A triple drabble written for the second B2MEM challenge. For Eli for his birthday. And thanks so to RiverOtter for the beta.
“And I must travel with that Dwarf?” demanded Legolas of Gandalf. “He and his father have never forgiven my father for the imprisonment imposed upon Thorin and his fellows so long ago. Dáin may consider us allies, but the same is not true of either Glóin or his son!”
“Do you think that Gimli hates Sauron and his creatures any less than do you, Thranduilion?” Gandalf returned. “Can you not see the importance of overcoming such differences if all of Middle Earth is not to fall into darkness? That is where the true peril has lain all these ages of the world—in allowing old hatreds and suspicions to fester. As long as we harbor suspicion of one another, we will not truly unite against our one common enemy, who wishes us all to fall!”
Legolas was to think on that warning given him by Gandalf often as the quest continued, and particularly after the remaining Fellowship entered Lothlórien. When the Lady Galadriel looked into his heart, had she not seen there the suspicion and resentment he’d still tried to hold against Gimli and all Dwarves? And had she not shown him how it would doom not just the quest but both Gimli’s folk and his own if he did not let that bitterness go?
And to think that he’d never foreseen the deepest peril to him was that he would so come to love and honor these mortals, and particularly this most stiff-necked of Dwarves and the remarkably Elvish Aragorn, and to come to see both as brothers.
To lose such brothers was so painful….
Yet, even knowing he would survive the pair of them, he found he did not regret having come to love them so.
“That is the peril I have embraced,” he admitted to himself.