"I heard somewhere," I tentatively began another day, "something about Tauriel being your foster daughter." When he didn't tell me I was wrong I continued. "May I ask why you took her in? Aren't kings very busy?"
"As king I am figuratively father to my people. All those without parents may come to me for shelter. They are all my children, in a sense."
I nodded. This made sense. He was sitting at his desk again, and I was sitting on the low wall not too far to his left. "Then what does that make me?" It was a question I had long been harboring, afraid to ask. I didn't know entirely how the elves regarded me, but it would help me to keep their opinions of me healthy if I understood.
Thranduil laid down his quill. He looked at me. "Then I suppose that would make you mine as well."
I didn't ask him to define 'mine'. I had about used up my bravery for the day. "I believe you would have made a much better father than mine did."
He inclined his head a fraction and returned to his documents. "I have done my very best."
I stood. "If the regard your people have for Legolas and Tauriel is any indication, you have done well."
I lightly touched one of the fine bones of his fingers that day, as gently as I possibly could. "You still don't seem entirely real to me," I admitted when he glanced at me. Some of his glances he permitted me to interpret. "There are no people in my world like you."
The next morning I came awake in starts and gasps. My entire body was filled with the remnants of the fire my father had thrown over me. My back had been splashed in flame. There was no dampening the agony of this injury, and as soon as I was fully awake I cringed against my mattress and howled.
Legolas—who had made a point since our quiet conversation to always be near when I woke in the mornings, was there within seconds. He threw open the door without hesitation and left the keys on the hook outside. He dropped to his knees beside me, saw the darkness seeping through the back of my tunic and without hesitation used one of his daggers to slice from the neckline of my borrowed tunic to the waist, so the livid injury spread across my back could breathe.
I heard the scuff of his boots on the stone as he flinched back and wondered if he had ever seen such an injury as this one. I couldn't see how he would have.
He leaped lightly over me to crouch in front of me and easily gathered me into his arms, avoiding touching my back at all. He sat me against him with my legs on either side of his waist, one of his arms supporting my weight beneath me and his other hand on the back of my neck to hold me to his chest so I wouldn't fall. He sprinted up the stairs, other elves who had heard me scream or hadn't pressing themselves to walls to make room as he passed. I couldn't decide if the cold breeze against my back was soothing or painful.
When we were nearing Nesetha's place of work I heard him shout her name ahead of himself so she would see us coming. As soon as she saw my back as he rushed toward her I heard her speaking rapidly, astonished and dismayed. I suppose they hadn't expected this level of damage. Legolas laid me on my side on the edge of a flat bed and the two of them eased me slowly so I was lying on my stomach. I was slightly propped up by my arms, which at the first touch of the injury had locked against my chest, hands fisted, as though the muscles to move them had been scorched too. In truth I was just afraid to move them in case I tore the skin that was already burned.
I was gasping, breath ragged, but I wasn't crying. I knew I was pale, and I felt nauseous as well. Nesetha took up a pair of shears and swiftly cut away all of the thick fabric near the sprawling wound and Legolas, who translated for her, took a place near my head and crouched where I could see him if I opened my eyes. "Mabyn, what can you tell Nesetha about your injury? What happened?"
What had happened was I had caught him putting the gas I had taken out of his car back into it and tried to take it away. He was tottering drunk and would just end up killing someone if he got in a car that started. He shoved me away and threw the half-empty can at my back, spilling gasoline from my right shoulder to left hip, and I'd flinched and spun back at him, screaming. He had thrown me against a wall and then pressed his lighter, and held it to my soaked clothes.
Shuddering, I managed to open my eyes partway but I couldn't bear to look at his smooth face when I felt so awful inside. "My people have developed a fluid that burns when you light it," I choked out as Nesetha searched hurriedly through her supplies for anything to help me feel better. "My father threw it over me and struck a match."
He quickly repeated this for Nesetha then asked me, "Why would he do that?"
