Snapshots

[eastofanduin]

Last Alliance

He doesn’t mean to, when he starts. He has always tried to be so strong, especially when he’s working with Thranduil. The young new-king has enough problems on his plate, a young still-elfling who should have been forced to stay home was the last thing he needed to worry about. But, today, seeing Thranduil come in again, battered and bruised, with that soul-deep ache in his eyes, of ‘I have failed them’. Flickering between a wearied king and a young man with the same thousand-yard stare Cannestad has seen a thousand times over reflected in all his patients eyes, in his father’s eyes. That hole where his mother used to be but isn’t any more, along with every elf he has seen pass into the healer’s tents that did not return after yet another battle, yet another skirmish. His 'healing hands' mean nothing if he cannot reach them, cannot heal them. He breaks. Thranduil’s arm is half-bandaged when the tears finally spill forth from where they have been banked, dammed up by weary eyelids. He is sobbing with his face pressed into Thranduil's shoulder, and the small part of him that screams at the impropriety of it is overwhelmed by the way he is drowning in the tumult of his emotion. Never has he felt so much like a child, too young and too fragile and only in the way. Canne feels awful for this, unburdening even more on shoulders already overburdened, but he cannot keep the tears in, cannot change that he is still, truly, not much more than a child and everything he does and has to do is, some days, far too much. It is not like he can turn to his parents, his mother dead in that first charge that gave him a new king, and his father always busy, and lost within himself. (His father who may as well have left, for all that Cannestad sees him nowadays. Maybe it would hurt less if his father had sailed after being overtaken by grief for wife and sea-longing instead). As he finally begins to hiccup to a stop, he can feel where his king has drawn him closer, silent, letting Cannestad outpour his tears. He suddenly feels terribly selfish, and when he has sniffled enough to speak clearly and pull himself together, he finishes wrapping up the other's arm. Cannestad looks up to thank Thranduil, but he is caught, silent, at the unshed tears in his kings eyes. He takes a deep breath. "If-if you want to... I can say that all the tears were mine."