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This started out because I wanted a Gimli/Legolas dieselpunk AU that was still set in Middle Earth, and then it morphed on me half way through into canon style angst and reconciliation between Gimli and Thranduil. I have a terrible suspicion that it is neither fish nor fowl now. Apologies in advance?
Title: Northern Babylon
Rating: PG
Fandom: Lord of the Rings, The Hobbit
Characters/Pairings: Gimli, Thranduil. Gimli/Legolas, Gimli & Thranduil, Gimli & Glóin
Summary: After four years fighting the war in the south, Gimli and Legolas have come back to their home city of New Rhovanion changed, and perhaps for the better. Gimli tries to make Elven Councillor Thranduil understand this, and understand that maybe there's hope for more than just Gimli and Legolas as well
Wordcount: 6036
Warnings/Notes: Alternate Universe, Dieselpunk, Cities, Post-War of the Ring, Meet the Parents, Family Feuds, Old Grudges, Reconiliation, Love
Disclaimer: Not mine
Title: Northern Babylon
Rating: PG
Fandom: Lord of the Rings, The Hobbit
Characters/Pairings: Gimli, Thranduil. Gimli/Legolas, Gimli & Thranduil, Gimli & Glóin
Summary: After four years fighting the war in the south, Gimli and Legolas have come back to their home city of New Rhovanion changed, and perhaps for the better. Gimli tries to make Elven Councillor Thranduil understand this, and understand that maybe there's hope for more than just Gimli and Legolas as well
Wordcount: 6036
Warnings/Notes: Alternate Universe, Dieselpunk, Cities, Post-War of the Ring, Meet the Parents, Family Feuds, Old Grudges, Reconiliation, Love
Disclaimer: Not mine
Northern Babylon
The war had changed them, Gimli thought. It had changed everyone, of course. None of them had gotten out unscathed. It had done a particular number on the elf and him, however. It must have done, because there were few other explanations for how odd he was feeling right now. How much a stranger he felt, in surroundings that should have been familiar.
He didn't think it was New Rhovanion that had changed. The city had been spared most of the ravages of the war in the south. They'd held off Mordor's advance south of the Running, managing to avoid military occupation, though the Lake District, the still-extant swathes of Mirkwood Forest, and the surface towers of the city itself had taken some damage. The first two had been the cost of stopping the Easterling ground advance, something Gimli knew had a much higher cost in lives, dwarven, elven and human alike, than it had in infrastructure. The latter had been the result of Nazgul airstrikes relatively early in the war, before the Thornhoth Eagles had driven them back south and the land war in Gondor had taken up too much of the Witch-King's attention to bother with anything north of Dol Guldur.
The strikes hadn't done too much serious damage. Not to the structures themselves, at least. New Rhovanion's towers had held strong against dragonfire bombs less than a generation ago, things that could melt rock and steel and concrete as easily as flesh. They'd withstood the explosive anarchy of Smaug's terrorist campaign, when over half the city's dwarven and human populations had been forcibly expelled, and urban fighting in the undercity had killed hundreds more. Nazgul overflights, for all their potency as a terror weapon, just didn't have the same kind of destructive power.
They'd taken chunks out of the city-top forestscape, though. Now that he had the eye for it, Gimli could see the places where it was still under repair. Several of the vast tiered balconies and the street-spanning aqueducts had given way altogether, even now still in the process of being rebuilt, and there were a thousand strange shards of sunlight to be seen as the great glasshouses and refracting mirrors were moved and repaired across the upper city. Worse than that, though, at least for those to whom mattered, were the vast barren stretches where the forests and gardens themselves had been burned away, leaving only cold concrete, melted steel and blacked earth behind them. The great hanging gardens of New Rhovanion, the city-top cathedral of light, had apparently taken the brunt of the city's physical blows this time.
It was strange for Gimli to find himself noticing that, to find himself understanding the pain of it. Dwarves in New Rhovanion didn't spend a lot of time looking upwards, after all. They had their own section of the city to be thinking about, the vast underground mines and thoroughfares, the lower reaches of the towers and the surface streetscapes where the city monorails and the vast ironworks lived. The Ereborean District, carved back into the mountain and the rock beneath the city, its oldest and purest part, was where Gimli had spent so much of his life. It was strange for him to spend so much time looking upward, moving upward.
He'd changed, though. The war had changed him, the things he'd seen, the things Legolas had shown him. He had an idea, now, what that damage meant to the elves of New Rhovanion. He'd seen his elf's face when their train had finally pulled into sight of the city and the scars across its upper reaches had become obvious. He'd seen the blankness that had slipped into Legolas' eyes.
And somehow, because of it, here he was. Gimli Glóinson, an Ereborean dwarf born and bred, standing on a balcony on the side of the Greenwood Oropherion Tower, trying desperately not to think about how many hundreds of feet too high into the air he was. Below him, down at street level and just above it, the great central depot of the Iron Rail Company spewed trains out onto the raised tracks above Oakenshield Avenue, and lighter engines onto the magnetic monorails a few storeys above them. With the repaired mirrors on the upper reaches of the tower filling the street canyon with light almost all the way to the bottom, it was terrifyingly obvious exactly how many feet above that familiar sight he now was.
It wasn't the same, the heights compared to the depths. He'd looked into chasms hundreds of feet deep in Khazad-dûm without a qualm, the great bridge spans of the subterranean Dwarrowdelf inspiring more awe in him than terror. That had been no less of a fall. With the artificial electric suns, no less visible a one either. He knew that. It was just ... it was different up here. It was different on the surface, on one of the tallest towers in New Rhovanion, on some flimsy elven balcony that had blasted tree roots sticking out of the bottom of it. He could see half the city from here. More to the point, he could see how it was all beneath him.
He should have stayed inside, he thought desperately. He should have kept to the interior atrium. The balconies and rooftops and external terraces were the realms of the elves, but the towers that bore them all up were still dwarven construction. The internal shafts, insulated from the sheer external drop and lit exclusively by light refracted from above, had managed to stay comfortably subterranean in feel despite the best efforts of their human and elven occupants. Even the Greenwood Oropherion, the great bastion of Wilderland Elvendom, full of light and water and greenery and with as much of the exterior reaches open to the elements as elvenly possible, hadn't been able to disguise the solid, quintessentially dwarven nature of the stone it was built in.
It had been eminently comforting to a poor dwarf lost and frowned upon in the elven reaches. For all that relations between the upper and lower city had eased since the bad years of Smaug's reign of terror, helped along by the influx of humans into the reconstructed Dale and Lake Districts, there still wasn't a lot of intermingling, and it was obvious from every elven face around him that Gimli wasn't meant to be up here. It wasn't that he was unwelcome, as such, just that he was very visibly out of place and everyone around him was very visibly refraining from mentioning it. In the face of that, a little dwarven architecture would have been really reassuring about now. A nice shield against both the heights and the blasted elves who lived in them.
Except that he'd come here for an elf. Except that there was one blasted elf for whom he would have -and had- braved a lot more than a mildly terrifying height and a little social disapproval. He'd seen the expression on Legolas' face at the damage to the forestscape. He couldn't begrudge him some time in the reaches trying to fix it.
Now, if only the bugger would actually show up, appear on the balcony and let them both go inside, Gimli would be golden. If the elf would only hurry up ...
