Destiny's Arrow

PAIRING: Legolas/Arwen/Aragorn...some others may be involved but you'll just have to wait and see

RATING: NC-17

DISCLAIMER: I neither created nor own these characters, setting, and some plot elements (i.e.-stuff I make reference to that happened in J.R.R. Tolkien’s books). Y’all know this. I am not making any money off of my writing. Blahdy blahdy blahdy blah. Please don’t sue me, I’m a poor college student who means no harm.

NOTE: This is my first fic. I’m not fragile. I LIKE CONSTRUCTIVE CRITICISM. You’re not going to hurt my feelings. If you like it, I’d like to hear from you (a little ego strokage never hurt anyone) and if you don’t, I’d love to hear how you think I could improve! Thanks! Let's get this show on the road! ~DR

------------------------------------------------------------------

Trine

(At the Gates)


It seemed unfair to Legolas that Luthien’s likeness, so beautiful a creature as Arwen, should bind herself irrevocably to a man. Truly, in every sense, he was a king among men, but a man nonetheless. Legolas knew that she would not be grieved in the West. He knew that few would mark her passing, but he knew, also, that he would be one who did. He would raise his fair voice in lament for whilwhile wishing it did not have to be so. A torrent, a cataract of thought sluiced through his mind as he watched the graceful curve of her neck when she melted into Aragorn’s arms at the gates of Minas Tirith. Her throat flashed as she breathed him in. Her skin needed no adornment to hold Legolas’s interest. He felt the heat of anger rising in him at the selfishness of her choice. He let it smolder. His anger was cooled by his joy in both their happiness. But, like any other metal, in cooling, his anger was only tempered. It was reheated and alloyed with jealousy by their lingering, hungry kiss. He had often felt those lips on his skin in centuries past. Legolas was again subdued when Aragorn turned his warm, brotherly gaze upon him. This time though, his anger and jealousy were refined to a cold, fearsome and steely hate. Despite the intensity of his thoughts and feelings, neither his face nor his bearing showed any sign. His expression remained placid and cool.

Yet Arwen felt what passed behind Legolas’s eyes, though she did not see it. She perceived simply a sorrowful and malignant presence whose depth and intensity shook her to the foundation of her soul. Arwen knew everyone that surrounded her. She knew Aragorn and Legolas best. She could not fathom such violent emotion coming from either of her loves, and so, she attributed it to neither of them. She thought to herself that it must be the shadow of Sauron’s broken spirit still lingering about the place he had so hated. Surely it would pass, she thought. And pass it did.

Legolas turned his magnificent head to survey the recovering fields of Pellinor, still stained with blood and littered with steel and leather. His overcast gaze passed over the Mountains of Shadow, sinister and foreboding. He liked the look of them just then. He stood brooding at the clearing sky when a gentle hand came to rest on the leather brace covering his forearm. Arwen’s clear, pale eyes met his when he turned, and a sensation like lightning passed through him at the brightness of her gaze.

“Is all well with you, Legolas?” she asked. Her voice sounded, to Legolas, like the gentle quavering call of a mourning dove. He watched the subtle movements of her mouth as she spoke. He thought there must be nothing in all the world so lovely as that voice spilling from those lips. Legolas stood, unable to speak for a moment. Her closeness put him in mind of their times together in Lorien and before that, Mirkwood. He looked into her eyes. He remembered those clear gray eyes misted and unfocused, lost in sensation.

“Yes,” he ansd fid finallookiooking away. He lowered his voice to a satin whisper, “I have missed you, Arwen. My soul has been lonely and restless without you near me.” Legolas closed his eyes and hung his head, trying to banish a vision of the elf beform, am, a woman who did not belong to him, writhing beneath him. In his mind, he could see her, eyes closed tightly, mouth open. Her remembered quiet cry of surrender and release rang in his ears. He stood paralyzed as his body remembered her smell, like rain and wild lavender underfoot. His breath caught in his throat as he remembered the texture of her skin against his, velvet beneath his fingers and against his chest. He could taste her sweat salted sweet skin. She filled his senses now as she had done then, and he willed down the heat that grew in his loins threatening to betray his thoughts.

“But I am near you now. I am here,” she moved to face him. As she spoke, Arwen placed her hand over Legolas’s heart as she had done so often at their partings and meetings. He covered her delicate hand with his larger one, but he did not look at her. Instead, he watched Aragorn’s receding back as he walked, talking with Gandalf. Legolas met her eyes this time as he spoke.

“But you are not,” he said, ice in his voice. She turned her long neck and sighed when her eyes fell upon Aragorn. “He smiles at me like a friend and brother while he takes from me with both arms the only thing I have held dear in all my long life.” With those words, for a moment, Legolas’s hate was laid bare. It sliced like a blade through his pretense, and Arwen recoiled from him as though she had been cut by it. She drew close to him once more. She looked deeply into his eyes, searching for a trace of what she had felt, hoping not to find it.

“I belong to him no more than I have ever belonged to you,” she whispered. And with that, she turned from him. She went, not to Aragorn, but to her chambers within the city. Leg wat watched her go. Arwen moved with immense grace, and he was mesmerized by her movement. She turned once more to look at him with such exquisite sadness in her face, mirrored in his own expression, that both thought their hearts would break. Arwen then met Aragorn’s eyes as she stood in the doorway. She smiled at him with lingering melancholy. He bowed his head to her, touching his forehead, his heart, and finally, finding her gaze again, held his hand out to her, presenting a phantom heart and a real love. Her sadness, he thought, lent her even greater elegance and beauty. Aragorn wondered what saddened her. He feared that now she was with him in Minas Tirith she had, at last, begun to regret her decision to remain with him in mortality. It would surely destroy him if she had given up eternity for nothing more than a stone around her neck. But he loved her so entirely that, had she not remained with him, he would have risked the fate of Numenor to follow her into the West. Surely a love so complete could not be weight, but wings. And truly, Aragorn’s love for her, though it soared to the heavens, was blind. He did not feel Legolas’s searing eyes upon him. He was blind to the malice and jealousy that tinged his friend’s ash colored eyes like a young, hot, hungry flame.

