Beauty and the Beast | Thranduil x Reader

Chapter 24

Once the queen's begetting day was behind him, Thranduil resumed his duties and was all business as usual. At least outwardly. Inside, he was still attempting to quell the rising emotions that he was becoming more aware of with each passing day. Emotions regarding you. Part of him could still not quite get over the way you had come into the West Wing the way you had, seeking him out if only to see if he was well. Why would you do that? He couldn't help but wonder.

He had seen flickers in your eyes over your time here, during the days you and he became... close. Flickers of emotion and unspoken words. Thranduil had dismissed them every time, chalking it up to his own imagination. Though why he assumed his imagination would conjure up such things he did not allow himself to study too closely. Still, in the back of his mind, he knew it was there. You had started to look at him in a way that he could not fully ignore. There was... yearning. Sorrow. Love?

No, he dare not think that possible.

Thranduil told himself not to be so foolish. First, he should not even be entertaining such ludicrous thoughts. Second, it was only a dream... an enchanting little dream, but a dream nonetheless. Nothing more. He had become so fraught with rage and despair and darkness since his wife's passing. You had witnessed all of it firsthand many times over and, while you seemed to be a lot more comfortable with him, he could not delude himself.

You could never love such a beast.

You had come to him as a prisoner, a human no less, and he reminded himself of the fact he had been so certain he could never again feel for another, not in the way he had his wife. His broken heart had been frozen in a block of unbreakable ice for the rest of eternity and it could not be thawed. Not at his will and not by the likes of a little human.

Still, sometimes, he found himself entertaining the idea. Frustratingly, he found himself seeking the thought out, as if it brought him some sort of... comfort. Thranduil could no longer fully understand himself. These sorts of emotions and thoughts had been locked up in a secret part of him for centuries. He had not even recognised them at first... but he was beginning to now.

He did not know how to feel about it.

The king threw himself into his duties to avoid falling into the trap of fully entertaining the entire fantastical notion. He had councils to attend, people to look after, defence of the borders to oversee. Not to mention a feast to ready himself for. It was one of his favourite things, to see all of his people come together in joy. Dancing and drinking and laughing the nights away. Despite his often stony exterior, Thranduil very much enjoyed seeing his people finding the light and the love in this kingdom, that had become so dark.

It always reminded him that they would endure.

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You were excited about the upcoming elven festival. You had managed to glean that it was a winter festival. The snow had almost all but melted away, not having stayed more than a few days after you and Thranduil had your excursion into the garden, but winter had not yet given way to the coming of spring.

The elves referred to it as Mereth Di a Rhîw Menel, which you were told meant, literally, 'Festival Beneath a Winter Sky'. No matter how many times somebody told you, you always forgot it. Still, you were eager for the days to pass and for the festivities to get here. The excited energy you could feel around you was infectious and you liked seeing everybody looking so light and free.

You also could not quite stop thinking about Thranduil and the queen's begetting day. Your heart felt heavy every time you did so. You felt so bad for him, losing his wife at all, but the way he had told you that she died was beyond your comprehension. The way he explained that he had been lured into a trap meant to capture him and, despite his efforts to fight back, his queen had been brutally slain before his very eyes. He had not been able to protect her, or many of his people. One had caused him to shut away his heart and one had caused him to shut away his entire kingdom. You did not think you would have still been walking around, you would be catatonic with grief... he was incredibly strong.

It did not escape you. That Thranduil opening up to you had been something incredibly significant. When you first arrived in this realm, everybody had been incredibly quick to draw your attention away from the queen's chambers but had never stated why. She had not been mentioned at all. Without anybody having to tell you in words, you just knew it was because Thranduil had probably forbidden it. He had been so stricken by his loss and his guilt, you realised, that he had forbidden his own wife from being so much as whispered about in his halls.

It did not strike you as an act bidden from a heart of stone, but that of a broken soul who did not know how to deal with the pain and so shut it out to the best of its ability. To carry that around for centuries as he must have? You could not fathom.

You had been so wrong in your first impression of the king. He hadn't given you much room to see him in another light, of course, but there was something in him that you simply had not seen. You understood him a lot more now and... you felt for him.

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Indeed, it seemed that for the both of you, your impressions had been so beyond what either of you had believed to be true.

Thranduil had seen a mere mortal girl. Unimportant and of no real use. Perhaps a little below him and his kind. He thought all life precious, this much was true, but when faced with mortal kind Thranduil had, over the years, began to withdraw... even look down his nose just a little.

His lack of trust in those outside of his own realm had grown and festered until it was simply too big for him to control. The race of men was weak, with little regard for those around them, even their own kind at times from what he had heard. There were some who were noble enough of heart, he supposed, but as a whole they were insignificant and he kept them at arms length, as he did with dwarves, even wizards.

However, you had been a complete surprise. He had looked upon you, at first, as a means to an end. He had wanted your father punished for the attack on his son and for the death of that precious Starfire Rose, and it mattered not to him how that punishment was dealt. Keeping you here would obviously hurt your father just as much as if he had kept the man here himself, he had been able to see that right away. The bond between the both of you was a true, deep one. So he had allowed it, swapped you out for your father, satisfied in the knowledge that it would indeed still be a punishment.

Then things had changed... he couldn't even pinpoint the exact moment that they had, the moment his own feelings had changed, but they had all the same.

You, too, had at first only seen a cruel, callous dictator who revelled in his own power. A horrible beast of a creature, who lived only to deal out despair and sorrow upon those around him, who did not listen to reason and who seemed to thrive entirely on spite. He had frightened you. Terrified you, even.

Then he had saved you from those orcs and you had saved him in return and... that seemed to have been the turning point. Then, that day up in the West Wing, when he first showed you the roses and explained everything, you had felt a massive shift. You started to feel at home here... at home around him.

You had both seen things in each other that you had not noticed before, simply because neither of you showed them and neither of you had been looking.