The fire has long since dimmed to embers, but the heat in your body burns hotter still.

Your skin is damp. Fevered. Sheets twisted around your legs where you'd kicked them off in your sleep. Every breath comes shallow, uneven. You murmur something—half-delirious—and shift against the pillows, face turned toward the stone wall, seeking coolness that doesn’t come.

You don’t see him watching you.

Thranduil sits by the edge of the bed, unmoving, wrapped in a silence he cannot control. No robes of state, no crown. His hair is unbound, falling like pale silk across one shoulder. In his lap, your hand rests in both of his—small and flushed and too still.

This is not how he imagined fear.

He has stood beneath burning skies. He has watched the tides of battle crash against stone. He has spoken words that changed the course of centuries. But nothing in all his long life prepared him for this:

You, brought low by something with no name. No blade. No battlefield. Just a mortal illness that crept in slow and cruel.

He had not seen it at first. The tiredness in your eyes. The way your hands trembled when pouring tea. You’d laughed it off, of course. Just a chill, you’d said. Nothing serious.

But your warmth grew unnatural.

Your strength frayed.

And now…

Now, you can barely open your eyes.

A healer had come, but offered little more than herbs, cool cloths, patience. “It must run its course,” they said, as if that was an answer befitting a king who has lost before.