"I'm told you're looking for my son."
A cool, unfamiliar voice sounded behind him, from the direction of the balcony doors, and Gimli's stomach took an abrupt plunge over the railings, happily heading streetwards and leaving the rest of him stuck behind it. He turned around slowly, already knowing who he'd see, and wasn't in the least disappointed.
He'd seen Thranduil Oropherion before, of course. Mostly in newsreels, but from a distance as well. The Elven High Councillor had a talent for being seen looking imperiously downwards from various heights, and had a particular fondness for the skycars and the aqueduct gondolas. He was easily recognisable, wearing those long, almost archaic greatcoats the elves favoured, all bronze and green, with his long golden hair bizarrely braided back with something that looked for all the world like live ivy. Even the most deep dwelling, surface-averse dwarves could recognise Thranduil on sight.
He looked a little different now. Some of it was the informality of his dress. Gimli was almost positive that few, if any, dwarves had ever seen the Elven Councillor in shirtsleeves and waistcoat before, his hair looped back into a tail that was, yes, held with an actual trailing plant, for reasons probably only an elf would know. It made him look smaller, somehow, maybe a little bit more fragile. Not quite the distant, impressive creature he usually appeared.
It wasn't just the clothes, though. Thranduil had raised a cool, imperious eyebrow at him as he stepped through the doors, and Gimli had the impression that this particular elf could manage to look distant and impressive even if he was standing buck naked two feet away from you. It wasn't his dress that made him look somehow smaller to Gimli now.
It was Gimli himself, Gimli thought, and Legolas too. He'd seen his share of impressive elves, now. Lord Elrond, Commander in Chief of the Allied Council. Lady Galadriel, dressed in white and amber, fearless in the face of Mordor. He'd seen his share of fragile elves, too. He'd seen Legolas through thick and thin, through grief and pain and triumph. He knew how vulnerable an elf could be, nowadays. He knew how defiantly strong they could be despite it. Thranduil's facade of impassive regality looked like just that to him now: a facade. A good one. An often real one. But a facade nonetheless.
Oddly, it almost made Gimli feel better about meeting him. Not because it gave him an edge or anything. Thranduil was Legolas' father, Gimli had no intention of trying to hurt or embarrass him without provocation. But it made Thranduil seem more real, and less a gold statue that had been propped up on a height. It made him seem like someone Gimli had a hope of dealing with.
"... Nothing to say?" Thranduil went on, moving further out onto the balcony and frowning at Gimli curiously. "I wouldn't have thought your mission was as secret as all that. Though I suppose, given your father, it may simply be habit on your part."
Gimli coughed, startled out of his trance. It was the height. He blamed everything on the height. It was no good expecting sense from a dwarf when he was nine hundred feet into the sky on a skinny bit of stone and metal.
He did bristle, though, for the reminder of Thranduil's treachery during Smaug's reign of terror. His father and the rest of the insurgency could have used better than blind indifference and a spot of imprisonment from someone who'd had no cause to aid the dragon. Even Smaug's fair and elven disguise shouldn't have been enough to fool so old and suspicious a creature as Thranduil into betraying them. Though it hadn't, he supposed. They'd realised that when the elf had stepped up afterwards. The funds and supplies he'd hidden from Smaug during the occupancy had been the salvation of a battered city in the aftermath, when outside aid would have taken too long getting in.
And, too, he had to allow that Thranduil had had other problems. The details of the Sauron's decades-long campaigns of destabilisation and corruption against the northern states were only now coming to light. Having seen Mordor up close and personal now, and knowing how fatal a weakness it might have been to trying fighting on two fronts, Gimli could maybe understand why Thranduil had chosen the path of temporary appeasement with the dragon.
It didn't stop the instinctive rush of anger and old betrayal, though.
"My apologies, Councillor," he growled tightly. "I was a bit distracted by the massive fall. Dwarves aren't meant for heights, you know."
Thranduil blinked, and glided over to stand beside Gimli and peer across the rail. As though he'd forgotten exactly how far up they were, and wanted to remind himself. Gimli refrained from growling at him. Truly he did.
"I see," the elf said, smiling faintly. "My apologies, then, Master Dwarf. I should have had them bring you to an interior waiting room. We have so few dwarven visitors to the tower that I'm afraid I'd forgotten how it affects you. Stonehelm usually prefers to meet with me in City Hall. Neutral territory, as it were."
"I'm not surprised," Gimli said grimly, easing his hands off the railing and shuffling away from the edge now that Thranduil had distracted him enough to allow it. "I've no idea how my ancestors managed to stay up here long enough to build these blasted things. Scaffolding at this height, in the open air with all this wind ..."
"It was an impressive endeavour," Thranduil agreed, his expression going a little distant. "Though much of the physical work on the heights was done by my people, past a certain point. Your ancestors designed the towers, but once we'd learned enough from aiding on the lower floors, we were able to carry out most of the external work at height. A great number of Rhovanion towers, though dwarven in design, are actually of elven construction in their upper reaches." He turned to Gimli, and smiled a little bit. "We're not entirely useless, you know. We can build as well as occupy."
Gimli blinked at him. "I ... I didn't know that," he said at last. Admitting it freely, because he honestly hadn't. He knew every inch of the lower city, knew who had carved every hollow and laid every stone in Erebor. The city-top had never held his interest, not until he'd spent four years fighting a war in the south with a Greenwood elf.
Thranduil simply looked at him, keeping that faint smile, and shrugged impassively. "It was a long time ago," he dismissed, waving a hand. "It was an arrangement of necessity between us, no more and no less. The southern expansion of Lorien and then Mordor into Mirkwood, and the loss of Moria for your people, left all of us little enough choice. An alliance for the foundation of a unified city state, one that could stand equal with any of the southern powers, was the only hope any of us could see." His smile slipped, became a sneer, old and tired. "You'll find that life is made of concessions for the greater good. However quickly they may be forgotten in the aftermath."
"I know," Gimli said, and Thranduil looked at him curiously. He shrugged, stiff and careful. "It's been a long four years. For everyone. I think all of us who fought have an idea what concessions look like now, and alliances too."
Thranduil stared at him for a long moment. He was leaning on the railings, his braid swinging out over the abyss and dancing idly in the breeze. He should have looked like Legolas. Gimli had seen his elf stand like that, dressed like that. Thranduil should have looked just like his son. Instead, for some reason, he looked more like Aragorn. Grave and tired, and with a strange light in his eyes, like the beginning of hope.
"Perhaps we do," the Councillor allowed, looking at Gimli thoughtfully. "There's a part of me, Master Dwarf, that wonders cynically how long it will take us to forget it this time, as we have forgotten it every time before. Alliances are fragile things, you see. Self-interest wins out sooner or later. It has always been so, as far as I have seen it." He paused, rubbing absently at one side of his face, bizarrely disarmed. "And yet," he murmured softly. "Yet something feels different this time. Maybe it's age catching up with me. Maybe it's blind optimism. But things feel ... brighter, all of a sudden. The air feels fresher. I'm not sure why."
