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“Tell me about the stars,” Tauriel says.
Thranduil looks at her, one eyebrow arching. They stand on his balcony, an unobscured shelf facing the East. She gazes not at him, but cranes her neck up, face turned towards the heavens. The light of the moon and stars glows silver upon them, turns Tauriel into some ethereal shadow beside him.
Thranduil swallows, asks, “What do you wish to know that you do not already?”
Tauriel’s eyes flick towards him, her mouth creasing into a smile. He knows her well; she has long been the companion of his son, at his side in lessons and play and training. Often over the years she has vanished on some misty evening for hours on end. She would always return before morning, bright-eyed and excitable, brimming with some secret delight. She would go walking into the night, and return with the stars shining in her eyes.
That was before Tauriel joined the palace guard, before his son became quiet and stern, before the shadows of the Greenwood deepened and plunged them into murky darkness. She is less prone to wander now, but ever does her gaze turn wistfully to the sky. Thranduil has never forgotten the girl who would go seeking the stars.
“I wish to know what you see,” Tauriel replies, “when you look up at them. My lord, I have seen you. You look for them near as often as I do.”
“Starlight is precious to the Eldar,” Thranduil says, “Well you know this.”
“Indeed, but it is more than that,” Tauriel says, and steps closer. Her eyes glitter, round and hopeful, and her hair in the darkness seems black as ink. Some half-forgotten instinct—the urge to twist strands of that black hair around his fingers—curls Thranduil’s hand into a fist. “You see something more, do you not?”
Thranduil does not answer, only glances up again at the sky. Tauriel may see only the beauty of the open night, the pinpricks of the stars chasing one another to lands undiscovered, to eternity; but Thranduil’s eyes trace the constellations, the shapes of history and myth on the canvas of the world. In the stars he can see the awakening of the Firstborn, and the coming of the end. He can trace the Sickle of the Valar with his eyes, follow the blade of the Menelmacar to its point. He can recall their glimmer on the first night he spent under the boughs of the Greenwood, on the night he first cradled his son, on the night his last joy seeped from him.
He remembers her, his lady, best in the starlight; the stretch of her smile, the black spill of her hair through his fingers, the warmth of her in his arms, heartbeat against heartbeat.
But she is gone now. Instead, beside him, stands Tauriel, who looks up at him with curiosity and hope and a hint of something else—a hint of desire in her eyes that reminds him of that heartbeat against him, that smile at his throat, that black hair twisted in his grip.
“Not tonight,” he says, and looks back at Tauriel, "Tonight I see only you.”
She is near enough that Thranduil can see the bob of her throat as she swallows, the minute drop of her eyes as she glances at his lips. “Why did you summon me here tonight?”
Because you look at me like she did, he thinks, like you see the stars when you see me. He cannot say that, though, and so chooses to say nothing. Instead, he gives in to his urge a little, reaches up a hand, and touches the edge of her jaw with his fingertips.
Tauriel has none of his reserve. He watches the uncertainty in her eyes give way to surprise, to hope, to the rising sun of her desire. Then she surges forward, leaning up to press her lips against his. She moulds against him, cups his chin and opens her mouth under his. Her back arches into him when he wraps his arms around her waist and pulls her closer. She’s so close, and so open, and so warm against him.
Some shift takes place inside Thranduil’s chest when he finally surrenders. It’s a shift he can feel under his feet, like a landslide or an earthquake. It’s a great crack in the frame of him through which need, lust, hunger spills into his heart. He hauls her to him, deepens the kiss, slides his tongue against hers, and tastes her. One hand tangles in her hair and he revels in its softness, in the low moan she gives when he tugs it. She clutches him tighter, and breaks their kiss to lean her forehead against his.
“Thranduil,” she breathes into the space between their mouths. His name in her hushed, sweet voice is another revelation in itself. He pulls her face up and kisses her again, nipping her lower lip and feeling her shudder against him.
“Will you ask me to stay?” she asks, quiet and near-breathless, when he pulls away again. She has not moved her hands from where they hold his head, and he feels her thumbs stroke his cheekbones. “Will you ask me to stay with you tonight?”
