"How like Pippin to insist upon going first," Meriadoc mused as he and Legolas walked the neatly raked gravel paths of the palace gardens. The early autumn sunlight was almost as bright as on the summer day a few weeks previous that witnessed the departure of Peregrine Took. "He always was impatient."

Legolas merely nodded. It was odd for one as young of spirit as Merry to be the voice of knowledge, but the slow decay of mortal aging and its natural consequence were things elves knew only from observation.

Merry closed his eyes, a look of pain on his face. The loss of his wife and dearest friend were open wounds. "I think he missed Diamond too much."

"As you miss your Estella," Legolas recalled the wives of Meriadoc and Peregrin vividly; Estella with her auburn curls and clear laugh, and Diamond, a lass whose edges were as hard as her namesake jewel but with a heart warmer than any fire. With the deaths of Diamond and Estella, Legolas observed something fundamental had changed in his companions. He'd seen the same alteration of spirit in Frodo after the Quest; for the hobbits death had ceased to be an enemy but an old friend whose visit was expected and long awaited. It was the living that was difficult now.

"Yes," the hobbit said as he fiddled with a brass button on his pale yellow brocade waistcoat. "But I'll be with her soon enough. I'm not a Took to rush things. I only get to die once and I mean to do it properly."

The elf stared at a white rose half-hidden by the shadow of a low garden wall. He inhaled its spicy-sweet fragrance and realized with regret that it was already beginning to wilt. Flowers always smelt their best when they were dying.

"Properly," Merry echoed, his word a breath. Pippin had seemed to know that his death drew near; Legolas noted the same signs now in Merry. It saddened him to see such a life extinguished. As the years hastened by, his mortal friends left one by one on a journey only one elf had ever completed.

"Merry?"

"No one in Gondor knows the words to speak for one of our dead. I said them for Pippin, who will say them for me?" he whispered.

"Teach me the words and I will speak for you," Legolas offered.

The words were few and simple as befitted the composition of Shire-folk. Legolas committed them to memory.

As they turned inward to return to the palace, a gull swooped overhead. "I haven't seen or heard one of those since we said farewell to Frodo," the hobbit noted. "It's a lonely sort of sound."

"They do not often come to the city." Legolas stared after the bird as it turned away from the city with a last cry. "It longs for the sea."

"I wonder how Sam and Frodo are," Merry said stifling a yawn. "It's strange how my mind turns to them now. I can't imagine Sam anywhere but Middle Earth with his hands deep in the soil. I never knew a finer gardener," Merry concluded with a nod, the corners of his mouth turning upward as if in confirmation of a private jest. "He would have loved Queen Arwen's blue roses. They weren't in the garden when he visited."

"No, they were a gift from Lord Celeborn."

The following morning brought word that Meriadoc had passed away in his sleep. King Elessar saw him laid to rest with all the honor and ceremony befitting a member of the Fellowship of the Ring. But after the official ceremony, a small group gathered to hear words from the Shire. Little did Legolas know that he would repeat this duty twice more – in Valinor upon visiting the green mounds marking the graves of Frodo Baggins and Samwise Gamgee, dead in the same hour of the same day.

"Though we are bereft of physical presence of Meriadoc Brandybuck, he remains in memory ever bright. May Merry sleep in peace until the world is made anew."