Gimli stared at him for a second. Aragorn, he thought distantly. Faramir. But not just them. He thought of Dwalin, holding court in barrack halls under the South Spur rail line. He thought of his father, announcing Erebor Industrials as part of the New Rhovanion representatives in the Allied Council. The sense of calm they had, the sense that something had been accomplished, and in its wake all things were possible. He looked at Thranduil, and thought of that.
"... Sauron was your Smaug, wasn't he?" he asked quietly, and Thranduil startled so badly he looked in brief danger of falling. The elf stared at him wide-eyed, as truly startled as Gimli guessed anyone had ever seen him, and he was just enough his father's son to find some satisfaction in that. Only for a moment, though. He had too much of an inkling of what he was saying, how much it mattered, to hold it long.
"What ...?" Thranduil started. Confused first, and then with a burgeoning, defensive anger. Gimli almost shook his head at the familiarity of it. "What are you talking about? Did Legolas---"
"The elf told me nothing," Gimli interrupted, rather hurriedly. It was true, and he hadn't planned to get Legolas in trouble with his father before the elf even knew that was an option. "He didn't have to. I know you elves like to be all mysterious all the time, but it wasn't that hard to make a guess. And a right one, by the looks of things." He paused, and said more gently: "He was to you what Smaug was to my father, wasn't he. He was the thing that kept you awake at night."
Thranduil stared at him, still half-caught in anger, and then, abruptly, he stood straight and stalked a little way away. He moved across to the other side of the balcony, facing outwards and wrapping his hands tight around the railing. Gimli blinked after him.
"I was there for the last Alliance," Thranduil said at last, stiff and cold to the chasm beneath them. "The last great war. And it was, you know. It was supposed to be the last. Ten years of horror, after which no war would come again. I always knew that it wouldn't be that way, though. Even before Sauron disguised himself as a mortal and took over Dol Guldur, driving my people northward, I knew our 'Great War' was never going to be our last. I have been waiting for him to show his face ever since. And I was right. He was here, all along. In the North, learning our secrets, learning our industrial base, seeking out his old weapons where we'd so carelessly dropped them. I knew he was here. I knew he would come back."
"... It doesn't make it better," Gimli said, because he had to. For his father's sake, he still had to. "What you did with Smaug. What you allowed to happen. It doesn't make it better that you had a reason. Not to those of us who lost people. Lost homes."
"I know that," Thranduil said. He turned a little, looked back across his shoulder to meet Gimli's eyes steadily. "I knew that from the first. But Smaug wasn't someone I could afford to fight. Every resource I had that wasn't directly tied into the city's running was focused southwards, into the Lake District and the remains of Mirkwood, to the borders with Dol Guldur. I had to keep control of our external borders. I couldn't fight an internal battle on top of that. I had to let Smaug take over, and leave his demise for someone else."
Gimli sighed, reaching up to scrub tiredly at his face. He didn't want to deal with this. Not on top of heights and homecomings and elves who were missing and/or late. He'd never been good at politics. He'd been a frontline soldier, probably among the best of them. After four years of war, after watching Aragorn struggle to rebuild his state in its wake, Gimli had hoped that coming home would be a break from it.
He should have known better, really. He'd come back with an elf. He'd come back with Legolas, and he'd been seeing his city half through elven eyes ever since. In this city, there was nothing worse for inviting politics to your door.
"At least it's over now," he sighed out, ambling over to stand beside his heart's father, turning to lean against the railing and pointedly ignore the fall behind him. Thranduil stared down at him, bemused and, perhaps, mildly charmed. "They're both gone, Smaug and Sauron after him. That's why you feel light, I guess. It's really over. This time, the bastards can't come back."
Thranduil studied him, very intensely all of a sudden, soft and thoughtful and curious. Gimli shifted uneasily, trying to ignore the itch in his spine the scrutiny caused. Elves. They had staring down to a fine art, yes indeed.
"You came looking for my son," the Councillor said at last, without looking away. "He's spoken of you, you know. He speaks of you quite often, since he returned. He counts you his boon companion. Perhaps ... even more than that. You do know that, I think?"
Gimli grimaced, his stomach taking another nice long lurch into space. Thank you, Legolas. So much for the famously closemouthed elves of Greenwood.
"We're not---" he started, shrugging awkwardly. "It's not official. Not yet. We had to come home first. Had to finish a few things. Tell people, ask for a blessing if not permission, get thundered at for a while before attempting to elope ... Ah. Not that we were ... Never mind. It won't matter for a while yet, now. Things here were worse than we'd expected. Worse than we'd hoped. We both wanted to help fix things for a while first. Before ... you know."
"Before informing your respective parents that you were intending to elope?" Thranduil asked, but it was humour more than rage on his face when Gimli chanced a look at him. In fact, it was close to mischief, and for a second there Gimli really could see Legolas in his father's features. Clear as diamonds in the deeps.
"Before informing them that we'd come to love each other, yes," he said gruffly, glaring at the elf in his turn. "And that we wanted to head back south soon. It wouldn't have been an elopement, tempting as the thought is. I know he loves you, you know. I'd not have stolen him away without saying anything. Nor he me, for that matter. And we'll have to wait for a while now anyway. He wants to help fix the city-top before we leave. It ... It did him damage, to come back and see it broken."
Something flickered in Thranduil's expression at that. It wasn't grave, nor angry either. Old, maybe. Old, and very tired.
"He's never lost a home before," the Councillor said quietly. "He was born long after the reshaping of Rhovanion, let alone the migration from the old countries. This place, this city, is the only home he's ever known, and it's never fallen in his memory. Even when Smaug was at his worst, he didn't touch the city-tops. Legolas has never seen it damaged on that scale before. He's seen it poisoned by Sauron, by my fear, but he has never seen scars carved across its face, or the physical evidence of how close it came to falling."
Gimli didn't answer. He remembered the slums of Ered Luin, if more dimly by the year. He remembered the loss in his father's face when they spoke of Erebor, of being driven out, of being cast from their own homes under threat of violence and of terror. He remembered anger, and pain, and grim determination. He'd known what Legolas had felt while their train pulled ever closer to the city. He'd known exactly what that look in his eyes had meant. He'd seen it long before, on so many now-gone faces.
There was part of him that might have been happy to see it on Legolas, once upon a time. A part that would have been grimly satisfied that at last an elf knew what it was like, had been forced to understand what Gimli and his people had had to endure when the dragon came. It had been quite a large part, once.
Things were different now. The war had changed them, hadn't it. It had burned out so many old hatreds, and left instead the faith and the companionship of brothers in arms. He'd fought beside Legolas, he lived and bled and loved alongside the elf on the battlefields of Rohan, Gondor and Mordor for four years now. He'd come to love him, out of the blue and for no sane reason, but he had. He could never want pain for Legolas now. If he could have kept him from knowing it, if he could have rebuilt those scarred city-tops with a wave of his hand, Gimli thought he would have done it. He wouldn't even have hesitated.
And Thranduil ...
It shouldn't make a difference that Thranduil apparently knew what exile felt like, that he had known pain and terror and the loss of many homes. It should have made it worse, even, that he could have known what it was like and refused to take a stand against Smaug anyway, that he could have let the expulsion happen. That should have sowed an even bigger anger in Gimli. It should have made things worse.
