| Voices seen to like to gloat when your not quite awake. They life to float and dart teasingly around you, each sounding different but all of them running into one another and becoming muffled. At times, it seemed to Gandalf that the voice were no more than ideas flitting chaotically through his brain to fast for him to catch. "...for two...went...Gwaihir came...." "Not much.....afraid." "...help him....need....love him...." One voice was different. He reached for it but it flew away again, the others coming back. "....I know how you must fe....." "...sure....?" "Please don't die..." THERE! There it was again! This voice was not muffled and confusing, but deep and melodic and familiar. This voice repeated three words steadily, like a heartbeat. "Please don't die. Please don't die. Please don't die.." He caught onto that heartbeat and held to it. He wasn't sure what he was hanging onto or what it was he was trying to get back to or out of but all he did know that this was something to *hold*. Simple as that. ***** The healers had left, and he was alone with the unconscious man. The healers said he was hurt badly, had lost too much blood, and had only a small chance of waking. Never more than now did he curse the incompetence and inadequacy of the healers in his own household. Elrond brushed his lips across the back of the other mans knuckles. "Please don't die, dearest." How many times had he pleaded that to Gandalfs hand, as if it would take on a life of its own and snap its fingers. It was the hands that had always fascinated him; long, graceful, they almost radiated a tangible aura of experience. And then, when they moved...oh, in sweeping arcs like angel wings or the quick, nimble movements of a elven child at play, Elrond would want nothing more than to have such things as those brush against his hands. Or any other part of his skin, or that matter.. "Please don't..." They wouldn't move now. ***** Gandalf was reminded of the dream he had in Orthanc, the dream of Elrond. Funny how much you can remember something that never really came to pass... Right before waking up he had considered and consented with the notion of never returning to the real world (as some would say it was.) He was tempted to stay once again. No paradise was here, but a comforting blanket of Nothingness. The Nothing quenched the grief of the one he loved most betraying him, the pain of his abused flesh.... He wanted to stay... **** Elrond's voice was becoming hoarse from repeating that same prayer over and over, so he fell upon touch as a prayer in itself. He ran his fingertips along Gandalfs arm, lightly, brushed back his hair, traced his face. 'So much is counting on you dearest..' he thought. 'I fear we will be lost if you leave us.' He touched the eyelids gently, willing them to open. 'I fear I will be lost if you leave me.' **** The voice had stopped. No!! His hands grasped vainly at the Nothing as his lifeline to whatever it was he was trying to hold onto disappeared and he fell. Despite being in Nothing, he had the curious sensation of falling, when your stomach leaps and your chest shrinks to you can't breathe well. But then he felt something else, something catch him in mid-Nothing and cradle him. Slight, gentle, invisible beings danced down his arms, through the strands of his hair, around the curves of his face and neck. They were apparently keeping him up with wings or else he'd still be falling...Were they fairies? The beings danced all around him, pulling and tugging at his brain to get him to open his eyes. Open his eyes? Is that why everything looked like Nothing? Because his eyes were closed? It had to be more than that, but he would give it a try anyway. He opened his eyes. **** |
| CHAPTER 4 |
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