The Prince's Pretend Mother

Ninth Entry - Not Yet a Breach

As it was I did manage to rise from my mourning. As I had before when my father had died, and then my mother, my husband, my son, and my brother. The trouble was that I wasn't mourning the past; I was mourning the futures that would never be. The conversations we would never have. The dinners we would never make together or the embroidery he would never criticize.

The conversations I would never have with any of them. That was what I mourned. The past was limited, it had a distinct end and a distinct beginning. But the future, for us, was meant to be endless. An incomprehensible thing to mortals. Just as death was incomprehensible to us. We could not come to terms with something that was not meant to be a part of our lives to begin with.

But I did manage. I threw myself into my jewelry, expanding into decorative hinges and cutlery; I added a few more hobbies to my list, such as improving my acceptable embroidery, taking a further interest in my clothes and involving myself more in their design, as well as reupholstering most of my furniture and flipping them end over end to fill their scrapes and refinish them. I sewed new drapes for all the rooms and new curtains for my bed. When all of that on top of looking after Legolas was not enough I took long walks until I returned exhausted and nearly always managed to rest as I was supposed to be resting.

And gradually, with effort, I was managing to stay alive.

I wasn't sure I was doing it right when I realized those twenty years I was so afraid of had already passed us by. I was horrified when I realized it was the evening of his hundredth birthday already; he was an adult. He had needed me less and less throughout the decades but now I was officially no longer necessary.

"What color would you like to wear tonight, Inladris?" Linwea asked me as she combed my hair a second time.

"The pale green, please. With the gold undertones."

Linwea helped me into the dress—the lacings were complicated on this one—and I sat again, straight-backed, so she could begin braiding my hair. She looped and twisted my braids so the majority of my hair still hung down past my hips but a great deal of it wove and wound through itself in a lacy mass behind my head. She had always had such deft fingers. Finally she helped me clasp the last thing I had made from Thranduil's gift of silver—a necklace fashioned after a cascade of slender twigs that fell down from my collar bones. The round twigs lay flat against my skin and were invisibly hinged so they could follow the shape of my chest where they fell and when I moved.

I hadn't meant to be but I was the last one finished dressing for the ball and I stepped fluidly through the engraved halls to the dining room, where I suspected the men would be waiting for me. Thranduil wore a long, pale blue tunic and over-robe and Legolas wore a shorter tunic and leggings in silver. Both wore their pale circlets over finely combed hair, and I was pleased to see that Legolas had gotten so immured in his habit of three braids that he had forgotten to remove them when the circlet would have restrained his smooth hair.

I paused with my hands on my hips in the entryway. "Don't the pair of you look lovely."

They turned, one smiling warmly and one coolly.

I held up my hands, beckoning to Legolas. "Come here, let me see that he hasn't missed anything."

"You will find something just to say you did," he said, still smiling, as he approached and let me run my fingers over the creases in the arms of his fine, shimmering tunic and turn him with a hand on his shoulder to comb out his pale hair with my fingers and tug at the hem of the tunic in the back.

"I would never." I perhaps took longer than I needed to looking over my boy, but I tried not to criticize where criticism was not needed. At last I stood before him again, cupping his face in both of my hands. He was well taller than I was now, though not yet as tall as his regal father. My lips trembled together and his lips twitched up in his form of an apology for my melancholy. I ran my fingertips lightly over his cheeks, touching the corners of his eyes, the end of his nose. I took a deep breath and my smile solidified. "I am proud of the man you have become," I said then, voice as steady as it had ever been, full of my immense gratitude for having had him in my life and my admiration of who he was.