It didn't. Gimli looked up at him, this strange, exhausted elf who'd lost his sneering facade, and even if he hadn't had Legolas in his heart, Gimli thought that maybe he might have forgiven Thranduil anyway. Just because it was over. Just because they were tired. Just because Smaug had been bigger than any of them, and Sauron bigger still, and somehow, despite that, they'd survived them. They'd beaten them. The towers of New Rhovanion still stood tall, for all their scars. The mines and the great halls and the ironworks still soldiered onwards, defiantly triumphant as the dust of Mordor settled. The forestscape would be repaired. The war was won. The bastards, once and for all, would not be coming back.
"He didn't see it fall this time, either," he said, slowly and carefully. He looked up at the Elven Councillor, his soon-to-be father-in-law, and felt a small, fierce little grin creep across his features. "He's not going to. None of us are. We won. I know we won, because I was there. Nothing's going to fall now. And a few things ... a few things are going to get built."
Thranduil looked down at him, a strange, faint smile appearing on his face, and all of a sudden Gimli believed that Thranduil had been a soldier too, once. He saw now that Legolas really had gotten it from his father, even as Gimli had gotten it from his. There was a wild, fierce light in the Elven Councillor's eyes, and Gimli could see how it had once allied with old enemies to build the greatest city in Rhovanion, simply because no other choice had been offered. He could see the creature who had fought the last great war, and come away knowing he'd have to fight again, and spent so very long and sold so many friendships making ready to do just that.
"Legolas mentioned that, yes," Thranduil murmured, smiling brightly. "A pair of cities, wasn't it? A little Southern Rhovanion, to help the human realms rebuild, and remind them who else was fighting beside them?"
Gimli stared at him. "I think we were focused more on the 'helping rebuild' part," he said, shaking his head in amazement. "We wanted to build something new, and help our friends while we were at it. Reminders I don't think we imagined coming into it."
Thranduil lifted his lip. His facade had never been wholly feigned, Gimli realised. His father had been right. There was, at the base of this creature, something that honestly was as hard and fierce and slow to trust as he'd been made out to be. It wasn't as complete as Glóin had believed. It wasn't all the Elven Councillor was. But it was there, nonetheless.
"There is hope now," Thranduil told him softly, and he looked at Gimli the way Glóin did sometimes. The way he must look at Legolas. Like a father. "There's hope, but there's self-interest too. There always is. Alliances are still fragile things, no matter how great the victory they've won. A city can still fall, can still tear itself apart from the inside. Alliances can be betrayed. When you return south, with my son's heart in your hands, you will remember that. You will remember to guard him as you guard yourself, against all the evils that still exist in this world. Won't you, Gimli Glóinson."
Gimli's breath hitched in his chest. His heart stuttered, terror and hope, because suddenly he knew what this was. He understood what he was being granted here, from so old and so suspicious a creature, with all their old grudges still between them. Thranduil sneered down at him, met Gimli's eyes with that wild, fierce stare of his, and Gimli understood at once.
"I will," he said quietly, solemn and sure as any oath he'd ever offered anyone. "I'll guard your son as the other half of my heart and my soul. I'll guard his life as my own, with my own. He'll know no pain that I have strength and means to stop. I swear that to you and gladly, by any oath you care to name."
Thranduil measured him, in the wake of that. Still and silent and more terrifying than even the chasm of air at his back, Thranduil weighed his sincerity for an endless moment. And then, with a mercurial change of mood that would have done the wind itself proud, the Elven Councillor straightened up once again and granted Gimli a bland and disarming smile.
"Good," the elf said, with abrupt and casual unconcern. "I think that settles things nicely between us. I'll go send someone to tell Legolas that you're here, shall I?"
Gimli blinked at him. "Tell someone that---" he repeated, and felt an old, familiar anger blossom almost distantly as he realised what it meant. "You mean he doesn't know!? I've been waiting here for more than an hour, on this ... this elven bit of fluff, swinging in the breeze! You-- You--"
"Oh, come now, Master Dwarf," Thranduil cut in, once again as snidely imperious as Gimli had ever seen him. "You cannot blame me, surely. I have ways and means of guarding that which I care about. I am not scrupulous in their use, and never have been. I have never had that luxury. You seek to claim my son. You should be glad that it was only a mild delay and a nice view of the city that greeted you, don't you think?"
Gimli stared at him. He couldn't ... He didn't ...
"You," he said, with thick, furious admiration. "You are the biggest bastard of an elf that I have ever met in my life, and I've known some who wanted to shoot me on sight! You know that? My father hates your guts, and if I didn't love your son, if I hadn't seen what I've seen ..."
"If you didn't love my son, you wouldn't be my problem, and we would never have had to have this little conversation," Thranduil pointed out. He smiled faintly in amusement, although he sobered a little almost immediately. "Understand. I don't expect us to be friends, Master Dwarf. I don't expect us to ever like each other. I know the history your family has with mine, and I understand when I've burnt my bridges beyond repair, believe me. I simply wanted to know what you felt for Legolas, and how much he mattered to you. I almost lost him. He marched south into a shadow that once took almost all I held dear. I thought I had lost him, you understand? And now he has returned, and soon he will leave again, and you are part of the reason for both. I will not apologise for testing you. I cannot."
... He couldn't deal with this, Gimli realised. He was too tired for this. They all were. But he understood. He thought of his own father, of the conversation they still had to have, and he understood Thranduil in this moment all too well. He didn't want to, any more than he had wanted to like and then love Legolas once upon a time, but he understood him nonetheless.
And maybe, with understanding, there came something not too far from forgiveness.
"... You never lose, do you?" he asked softly, shaking his head exhaustedly at yet another impossible bloody elf. "You or your son. You really never lose."
Thranduil tilted his head, a strange expression on his face. "I have lost more than you ever will," he said quietly. Almost gently. "I say that as much as a hope as anything else. The Valar willing, neither you nor my son will ever learn to lose as I have lost, nor will you ever become what I became. I do not win, Gimli. I simply endure, until my enemies have withered in the interim." He smiled faintly. "As an approach, it is not without its merits, I grant you that. It does not make you many friends, however, and I think you and my son would find that wearisome."
Gimli tugged his beard irritably in response to that. Not because he disagreed, necessarily. He didn't. Just because he didn't know what to do with it, and was too tired and annoyed to try figuring it out. He had to, though. He knew that, and in its cause ...
He stomped over to the balcony doors, coming to a halt directly in front of Thranduil, the better to glare up at him evilly. The elf blinked at him, bemused once again, and only more so when Gimli abruptly stuck out his hand and turned it to offer a warrior's clasp. Thranduil reared back a little, wrongfooted by the gesture, and Gimli waggled his hand impatiently until at last, extraordinarily warily, the elf reached down and clasped Gimli's arm in turn. Brotherhood, or close enough to count. A strange thing to seek out with your lover's father.
"It might get you friends enough yet," he said gruffly, looking up at the elf. "You've lasted long enough for friendship to be safe again. Might be you ought to think about that some, hmm?"
Thranduil shook his head, an odd confusion, but he kept his grip on Gimli's arm. He held tight to a hope. "My son loves you," he said, watching Gimli curiously. "Is that not enough for you, that you'd want the friendship of your father's enemy as well?"
