Morning came whether Ivan was ready for it or not.
He'd spent the night exploring the strange internal space he'd fallen into—what the memories eventually labeled the Ancestral Inheritance Space, though that name felt too grand for what amounted to a mental filing cabinet—but it hadn't answered his most pressing questions. Where had Legolas's consciousness gone? Why was Ivan here instead? Would the original owner eventually resurface and demand his body back?
No responses. Just echoing silence and shelves of inherited knowledge he wasn't yet equipped to access.
The servant's knock at dawn felt like a death sentence.
"My prince. The King summons you to the throne room. He states attendance is not optional."
Ivan stood at the window, watching the corrupted forest catch the filtered light. His hands were steady. Legolas's hands. They'd been steady for centuries.
"Tell him I come."
Dressing proved challenging. The wardrobe was full of clothes designed for someone who'd worn them a thousand times before—elegant tunics, leather bracers, soft boots that molded to his feet like living things—and nothing came with instructions. He managed something approximating appropriate through trial and error, studying his reflection in the silver mirror to confirm he looked like a prince rather than an impostor playing dress-up.
The impostor in the mirror looked every inch the Elvish royalty.
Fake it till you make it, Ivan thought grimly. And if you can't make it, fake it till they stop asking.
The walk to the throne room took twenty minutes and felt like hours. Every corridor brought new recognition: that's where Legolas broke his first bow (aged forty, practically a toddler by Elvish standards); that door leads to the wine cellars his father was so protective of; those stairs descend to the dungeons where enemies of the realm awaited justice.
The guards at the throne room doors watched him approach with carefully blank expressions. They knew something was wrong. Of course they knew. Elves had spent millennia studying each other's microexpressions. Any deviation from Legolas's normal behavior would register like a siren.
Ivan kept walking.
The doors opened before he reached them—whether by magic or hidden mechanism, he couldn't tell—and the throne room spread before him in all its organic grandeur.
It was carved from a living tree, or perhaps grown into the shape of a room. The walls curved in ways that stone could never achieve, branches woven overhead into a canopy that filtered the morning light into soft gold. At the far end, raised on a natural platform of twisted roots, sat the throne.
And on the throne sat Thranduil.
Ivan's borrowed body froze.
The reaction was instinctive, older than conscious thought—muscles locking, breath catching, every cell responding to the king's presence the way prey responds to a predator's approach. Legolas had loved his father, the memories insisted. But that love had been tangled with something else. Something that felt a lot like fear.
Ivan forced his legs to move. One step. Another. The throne room was empty except for the two of them, which was either a courtesy or a trap.
Thranduil watched him approach without moving. The king looked exactly like his movie portrayal—tall even by Elvish standards, blonde hair falling past his shoulders, eyes pale as winter ice—but the reality was sharper somehow. More dangerous. Like the difference between a photograph of a blade and the blade itself.
Ivan stopped at what he hoped was the appropriate distance. The memories offered conflicting options: close enough for conversation, far enough for formality, somewhere in between for father-to-son discussions.
He split the difference and hoped.
"Father."
The word came out steadier than expected. Legolas's voice, carrying all the weight of their centuries together, delivered by a consciousness that had only known this man for a handful of hours.
Thranduil's head tilted. Almost imperceptible. A snake deciding whether to strike.
"You seem different, ion nín."
Son of mine. The Elvish dropped into Ivan's awareness without effort, Legolas's linguistic knowledge filling gaps before he could stumble over them. But the words carried weight beyond their literal meaning. Affection, yes, but also ownership. Expectation. You are mine, and mine do not deviate.
"The Shadow pressed against me," Ivan said, deploying the same excuse he'd used on the healer. "In dreams. It left... marks."
"The Shadow does not explain everything."
Thranduil rose from the throne in a single fluid motion. The motion itself was a statement—kings do not rise to meet princes; princes approach kings and wait to be acknowledged. But Thranduil was walking now, descending the root-stairs with a grace that made Ivan's practiced movements look arthritic by comparison.
He stopped an arm's length away. Close enough to strike. Close enough to embrace.
"The healer reports your fëa is displaced."
Shit.
"She used the word 'jostled,'" Ivan said.
"I used displaced. The distinction is mine." Thranduil's eyes narrowed. They were the same color as Legolas's—as Ivan's, now—but colder. Harder. Like looking into a glacier and seeing something ancient frozen beneath the ice. "What happened to you, Legolas?"
Ivan held the king's gaze because looking away felt like surrender. The memories offered no guidance here. Legolas had never been in this situation—had never needed to explain himself when there was nothing acceptable to explain.
"I do not know."
Truth. As much truth as he could offer.
"You do not know." Thranduil's tone was flat. "My son, who has walked these halls for nearly three thousand years, wakes one morning changed enough that our healers feel it in his soul, and he does not know what transpired?"
"The dreams were dark." Ivan kept his voice steady, drawing on the control Legolas's body offered even when his borrowed heart wanted to race. "The corruption pressed closer than it has before. I resisted. Perhaps the resistance... cost me something."
"Or granted you something."
The accusation hung in the air between them. Ivan caught the implication instantly—Thranduil thought his son might have touched the Shadow deliberately, reached toward Dol Guldur's power instead of away from it, traded something precious for something dangerous.