“Do you wish that?” he asks in turn, though his grip on her back, pulling her flush against him, belies his level voice. Oh, how he wants her, her body under his, her mouth against his, her black hair fanned across his pillows...
“Yes,” she says, the word a breath across his lips as she leans in, “Yes, I do.”
Thranduil’s fingers tighten on her hips, and he has to take a steadying breath before he says, “Then I ask you. Stay with me tonight. Have me.”
She nods once, sharply, and whatever else is left to be said is lost in the crush of their mouths.
There is little grace in the way they stumble back, out of the sight of the night sky and into the welcoming darkness of his bedchamber. Thranduil keeps his arms tight around her waist as she clamps one hand to the back of his head and slips the other under his robe, pushing it off his shoulder. Her boots scuff against the floor when she is walked backwards and knock against his own until finally, impatiently, he unlocks his grasp on her and grabs at her thighs, scooping her up and hooking her legs around his hips. There is greediness in how he wants her that he had not expected. Some ember in him, that has not been stoked in so long, now glows hot as she pushes his robe to the floor and touches his bare skin. It should unnerve him, to feel control slide so easily from his grasp, but, oh, it has been too long, and an answering fire rises in her, in her fingers clutching at his shoulders, in her lips moving hungrily on his.
Thranduil's bed sits in the centre of the room, low and without posts so that, should he please, he can always look out to the balcony and gaze at the forest and sky. Her eyes fly open when he lowers her onto this bed, and even in the shadows her eyes shine up at him, bright and earnest.
“I haven't—” Tauriel begins to say, and Thanduil pauses, “I've never—there's been no one else.”
“No one?” he repeats, hand gentling on her knee.
“You're the first I've wanted.”
Despite himself, he chuckles, and reaches up to brush a lock of hair away from her face. “You honour me, Tauriel.”
The tension eases from Tauriel's face at this. She bites her lip—already red and swollen from Thranduil's own mouth, and by the Valar she must know how she would draw his gaze there, how it would stir him—and then asks, “May I still have you then?”
Thranduil wants nothing more. He lowers himself over her, sliding his knee between her legs. When he leans down, she tries to surge up to meet him, lips parted, but he presses her back to rest flat on the bed. He kisses her slowly, languidly, until he feels her relax beneath him, until her fingers slide into his hair and he feels the vibration of a soft moan.
When she is mellow and pliant under him, Thranduil hooks his fingers beneath the laces on her bodice, and waits for her to open her eyes and nod once before deftly picking them apart. After so long, he had almost forgotten the pleasure of stripping a partner, of pulling the fastenings and trappings of clothing away and baring the secret skin beneath for his eyes alone. She lets him undress her without embarrassment or fear. She lifts her hips to tug down her breeches, sits up to help him pull her tunic off, and then watches him drink her in, chin raised defiantly.
“Am I to your liking, my lord?” she asks, a mischievous smile plucking at her lips. Thranduil wrenches his eyes up, reaches out and takes hold of her chin.
“Don’t call me that,” he says, “Not here.”
Tauriel’s face falls, her eyes widening. For a chilling moment, Thranduil thinks that he has unnerved her, or even frightened her. He goes to gentle his hand on her chin, to make his touch a reassuring one, but then Tauriel’s fingers wrap tight around his wrist, tugging it away.
“Then what shall I call you?” Tauriel asks, bringing his hand up to her mouth. She kisses his knuckle, and then very deliberately drags her lips down. Thranduil feels the flicker of tongue at his pulse point. “More importantly, what shall you call me? I am new to these matters, you see, but I believe I might have some suggestions.”
Thranduil chuckles, and tangles his spare hand in her hair, inky-black in the darkness. “Names are the traditional choice, I understand.”
“But we are not traditional.”
“No, we are not,” Thranduil says. When he leans in to kiss her throat, she sighs and tilts her head back, pulling him tighter into her embrace. We are not traditional, he thinks, but in the starlight and the shadows we can be anything.