Gimli snorted. "I love your son," he countered. "Wanting his father's friendship isn't that much of a stretch. The time for war is over, Thranduil. I've had four years, and I'm sick to my ears of it. It's time for rebuilding now, and maybe that might include some long-burnt bridges, don't you think? Just for the challenge, if nothing else."
Thranduil laughed. Involuntarily, Gimli thought, looking down at him in frank amazement, but he laughed nonetheless, and squeezed Gimli's arm in startled agreement. He'd had a longer war than Gimli, of course. He'd been fighting for an awfully long time, while the world kept changing around him. It would take him a while to get used to the sense of lightness now that he didn't have to anymore. It might take him a while ... to get used to the possibilities of it.
But he would get used to them, Gimli thought. He hoped so, anyway. He smiled up at Legolas' father, his people's old adversary staring in baffled amusement down at him, and he thought there might be hope for the lot of them yet. The war had changed them, one and all.
And for some of them, Gimli thought, it had changed them for the better.
The war had changed them, Gimli thought. It had changed everyone, of course. None of them had gotten out unscathed. It had done a particular number on the elf and him, however. It must have done, because there were few other explanations for how odd he was feeling right now. How much a stranger he felt, in surroundings that should have been familiar.
He didn't think it was New Rhovanion that had changed. The city had been spared most of the ravages of the war in the south. They'd held off Mordor's advance south of the Running, managing to avoid military occupation, though the Lake District, the still-extant swathes of Mirkwood Forest, and the surface towers of the city itself had taken some damage. The first two had been the cost of stopping the Easterling ground advance, something Gimli knew had a much higher cost in lives, dwarven, elven and human alike, than it had in infrastructure. The latter had been the result of Nazgul airstrikes relatively early in the war, before the Thornhoth Eagles had driven them back south and the land war in Gondor had taken up too much of the Witch-King's attention to bother with anything north of Dol Guldur.
The strikes hadn't done too much serious damage. Not to the structures themselves, at least. New Rhovanion's towers had held strong against dragonfire bombs less than a generation ago, things that could melt rock and steel and concrete as easily as flesh. They'd withstood the explosive anarchy of Smaug's terrorist campaign, when over half the city's dwarven and human populations had been forcibly expelled, and urban fighting in the undercity had killed hundreds more. Nazgul overflights, for all their potency as a terror weapon, just didn't have the same kind of destructive power.
They'd taken chunks out of the city-top forestscape, though. Now that he had the eye for it, Gimli could see the places where it was still under repair. Several of the vast tiered balconies and the street-spanning aqueducts had given way altogether, even now still in the process of being rebuilt, and there were a thousand strange shards of sunlight to be seen as the great glasshouses and refracting mirrors were moved and repaired across the upper city. Worse than that, though, at least for those to whom mattered, were the vast barren stretches where the forests and gardens themselves had been burned away, leaving only cold concrete, melted steel and blacked earth behind them. The great hanging gardens of New Rhovanion, the city-top cathedral of light, had apparently taken the brunt of the city's physical blows this time.
It was strange for Gimli to find himself noticing that, to find himself understanding the pain of it. Dwarves in New Rhovanion didn't spend a lot of time looking upwards, after all. They had their own section of the city to be thinking about, the vast underground mines and thoroughfares, the lower reaches of the towers and the surface streetscapes where the city monorails and the vast ironworks lived. The Ereborean District, carved back into the mountain and the rock beneath the city, its oldest and purest part, was where Gimli had spent so much of his life. It was strange for him to spend so much time looking upward, moving upward.
He'd changed, though. The war had changed him, the things he'd seen, the things Legolas had shown him. He had an idea, now, what that damage meant to the elves of New Rhovanion. He'd seen his elf's face when their train had finally pulled into sight of the city and the scars across its upper reaches had become obvious. He'd seen the blankness that had slipped into Legolas' eyes.
And somehow, because of it, here he was. Gimli Glóinson, an Ereborean dwarf born and bred, standing on a balcony on the side of the Greenwood Oropherion Tower, trying desperately not to think about how many hundreds of feet too high into the air he was. Below him, down at street level and just above it, the great central depot of the Iron Rail Company spewed trains out onto the raised tracks above Oakenshield Avenue, and lighter engines onto the magnetic monorails a few storeys above them. With the repaired mirrors on the upper reaches of the tower filling the street canyon with light almost all the way to the bottom, it was terrifyingly obvious exactly how many feet above that familiar sight he now was.
It wasn't the same, the heights compared to the depths. He'd looked into chasms hundreds of feet deep in Khazad-dûm without a qualm, the great bridge spans of the subterranean Dwarrowdelf inspiring more awe in him than terror. That had been no less of a fall. With the artificial electric suns, no less visible a one either. He knew that. It was just ... it was different up here. It was different on the surface, on one of the tallest towers in New Rhovanion, on some flimsy elven balcony that had blasted tree roots sticking out of the bottom of it. He could see half the city from here. More to the point, he could see how it was all beneath him.
He should have stayed inside, he thought desperately. He should have kept to the interior atrium. The balconies and rooftops and external terraces were the realms of the elves, but the towers that bore them all up were still dwarven construction. The internal shafts, insulated from the sheer external drop and lit exclusively by light refracted from above, had managed to stay comfortably subterranean in feel despite the best efforts of their human and elven occupants. Even the Greenwood Oropherion, the great bastion of Wilderland Elvendom, full of light and water and greenery and with as much of the exterior reaches open to the elements as elvenly possible, hadn't been able to disguise the solid, quintessentially dwarven nature of the stone it was built in.
It had been eminently comforting to a poor dwarf lost and frowned upon in the elven reaches. For all that relations between the upper and lower city had eased since the bad years of Smaug's reign of terror, helped along by the influx of humans into the reconstructed Dale and Lake Districts, there still wasn't a lot of intermingling, and it was obvious from every elven face around him that Gimli wasn't meant to be up here. It wasn't that he was unwelcome, as such, just that he was very visibly out of place and everyone around him was very visibly refraining from mentioning it. In the face of that, a little dwarven architecture would have been really reassuring about now. A nice shield against both the heights and the blasted elves who lived in them.
Except that he'd come here for an elf. Except that there was one blasted elf for whom he would have -and had- braved a lot more than a mildly terrifying height and a little social disapproval. He'd seen the expression on Legolas' face at the damage to the forestscape. He couldn't begrudge him some time in the reaches trying to fix it.
Now, if only the bugger would actually show up, appear on the balcony and let them both go inside, Gimli would be golden. If the elf would only hurry up ...
"I'm told you're looking for my son."
A cool, unfamiliar voice sounded behind him, from the direction of the balcony doors, and Gimli's stomach took an abrupt plunge over the railings, happily heading streetwards and leaving the rest of him stuck behind it. He turned around slowly, already knowing who he'd see, and wasn't in the least disappointed.
He'd seen Thranduil Oropherion before, of course. Mostly in newsreels, but from a distance as well. The Elven High Councillor had a talent for being seen looking imperiously downwards from various heights, and had a particular fondness for the skycars and the aqueduct gondolas. He was easily recognisable, wearing those long, almost archaic greatcoats the elves favoured, all bronze and green, with his long golden hair bizarrely braided back with something that looked for all the world like live ivy. Even the most deep dwelling, surface-averse dwarves could recognise Thranduil on sight.
