Remembrance Is All by Agelast

Afternoon Delight

Beleg Cúthalion/Haldir. Teen. Haldir meets a legend in Valinor, and the legend wants to go swimming. 

Written for the kisses meme on LJ, for Beleg/Haldir, back of the neck.

The sun was hot overhead, and the lake looked inviting, its waters clear and sparkling. Without many words traded between them, both Haldir and Beleg began to strip off their clothes and then waded into the waist deep water, exclaiming at its warmth.

Haldir knew that he was staring, and that he should stop, but Beleg made no comment on it. He swam further, until his hair is a bright spot in the blue water.

Haldir felt his heart beat slowly in his chest, as he cut through the water slowly. He had much to think about, his head felt too small to hold it all in. When he had been young, it had been a great, venerable game to play the heroes of Doriath. He himself had fought most fiercely to play either Beleg or Mablung. (And Beleg more than Mablung, for his father’s bow was to be his own Belthronding.)

It was always a cause of great unhappiness if he was forced to be Beren, or, worse, Túrin.

He never liked Túrin.

But none of that had prepared him to actually meet Beleg, the hero of his childhood! And nothing had prepared him to find that Beleg was very much like himself, a simple elf, uneasy with the splendors of Aman, and more at home in the woods than anywhere else.

Time stretched out, golden, promising, and empty of all expectations. There was no enemy to fight, and no home to defend. If he had thought the life of a marchwarden a lonely one, life in paradise was doubly so. He missed his brothers, he missed his home.

Even the Lady had no more use for his services, he was cut free, floating like a leaf on the water.

He was floating … Oh, he was floating, the sand beneath his feet had dropped away. He began to swim forward, looking for Beleg, but could not find him -- until he felt a cool hand on the back of his neck, and a kiss that quickly followed it.

Haldir turned to find Beleg floating next to him and he flushed as much for the kiss as to be so easily caught out. Though, of course, there was no shame in it, not with Beleg.

There was a hundred things he wished to say, profound things, clever things, anything except --

Haldir coughed and said, “Ah, the hour grows late --” the sun was still high in the sky, and Beleg gave him an amused look -- but Haldir went on, “do you wish to -- rest?”

“Yes,” Beleg said, and truly, the gaze of the rehoused was difficult to endure! Or perhaps it was Haldir’s nervousness?

Together, they swam to shore, but afterwards, alas, got very little rest.