When she slips a hand between their bodies, Thranduil takes it in his own and guides her to the waistband of his trousers. As she opens the lacings, her brow is furrowed as if in concentration. Her grip when she takes him in hand is light, so light that he would call it teasing were it anyone else. As such, he simply exhales heavily through his nose and presses her forehead into the crook of her neck and allows her gentle touches. He lets her explore until her grasp becomes more confident and she begins to stroke him in earnest, until he is fully hard and his blood runs boiling and the pit of his belly is a knot of tension. Just as she twists her wrist and desire throbs within him, achingly sweet and dangerously near peaking, Thranduil summons the strength to stop her hand.
“Let me,” he says, and bears her back down onto the bed, craning his neck to kiss her again. She shivers as his hand trails down her body, tracing her collarbone and cupping her breast, following the flat plane of her belly to slide between her thighs. Teeth graze against Thranduil’s lower lip when he touches her, and her legs open beneath him, letting him settle between them. When he presses his fingers inside her core, he finds her wet, and glances up to see that her face is blushing pink at this discovery.
“You spoke truly, I see,” he says, teasingly, “You want me very much indeed.”
Her blush deepens, but she meets his eyes with a sure gaze. Her hips strain up against his hand.
“I do,” she says, stretching out to grasp him, “And I want you now.”
Now, it is Thranduil’s hand batted away. The time for teasing, for exploration and for tentative touches is over now. Thranduil kneels up between her thighs and tugs his trousers down with near-trembling hands. She reclines back on the bed, and watches him, eyes half-hooded and lips parted invitingly. Her hair spills black across the pillows. Thranduil burns for her.
“You’re beautiful,” he tells her as he leans over her. Her eyes glitter like stars up at him. Her soft mouth curves just the slightest, and he feels her pull her knees up, opening herself to him. “Beautiful,” he says again, and sinks into her with a long, low sigh.
“Oh,” she says. Thranduil chuckles breathlessly, dropping his head to press their foreheads together. Oh, indeed, he thinks. She is tight and hot and slick around him, as agonizingly perfect as he had hoped, and it takes every reserve of strength he has, after so long alone, to keep still for a moment more. He fists the sheets on either side of her head, twisting the linen between his fingers, and focuses on her face, on her wide bright eyes and the surprised ‘o’ of her mouth.
“Are you alright?” he asks. Slowly, she inhales. Her eyes, when they meet his, are still round, but less now with shock and more, he fancies, with wonder.
“It is so strange,” she says, and then she smiles. “Do it again.”
Thranduil grins back at her, filled with some wildness as the last of his restraint whispers away. She gasps when he surges into her again, and clutches at his back fiercely, and breathes “Again” once more.
It takes a handful of thrusts for the strangeness of it to be lost, but before long her hips are rocking up to meet his, their rhythm languid and smooth, as if this were practiced, something they had done together a thousand nights before. Her nails scoring down his back, and her voice sighing in his ear are delights that Thranduil did not expect—she is quieter than he thought she would be, but her soft pants and moans are as urgent as the fingers digging into his buttocks, entreating him to go harder, faster, deeper, until he feels sweat break on his brow and need tighten in his belly and loins, yearning for release.
Below him, her face is a paroxysm of pleasure: her eyes shut and her lashes flutter, her mouth falls open and her voice climbs higher, a rising ‘oh, oh, oh’ as they move together. At one particularly hard thrust, Thranduil feels her pulse around him, and her toes curl against his calf. “Thranduil,” she rasps, clasping him tighter, hiking her knee up his side, taking him in more, “please, Thranduil, I’m almost, oh!”
He can feel that she’s close, in the clutch of her body and the breathless strain in her cries. He can feel that he is too, as tension coils up his thighs and in the pit of his belly, as he thrusts harder into her heat, panting harshly with the exertion. She throws her head back and her hair flies, inky-black, and he can’t resist tangling his fingers in a lock of it. He kisses the spill of hair over his fingers, and moves to kiss the white skin of her neck and shoulder. She groans, and her legs curl tighter around him. Thranduil can feel the tremor in her thighs as he rocks with her, as they near the heights of their pleasure. He wants to see her, he thinks. He wants to see her face, he wants to be there with her, he wants her to look at him, for them to topple over the edge together. Quickly, Thranduil lifts his head and leans in to kiss her mouth, desperately and with little finesse.