He looked a little different now. Some of it was the informality of his dress. Gimli was almost positive that few, if any, dwarves had ever seen the Elven Councillor in shirtsleeves and waistcoat before, his hair looped back into a tail that was, yes, held with an actual trailing plant, for reasons probably only an elf would know. It made him look smaller, somehow, maybe a little bit more fragile. Not quite the distant, impressive creature he usually appeared.
It wasn't just the clothes, though. Thranduil had raised a cool, imperious eyebrow at him as he stepped through the doors, and Gimli had the impression that this particular elf could manage to look distant and impressive even if he was standing buck naked two feet away from you. It wasn't his dress that made him look somehow smaller to Gimli now.
It was Gimli himself, Gimli thought, and Legolas too. He'd seen his share of impressive elves, now. Lord Elrond, Commander in Chief of the Allied Council. Lady Galadriel, dressed in white and amber, fearless in the face of Mordor. He'd seen his share of fragile elves, too. He'd seen Legolas through thick and thin, through grief and pain and triumph. He knew how vulnerable an elf could be, nowadays. He knew how defiantly strong they could be despite it. Thranduil's facade of impassive regality looked like just that to him now: a facade. A good one. An often real one. But a facade nonetheless.
Oddly, it almost made Gimli feel better about meeting him. Not because it gave him an edge or anything. Thranduil was Legolas' father, Gimli had no intention of trying to hurt or embarrass him without provocation. But it made Thranduil seem more real, and less a gold statue that had been propped up on a height. It made him seem like someone Gimli had a hope of dealing with.
"... Nothing to say?" Thranduil went on, moving further out onto the balcony and frowning at Gimli curiously. "I wouldn't have thought your mission was as secret as all that. Though I suppose, given your father, it may simply be habit on your part."
Gimli coughed, startled out of his trance. It was the height. He blamed everything on the height. It was no good expecting sense from a dwarf when he was nine hundred feet into the sky on a skinny bit of stone and metal.
He did bristle, though, for the reminder of Thranduil's treachery during Smaug's reign of terror. His father and the rest of the insurgency could have used better than blind indifference and a spot of imprisonment from someone who'd had no cause to aid the dragon. Even Smaug's fair and elven disguise shouldn't have been enough to fool so old and suspicious a creature as Thranduil into betraying them. Though it hadn't, he supposed. They'd realised that when the elf had stepped up afterwards. The funds and supplies he'd hidden from Smaug during the occupancy had been the salvation of a battered city in the aftermath, when outside aid would have taken too long getting in.
And, too, he had to allow that Thranduil had had other problems. The details of the Sauron's decades-long campaigns of destabilisation and corruption against the northern states were only now coming to light. Having seen Mordor up close and personal now, and knowing how fatal a weakness it might have been to trying fighting on two fronts, Gimli could maybe understand why Thranduil had chosen the path of temporary appeasement with the dragon.
It didn't stop the instinctive rush of anger and old betrayal, though.
"My apologies, Councillor," he growled tightly. "I was a bit distracted by the massive fall. Dwarves aren't meant for heights, you know."
Thranduil blinked, and glided over to stand beside Gimli and peer across the rail. As though he'd forgotten exactly how far up they were, and wanted to remind himself. Gimli refrained from growling at him. Truly he did.
"I see," the elf said, smiling faintly. "My apologies, then, Master Dwarf. I should have had them bring you to an interior waiting room. We have so few dwarven visitors to the tower that I'm afraid I'd forgotten how it affects you. Stonehelm usually prefers to meet with me in City Hall. Neutral territory, as it were."
"I'm not surprised," Gimli said grimly, easing his hands off the railing and shuffling away from the edge now that Thranduil had distracted him enough to allow it. "I've no idea how my ancestors managed to stay up here long enough to build these blasted things. Scaffolding at this height, in the open air with all this wind ..."
"It was an impressive endeavour," Thranduil agreed, his expression going a little distant. "Though much of the physical work on the heights was done by my people, past a certain point. Your ancestors designed the towers, but once we'd learned enough from aiding on the lower floors, we were able to carry out most of the external work at height. A great number of Rhovanion towers, though dwarven in design, are actually of elven construction in their upper reaches." He turned to Gimli, and smiled a little bit. "We're not entirely useless, you know. We can build as well as occupy."
Gimli blinked at him. "I ... I didn't know that," he said at last. Admitting it freely, because he honestly hadn't. He knew every inch of the lower city, knew who had carved every hollow and laid every stone in Erebor. The city-top had never held his interest, not until he'd spent four years fighting a war in the south with a Greenwood elf.
Thranduil simply looked at him, keeping that faint smile, and shrugged impassively. "It was a long time ago," he dismissed, waving a hand. "It was an arrangement of necessity between us, no more and no less. The southern expansion of Lorien and then Mordor into Mirkwood, and the loss of Moria for your people, left all of us little enough choice. An alliance for the foundation of a unified city state, one that could stand equal with any of the southern powers, was the only hope any of us could see." His smile slipped, became a sneer, old and tired. "You'll find that life is made of concessions for the greater good. However quickly they may be forgotten in the aftermath."
"I know," Gimli said, and Thranduil looked at him curiously. He shrugged, stiff and careful. "It's been a long four years. For everyone. I think all of us who fought have an idea what concessions look like now, and alliances too."
Thranduil stared at him for a long moment. He was leaning on the railings, his braid swinging out over the abyss and dancing idly in the breeze. He should have looked like Legolas. Gimli had seen his elf stand like that, dressed like that. Thranduil should have looked just like his son. Instead, for some reason, he looked more like Aragorn. Grave and tired, and with a strange light in his eyes, like the beginning of hope.
"Perhaps we do," the Councillor allowed, looking at Gimli thoughtfully. "There's a part of me, Master Dwarf, that wonders cynically how long it will take us to forget it this time, as we have forgotten it every time before. Alliances are fragile things, you see. Self-interest wins out sooner or later. It has always been so, as far as I have seen it." He paused, rubbing absently at one side of his face, bizarrely disarmed. "And yet," he murmured softly. "Yet something feels different this time. Maybe it's age catching up with me. Maybe it's blind optimism. But things feel ... brighter, all of a sudden. The air feels fresher. I'm not sure why."
Gimli stared at him for a second. Aragorn, he thought distantly. Faramir. But not just them. He thought of Dwalin, holding court in barrack halls under the South Spur rail line. He thought of his father, announcing Erebor Industrials as part of the New Rhovanion representatives in the Allied Council. The sense of calm they had, the sense that something had been accomplished, and in its wake all things were possible. He looked at Thranduil, and thought of that.
"... Sauron was your Smaug, wasn't he?" he asked quietly, and Thranduil startled so badly he looked in brief danger of falling. The elf stared at him wide-eyed, as truly startled as Gimli guessed anyone had ever seen him, and he was just enough his father's son to find some satisfaction in that. Only for a moment, though. He had too much of an inkling of what he was saying, how much it mattered, to hold it long.