"Because he was very drunk and being very dangerous. I tried to stop him from leaving the house because I knew he was in a mood to fight people who didn't deserve it, and he might hurt them."
"Other people might have been better able to fight him than you were," he gravely pointed out.
"But he was my father, so I considered him my responsibility." I closed my eyes again and cringed as Nesetha began to work. "You can't fix it," I insisted to her, voice splitting. "This never healed. It never will."
"She has the right to attempt to save your life even if you already think it is lost," Legolas told me, and stood to speak to Nesetha once more. His hand, which had rested against the hair over my undamaged ear, remained where it was, and despite barely knowing him having any kind touch at all made me feel a little bit less obliterated.
I know Nesetha used the softest cloths she had but it still felt as though she was scraping away the blood and other things seeping from my back and I had to struggle not to cower away from her or cry out. I was still struggling to breathe properly but I knew that was rooted inside me and not in anything that had been done to my skin. At some point soon after questioning me Legolas went to the door of the healing room and called out, giving a list of orders to whoever he'd seen outside. Then he returned, because he apparently thought I needed someone I could see to stay with me, and stood beside me with his hand warming my hair.
Tauriel arrived first, at a run. Minutes later Mirinel, Soviel and Oloran arrived in a similar fashion. When they got off duty, Cerian and Luviel came as well. By then Nesetha had done what she could with herbs and poultices and was trying to sing the hurt out of me, as best I could tell. She had given me something for the pain already and it had somewhat dulled the sharpness of it, but I still throbbed from shoulders to hips, and I still felt exhausted in a way I had never felt before.
"Is this the last one, Mabyn?" Tauriel softly asked me, though she already knew the answer.
I slid my red-lined eyes open. "Yes."
"I am sorry."
"I suppose I can't say 'I'll survive'," I weakly replied, and she tried very hard to smile.
"I suppose you can't," she sadly agreed.
Unlike the last several times I had needed her assistance, this time Nesetha did not permit me to leave after treating me, nor did I try to. I remained miserably lying curled stiffly on my right side so I could still hear those who came and went. My six lovely guards couldn't all stay forever—they had bigger responsibilities than me. Besides, I wasn't going anywhere. I didn't even want to.
Mirinel brought me a hot drink an hour or two after Legolas first brought me in—he had left with Tauriel soon after Cerian and Luviel arrived. But the drink went cold as I sipped it because I was so uninterested in putting anything into myself today. My appetite, I had noticed, had been declining for at least two weeks now.
I wanted to be able to go see Thranduil that day but I couldn't sit up without either assistance or great pain, and no one would help me because they all wanted me to stay here. That night Tauriel sat at my side for several hours—they had brought my pot of moss from my cell for me to look at and I knew they would not be sending me back down until I was either healthy enough or brought myself. She combed out my hair and braided it for me.
"I want to go home," I whispered once, and I felt her nimble fingers pause in my hair. "But that is a place that doesn't exist."
She smoothed my hair and ran one of the slender braids over my shoulder. She had enough time to do the intricate work that I hadn't bothered with in weeks. I suppose she and I agreed that there was nothing that either of us could say.
I kept myself sane by reminding myself that this pain had gotten better before it got worse and my body turned on me. I had been able to go back to work for a little while. But my time was also rapidly dwindling. It had only been eleven days from when I had first taken the injury until it took me.
"How long?" Tauriel asked then, her thoughts echoing my own.
I looked up at her and away, pressing my lips together, then pinning them with my teeth, to keep the tears locked safely away. "I don't know precisely. Maybe two weeks."
Tauriel bowed her head. "We will miss the joy you have brought to us."
My lips fluttered and my throat closed in. "I will miss you too."
"How long will you remain....well?"
I was glad that Tauriel knew she could ask of me the difficult questions. "I don't know. The time between the injuries hasn't passed the same way it did originally, so I do not know if the illness will progress the same way either. The first time...." I took a breath. My chest still felt wound in iron. "The first time I took this injury I had a fever after two days, and other symptoms of an infection followed. I lost my hold on my own health after eleven or twelve days."
