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by Linda Chapple.

Two small things before the beginning of the story:

(1)    This is set early on in the friendship between Aragorn and Legolas, and both are

still learning about each other.

(2) I've given the elves cat-like eyes, so they reflect bright light.

The storm had been building for the entire day and Aragorn was almost glad when it finally broke.  Almost.  Most of the day had been intolerable, and it was only partly due to the fact that the muggy atmosphere made any kind of movement a sweat-drenched nightmare.  The real, nail-in-the-coffin reason that the day was the kind to induce nightmares had managed to vanish again, while his back was turned.  Doing his best not to grind his teeth, Aragorn backtracked.

Again.

For what felt like the millionth time in the past hour.

"Legolas, will you come down from there?"  Nothing but the sound of wind-tossed leaves answered.  "Legolas!"

"Yes?"  Legolas suddenly appeared a little to his right, apparently hanging upside down from a branch, his hair whipping around his head and the arrows in his quiver somehow managing to defy gravity by not falling to the ground.

Swallowing the yelp of surprise at the elf's sudden appearance, Aragorn recovered his breath and gave Legolas one of his best glares.  It had no noticeable effect.  Legolas had grown increasingly restless during the afternoon, as the storm continued to build, and when the wind had started to blow through the trees, the normally poised and unflappable elf had started to act more and more like an overexcited cat.  Although Aragorn was no longer a stranger to the mischievous side of Legolas, this apparent fit of lunacy had taken him completely by surprise.

"Will you come down from there?" he demanded, when Legolas showed every sign of climbing back up the tree.

Legolas paused and gave him a bright-eyed, slightly unfocused look.  "Why?"

A jagged sheet of lightning tore across the sword-metal sky, making Aragorn flinch and Legolas' eyes briefly flare with a silver-green light.  "That's why!" he said in exasperation, jabbing a finger up in the direction of the sky.

Legolas gave what sounded suspiciously like a gurgle of laughter.  "Silly Ranger," he said in a scoffing tone, before vanishing back into the tree.

Aragorn bit back the urge to whimper.  The storm was getting closer and closer, the intervals between the lightning flashes and the thunder growing shorter.  The one thing he knew for certain was that they really should be thinking of leaving the forest and making for the nearest bit of clear ground and lying down until the storm passed over.  He'd had it dinned into him that standing under a tree when it got struck by lightning was not a Good Thing.

A blue-white snake of light writhed across the sky.  The resulting whoop of delight from up the tree was swiftly drowned out by the drum-beat of thunder.  Aragorn sighed.  Obviously Legolas hadn't learned from the same knee as him.  Either that, of the elf was having a blond moment to end them all.

I can't believe I'm doing this, Aragorn thought to himself, as he went to the tree Legolas was perched in and started to climb it.  It started off a simple climb but the higher he got, the more the tree dipped and swayed under him, making him increasingly cautious.  The last thing he needed to happen was for him to fall out of the damn thing.  It had taken Legolas nearly a month to get over the first time it had happened.  From his expression of wide-eyed surprise when Aragorn had tumbled out of the oak, plus the seemingly endless questions as to how he had managed it, it had appeared that Aragorn had earned the dubious honour of being the first conscious person Legolas had ever seen fall out of a tree.  Fortunately for his chances of ever seeing the Undying Lands, Legolas had found something else to be astonished about before Aragorn snapped and strangled him.

Legolas, of course, was right up on the topmost branches.  Naturally; where else would the mad elf be during the height of a summer storm?  Aragorn asked himself.  The fact that Legolas was happily ensconced on branches that would normally have difficulty in supporting a squirrel was something that only occurred to Aragorn just as he was about to take the nose-dive he had been dreading, and it took some very undignified grabbing and holding on to prevent his swift return to the forest floor.  He closed his eyes, counted to ten in Common, Sindarin and Quenya and told himself, very firmly, that the death of his youngest son would upset King Thranduil.  He opened his eyes to find himself practically nose to nose with a curious Legolas, yelled and had to grab at the branch again to stop from falling.

"What are you doing?" Legolas demanded in fascination.  "You usually laugh at me when I hug the trees."

