling with the subtler fragrance of sun-warmed stone and old wood. The hush of the house was not silence, not entirely - it thrummed with that peculiar, gentle aliveness that so often clings to spaces well lived-in.

Then came the sound of footsteps - bare against the stone, light and unhurried. Fingon appeared in the archway with the beginnings of a smirk in his eyes. His sleeves were pushed to the elbow, revealing forearms spattered faintly with what might have been paint, and his dark hair was gathered carelessly at the nape of his neck.

"You again?" Fingon said, the corner of his mouth curling upward in mock dismay as Legolas shut the door behind her.

"Try to sound less delighted." She replied dryly, shifting Ýrwen's weight in her arms as the baby let out a soft sigh in her sleep.

"Come in." Fingon stepped back to let her pass, his grin widening as he added, "Nerdanel finally get fed up of the two of you?"

"Only temporarily." Legolas insisted, allowing herself to smile. "She was sculpting, claimed I was hovering and then pointed at the door with a chisel."

"A classic Nerdanel eviction." Fingon chuckled. "You must be doing well if she's already treating you like one of her own."

From deeper in the house, Maglor's voice floated in, warm and dry. "Well, I'm not sculpting and Fingon makes decent tea. You're safe here."

Legolas gave a quiet huff of amusement as she stepped through the archway into the sitting room. The air inside was still cool, basking in the filtered gold of mid-day sunlight that played along the stone walls. Fingon had led her in ahead of her pace, but turned back now, drawn not by her presence but by the small bundle she carried in her arms. His gaze gentled as it settled on Ýrwen, still tucked close against Legolas' chest.

"Is she sleeping deeply?" He asked, his voice lowering instinctively, though still tinged with that tentative warmth he rarely tried to hide around them both. He hesitated, just slightly, before extending one hand, "May I?"

"Don't drop her." Legolas warned, stepping closer and loosening the wrap at her shoulder. "She's surprisingly judgemental for someone who drools on herself."

Fingon laughed, already reaching for the small bundle with careful hands.

"If you wake her, I'm leaving her here and going home." Legolas said with a straight face, though her eyes glinted all the same.

"Noted." Fingon murmured solemnly as he cradled the child, his large hands impossibly gentle against the fine linen of her swaddling.

He looked down at Ýrwen, and something softened in his expression, an old, wistful tenderness. "Hello again, little one." He whispered quietly, "You're the real reason I opened the door, you know."

"I had suspected." Legolas said at last, her words laced with a dry humour though softened by something warmer beneath. She settled into one of the low chairs by the hearth and let her gaze drift toward the doorway where sunlight filtered through the windows and onto the stone.

"It's quiet without him here." She mused, more to herself than to either of them, her eyes following the flicker of light as if Maedhros might step through it at any moment, tall and wordless, all flame and shadow.

He had a way of doing that; of slipping into a room like a wraith born of silence, without so much as a whisper of footfall. One moment absence, the next an unignorable presence, sharp as a drawn sword and yet so utterly still that it seemed almost like the air had been holding space for him all along.

"Maedhros will be sorry to have missed you." Maglor said, his tone even as ever though his eyes softened as they flitted from the small tin of dried tea leaves he had been sorting through, to Legolas. He set Legolas' cup carefully on the low table before continuing. "He's off pacing the cliffs again. Said something about needing to breathe."

Across the room, Fingon gave a low huff of amusement. He stood near the tall archway, sunlight slanting warm across his shoulders as he cradled Ýrwen with the casual ease of someone who had done this many times before - centuries ago, perhaps, but remembered like the back of his hand still. The elfling was a small, quiet weight against his chest, her breath dampening his tunic as her tiny fist curled stubbornly into his hair. Fingon shifted his hold slightly; a hand coming to support the elfling's head as he rocked her gently as if the motion was little more than second nature to him.