Tauriel stroked the hair back from my face. "We will take care of you as best we can."
I was still weak the next day when I insisted upon getting up. I refused to allow my own unhappiness to make this end as miserable as the one I had been and technically still was suffering in my world. Mirinel took me to the paddocks and permitted me to sit with the chickens for a bit, running my hand over their smooth and softer feathers. I stuck my hand through the slats of the goats' fences and let them lip at my palm. They were very disappointed to find that I would provide them no food, but didn't renege their friendship once it had been proved that I wouldn't. Mirinel insisted that I come to the guardroom to eat for midday, and I managed to tease her by refusing to leave the optimistic air of the hopping goats. She finally lifted me up and put me gently over her shoulder, returning me to my feet only when I swore in and out that I would not try to go back. Nobody wanted to force me when I appeared ready to crumble at the joints.
"Are you feeling any better, Mabyn?" Cerian hopefully asked as I sat beside him with a bowl of soup with strange things floating in it that Nesetha had apparently made especially for me.
"I'm up and about aren't I?" I asked him, thinking I had said that before but not remembering when.
"Yes," he agreed. "But you also are determined to lessen our worry. If you did not like us I do not believe you would try so hard."
I snorted. "If I didn't like you I'd make a game out of seeing how well I could vex you." The soup Nesetha had made wasn't bad, but just about everything tasted bland, and the elves didn't favor spicy foods so I couldn't test my theory of losing my sense of taste. Perhaps I was just uninterested.
"If there is anything we can do," he reminded me, as multiple people had, "to make you more comfortable, you must tell us."
I cracked a smile at him. "Don't worry, Cerian. If I want you to shine up my boots I'll tell you so."
"If you could rationalize how that would add to your comfort I might even do so," he blithely agreed with a smile of his own, propping his temple against his fist.
"So I can see my reflection in them," I mused. "It revitalizes me to see that I am still gorgeous."
"You are lovely," Tauriel said as she passed me from her desk, laying a warm hand on top of my head.
The elves had certainly changed in their treatment of me these last several weeks. I had noticed how they made a point, initially, not to touch me or encroach too much on my space. I had only been touched by women, and only when necessary. These days it wasn't uncommon for any one of them to lay a hand on my shoulder or lift me from one place to another or to swiftly bend and kiss my brow. They had accepted me for who I was and whatever they thought I was. I loved them for it. I did not fully comprehend elves—they were far too different—but I was certain that many of them were fond of me too.
I had not expected, when waking in this world, in this reflection-life, the disturbances I might make. I had expected to miss this life more than my real one. I had not expected to be missed. How could I have guessed that, more than I would lose this world, the people of this world would lose me? I had never thought to be such an influence. Not since in my other life so few people were influenced by me. But then, there, when faced with far more adversity, I tended to show my coarser cheek even to those who may wish me well if they knew me. My world was not one in which I could afford to be soft. I treated all people like the scars they might have made if I'd let my guard down and if they couldn't stand that ugly face I didn't need them. I didn't want to need anybody. I didn't want to have to. Dependency, like so many other things I didn't admit to, terrified me. It made me so terribly vulnerable.
I walked, very slowly, back straight and rigid, up to Thranduil's platform. He was pacing today, his hands tucked into his lower back. He watched me climbing the stairs as though I were climbing a slope of ice and his cool expression never changed.
"There are two of us on the run,
Going so fast every doubt we had was coming undone
And falling behind with everything we left there
We held on for far too long
And now we pass so many people on the road
They could come along, I wish they'd been told
They may call it a shot in the dark
From what we know, it's not unheard of
And we'll one day tell our story
Of how we made something of ourselves now."
The songs came easily to me today. I had had so long to swim through them in my mind in the day before, and I'd used so many of them to distract myself from the pain the first time when I'd had no one nearby to help me.