At last, Arwen turned away and disappeared through the shaded doorway. The spell, the trine was broken by her departure. The seething anger that had clutched Legolas’s heart began to ebb. But an idea, a cruel thought lodged like a splinter in his mind.

Aragorn touched Gandalf’s shoulder when they had finished speaking. Gandalf looked coolly, perhaps reproachfully, at Legolas as he, too, turned and disappeared into the city. Aragorn turned his weathered, smiling face upon Legolas as he approached. As he walked, the warm westerly breeze caught the king’s darkr, er, exposing the barest hint of silver. It was only slightly more pronounced in his beard. Today, Aragorn looked young. He was a majestic and powerful presence. Today, he breathed kingliness that surrounded him almost tangibly.

Legolas had seen a better than a hundred kings and stewards pass. His arrogance assured him that Aragorn was no different from the others, but his intuition whispered warningly otherwise. He ignored it and centered himself. He stood tall and proud in the morning light. His black hair showed a blue cast in the pale soft light of the rising sun. He watched haughtily as Aragorn approached, not helping to close the distance. As Aragorn drew nearer, he opened his arms to Legolas, who accepted the embrace. Even as he did so, the elf considered the speed and grace of motion that would be required to unsheathe the dagger from Aragorn’s belt, pull him to his chest, and drive the blade between his ribs. Legolas smiled vaguely at the thought, but dismissed it as he wrapped his sinuous arms around the Dunadan’s barrel chest and over his thickly muscled shoulder. Legolas broke the embrace as soon as cordiality would allow. He did not wish to seem as unfriendly toward Aragorn as he felt. Aragorn studied the eor aor a few moments before speaking. When at last he found his voice, it was gravely and weathered as his face. It had, to a lesser degree, the rich undulating quality of Saruman’s.

“Perhaps it is the morning light, Legolas, but you are the nessness of death. Are you well?” Aragorn gazed into the fathomless eyes that watched him steadily. But though his gaze was steady, Legolas fought a terrible battle within himself. He felt as though he were slipping, sinking into a cold dark pool. He loved Aragorn as a brother, but a brother now in competition with him for Arwen’s love. Though Legolas did not like to see the bitterness he felt at losing a competition, any competition, and this one more than any other, the bitterness remained. He sensed a spring of it welling up into the pool that he was beginning to drown in. The cruel thought-Does he know? Should he know?-bolted through his mind again. He struggled to the surface and answered numbly.

“I am well in body, but my soul is restless as the wind,” was his only reply.

“Is it the sea? That was the Lady Galadriel’s word and warning. And it was following me that you first heard the waves and the gulls. If that is the cause of your pallor, I am sorry,” Aragorn spoke, extending a leathern hand and planting it on Legolas’s shoulder.

“The sea calls as it never has before, but it does not demand,” Legolas answered slowly.

“What then, makes Legolas’s fair face sad and pale and his voice weary?”

“The coming of your Lady has put me in mind of home and times passed, and soon, I must find my home by onth oth or another,” Legolas answered as he looked once more over the ruined field. Aragorn smiled warmly again as he spoke.

“Yes. Yes, I know your mind, Legolas. You are as I have been these many long wandering years. Never belonging anywhere. Restless, as you say, as the wind,” Aragorn gave a long sigh, then continued, “Though I wish you would remain in my company, I will not ask you to ignore the voice that draws you. When will you return to Thranduil’s hall?”

“I will not,” spoke the elf softly.

“Where then will you go?” asked Aragorn, puzzled.

“I once belonged in Mirkwood, and once I belonged in Lorien. Now I cannot say where I will find my home for I do not yet know where she will at last come to rest.” Legolas fell silent. Aragorn searched his face for a hint of who she was. He knew of none upon whom Legolas had bestowed his affections. But he suspected that if his amorous passions ran as deep as his fighting spirit, that Legolas would make a woman a fine lover indeed. And to call a woman home suggested to Aragorn that perhaps more than affection had been shared. A tempest of thought and question raged in Aragorn’s mind as he watched his friend. Legolas stood still as a winter night, sadly watc the the mounting sun. Sadness lent Legolas the same poignant grace it had Arwen in Aragorn’s sight. Their resemblance that morning spurred the idea that perhaps she knew what troubled their friend.

Aragorn did not wish to anger the elf, whose temper he knew to be fierce, with clumsy prying questions. Besides, he knew, also, that Legolas would easily evade any such questioning if he wished, and his inattentiveness told Aragorn that he did. So he left Legolas to his sunrise.

“Be at peace, Legolas. We shall speak at a fairer hour.” Legolas turned to smile weakly in reply. Aragorn let his hand fall from the elf’s shoulder and turned into the city. Once he lost sight of Legolas, he made for Arwen’s chambers to ask her the cause of his friend’s despondency and consult her advice on how best to remedy it.

 

--------------------------------------------------------

 

*Heaves great heroic sigh* I had to take this down and repost it because it was NC-17 and ff.net is the Devil! Just for the record, this fic had 172 reviews. And now? Now they’re all gone *whimper*. I’m going to repost a chapter at a time, but it will probably be at regular intervals (a chapter per week, I think)…so anyone reading this for the first time won’t have to wait too long between updates until I get up to chapter 15 or so.

~DR