Legolas watched in silence, her thoughts circling in slow but deliberate paths, where memory and rumour tangled like unruly threads. Gil-galad, yes that was it. She had almost let the name slip from the forefront of her mind, a relic from before her time of stories half-heard in council chambers and distant stories of Elrond recounting his youth. Fingon's son. Born of no wife, claimed by no mother, his beginnings veiled in a discretion so absolute that it had sunk into myth.

Much like her, she supposed, in all but scale and consequence. She, an afterthought in the chronicles of kings; he, a crowned name that had outlived every elegy. And yet both names marked by an absence, by questions no one seemed willing to answer aloud.

She had never asked. Not Fingon, not Maedhros - though both stood close enough now that the temptation might have brushed her lips, had she allowed it. But Fingon's devotion left little room for such inquiries. It clung to him like tempered steel, the sort that bends but never breaks, polished bright by centuries of choosing Maedhros above all else. Whatever had come in between seemed not erased so much as encompassed, folded into a quiet part of himself that no one was permitted to touch. So the thought slipped from her grasp just as quickly as it came, unraveled before it could form a question.

"Maedhros told me the stone was too warm today." Fingon said at last, glancing toward Legolas with a wry grin that carried both affection and exasperation. "That's usually code for I love you, but if I don't go for a walk, I'll throw something."

The smallest smile touched Legolas' mouth, there and then gone again, like a gentle breeze skimming water. "That's fine." She murmured, "I'd rather he breathe than brood."

"Oh, he broods while breathing." Maglor commented dryly, setting down the teapot. "He's efficient like that."

Fingon's laugh came warm this time, chasing the quiet from the edges of the room. He tipped his head to glance down at Ýrwen as if sharing the joke with her, a few strands of hair slipping loose from its knot and brushing her cheek. The elfling slept on, untroubled and when Fingon spoke again, his voice had gentled.

"You should have seen him when the pair of you stepped off that ship." He recalled fondly, gaze lifting to Legolas once more. "I think he forgot how to speak."

Legolas' gaze dipped, her lashes lowering like curtains drawn against too much light. Her breath came slow, measured, as if the very act of speech itself demanded caution. "I'm still getting used to being looked at that way." She said at last, each weight carrying the delicate weight of something brittle and worn.

Fingon's brow furrowed, the motion soft but clear in its intent. Ýrwen shifted ever so slightly against his chest with a small mewl, and he adjusted her instinctively, hands steady as he angled toward Legolas. "What way?"

The answer lingered unspoken for a moment as Legolas let her eyes drift past him, back again to the spill of sunlight pooling across the stone floor. Her fingers wandered over the arm of the chair, sketching formless shapes - as though meaning could be found in tracing what she struggled to name. Only then did she speak, her voice hushed and deliberate despite its hesitance.

"Like I'm something broken that mended without permission." She admitted. "Or something unexpected that arrived with too much noise and too many questions."

The words settled between them, and silence followed as Fingon began testing words in his mouth. He ran his tongue over them, picking each syllable apart to decide the best way to phrase what he knew to be true.

When Fingon eventually broke the quiet, he found himself crouching in front of Legolas so their eyes met, Ýrwen still nestled against him - the elfling's soft breath rising and falling between them like a fragile tether.

"Not broken." He insisted, "Changed unseen. Hardened by fire. Like your father. Like all of us, in the end."

Legolas' breath lingered on the edge of something sharp, but she let it go slowly, smoothing it into stillness. Her gaze lifted, not all the way, but just enough to find Fingon's eyes. There was no smile, no easy grace in it; only a small tilt of her head and a softening at the edges of her mouth that spoke what her voice could not. Thank you. And for a heartbeat, it was enough. Fingon, to his credit, did not press; he only met her gaze with a steadiness that felt like the roots of a tree - quiet, sure, and impossible to shake.

From behind, the hush broke. Maglor's voice came then, carrying a weight Legolas could only call guilt; an ache that tugged on the edges of his restraint. It intruded on the quiet like the first note of a melody left unplayed for centuries, hesitant yet insistent, as if he were testing the air before daring to disturb the fragile intimacy between her and Fingon. "You're adjusting well to living with my mother though?"

