The servant returned at midmorning with a healer in tow.
Ivan heard them coming—footsteps too light for human ears, but his weren't human anymore—and had approximately thirty seconds to compose himself. He grabbed the nearest piece of furniture that looked like it belonged to a sick person, which turned out to be a chair draped in something velvet, and arranged himself in it with his head tilted back and his eyes half-closed.
The performance felt ridiculous. The body he wore could probably run a marathon without breaking a sweat.
The door opened without a knock. Elvish privacy rules, apparently. Or maybe just healers.
She was tall—of course she was, they were all tall—with dark hair braided back from a face that looked ageless in the worst possible way. Not young, not old, just... permanent. Like a statue that had decided to start walking around.
"Prince Legolas." Her voice was cool, clinical. "Your father sends me."
Of course he does.
"I told the servant I required rest."
"The King disagrees with that assessment."
Ivan bit back the response that rose instinctively—something sarcastic about Thranduil's medical expertise—and forced his expression into what he hoped was neutral exhaustion. The healer was already moving toward him, one hand extended.
"May I?"
He had no idea what she was asking permission for, but refusing seemed worse than agreeing. He nodded.
Her palm pressed against his chest, just above where his heart beat its slow, foreign rhythm. Her eyes unfocused, and something—some sense Ivan didn't have a name for—brushed against the inside of his mind.
He froze.
Whatever she was doing, it felt like a doctor using a stethoscope, except the stethoscope was made of thought and she was listening to something a lot more private than his heartbeat.
After a long moment, her brow furrowed. "Your fëa feels... strange."
Shit.
"Strange how?" His voice came out steady. Thank God—thank whatever Valar existed—for Legolas's physical control.
"Displaced. As if you have been... jostled." She withdrew her hand, but her eyes remained fixed on his face with new interest. "What happened last night?"
Ivan let the silence stretch while he scrambled for an answer. What did Elves dream about? What would be a plausible excuse for his soul feeling like it had been "jostled"?
"The Shadow," he said finally. "In my dreams. It pressed against me. I... resisted."
Not entirely a lie. The corruption in the forest was real enough. If Legolas had been sensitive to it before—and from the scattered memories Ivan was beginning to sort through, he had been—then claiming it affected his sleep wasn't unreasonable.
The healer's expression shifted. Not quite believing, but not dismissing either. "The Shadow presses on all of us, my prince. It does not usually leave marks of this nature."
"Perhaps I resisted harder than usual."
Her mouth thinned. She didn't like the answer, but she didn't have a better explanation to offer. Ivan watched her weigh options behind those ancient eyes—escalate to Thranduil? Demand more tests? Accuse the prince directly?
"You should rest," she said finally. "But I will return this evening. If your fëa remains... unusual... the King must be informed."
"I understand."
She didn't offer the traditional farewell—whatever that was—just turned and left with the kind of liquid grace that made Ivan acutely aware of how clumsy his own movements still were.
The door closed. He waited, counting heartbeats, until her footsteps faded entirely.
Then he stood and nearly fell.
His legs tangled. The balance was wrong—his center of gravity sat in a different place than thirty-odd years of muscle memory expected. He caught himself on the chair, overcorrected, stumbled three steps sideways before catching the wall.
"This is ridiculous," he muttered.
His voice echoed in the empty chamber. Legolas's voice, but with Ivan's frustration coloring every syllable. The disconnect was maddening. He could access memories of incredible physical feats—climbing vertical surfaces, firing arrows at impossible speeds, moving through combat like violence was a dance—but the bridge between knowledge and execution was broken.
Or more accurately: the bridge had never existed. Those memories belonged to someone else. Ivan was just a tourist rummaging through the gift shop.
He pushed off the wall and walked. Slowly. One foot in front of the other, the way his physical therapist had taught him after that skiing accident in college. Find the weight. Feel the floor. Let the body figure out what the brain couldn't explain.
Five steps. Turn. Five steps back.
He tripped on step seven.
The floor hit his palms—hands splayed, catching himself in a position his body knew instinctively was suboptimal for recovery—and he stayed there, breathing, letting the humiliation wash through him.
Legolas Greenleaf had never fallen in centuries of walking these halls. Prince of the Woodland Realm, archer without equal, capable of surfing a shield down a flight of stairs while firing arrows at Uruk-hai.
And Ivan couldn't cross a room without tripping over his own feet.
He pushed himself up. Tried again. This time he let his eyes unfocus slightly, stopped thinking about where his feet were supposed to go, and let the body's buried instincts take over.
Better. Not good, but better.
