“Thank you for this,” Kurt said. He held tight to his husband's hand and watched with sorrowful eyes as the Elven boats departed the shore. “Thank you for coming with me to watch my people leave.”

“And there's nothing I can say,” Blaine asked, his own mourning overwhelmed by the sheer number of Elves boarding boats for the Undying Lands, never to return, “not a word that would convince you to go with them?”

“Why, Blaine?” Kurt looked upon his husband – his whitening hair, the wrinkles around his eyes, the smile absent from his lips. “Have you discovered the secret to living forever and have not yet told me?”

“I have not,” Blaine admitted sadly. “You know I have not.”

“Then there is no reason, Dwarf, for me to do anything but stay exactly where I am, and spend the rest of your life, and mine, loving you, and not as a memory to carry with me, but right here, in the flesh, where I can keep your heart next to mine for as long as possible.” Kurt sighed, looking back at the boats on the water, fanning out into the mild current like butterflies opening their wings for the first time and lifting into the sky. “I just needed to see them. I just needed to know.”

“To know what, my love?” Blaine kissed Kurt's hand, his skin growing ever colder, swifter now that Kurt's decision to denounce the Grace of the Valar had become definite.

“That they would be gone,” Kurt said, his voice near a whisper. “That they would be safe. That when again I walk through the Great Halls of Rivendell, which I find I must do, Husband, that it will be empty, Lord Elrond's throne vacant. That when I journey to the Forests of Lothlorien, the illusory magic of her sacred, protected Trees will have begun to fade. That things must change, Husband, and we will be here to see them change.”

“The time of the Elves is over on Middle-earth,” Blaine said. “You are one of the last.”

Kurt nodded. “Tis the way it should be.”

“Have you no regrets?” Blaine asked, tentative, frightened that he would hear that Kurt's list of regrets was long, and that, in some small measurement, veiled as Kurt might describe it, either by existence or deed, Blaine might be numbered among them.

“I have a few, Husband,” Kurt replied, “but only one which I number as important.”

“And that is?”                         

Kurt looked down at his Dwarf husband, and for the first time in all the long afternoon, he smiled.

“That you, my love, did not come in to my life much, much earlier.”