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In his dreams, Legolas floats.
Back flat against the current, he drifts; willing the tide to carry him onwards towards that place where the horizon shifts and shatters, where the water slips to silver glass and the white shores reach out with arms smelling of salt and warm earth. How easy it would be, to ebb here, and wait for the arms of the ocean to lay him sweetly down into the bosom of that far green country where the ache in his bones is naught but memory.
It has been said of the Elves, those fair and deathless children of Ilúvatar, that they do not live, but linger. Life clings to them like the fragile threads of a spider's web, holding them in place as they watch age after age of Middle-earth pass into the dark. Many of them wander, forever searching for a shore, fading from a grief that they cannot name. And when it calls to them, they go.
And so, Legolas lingers on. Frozen and unchanging as the colours of the world fade and bloom and fade again, flora and fauna returning to the earth even as Yavanna's gentle hands coax new life up into the sunlight. Like the water, like the sea, he watches; still and eternal as his friends turn white and crumpled like old parchment, shrinking and slowing even as their children blossom; dried leaves and fresh petals fluttering together on the wind.
The silver threads in Gimli's hair and beard are exquisite. Legolas wishes to take them for himself, to pluck them between his fingers like heavenly harp strings and encase them in amber, just as Gimli did with the three gifted to him by Galadriel. Gimli grumbles when Legolas points them out, bats his hands away, I beg you, amrâlime, do not remind me of my age.
Yet Legolas has learnt that he adores age. He is a marble statue in the midst of a blooming garden, its flowers changing a little with each passing year. Still, unchanged, unchipped; but smeared with the colours of his friends around him, their petals settled sweetly in his hair and the lines of his open palms. Crinkle-eyed, silver-haired, wisdom and joy and peace without measure, they are beautiful. They are so beautiful.
Legolas watches Gimli as he sleeps, long fingertips tracing the lines of his face; mapping the dales and rivers of a land that he knows so well. He journeys the crags of crow’s feet and bathes in the valleys of Gimli’s laugh lines, climbs the rough-hewn mountain of a nose thrice-broken and smattered with freckles like alpine clover. When he presses his lips to the cracked, sun-baked earth of Gimli’s forehead, he tastes milk and honey on his tongue.
Gimli blinks awake, his eyelashes fluttering, and there. The two greatest treasures, tucked away inside the stone by Aüle himself for only the most worthy to find. Green agate, tiger’s eye, brown quartz spun with amber. They crinkle at the edges as Gimli smiles.
“Something on my face?”
A song. A lifetime. A world.
Legolas laughs, a soft, breathless thing like a swelling wave, dusted with seafoam.
“Not a thing, my love”.
The sea calls to Legolas, still and silent; with the whispering, gentle promise of its song. His dreams are laced with salt, and the call of gulls lingers long after he wakes.
But here, on the shore, there is life. The crush of grass beneath his bare feet and the tang of berries on his tongue; fields and hills and forests yet-unseen; Sam's shy, bubbling giggle and Aragorn's earth-warm hugs and the rumbling rockslide of Gimli's laugh, the crackling woodsmoke of his sleeping breaths against Legolas's skin.
An inked rune on Legolas's wrist, an elven braid in Gimli's hair. Vows whispered against flesh in the hushed darkness, an unspoken promise in each step of Legolas's soles against the soil, feet firm to the earth. A song. A lifetime.
A world, a world, a world.
That night, Legolas dreams of mountains.