Love Lead Me On - A Legolas x Priestess!Reader Fanfiction

Chapter 4: With a downcast smile, you pierced my heart like a dagger

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*After giving me a smile with downcast eyes, you suddenly grew up

That was like a sharp knife split my chest apart...*

There stood Legolas, clad in the finest silver tunic that reached his knees, dark brown pants and matching boots. His entire outfit screamed sophistication and elegance, his hair in its usual perfect braids, but his eyes...

His supposedly stunning and enticingly piercing blue eyes that always seemed so alive just looked too tired, sad and emotionally spent that it physically hurt her.

He was smiling but it was so mournful that Celine just hopes he would stop straining himself by pretending. His gaze then fell to the ground, defeated, as if he'd not only seen war but something much more tormenting.

And it stabbed her with more pain than a jagged saw would ever inflict on her body.

Which of course, makes perfect sense, considering the hole the elven prince had dug himself into.

And then she remembers, of course he'd end up like that. She almost forgotten that she had seen Kili with Tauriel earlier. She was way too caught up laughing with Thorin that she couldn't pay them any heed back then.

It didn't matter whatever it is that they were doing because the war had been won and Legolas had all but lost this one.

"Am I the only one noticing or is it getting a bit too stuffy here, dear prince? Shall we head outside for some fresh air?"

And Celine is just about to lose it too.

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*--It's not that I want to be loved, but I want to love all of you*

"You knew this would happen, did you not?" Celine began right after they got out and into one of Erebor's near nonexistent balconies.

It's not as elegant as the ones they have in Mirkwood, Rivendell or Lothlorien. Neither does it offer any splendid scenery down below. All one could see from where they are were the bloodied battlefields from where they fought earlier, and whatever is left of the -once again- ruined city of Dale.

The morbid side of her thinks that the setting somehow matches the mood they are both currently in, perfectly.

But they aren't here to make small talk about the differences of dwarven and elvish aesthetics and so she kept the thoughts to herself.

Legolas made his way to the crumbled stone railings without a word.

Celine didn't really have much to do but wait for his response, and so she did.

There's nothing she could say to make things better for him anyways.

A few minutes had passed and she thanked the valars for her expansive patience when it came to the prince.

"Yes." he hung his head low and slumped his shoulders from what she could see of his back.

Cautiously making her way towards him as if she's walking on thin ice -which she probably is doing at the moment- she voiced out that one question that had been nagging at her ever since, "Then why did you still do it? Why have you kept pushing the inevitable aside? If you knew you would end up hurting, why?"

And she ponders, she should be asking herself pretty much the same question as well.

Why?

And she'll come up with a pathetic excuse like-

"I cannot. Could not stop. I have tried, multiple times to... To forget. But I couldn't. It had always been and will always be there on the back of my mind... And before I know it, I am back and stuck on the same place as I had been before." He didn't turn to her and just stared straight ahead, glimmers appearing on the corners of his eyes before he bowed and held his head in between his hands, breaths shuddering and racking his body.