"No." The word came out sharper than intended. "I would never—"
"The son I knew would never." Thranduil's voice dropped, soft and cold as fresh snow. "But you claim you do not know what you are anymore. So how can I know what you would and would not do?"
Ivan opened his mouth. Closed it. The trap was elegant—anything he said to defend himself proved he had reason to need defending.
The silence stretched between them, thick and brittle.
Finally, Thranduil stepped back. The distance returned to his expression, formality sliding over whatever genuine concern might have lurked beneath.
"You will resume your duties tomorrow. Whatever ails you—if it is ailing at all—duty cures. You will patrol the eastern borders. You will train with the younger guards. You will attend court functions as befits your station." A pause. "You will be watched."
"Yes, Father."
The words came automatically. Legolas's response to every royal command, delivered with the proper blend of deference and acceptance. But something in Ivan's chest rebelled at the submission—some stubborn human core that remembered a different relationship with authority, one where respect had to be earned rather than demanded.
He buried that rebellion deep. Later. He could process later.
Thranduil turned away, ascending back toward his throne. "You are dismissed."
Ivan bowed—the motion coming easier than expected, his body remembering even if his mind found it foreign—and retreated toward the doors. His back felt exposed, vulnerable. Legolas's memories insisted the king had never attacked a family member, but Ivan's human instincts screamed that turning your back on a predator was never safe.
He made it to the corridor before his legs gave out.
One hand against the living wood wall, the other pressed to his chest where his heart beat that slow, wrong rhythm. The throne room doors closed behind him with the sound of finality. Two guards stood at attention, their eyes fixed forward, carefully not seeing the prince's weakness.
Ivan leaned against the wall and breathed.
The encounter had lasted maybe ten minutes. It felt like hours. Every word had carried weight he couldn't fully parse, every pause loaded with implications his human understanding couldn't grasp. This wasn't just a family disagreement—it was a political confrontation, a power dynamic centuries in the making, a relationship so complex that the man who'd lived it for three thousand years probably couldn't have explained it either.
And Ivan had to navigate it. Every day. For the rest of this borrowed life.
Debug the problem, he told himself. But the problem wasn't a bug in a code base. The problem was that he'd been dropped into the middle of a story he only half-understood, wearing the skin of a character he couldn't pretend to be.
His hands wouldn't stop shaking.
Legolas's hands—steady for centuries, calm through battles and disasters and the slow dying of his world—trembled against the wall like leaves in a storm. And Ivan couldn't tell if the fear was his own, or if he'd inherited that too.
The memories rose unbidden: Thranduil's face after the fall of Erebor, cold and closed, refusing to acknowledge the Dwarves' suffering. Thranduil on the day Legolas's mother sailed West, standing alone at the dock while his son wept somewhere private, because princes did not cry where kings could see. Thranduil in the council chambers, dismissing every proposal to address Dol Guldur's corruption because it does not touch us yet.
Legolas had loved his father. The memories made that clear. But love and fear shared space in this borrowed heart, and Ivan couldn't separate them.
He pushed off the wall. His legs held. The guards continued not-seeing, their courtesy a gift he didn't deserve but desperately needed.
Tomorrow. Duties. Patrol.
He had maybe eighteen hours to figure out how to be an Elvish prince, an archer without equal, and a warrior capable of surviving the corrupted forest his father refused to acknowledge was dying.
Ivan started walking. His feet knew the way to the training grounds, even if his mind didn't. And somewhere in that journey, between one breath and the next, he made a decision.
He wasn't Legolas. He would never be Legolas, no matter how perfectly he learned to wear the man's face. But he was here, in this body, in this life, with knowledge of a future the original prince could never have possessed.
The War of the Ring was coming. The Fellowship. Mount Doom. Everything he'd watched on screens and read in books—all of it would unfold around him, through him, whether he was ready or not.
He couldn't stop it. Probably couldn't change it, not in the ways that mattered. But he could prepare. He could learn.
And if that meant becoming a version of Legolas Greenleaf that had never existed before—a prince with a programmer's logic and a modern man's desperation—then so be it.
The training grounds lay ahead, empty in the early morning light. Practice dummies stood in rows, their wooden bodies scarred by centuries of abuse. Archery targets clustered at the far end, distances marked in Elvish script Ivan could read as easily as English.
His hands found the bow before his brain finished planning. The weight was familiar in a way nothing else had been—not the clothes, not the corridors, not even his own reflection. Legolas had learned archery before he could properly speak. The skill was written into muscle and bone.
Ivan nocked an arrow. Drew back. Let his eyes find the target through senses that had never existed in his old life.
The shot flew true.
It struck the target dead center, and for one perfect moment, Ivan forgot he was an impostor.
Then his hands started shaking again, and he remembered.
The sun climbed higher over Mirkwood's corrupted canopy. Somewhere in the forest depths, shadows stirred. And in the training grounds of the Woodland Realm, a dead programmer from Seattle began the slow, painful work of becoming someone he'd never been meant to be.
His father's words echoed in his mind: You will be watched.
"Good," Ivan whispered to the empty yard, nocking another arrow. "Watch this."
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