"What ...?" Thranduil started. Confused first, and then with a burgeoning, defensive anger. Gimli almost shook his head at the familiarity of it. "What are you talking about? Did Legolas---"
"The elf told me nothing," Gimli interrupted, rather hurriedly. It was true, and he hadn't planned to get Legolas in trouble with his father before the elf even knew that was an option. "He didn't have to. I know you elves like to be all mysterious all the time, but it wasn't that hard to make a guess. And a right one, by the looks of things." He paused, and said more gently: "He was to you what Smaug was to my father, wasn't he. He was the thing that kept you awake at night."
Thranduil stared at him, still half-caught in anger, and then, abruptly, he stood straight and stalked a little way away. He moved across to the other side of the balcony, facing outwards and wrapping his hands tight around the railing. Gimli blinked after him.
"I was there for the last Alliance," Thranduil said at last, stiff and cold to the chasm beneath them. "The last great war. And it was, you know. It was supposed to be the last. Ten years of horror, after which no war would come again. I always knew that it wouldn't be that way, though. Even before Sauron disguised himself as a mortal and took over Dol Guldur, driving my people northward, I knew our 'Great War' was never going to be our last. I have been waiting for him to show his face ever since. And I was right. He was here, all along. In the North, learning our secrets, learning our industrial base, seeking out his old weapons where we'd so carelessly dropped them. I knew he was here. I knew he would come back."
"... It doesn't make it better," Gimli said, because he had to. For his father's sake, he still had to. "What you did with Smaug. What you allowed to happen. It doesn't make it better that you had a reason. Not to those of us who lost people. Lost homes."
"I know that," Thranduil said. He turned a little, looked back across his shoulder to meet Gimli's eyes steadily. "I knew that from the first. But Smaug wasn't someone I could afford to fight. Every resource I had that wasn't directly tied into the city's running was focused southwards, into the Lake District and the remains of Mirkwood, to the borders with Dol Guldur. I had to keep control of our external borders. I couldn't fight an internal battle on top of that. I had to let Smaug take over, and leave his demise for someone else."
Gimli sighed, reaching up to scrub tiredly at his face. He didn't want to deal with this. Not on top of heights and homecomings and elves who were missing and/or late. He'd never been good at politics. He'd been a frontline soldier, probably among the best of them. After four years of war, after watching Aragorn struggle to rebuild his state in its wake, Gimli had hoped that coming home would be a break from it.
He should have known better, really. He'd come back with an elf. He'd come back with Legolas, and he'd been seeing his city half through elven eyes ever since. In this city, there was nothing worse for inviting politics to your door.
"At least it's over now," he sighed out, ambling over to stand beside his heart's father, turning to lean against the railing and pointedly ignore the fall behind him. Thranduil stared down at him, bemused and, perhaps, mildly charmed. "They're both gone, Smaug and Sauron after him. That's why you feel light, I guess. It's really over. This time, the bastards can't come back."
Thranduil studied him, very intensely all of a sudden, soft and thoughtful and curious. Gimli shifted uneasily, trying to ignore the itch in his spine the scrutiny caused. Elves. They had staring down to a fine art, yes indeed.
"You came looking for my son," the Councillor said at last, without looking away. "He's spoken of you, you know. He speaks of you quite often, since he returned. He counts you his boon companion. Perhaps ... even more than that. You do know that, I think?"
Gimli grimaced, his stomach taking another nice long lurch into space. Thank you, Legolas. So much for the famously closemouthed elves of Greenwood.
"We're not---" he started, shrugging awkwardly. "It's not official. Not yet. We had to come home first. Had to finish a few things. Tell people, ask for a blessing if not permission, get thundered at for a while before attempting to elope ... Ah. Not that we were ... Never mind. It won't matter for a while yet, now. Things here were worse than we'd expected. Worse than we'd hoped. We both wanted to help fix things for a while first. Before ... you know."
"Before informing your respective parents that you were intending to elope?" Thranduil asked, but it was humour more than rage on his face when Gimli chanced a look at him. In fact, it was close to mischief, and for a second there Gimli really could see Legolas in his father's features. Clear as diamonds in the deeps.
"Before informing them that we'd come to love each other, yes," he said gruffly, glaring at the elf in his turn. "And that we wanted to head back south soon. It wouldn't have been an elopement, tempting as the thought is. I know he loves you, you know. I'd not have stolen him away without saying anything. Nor he me, for that matter. And we'll have to wait for a while now anyway. He wants to help fix the city-top before we leave. It ... It did him damage, to come back and see it broken."
Something flickered in Thranduil's expression at that. It wasn't grave, nor angry either. Old, maybe. Old, and very tired.
"He's never lost a home before," the Councillor said quietly. "He was born long after the reshaping of Rhovanion, let alone the migration from the old countries. This place, this city, is the only home he's ever known, and it's never fallen in his memory. Even when Smaug was at his worst, he didn't touch the city-tops. Legolas has never seen it damaged on that scale before. He's seen it poisoned by Sauron, by my fear, but he has never seen scars carved across its face, or the physical evidence of how close it came to falling."
Gimli didn't answer. He remembered the slums of Ered Luin, if more dimly by the year. He remembered the loss in his father's face when they spoke of Erebor, of being driven out, of being cast from their own homes under threat of violence and of terror. He remembered anger, and pain, and grim determination. He'd known what Legolas had felt while their train pulled ever closer to the city. He'd known exactly what that look in his eyes had meant. He'd seen it long before, on so many now-gone faces.
There was part of him that might have been happy to see it on Legolas, once upon a time. A part that would have been grimly satisfied that at last an elf knew what it was like, had been forced to understand what Gimli and his people had had to endure when the dragon came. It had been quite a large part, once.
Things were different now. The war had changed them, hadn't it. It had burned out so many old hatreds, and left instead the faith and the companionship of brothers in arms. He'd fought beside Legolas, he lived and bled and loved alongside the elf on the battlefields of Rohan, Gondor and Mordor for four years now. He'd come to love him, out of the blue and for no sane reason, but he had. He could never want pain for Legolas now. If he could have kept him from knowing it, if he could have rebuilt those scarred city-tops with a wave of his hand, Gimli thought he would have done it. He wouldn't even have hesitated.
And Thranduil ...
It shouldn't make a difference that Thranduil apparently knew what exile felt like, that he had known pain and terror and the loss of many homes. It should have made it worse, even, that he could have known what it was like and refused to take a stand against Smaug anyway, that he could have let the expulsion happen. That should have sowed an even bigger anger in Gimli. It should have made things worse.
It didn't. Gimli looked up at him, this strange, exhausted elf who'd lost his sneering facade, and even if he hadn't had Legolas in his heart, Gimli thought that maybe he might have forgiven Thranduil anyway. Just because it was over. Just because they were tired. Just because Smaug had been bigger than any of them, and Sauron bigger still, and somehow, despite that, they'd survived them. They'd beaten them. The towers of New Rhovanion still stood tall, for all their scars. The mines and the great halls and the ironworks still soldiered onwards, defiantly triumphant as the dust of Mordor settled. The forestscape would be repaired. The war was won. The bastards, once and for all, would not be coming back.
"He didn't see it fall this time, either," he said, slowly and carefully. He looked up at the Elven Councillor, his soon-to-be father-in-law, and felt a small, fierce little grin creep across his features. "He's not going to. None of us are. We won. I know we won, because I was there. Nothing's going to fall now. And a few things ... a few things are going to get built."
