#boredom induced minifics

[roselightfairy]

OOPS I MINIFICCED AGAIN LAST NIGHT.

Also apparently whumptober is a thing? and there are prompts every day for ways to hurt characters??? well all righty then. The prompt for today was “Insomnia,” and I wrote a little thing that follows along with some of the ideas of To the Sea, though it takes place probably several years after.  More old married couple, more angsty and less fluffy than last time.

“You have not been sleeping.”

It was the way Legolas looked away, the way his fingers plucked at one another, that convinced Gimli that he was right.

He had been noticing hints of it for some time, though he had not trusted his inklings at first.  Legolas was an elf and he a mortal, after all, and it was not unusual for Gimli to fall asleep first, to rise in the morning and see that his husband lay already wakeful beside him.

But it was unusual to wake during the night to a cold bed, alone because Legolas had not yet come to join him—or had already risen—or had not deigned to rest at all. And now he looked on Legolas’s decidedly weary face, and his movements, which Gimli now clearly noticed were a shade more sluggish than usual—and he wondered how long Legolas had hidden this from him, before he had caught on.

“Is it the dreams?” he asked, taking Legolas’s hands gently into his own, running his thumbs over the knuckles.  Pushing down the wave of fear and grief that swelled up at the thought.  “Have they worsened again?”

Legolas bit his lip, looking as though he might cry.  “I am sorry,” he whispered.

Gimli closed his eyes, fighting tears of his own.  He felt old in a way he rarely felt, even still: bowed under a weariness that only took him with thoughts of the dreams, of the sea, of the time that they had that was always trickling away.

“Do not apologize,” he said, and drew Legolas tight into the circle of his arms. Legolas’s own hooked around his shoulders like the clasp of a lifeline, holding them both to an anchor, keeping them from being swept away.  “Never that.”

“I am not leaving,” Legolas breathed in his ear.  “Not yet.”

The words were a buoy, and Gimli clung to them.  “I know.”

[roselightfairy]

I was very bored at work yesterday, and I wrote a silly fluffy minific.  Emphasis on the silly, emphasis on the fluffy, emphasis on the mini.  I’ve never done this before, but I think I’m going to post it on here.

Also, work tonight looks like it might be similar, so I’m thinking of reblogging some prompt lists. If people are interested, and if you like this one, prompt me and I’ll see if I can manage another one tonight.

Okay. Fic now. (SELF-CONSCIOUS AGH.)

This takes place in some unspecified time in the Finding a Voice ‘verse. Ridiculous fluffy married L/G, don’t look at me.

Gimli jerked awake, lurching up and forward in a sudden motion – though he could not for the life of him think what had startled him – and smashed his forehead into something alarmingly close, and not nearly soft enough.

“Wha – ?” he gasped, his hands flying to his head just as he heard a matching squawk of pain and felt the whoosh of air and hair past his face.  He opened his eyes just in time to see Legolas roll off of him, both hands clutched to the lower half of his face.

“You –” Gimli stared at him, processing, and then he could not help himself: he burst out laughing.

“Cruel,” Legolas moaned into his hands, though he too laughed cautiously after a moment, wiping watering eyes with one hand while keeping the other pressed to his nose. “Although I admit it is no more than I deserved.”

“I should say so!” gasped Gimli, heart still racing from the first shock.  “What were you, looming over me like an owl stalking a mouse?”

Legolas flushed.  “I like watching you sleep,” he protested meekly.  “Though if I am to be thus punished for my fascination, perhaps I shall have to do without the pleasure.”  He sniffed, probing carefully at his nose with the hand that remained clamped to his face.

All Gimli’s bluster drained away at Legolas’s earnestness, as it did so often; he did not even try to fight the soft warm feeling melting his insides.  “None of that, now,” he said, rolling over and pushing the dark hair out of Legolas’s face.  “Let me see.”

He pried Legolas’s hand gently from his face to inspect the damage for himself, until he was satisfied that Legolas’s nose was as whole as ever, if a bit tender.  “I am sorry,” he said, bending over and dropping a light kiss onto it.  It wrinkled in reflex, and Gimli laughed.  “Can you bring yourself to forgive me?”

Legolas laughed as well, reaching up to catch Gimli’s face and guide him – very carefully – back down for a deeper kiss.  “I think I can manage that.”

[roselightfairy]

Don’t even ASK me about work yesterday and today, but, uh, another minific ensued.

This is one I actually kind of wanted to write as a longer story once upon a time, but as seen in the fic to come, I definitely don’t have the juice for it.  I’m honestly not even happy with this bit, but I’m attention-starved and pretending that my creative well isn’t totally dry, so I’m posting it anyway.

Set, if it isn’t clear, right after Finding a Voice, in the in-between time when Gimli and Legolas are each at their respective homes.

My dear Gimli,

I am not unaccustomed to the feeling of missing a loved one, but never have I known an absence like this before.

It is not the dull ache I have long known, faded into a pain at the back of my heart that only sharpens at certain moments few and far between.  It is the ache of a fresh-lost limb, whose absence I feel more for the illusion of its presence - I only remember it is gone when I go to move it, and then I realize that a part of me is elsewhere, and I yearn for nothing more than to have it back.

I can marvel at it now, for how is it that I could not have known the shape of my heart before?  But then, perhaps it is only fitting, for the first time I knew the extent of my affection was when we were first parted, when I first realized that half of it beat in your breast instead.

I have no better words to tell you this, so I hope you will understand that I love you and miss you most dearly...

***

Ravens of Erebor, Legolas thought, were much akin to their dwarven counterparts: disinclined to idle chatter and often unprepared for the full spectrum of elven emotion.