"Throw me in a landfill
Don't think about the consequences
Throw me in the dirt pit
Don't think about the choices that you make
Throw me in the water
Don't think about the splash I will create
Leave me at the altar
Knowing all the things you just escaped
Push me out to sea
On a little boat that you made
Out of the evergreen that you helped your father cut away
Leave me on the ice
To wait until the morning barge arrives
Don't you dare look back
Walk away
Catch up with the sunrise."
I was not so full of my own self-pity to accuse the world of never having loved me. I know there were some people left in my world that had. But the right ones had considered me a nuisance at best and a means for vengeance at worst. It had been the ruin of me.
"I'll tell him we love him
And that we'll always be there
Though my heart won't beat for much longer
I'll let him know that we will always care
I'm going home
Home to a place
A place I must go
A place you will go someday
I'm going there
Where I'll be awake
But my eyes are closed
I'm going home
I'm going home."
I bit my lips together on the insides. Home shouldn't have to be a place you only went when you died. It shouldn't be an inevitable last resort. It shouldn't be a place you were dragged to or afraid of or you associated with pain and fear. There were so many things that it just SHOULDN'T BE that mine had been—if it was not what I qualified as a home, then had I always been homeless? That was wrong too.
Thranduil interrupted my furious thoughts, for which I was grateful. I'm sure he saw how unsteady I was today—I could feel my hands trembling, and I knew my pale face had pinked with the effort I was taking not to drop to my knees and scream until my heart burst and saved me and took me to this revered distant place called home. What was it he'd said to me in our first interrogation? I understand that you are not emotionally stable. Yes, that felt about right.
Thranduil came to stand before me, both of us facing each other directly for the first time since his interrogations. I knew he had been avoiding this sort of arrangement before; in this much we had understood each other, and he seemed to well understand what made me afraid. He lifted his chin in announcement that he was going to speak and asked an unexpected question. "What do your people think of death?"
The bluntness of it startled some of the anger out of me, leveling my thoughts like a douse of ice into hot water. "Each religion and culture regards death differently. Many of the people from my culture think you will go to a paradise or a purgatory depending on how good or bad of a person you were in life."
"And yourself?"
I found that I was no longer afraid of looking at him directly, of us standing before each other looking the other in the eye. "I think I'll get another chance to live but that doesn't mean I'm not upset about how this one went and finished."
"It isn't finished yet."
I looked at my toes and then back up. "If you've read a story through once, does it mean the story isn't finished if you go through it again and just happen to have not reached the end yet?"
Thranduil took a slow step toward me, and another, his silvery robe swirling like shimmering mists around his legs. With the grace of the elves he took one knee before me, and raised one long hand to cup my face, his expression inscrutable. He seemed to be looking for something in my quieted eyes, as if he could take his comprehension from them through touch alone. My lips twitched toward a trembling smile, and tried to pull up and repeatedly failed as I felt my insides beginning to shake and I knew I was swiftly losing control of the stillness I presented on the outside. Like a tiny earthquake losing ground, I shattered back from my stresses and broke. I crumpled, plunging myself into the king's chest because he had offered sympathy in a form that I could accept, and I had needed it. I wrapped my arms around his narrow ribs and held on as tightly as I could, which wasn't very tight anymore, and stuck my face in the fabric of his shoulder because I knew no one would make me leave that spot before he did. It was a safe little spot to be at the moment.
Thranduil hesitated, unsure of what to do with himself or perhaps with his hands. I wondered when the last time he'd been embraced had been. I knew it hadn't happened from a child anytime recently, since there were no longer children here aside from me. But after a pause his hands settled lightly on one of my shoulders and the back of my hip, his arms held carefully away from my back.
"Thank you," I said into his shirt, reigning the trembles back in. "For letting me use you to relearn old habits."
"I understand," he said, which told me next to nothing when it came to him, but that was all right. I didn't need anything else from him. He had already helped me.
(pg288)
Last Edit: 22 December 2014