“Look at me,” he murmurs when he breaks away, face still close enough to hers that he can see the shadow her lashes cast before she opens her eyes. His spare hand he moves down her body again, dragging it perilously slow until he reaches the place where they are joined. When he begins to rub her, she keens beneath him, her gasp hitching into a low whine. Her knee pulls up higher, her hips jerk more insistently. “Look at me, lirimaer, let me see you!”
He aches when her eyes rise to meet his, shining earnestly in the darkness. The look in them is all too familiar, unforgotten even as he feared he might lose it. Like she sees the stars when she looks at me.
As I do when I look at her.
Pleasure throbs deep within him, and sparks of fire dance up his spine, spinning him ever closer to his peak. Even as his thrusts pick up speed, he redoubles his efforts to bring her with him, pressing harder, stroking roughly where she most needs his touch, and watches her face go slack, listens to her gasps grow sharper and needier, feels her tighten around him and her hips stutter and then, and then—
She cries out when she comes, an unexpectedly loud shout of utter delight and surprise as her release quakes through her. He keeps moving throughout it, rubbing her, drawing out her peak until she is shaking. The whole time, she keeps her eyes open, watching him, and when he rocks into her again, chasing his own release, she reaches up to frame his face, angling his head so that their gazes meet.
It is that that undoes him in the end. Not the way she leans up to kiss him, not the way she wraps her legs around him, urging him to take what he needs. She has given him that already, in that look in her eyes.
When his orgasm breaks over him, hard enough that he trembles in her arms from the force of it, he thinks it is the first time he has felt strong—wonderful—loved—in far too long.
When Thranduil wakes up, it is daybreak. He lies on his side, facing his balcony with one arm outstretched over the mattress, as if reaching for the dawning sun. His body is sore, but it is a welcome pain, and unbidden a smile takes his lips.
It takes him a moment to realize that there is no warm body at his back. When he sits up, he finds that he is, however, not alone. She stands at the side of the bed, turned away from him, already in her breeches and tunic and picking up her bodice. He watches her reach up and scrape her hair over one shoulder, shrug the bodice on, and then toss her head, letting her hair swing down her back like a pendulum.
In the new morning light, her hair gleams red as copper. Thranduil stares.
How odd, he thinks—but then, how odd that he should be surprised! It is Tauriel. He has known her so long, knows who and how she is, and least of all what she looks like. And yet, last night, it had seemed—he had thought, somehow, that the hair he had stroked, gripped, kissed, was black as ink. He had thought...
He must have imagined it. It had been dark in his chamber, after all, though the night was a mild one. It must simply have been some mistook shadow.
Thranduil feels heavy, all of a sudden—heavy and aching, all the sweetness of before forgotten. The rustling of the sheets as he sits up catches Tauriel’s attention, and she looks back over her shoulder. When she sees him, a smile spreads across her face, lovely as anything Thranduil could hope to see.
“‘Quel amrun,” she says. She looks beautiful, Thranduil can see now: her hair, her long red hair, is an unbraided mess, her clothes are rumpled, her lips are pink, and her eyes are shining, and he the cause of it all.The sight, which ought bring him such satisfaction, only makes his heart pang with bitterness. You are an old fool, he thinks.
“How do you feel?” he asks, trying not to let his voice fall flat. Tauriel turns around fully, still lacing up her bodice, still smiling.
“I’m aching,” she replies, deadpan, and despite himself he chuckles, “but I deserve it, I think. Earned it, even.”
“Yes,” Thranduil says, because he cannot think of what else to say. Shame and guilt writhe in his belly and, suddenly, he can’t abide to look on her anymore. He swings his legs over the bed and stands, hunting for his robe. It is crumpled near the foot of the bed, when Tauriel had let it drop. Pulling it on feels like pulling on armour; he feels that much more in control with it wrapped around him.
“You never did answer my question.”
Thranduil turns back to Tauriel, startled. “I beg your pardon?”
Tauriel steps closer to him, loose-limbed and head cocked. “Last night. I asked you to tell me about the stars. I asked what you saw when you looked at them.”
Thranduil had almost forgotten about that. Of course, Tauriel would not have. “Does it matter?” he asks.