"My affection tends to increase in direct relation to how far off the ground I am," Aragorn told him a little breathlessly.

Legolas immediately looked intrigued, and Aragorn braced himself for another seemingly endless barrage of questions.  The prince's curiosity was close to insatiable and once a subject attracted his attention, the only thing that saved said subject from being playfully squeezed to death was the appearance on the horizon of another, even more fascinating, concept.  'Butterfly mind' just didn't come into it, and like the cat he shared so many characteristics with, Legolas saw anything that moved as a potential toy.  Or lunch.  Or both.

Fortunately for Aragorn, another spectacular display of lightning distracted the elf, and Legolas bounced back upright again, crying out with delight.  Aragorn closed his eyes and gritted his teeth as the entire leaf canopy dipped and swayed like a ship in a storm.   "Do you have to do that?" he asked plaintively, once he was certain he had control of himself.

"Do what?" Legolas asked with absent-minded curiosity, as he scanned the sky for the next flash of lightning.

"Leap about like a squirrel drunk on fermented pears!" Aragorn snapped.

Legolas tossed him an amused look.  "Squirrels don't get drunk on fermented pears, Aragorn."

"Fancy that," Aragorn gritted.  It was going to take days for the imprint of the bark on his hands and calves to fade.

"No, they prefer plums."  Legolas tilted his head to one side as he watched Aragorn, and a mischievous smile flickered across his face.  He bounced a little, experimentally, and the smile widened when Aragorn immediately hugged his branch even tighter.

"Don't you even think of considering it," Aragorn said warningly, when he saw the gleam in Legolas' eyes.  "I don't land on my feet, the way you do."

"No, you land on your-"

"Legolas!"

The elf gave a laugh of pure devilment, but his mercurial attention went back to the sky as an entire river system of molten gold and ruby strands of light blazed into life directly above them.  The thunder followed immediately, a cascading torrent of sound.  Legolas lifted up his head and hands, wrapping one of his legs around a branch and bracing the other one against a second.  He could feel the wildness of the elements calling out to him.  The wind plucked at his hair and on impulse, he reached up to break the thong that kept it tied back from his face, relishing the way it was immediately lifted up and away from the back of his neck, flying on the wind.  He could almost imagine that he had wings, and that if he stretched up far enough, the wind would pick him up and carry him away....

A yelp and the sound of a breaking branch jerked him back to the here and now.  Sensing Aragorn start to slip, Legolas shifted his balance slightly and lunged forward to grab at the man as he started to tilt, throwing his weight to one side and bringing Aragorn back onto an even keel.  He let him go as soon as he sensed that Aragorn had regained his balance, and for the first time in a while, something approaching his usual good sense flickered into existence.

"You shouldn't be up here," he told Aragorn, remembering that men were less agile in the trees.

"Neither of us should be up here, you moron!" Aragorn practically spat in exasperation.  "Didn't anyone ever tell you that it's dangerous to sit in a tree during a thunderstorm?"

Legolas lifted a shoulder in a half-shrug.  "Sometimes."

"What?"

"It's sometimes dangerous to sit in a tree during a thunderstorm," Legolas elaborated helpfully.  "But it's also the best way to get a good view."

Aragorn closed his eyes.  "I didn't hear you say that," he said firmly.  "Legolas, we should be getting as far away from the trees as possible, not sitting in them and clapping our hands over the lightning display!"

As if to rebuke him for his words, several lightning bolts danced and intersected above them, touching the dark grey and near-black clouds with mithril.  Once again, Legolas' eyes blazed with hammered silver and green, reflecting the heavenly light with a glow of his own.  An expression of pure joy claimed his face as he looked up, and Aragorn resigned himself to losing the elf for the duration of the storm.

An eye-searing bolt of yellow-white suddenly slammed down vertically out of the heavens and struck a tree in the middle distance.  Aragorn jumped at the relative nearness of the target, then jumped again when Legolas let out a banshee howl that would have made an orc run screaming for its nest.  He turned to look in time to see Legolas fling back his head and howl again.  There was an expression halfway between pain and rage on the elf's face, and Aragorn realised that he was empathising with the fate of the tree that had been struck.