Thranduil looked down at him, a strange, faint smile appearing on his face, and all of a sudden Gimli believed that Thranduil had been a soldier too, once. He saw now that Legolas really had gotten it from his father, even as Gimli had gotten it from his. There was a wild, fierce light in the Elven Councillor's eyes, and Gimli could see how it had once allied with old enemies to build the greatest city in Rhovanion, simply because no other choice had been offered. He could see the creature who had fought the last great war, and come away knowing he'd have to fight again, and spent so very long and sold so many friendships making ready to do just that.
"Legolas mentioned that, yes," Thranduil murmured, smiling brightly. "A pair of cities, wasn't it? A little Southern Rhovanion, to help the human realms rebuild, and remind them who else was fighting beside them?"
Gimli stared at him. "I think we were focused more on the 'helping rebuild' part," he said, shaking his head in amazement. "We wanted to build something new, and help our friends while we were at it. Reminders I don't think we imagined coming into it."
Thranduil lifted his lip. His facade had never been wholly feigned, Gimli realised. His father had been right. There was, at the base of this creature, something that honestly was as hard and fierce and slow to trust as he'd been made out to be. It wasn't as complete as Glóin had believed. It wasn't all the Elven Councillor was. But it was there, nonetheless.
"There is hope now," Thranduil told him softly, and he looked at Gimli the way Glóin did sometimes. The way he must look at Legolas. Like a father. "There's hope, but there's self-interest too. There always is. Alliances are still fragile things, no matter how great the victory they've won. A city can still fall, can still tear itself apart from the inside. Alliances can be betrayed. When you return south, with my son's heart in your hands, you will remember that. You will remember to guard him as you guard yourself, against all the evils that still exist in this world. Won't you, Gimli Glóinson."
Gimli's breath hitched in his chest. His heart stuttered, terror and hope, because suddenly he knew what this was. He understood what he was being granted here, from so old and so suspicious a creature, with all their old grudges still between them. Thranduil sneered down at him, met Gimli's eyes with that wild, fierce stare of his, and Gimli understood at once.
"I will," he said quietly, solemn and sure as any oath he'd ever offered anyone. "I'll guard your son as the other half of my heart and my soul. I'll guard his life as my own, with my own. He'll know no pain that I have strength and means to stop. I swear that to you and gladly, by any oath you care to name."
Thranduil measured him, in the wake of that. Still and silent and more terrifying than even the chasm of air at his back, Thranduil weighed his sincerity for an endless moment. And then, with a mercurial change of mood that would have done the wind itself proud, the Elven Councillor straightened up once again and granted Gimli a bland and disarming smile.
"Good," the elf said, with abrupt and casual unconcern. "I think that settles things nicely between us. I'll go send someone to tell Legolas that you're here, shall I?"
Gimli blinked at him. "Tell someone that---" he repeated, and felt an old, familiar anger blossom almost distantly as he realised what it meant. "You mean he doesn't know!? I've been waiting here for more than an hour, on this ... this elven bit of fluff, swinging in the breeze! You-- You--"
"Oh, come now, Master Dwarf," Thranduil cut in, once again as snidely imperious as Gimli had ever seen him. "You cannot blame me, surely. I have ways and means of guarding that which I care about. I am not scrupulous in their use, and never have been. I have never had that luxury. You seek to claim my son. You should be glad that it was only a mild delay and a nice view of the city that greeted you, don't you think?"
Gimli stared at him. He couldn't ... He didn't ...
"You," he said, with thick, furious admiration. "You are the biggest bastard of an elf that I have ever met in my life, and I've known some who wanted to shoot me on sight! You know that? My father hates your guts, and if I didn't love your son, if I hadn't seen what I've seen ..."
"If you didn't love my son, you wouldn't be my problem, and we would never have had to have this little conversation," Thranduil pointed out. He smiled faintly in amusement, although he sobered a little almost immediately. "Understand. I don't expect us to be friends, Master Dwarf. I don't expect us to ever like each other. I know the history your family has with mine, and I understand when I've burnt my bridges beyond repair, believe me. I simply wanted to know what you felt for Legolas, and how much he mattered to you. I almost lost him. He marched south into a shadow that once took almost all I held dear. I thought I had lost him, you understand? And now he has returned, and soon he will leave again, and you are part of the reason for both. I will not apologise for testing you. I cannot."
... He couldn't deal with this, Gimli realised. He was too tired for this. They all were. But he understood. He thought of his own father, of the conversation they still had to have, and he understood Thranduil in this moment all too well. He didn't want to, any more than he had wanted to like and then love Legolas once upon a time, but he understood him nonetheless.
And maybe, with understanding, there came something not too far from forgiveness.
"... You never lose, do you?" he asked softly, shaking his head exhaustedly at yet another impossible bloody elf. "You or your son. You really never lose."
Thranduil tilted his head, a strange expression on his face. "I have lost more than you ever will," he said quietly. Almost gently. "I say that as much as a hope as anything else. The Valar willing, neither you nor my son will ever learn to lose as I have lost, nor will you ever become what I became. I do not win, Gimli. I simply endure, until my enemies have withered in the interim." He smiled faintly. "As an approach, it is not without its merits, I grant you that. It does not make you many friends, however, and I think you and my son would find that wearisome."
Gimli tugged his beard irritably in response to that. Not because he disagreed, necessarily. He didn't. Just because he didn't know what to do with it, and was too tired and annoyed to try figuring it out. He had to, though. He knew that, and in its cause ...
He stomped over to the balcony doors, coming to a halt directly in front of Thranduil, the better to glare up at him evilly. The elf blinked at him, bemused once again, and only more so when Gimli abruptly stuck out his hand and turned it to offer a warrior's clasp. Thranduil reared back a little, wrongfooted by the gesture, and Gimli waggled his hand impatiently until at last, extraordinarily warily, the elf reached down and clasped Gimli's arm in turn. Brotherhood, or close enough to count. A strange thing to seek out with your lover's father.
"It might get you friends enough yet," he said gruffly, looking up at the elf. "You've lasted long enough for friendship to be safe again. Might be you ought to think about that some, hmm?"
Thranduil shook his head, an odd confusion, but he kept his grip on Gimli's arm. He held tight to a hope. "My son loves you," he said, watching Gimli curiously. "Is that not enough for you, that you'd want the friendship of your father's enemy as well?"
Gimli snorted. "I love your son," he countered. "Wanting his father's friendship isn't that much of a stretch. The time for war is over, Thranduil. I've had four years, and I'm sick to my ears of it. It's time for rebuilding now, and maybe that might include some long-burnt bridges, don't you think? Just for the challenge, if nothing else."
Thranduil laughed. Involuntarily, Gimli thought, looking down at him in frank amazement, but he laughed nonetheless, and squeezed Gimli's arm in startled agreement. He'd had a longer war than Gimli, of course. He'd been fighting for an awfully long time, while the world kept changing around him. It would take him a while to get used to the sense of lightness now that he didn't have to anymore. It might take him a while ... to get used to the possibilities of it.
But he would get used to them, Gimli thought. He hoped so, anyway. He smiled up at Legolas' father, his people's old adversary staring in baffled amusement down at him, and he thought there might be hope for the lot of them yet. The war had changed them, one and all.
And for some of them, Gimli thought, it had changed them for the better.