Legolas herself, however, did not receive it as an intrusion. If anything, she found a quiet relief in the shift. She had come to relish at sidestepping the intricate entanglement of her Finwëan heritage, and the delicate sensitivities of its living remnants - and the careful cadence of her father's voice had offered her the levity she hadn't realised she needed until the tension taut inside of her had dissipated.

"Nerdanel's company is... grounding." She said at last, "I needed it, I think. She lets me be quiet without taking it for rejection. And I think she likes the noise Ýrwen brings." Her mouth curved, faint and fond, "Fills up the spaces that used to echo."

Maglor's head lifted from where he sat beside the low table, his expression softening in a way she did not often see - warmth threaded with something older, weightier, a touch of sorrow tempered by pride. "She always found solace and joy in creation." He told her, "Whether it was stone of life itself. I am glad you are comfortable there, penneth." His voice gentled on the last word, carrying a cadence Legolas had never known in her childhood.

Fingon turned slightly toward them, mischief in his eyes, softened by fond remembrance as he rocked Ýrwen with the same steady ease. "I think she's grateful to finally have some girls in the house - after seven boys and Fëanor." Fingon's smile sharpened, laughter rolling warm. "That is a particular kind of storm one does not easily forget."

Legolas' lips quirked, tension easing from her by some small measure. "Only yesterday, she told me I was 'loud in a manageable way'". She gave a soft incredulous huff, "I think it was a compliment."

Maglor chuckled, a quiet thing, but undeniably rich with old affection and something akin to relief. "From her," He said, kind certainty lacing his tone, "It is."

Silence settled again, though it was no longer brittle. Ýrwen stirred faintly from where she slept in Fingon's arms, little fingers uncurling against him. Legolas' next words came softer, edged with something that ached like tenderness newly learned. "I'm grateful to have her." She confessed, "I've never had a grandmother before."

The stillness that followed was full, not empty so much as it was like a breath drawn and held between them. Maglor's gaze lingered on her, and for the first time she could recall, there was no shadow of fear that she would turn away. When he spoke, his voice had dropped to something near a whisper, threaded with all the centuries of what could not be reclaimed. "You're making up for lost time."

It was not a rebuke, nor quite consolation, but instead something in between - something that acknowledged all the hollow years and unspoken griefs. Yet there was a weight to it, a shape that felt like promise, and Legolas, weary though she was, let herself lean into that fragile thing. For the first time in many long months she let herself believe that perhaps time - given enough of it - could be remade.

"You know." Fingon said at last, soft and uncertain, as if he hardly trusted his own voice. His gaze wandered between the two of them - the kinsman he had mourned beyond hope and the russet haired once stranger who bore their blood like a banner, "I still do not quite believe you're real. Either of you. When I returned from Mandos, they said nothing. No word. No whispers. We thought you were gone forever, Makalaurë."

Across from him, Maglor set down his tea and gave a low breath that could have almost been a laugh if not for the lack of mirth. "I very nearly was." His voice was quiet and his words fragile, like frost stubbornly clinging to the edges of winter.

Fingon's eyes softened, though his smile never quite reached them. "And then." He began, and there was a wonder in his tone now, the disbelief worn thin but not yet gone as he turned to address Legolas. "You walked off the ship with him - hair like wildfire, child on your hip, and Laurë proclaiming you his daughter. I did not know whether I should laugh or weep."

Legolas shifted where she sat, the weight of Ýrwen unusually absent from her arms as the elfling now nestled in Fingon's keeping as if the centuries of exile and estrangement had never been. "It is strange." She tentatively admitted, "The idea that you're family. I have been to this house - what? Four times, perhaps? And still it feels as though I'm slipping into someone else's memory."

Fingon's head shook gently, and this time his smile did reach all the way to his eyes. "It doesn't feel that way to me." He told her, voice calm and steady in its certainty. "It feels more like we're starting something long overdue."