"Legolas?  Legolas!"  He continued to yell his friend's name until Legolas eventually twisted around to face him, his eyes glittering dangerously.  "This is what happens, Legolas.  You can't change it, or prevent it.  You just have to endure it.  Distance yourself from the trees before you get hurt!"

Legolas snarled something that had Aragorn blinking and wondering if he had heard correctly.  He knew a smattering of most of the tongues of men, and while he was fluent in Sindarin, he could also speak enough Quenya not to embarrass his foster-father.  He didn't recognise what Legolas had just spat at him, the growly-sounding words seeming to come from the back of the elf's throat.  He twisted away from Aragorn and readied his bow, reaching back to unsnap his quiver and draw out an arrow.  Aragorn watched in increasing bewilderment as Legolas took aim at the clouds.

"What are you doing?" he demanded.

"Reminding the Storm Folk of the rules of the Dance," Legolas threw back over his shoulder.

Before Aragorn could demand a more detailed explanation, Legolas had sighted on some target he could see and loosed the arrow.  It flew off into the darkening air and a few seconds later, another lightning bolt flashed off to one side.  Legolas muttered something under his breath and reached for another arrow.

"Lego-"

"Be quiet!  I cannot aim if you are chattering in my ear!" Legolas snapped.

Utterly stunned, Aragorn obediently shut up.  Legolas had never demanded silence while he shot before.  Still, he'd never been trying to shoot down a thunderstorm before.  Aragorn did his best to ignore the sight of smoke rising from where the lightning had struck the tree and watched his friend take aim at the sky once again.  The elf seemed to have slipped into something approaching reverie, his eyes unfocused and almost solid silver, the arrow nocked and ready.

Then it was released, the string humming its lethal song as the arrow flashed up into the sky.  Aragorn automatically followed its path, then cried out in pain as a bolt of lighting seemed to explode into being directly in the line of his vision.  Blue-white light swallowed up the arrow and he shut his eyes, seeing the flare against the closed eyelids.  He could have sworn, however, that at the very instant he had looked away, there had been a smaller, but no less intense flash of dark gold at the very centre of that snake of sky-fire.  He braced himself for the thunder, but it never came.  Opening his eyes and trying to blink away the massive shadow blooms that obscured his vision, Aragorn gazed up at the sky in amazement.  There was a silent pattern of light playing against the clouds.  For a moment, it almost looked like the shadows cast by people dancing, but then it was sucked up into the cloud and the world seemed to hold its breath.

Rain...

It fell from the sky as though someone had opened the sluice gates to heaven.  Aragorn gasped at the force of it as it landed on him and made the branch he was clinging to slippery as ice.  The lightning seemed to have retreated above the clouds, now, and the thunder was a more distant thing.

"What... what was all that about?" he demanded of Legolas.

The elf had been sitting with a faintly mournful expression on his face as he looked in the direction of the blasted tree, but he blinked and turned towards Aragorn when he registered the question.  "What was what?"

"That firing the arrows into the air," Aragorn elaborated.

Legolas shrugged.  "I was reminding the Storm Folk of the agreement they made with my ancestors," he said quietly.

Aragorn frowned in confusion, then realised that Legolas was probably referring to the woodland elves when he said 'my ancestors'.  Legolas tended to have more in common with his mother's side of the bloodline than his father's more impressive - and imperious - lineage.  "What agreement was that?"

"They may dance across the heavens.  They may dance across open ground or water.  But they must never strike a living tree."  He shrugged.  "They are elemental beings.  Sometimes they forget and have to be reminded."  He blinked and focused more closely on Aragorn and his lips twitched.  "Are you all right?  You don't look very comfortable."

Aragorn gave him a long-suffering look.  "That's probably because I'm not," he snapped.  "Can we get out of this tree and into some kind of shelter?"

"I thought you wanted to get away from the trees and go and roll around in the open?" Legolas reminded him with wide-eyed innocence.

Aragorn couldn't stop his lips from stretching into an answering smile.  "That was before my lunatic friend told off a thunderstorm and made it decide to play nicely," he said wryly.  "Come on, you can impress me with your woodland skills and find us somewhere dry to sit this rain out."

It was, of course, a forgone conclusion that he should fall out of the tree on the way back down.

 * * *