This one watched him with beady, impatient eyes, urging him to cease his delaying and pass over the letter, that the bird might finally return to his mountain home.  "I know," Legolas said, moving to do so and then abruptly losing his nerve and twitching back.  "It is only..."  His belly fluttered with nerves, and he abruptly regretted all he had written; he wished to tear the letter into pieces and begin anew.

"Goodness, Legolas," said Eleniel, and it was a sign of his distraction that he jumped at her sudden appearance. "Be careful - I can feel the heat of your blush from arm's length away.  Do you wish to rival the sun herself?"

"Hush," Legolas mumbled, swatting in her direction and flushing harder.

Eleniel grinned at the letter.  "Is that written for anyone in particular?" she teased.  "And do you plan to seal it with a kiss, as do the children of men with letters to their sweethearts?"

Legolas clutched the letter to his chest as though to protect it, and again he fought the urge to rewrite the whole thing.  But Eleniel seemed to sense it, and her teasing smile softened.  "Relax, Legolas," she said.  "I saw him as well as you did, and I assure you the infatuation goes both ways."

She patted his arm before slipping away and leaving him to gaze down at the letter, and then up into the exasperated eyes of the raven.

"Do not tell," he whispered, and glancing around to see that no one was watching, he pressed his lips to the seal before passing the letter to the bird and watching both soar away in the direction of the mountain.

***

Gimli could not wait until he had returned to his own room to read the letter.  He stood exactly where he had received it, in the hall outside his preferred drafting room, and broke the seal as his fellows flooded out of the room around him.  And there he stood, reading... and reading...

"Goodness, my lord Gimli."  It was Alma, the young apprentice who had impressed him enough that he was thinking of taking her on.  "Are you quite well?"  

He looked up, ready to reassure her, but then he saw that she was giggling, surely more aware than she had pretended of the contents of his letter.  "I do not think I have ever seen you blush so before..."

[roselightfairy]

Guess who worked late again last night! *two thumbs up* And you all know what that apparently means!

Boredom-induced minific number four, coming up.  Inspired, this time, by nothing in particular, and so fluffy you might suffocate.

The further Gimli wandered away from the settled area, the closer he had to look at the ground, picking his way through roots and tangled branches and ferns.  The trees and undergrowth grew more thickly here than was to his comfort, and elves – particularly these elves – did not, in his opinion, have an appropriate concept of trails.

Eleniel had said he would find Legolas out here, but that he had not wandered too far – but then, Gimli knew his husband, and Legolas’s understanding of wandering too far was very different from Gimli’s own.  And Gimli had no intention of wrestling trees for hours on end.

He brushed a twig out of his beard and contemplated calling Legolas’s name.  His ears were keen; surely he would hear…

“Hello.”

Gimli’s feet left the ground, and he nearly tripped over them coming down in his haste to whirl around.  Had he been holding anything, he surely would have flung it.

“Legolas!” he sputtered, one hand coming to his chest, his heart pounding in his ears like a stampede of mumakil. “What are you – why –?”

From where he hung – dangling upside down from a tree branch, his face directly at Gimli’s level and inches away – Legolas gave an unrepentant smile.  “Welcome back, my love!”

“Are you trying to give me heart failure?”  Try as he might, Gimli could not keep his tone belligerent.  “A cruel elf you are indeed, to toy thus with your husband’s mortal senses!”

He found room amidst all the fond affront for a touch of pride when instead of shrinking away, Legolas laughed and reached out to take Gimli’s face between his hands.  “I am sorry,” he said, bending his head (in a way that made Gimli’s neck twinge in sympathy) to press a kiss to Gimli’s forehead.  “I wished only to surprise you.”  Another kiss, this time to Gimli’s nose.  “Is there any way you can ever forgive me?”

“Perhaps,” Gimli said, letting his eyes half-lid, tilting his head and parting his lips.  “It might be possible to convince me.”  And when Legolas leaned in to kiss him fully, Gimli caught hold of his shoulders in an iron grip and tugged.

Legolas dropped with a squawk and a great rustling of leaves, rolling into enough of a ball to protect his head but not enough to save him from landing in an undignified heap at Gimli’s feet, all rumpled clothing and fallen leaves and wide brown eyes.

“Now you are forgiven,” said Gimli, and he did not try to hold back a grin.

Legolas’s look of betrayal lasted only seconds before he burst into delighted laughter, so bright and merry that Gimli felt himself falling in love all over again.  “And they say your people are rigid and humorless,” he said.  “I have long since learned never to believe them.”

“It is a lesson you had best retain,” said Gimli. “Along, perhaps, with the reminder that dwarves make dangerous enemies!”

He turned, making to walk back the way he had come; behind him, Legolas sprang to his feet.  “That I know,” he said, wrapping his arms around Gimli from behind and draping over his shoulders like an entirely new kind of elven cloak.  “Then I am lucky you love me, am I not?”

He brushed a kiss against Gimli’s cheek from behind, and Gimli could not help nuzzling back into the caress.  “You are,” he said, his heart melting, “and I do.  That too you had best not forget.”

Legolas let out a happy sigh.  “I never intend to.”

[roselightfairy]

Sweet Sorrow

Summary: Gimli and Legolas spend their last night in Ithilien.

They will be missed.

I minificced again last night, but this one is long enough that it deserves the archive, so...here we go. It’s a little sadder and a little less romance-focused than the last, but it has more old married couple in it. Also Eleniel. (Because she’s my OC and I can inflict her on you if I want to.)