Her gaze lifted, almost against her will, and found Fingon's. There was a question in it, raw and trembling, like a bowstring drawn too far. Legolas' eyes were bright in their uncertainty, wide as though expecting the blow that always came after hope.

"You truly want to know me?" She asked at last, and the words were scarcely more than a breath; delicate enough that they could have splintered in the air between them, hesitant and small, as if she feared they might cost her more than she could spare.

Fingon felt it first, the sharp sting of sorrow that someone so fierce, so unyielding in the tales of Middle-earth, could sit before him like this - startled that anyone might care, let alone blood of her blood.

Then came Maglor who felt it deeper still, for it was his wound that made this disbelief. His hands curled against his knees, nails biting the skin as if to contain the tide of shame. To see his daughter look at her family as though they were a mercy too great for her to claim, as though love were some rare, forbidden thing outside of Elrohir - it was more than he could bear.

Fingon had to work his throat twice before he could speak, and when he did, his fëa cried out even as his voice remained steady.

"I do." He said softly, as if to soothe something wild and wounded. "You're part of him - though he had an odd way of showing it." Fingon sent a faint, wry glance toward Maglor, who bore it with the silence of one who had no defence left. He went on, even gentler now, "And you are a song none of us knew existed. I'd like to hear the rest of it."

Maglor spoke then, and though his tone was mild, there was no mistaking the weight behind it. "He means that, Legolas."

Legolas held his gaze for a breath, then Fingon's, and something in her that had been knotted for long years eased, just a fraction. Her mouth quirked upward, small and almost shy. "I think." She said softly, "I'd like that too."

Maglor's chest loosened where tension had lived like a clenched fist for centuries. It was not absolution - he neither sought nor deserved that - but it was an opening, and after so long in darkness, even a crack of light felt blinding. His fingers curled subtly against his knee again, anchoring himself to the moment, to the sound of his daughter's voice choosing them. Her family.

Fingon did not speak either. He simply let his breath leave him slow, careful, as if afraid that even exhaling too loudly might fracture this fragile peace. The weight of Ýrwen in his arms grounded him. He shifted ever so slightly, cradling Ýrwen more securely against his chest, and gave a faint, rueful laugh. "She's utterly unimpressed with me." He admitted, the corners of his eyes crinkling in amused frustration as the elfling barely acknowledged his care.

Legolas smiled, a soft warmth threading through her voice. "Give her time." She said, leaning back in her chair with a faint tilt of her head. "She warms to people faster than I ever did."

"You've warmed up?" Fingon's tone carried mock surprise, though his eyes were careful, watching her closely.

"Slightly." Legolas allowed the small smirk tugging at her lips. "Don't push it."

Maglor, seated opposite her, let out a dry chuckle. "That is her warm." He said, gesturing subtly toward Legolas, "You should see her tolerant."

Fingon laughed softly, shaking his head. "Still, it's surreal though." He murmured. "Maglor, a grandfather. I half expect the skies to split."

Legolas' smile faltered only slightly, her gaze dropping to the small, sleeping form in Fingon's arms. "I'm still adjusting to that one myself." She admitted, her voice quiet in its reflection.

Fingon tilted Ýrwen gently, as if to better study her. "She's so small. And still. You'd hardly think the world broke open to bring her here." His voice softened instinctively, "How is she finding Valinor?"

Legolas' hand rested lightly on her knee as she considered. "Well. I think." She began, her eyes tracing the soft lines of her daughter's face. "She scarcely knows anything else. And she's sleeping more at night. A few hours, at least. I almost don't know what to do with the silence."

Maglor's gaze softened, the faintest lift at the corners of his mouth. "Rest, or write." He suggested. "Or finally read the book I left you."

Legolas raised an eyebrow, lips curving into a wry half-smile. "The one about early Quenya verb conjugation? Thrilling."

Maglor's head tilted, as if affronted on behalf of a seemingly great art. "It's a classic." He replied, tone smooth but edged with a mock solemnity Legolas knew well. In his lap, a loose sheet of parchment shifted under his hand, and he tapped it once as though to drive his point home.