“I’d like to know,” she says, moving even closer, to within an arm’s length. He swallows, hard.
Half a dozen answers fire across his mind like comets: I see her. I see the happiest moments of my life, and the worst. I see my joys, my regrets, everything I was and can never be again. I see she who I loved, who I wanted you to be. And now he will see her, the woman in the starlight whose hair is a river of flame.
But he cannot tell her any of this, and so he gives her a half-truth. “It is memory,” he says, and falls silent.
A thoughtful look settles on Tauriel’s face. After a moment, she nods, accepting it as an answer.
“So it is,” she says, and smiles again, wistfully, “But it is mystery too, I think, and promise. I believe it is what has come before, and what could come next, or could not. Our past and our future, all written across the same night sky. The possibilities are endless, are they not?”
“How optimistic of you.”
“Even you cannot limit the sky!” Tauriel laughs. Thranduil’s face hurts with the effort of not smiling back. After a moment, even Tauriel cannot help but notice. Her brow furrows.
“Is something the matter?” she asks. Her hand reaches out, as if to take his.
“No,” Thranduil says—too quickly, too brusquely. He moves around her, deliberately not touching her. He scarcely knows what he is thinking, only that she must leave, that he must be alone. He is better alone, he is certain of that now. “You should return to your duties now. Day waits for no-one.”
“Something is wrong,” he hears Tauriel say, hears the click of her heeled boots on the floor as she follows his pacing. “Have I displeased you somehow, Thranduil?”
“Do not call me that.”
The words are snarled, too harsh, too angry. Tauriel breathes in sharply behind him. For a moment, Thranduil does nothing, only clenches his fists together, trying to contain the anger brimming cold in his breast. It is not Tauriel he is angry with. It is not her who has done any wrong, but himself.
“I apologize, my lord,” Tauriel says, sounding out the words carefully, “but I had thought—last night, you asked—”
“That was last night,” Thranduil says. And that was another man. The creature who took her, who asked her to call him his name, he had been a lie. He was a shade, a phantom around which the starlight and the shadows bent to make him seem alive. Neither of them had been real last night, not truly. For a moment, hair black as ink flashes before his eyes, and his stomach churns.
“I don’t understand,” Tauriel says. Thranduil takes a deep breath. How can he explain it all, when he barely wrap his own mind around it? How can he open up to her, when he cannot even know the truth in his own heart?
So he does not.
“The sun is risen now,” he says, smoothing down his robe and affecting a tone smooth and hard as steel, “You provided ample entertainment last night, and I thank you for it, but do not presume above your station.”
Thranduil turns, schooling his expression into something aloof, distant, even as his gaze finds Tauriel’s wide eyes.
“I am the king,” he continues, folding his hands behind his back, “and you my Captain—and of lowly, Silvan stock at that. I will not have you assuming such…familiarity. You are fair enough, and capable, yes, and I wanted to have you; but surely you did not believe I desired anything more?”
Tauriel, for a moment, simply stares at him in stunned silence. She’s hurt, Thranduil can see; it’s why he said such things, but seeing the pain flash through her eyes—those same eyes that had looked at him with such reverence, the reverence that he missed and craved and returned—is like a knife in him. Stood alone in the centre of the grand room, gazing upon the cold creature who had been her first lover, Tauriel looks lost.
“Oh,” she says at last, and then, in a small voice, “No, my lord. Of course not.”
Thranduil clenches his fists again, tight enough that he feels his nails break the skin of his palm. “Good,” he grits out, “Now return to your duties, Captain.”
“Yes, my lord,” Tauriel says, and turns on her heel, and marches stiffly from his chamber. Though she closes the door gently behind her, the sound seems final as a funeral dirge.
Thranduil unclenches his hands. Blood, scarlet and vibrant, swells in the crescent imprints left on his palms. His lady had always hated it when he did this; she would take his hands, unfold his fingers, and tell him “one day, you’ll leave a scar that will never heal”.
But she is gone, and Tauriel is gone, and Thranduil is alone. Even the stars and their memories have left him, and the shadows and their tricks. I am better alone, he thinks, and looks out at the morning sky.