He would not fail his people, even though his heart had died in his chest long ago.
Rating: NC-17
Warnings: This story features descripions of mutilation, mpreg and death.

Beta help by the members of the Lizard Council, thank you for all the helpful suggestions. :)

An hour before the sun would even send the smallest ray of light over the horizon, Thranduil woke on the edge of a scream – as he had unfailingly done every day since he found the shattered remains of his wife.

His mouth tasted of bile as he blindly groped for the goblet of wine that stood ever ready on the nightstand, swallowing the heavy vintage without tasting as he tried to calm his racing heart.

...his second-born's well-formed body so grotesquely swollen...

He stumbled blindly towards the banked fire and stoked the coals, trying in vain to suppress the pictures that still ran through his mind, for after so many years they were as well-known to him as the shape of his own hands... his own murderous, blood-stained hands...

...the face he had showered with kisses on the joyful day of his birth mutilated beyond recognition, deep gouges dripping blood...

His breath still came as fast as if he had tried to outrace the familiar horrors that unerringly visited him every night. He stared into the fire, trying to force himself to let go of the images which had burned themselves into his mind, but as if by some trick, the flames sprung up and suddenly burned more brightly, dancing merrily like his wife's long, soft hair in the wind.

Why have you abandoned me, he asked her in despair, asked the uncaring Valar who seemed to have forgotten all about the horrors to be found on these shores. “Why have you abandoned me?” he shouted at Eru in sudden defiance and threw his goblet into the fire, where the wine sizzled as it soaked the burning coals.

Thranduil fell to his knees and hid his face in his hands, trying to hide from what he knew he would see in his dreams until the very end of Arda.

The body so transformed that it no longer seemed like that of a man, belly swollen, veins pulsing with a sluggish, dark poison that would only torment, not kill, not until the fell spawn had grown enough to do the deed from the inside with teeth and claws... And then the eyes opened, and he saw his son in them.

“Help me, ada...”

“No,” Thranduil breathed, getting up to stumble away from the fire, helplessly shaking his head as if to ward off the vision that would yet unerringly run its course until it had him tremble on the brink of madness.

“Kill me, ada...”

He sobbed and shook his head, no, no, no, he would not, he could not, oh Eru have mercy, and then there was the healer with the dagger, the blade gleaming in the light so that he wanted to grab it and push it into his own heart rather than end the life of his son, his son who had ridden on his knee, crawled into his bed at night, showed off his first self-fletched arrow, who had always, always made him proud, made him love...

“I will not!” he sobbed in horror at what he had done.

He reached for the dagger to kill his son and then himself to escape this pain which no father should have to bear, yet the healer shook his head and turned away, denying him even this last escape by his questionable mercy, for as Thranduil helplessly watched the healer raise the knife, he knew that it was his own hand holding the knife, his own ineffectual hands spattered by the lifeblood of the son he would have given his life to protect...

“I will not!” he screamed again in angry defiance, daring the Valar, daring Gorthaur to throw more horrors at him, and with an unsound laugh because he would not break, he could not break, not when his people depended on him, he took up the bottle Galion left near the fireplace every morning to take a long draught, swallowing down unbearable pain and grief until there was nothing left of him anymore but the determination of a liege who had to defend a realm from all the evil that surrounded it. His wife had abandoned him, choosing rather to die than to face this horror at his side, and he knew that he had failed her, and that he would love a wife no more even though she would never leave the Halls of Mandos again. He had failed as a father, had killed his own son, oh Eru have mercy – he could be a father no more, never again; there was no warmth left in his shriveled heart. What was there left now but the responsibility he had inherited from his own father, the need to lead a people so heavily beleaguered by evil and Gelydh eager for power both?

He would not fail his people, even though his heart had died in his chest long ago – yet a king need have no heart, as long as he had a duty to keep his body alive, and in this, at last, he would not fail, no matter what further horrors his soul might have to bear.


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Gelydh - Sindarin for Noldor