Fingon gave a low chuckle as the elfling stirred in his arms. "Your naneth mocks all that is noble in our scholarly tradition." He declared with the mock-gravitas of a king pronouncing doom. Though his smile betrayed him, "Uncle Fingon shall teach you better."

Legolas' mouth curved, her glance darting from Fingon to her daughter, then softening in some quiet amusement that Maglor suspected hid a deep tenderness. "She'll learn to climb trees before she can spell. That's all I care about."

Fingon arched one elegant brow in theatrical horror. "Climb trees?" His voice warmed to laughter, "Valar save us, another wild one."

Maglor's chuckle came quieter, low and threaded with memory. "It's in her blood." He said, his eyes shadowing as they turned from Ýrwen to his daughter. "You should've seen her mother on the rooftops of Minas Tirith. She looked as if she wanted to fly, or fall, just to see if she could rise again."

Legolas made a sound halfway between a laugh and a scoff, the tilt of her chin baring challenge. "You were dramatic about it." She said, crossing her arms with all the unrepentant poise of one who knows the weight of her own choices and stands by them regardless. "I was perfectly in control."

Maglor's brows rose with a dangerous calm that betrayed him as undoubtedly the figure of legend and terror he was, though his mouth held the quirk of something perilously close to fondness. "You were eight months pregnant." He reminded her, softly but with the cutting precision of a blade's edge.

"And clearly fine." Legolas shrugged, a flicker of light glinting off the russet fall of her hair as she moved. "I didn't fall, did I?"

"That's hardly the benchmark, penneth." Maglor murmured, the old endearment carrying an ache as old as entire kingdoms. His fingers curled loosely on the parchment, knuckles pale, and for a scarce moment he seemed simply to wrestle with a tide of words left unsaid. "Just because you can scale stone walls, or march on the Black Gate with a child in your belly - it does not mean that you should."

Fingon stilled, as if wary of breaking the tension between father and daughter, though Ýrwen slept on, oblivious to the pulse beneath her cradle of silk and warmth.

Legolas looked at Maglor then - not with anger, but with a weariness so quiet it might have gone unnoticed, had Maglor not known her well enough to see the shift. Her shoulders eased by a fraction and when she spoke, her voice was soft, almost absent. "I needed air. And silence. And a high place where no one could ask questions."

"No wonder Maedhros watches you like you might catch fire just standing still." Fingon's voice carried the warmth of easy humour, but there was something quiet beneath it - an undeniable recognition that pricked against old scars.

Legolas blinked, caught off guard, and for a heartbeat she nearly laughed, but the sound snagged in her throat. "He wouldn't be the first." She said instead, her tone gentled by memory though the words were not.

Fingon stilled. "What do you mean?"

Legolas' lips parted in a breath, the faintest of huffs escaping. "When I was an elfling." She began, voice low and weighted with something old, "Before anyone dared speak what I was, they just called me cursed."

She looked down at her hands as though expecting to see the words still branded into her skin. "That hair, they said. That temper. That fire. Like I was some ill-omened spark that never learned to stay quiet."

Fingon's brow furrowed, a line etching deep between his eyes. His eyes searched Legolas', but she did not flinch, only met his gaze head-on. "Because you looked like Maedhros?" He asked softly.

Her mouth curved, not into a smile, but something thin and tender as her fingers toyed with the curls at her shoulder - a restless, almost defensive gesture. "Still do. Too much, I think. The shape of him was stamped into me before I even knew his name."

The silence between them hummed, a taut string drawn near breaking. Fingon broke it with care, his voice low but fierce in its conviction. "It's not a curse."

Legolas blinked, caught off guard. For a heartbeat she nearly laughed, but the sound caught in her throat - tangled there, half-formed, like a bird that had forgotten how to fly. Of course he would not name it a curse. How could he? Fingon, who had once crossed an entire frozen hell for Maedhros; Fingon, whose song had split the silence of Thangorodrim to answer a cry no one else dared follow. Fingon, whose gaze even now softened whenever his cousin's name brushed the air. To Fingon, Maedhros was not ruin but radiance. The scarred and burning thing others called fallen - Fingon called beloved.