He practiced for what felt like hours. Walking became acceptable. Running—attempted only once, in a burst of frustrated ambition—remained a disaster. But the basic motion started to click. Not natural, not yet, but functional.
By the time the light outside shifted toward evening, Ivan could cross the chamber without assistance. Small victories.
He sank into the chair the healer had found him in and closed his eyes. The doubled memories were still there, but they'd started to sort themselves. Human memories clustering on one side, Elvish on the other. He could access either by focusing, like searching a filing system with two different organizational schemes.
Legolas's childhood emerged in fragments: archery lessons that started before human children could hold a bow. Early patrols through forests that were still green, still healthy, before the corruption crept south from Dol Guldur. The first spider he'd killed, its legs twitching as ichor pooled on fallen leaves.
And through it all, like a cold current beneath warmer water—Thranduil.
His father. Legolas's father. Ivan had no idea which possessive was correct anymore.
The memories weren't cruel, exactly. Thranduil had never struck his son, never abandoned him, never done any of the obviously abusive things that would have made Ivan's relationship with him simple. Instead, there was just... distance. Expectation. A constant awareness that the prince's performance reflected on the king, and anything less than perfection was a failure.
Ivan opened his eyes and stared at the ceiling—carved wood, of course, because everything here was carved wood—and felt something twist in his chest.
He'd had parents. Real ones, back in Seattle. His mother was still alive, probably, assuming the timeline translated at all. She'd get a call about the accident, about her son dying in a crosswalk because he wasn't paying attention. She'd grieve. She'd move on, eventually. That's what people did.
And Ivan was here, wearing someone else's son like a costume, about to walk into that borrowed life and pretend to belong.
Something caught in his throat. He swallowed it down.
Debug the problem. That's what you do.
He couldn't go back. That much seemed clear. Whatever had happened—whatever cosmic glitch had ripped his consciousness out of a dying body and dropped it into an Elvish prince—there was no undo button. No Ctrl-Z to restore from backup.
This was his life now. All of it.
The knock came while he was still processing that realization. Not the healer this time—different footsteps, lighter and quicker—but someone with authority nonetheless.
"My prince?" A new voice. Female. "You have missed the evening meal."
Ivan checked the window. The light had changed again, sliding from sickly green toward full darkness. He'd lost hours to memory-sorting, to practice walking, to existential crisis.
"I am not hungry."
A pause. Then, cautiously: "Shall I inform the kitchens to prepare something for your chambers?"
The question had layers. Ivan caught them only because Legolas's memories supplied context: meals with the court were important. Political, even. Missing one was unusual; missing two was a statement. Thranduil would be watching. Thranduil was always watching.
"Yes," Ivan said. "Something light. And—" He hesitated, sorting through options. "Thank whoever brings it. Personally."
The silence that followed suggested this was not a thing Legolas normally did.
"As you wish, my prince."
Footsteps retreated. Ivan rubbed his face with both hands—too-smooth hands, fingers too long—and tried to plan his next move.
The healer would return. Thranduil would demand answers. At some point, Ivan would have to walk out of this room and convince everyone who'd known Legolas for centuries that nothing had changed.
He was going to fail. The only question was how badly, and how quickly.
But first: food. When had he last eaten? The memories blurred together—Legolas's last meal, Ivan's last coffee—but his stomach was making noises that suggested the body needed maintenance regardless of which consciousness was driving.
The tray arrived carried by an Elf barely taller than Ivan's old height, with ears that swept back at the sharp angle he was starting to recognize as standard for this species. The servant's hands shook slightly as she set the tray on a side table.
"Thank you," Ivan said.
Her eyes widened. Just briefly—just enough to confirm that Legolas Greenleaf had never thanked a servant in his extremely long life—before she bowed and fled.
Ivan stared at the closed door for a moment, then looked at the food. Bread, fruits, something that might have been cheese. All of it looked simultaneously familiar and alien, like comfort food from a country he'd never visited.
He ate anyway. The body was happy. The mind...
The mind wasn't ready to deal with tomorrow.
He was still sitting there, crumbs on the empty plate, when he felt it: a pull from somewhere deep in his chest. Not physical pain—more like a hook behind his sternum, tugging toward something he couldn't see.
Ivan closed his eyes and followed the sensation inward.
Legolas's memories rose to meet him. Not scattered fragments this time, but a flood—centuries of starlight, battle, his father's cold expectations, the forest he'd sworn to protect rotting around him year by year—
The room dissolved.
When Ivan opened his eyes, he wasn't in the prince's chambers anymore. He was standing in darkness, and the darkness had walls.
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