How could someone who loves the fire ever call it dangerous?

Her mouth quivered, not in mirth but something tauter, stranger, the taste of old disbelief lingering like ash. He cannot understand. Because where others saw the blaze and flinched, Fingon looked at Maedhros as if the sun itself rose only for him each dawn. He could never look at Maedhros' likeness and call it ill-starred. Not when he still bore the scars of choosing him, again and again, without regret.

"You say that now." Legolas murmured, voice low as if confessing something fragile. "But you didn't see how people looked at me. Like an echo of ruin that had no business under the forest's boughs. As if I were something dangerous. Something wrong."

Maglor's breath left him slowly as he turned his gaze to Legolas' hands, pale against the weave of her skirts, fingers curled as if bracing against some unseen wind. "If I could take that from you." He said, and the words trembled as though they carried more weight than even his mighty voice could hold. "Every glance. Every word that ever made you doubt your worth - I would."

"I know." Legolas said softly. "But you can't. And I'm not asking you to. It's a part of me now, all of it. I just..." She faltered then, hesitating as the words slipped like water between her fingers - caught somewhere between Middle-earth and the white shores of Valinor. "I don't know what it means yet, to resemble him so fiercely."

Across the room, Fingon stirred. His face, all silvered light and quiet strength, softened as he cradled Ýrwen tighter and leaned forward. "It means." He began, voice as steady as Laurelin's roots, "That you are brave enough to see the full shape of someone and not run from it. That's more than many have ever managed. Even in our house."

Something flickered across Legolas' countenance then - doubt, or perhaps something rawer still - and before she could speak, Maglor broke the silence once again. His voice different now, lower, with a quiet ache behind it. "He sees it too, you know." He admitted, "The resemblance. It unsettles him just as much as it does you."

Her head tilted, a question shaping itself in the corners of her mouth as she absentmindedly watched Fingon trace the soft arc of Ýrwen's tiny cheek with a calloused thumb. "So that's why he avoids me?"

"Not avoid." Maglor asserted. "He's careful. Measured. Not because he fears you - but because he's afraid he'll hurt you. Afraid that if he opens the door, everything he was will fall out and undo what you've built."

"I'm not asking him to bare his scars." Legolas said at last, her voice low but steady, though the tremor in her hands betrayed her. "Only to stop flinching when I walk into a room."

Fingon exhaled slowly, as though bracing himself against his own honesty. "He's trying, Legolas. Truly." He insisted, lifting his eyes to her's. Silence settled for a moment between them, warm but taut. The child in his arms gave a drowsy sigh, and Fingon's voice gentled again, as if for her sake. "He's just slower than the rest of us. Always has been. And-" Fingon hesitated for a moment, eyes drifting toward the shadows where memory lingered, "Re-embodiment wasn't kind to him, he struggles more than he lets on. He carries more than he knows what to do with. Sometimes, more than he should."

"I'll wait." Legolas said quietly, though her words were nothing if not certain. "I'm good at waiting. I waited most of my life just for someone to claim me."

Opposite her, Maglor froze. Sunlight poured through the high arching window at his back, gilding the fall of his hair until it burned like molten mithril. But his face, his face was as bare as a blade. He did not flinch from her, and yet his gaze slid for a heartbeat to the floor, as though the weight of her truth had found a seam in his armour. "And I failed you in that." He admitted, voice no more than a breath.

Legolas' lips curved, barely, into something soft - almost tender. "But you came when I needed you most." She said, "You crossed the Sundering Seas for me. You've stayed."

The silence that followed was not hollow. It was instead full, layered with all the things neither dared speak: remorse, gratitude, the tender shoots of something not yet named.

Legolas' throat tightened, but the smile she offered was steady, if small. "That's more than I could have ever asked for."

Series this work belongs to:

• Part 2 of once revealed