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It’s sunset and the Númenor sailors are chanting to Uinen, vassal of Ulmo and lady of the seas, for a calm voyage. King Halbrand of the Southlands, who is neither king nor of the Southlands nor Halbrand, stays up on deck leaning against the wooden rails listening to them, fascinated. There’s familiarity to their songs and newness as well. He notices a few of the boys Galadriel was teaching to fight joining in, some familiar already with the words, some hesitant and mumbling and looking at each other before picking up on the refrain. Whether Uinen would appreciate it or not (and she would, Uinen is kind and generous and grateful), It must be working as far as the sailors are concerned; the waves stay low and the winds keep level and strong, bearing them back towards Middle-Earth.
He doesn’t join in; he isn’t one of them (he truly isn’t one of them), and their calm voyage would become considerably less calm if Uinen recognised his voice. Besides, it isn’t Uinen he’d be singing to placate for his calm seas, anyway. It’s Ossë, her husband, volatile and untrusted, lord of storms and battered coasts. Ossë had been tempted by Melkor too, once, had carved up the seas with Sauron; but Ossë was tempted back again by Uinen’s calm currents of voice in his ear. No doubt Ossë still has much to prove. No doubt Ossë would delight in having an opportunity to prove it.
Galadriel comes to him there on deck, still in her armour like the warrior queen she should be, with the pinks and oranges of the sunset glowing on her. She stands with him wordlessly and listens to the sailors sing, for a while, and then she puts her hand down on the railing beside him - no, overlapping, her two smallest fingers laid in the grooves between his - and he does not dare move.
“I would like you to come to my cabin,” she says. Her voice is a little heavier than normal, her words careful, considered. He realises she has thought about how to ask him this, and the idea of that pleases him almost as much as the idea of what could follow.
He nods.
(Ossë, please, he thinks, as they walk together across the ship in silence. Ossë, look how she shines. Ossë, if you take this from me I’ll bring an army to march on Valinor.)
Her cabin is small, barely room for a wooden bunk and a low stool. It feels like an insult to him in a way his own even humbler hammock does not. He’d have given her a whole ship of her own (and his), leading the fleet, her house crest on its sails. The thought makes him smile.
She notices immediately. “What is it?”, she asks him, with an unlike-her hesitation in her voice.
“Just thinking how far we’ve come since that raft,” he says. “Can you believe it?”
“I always believed it.”
He bows his head in agreement - she had, at that. “Do you like your armour?”
“Yes,” she says. “It’s beautiful. But - did you really find this? It’s an Elvish design.”
No, of course he hadn’t. No secondhand armour for her. He does, briefly, consider pretending otherwise for the sake of his cover, but he’s rapidly remembering there are things more important to him than his cover. “It’s more my own work than I led you to believe. It’s a gift, for you.”
“It’s beautiful,” she says again, her clear blue gaze holding him firm. “Thank you.”
“Can I check how it fits?” Partly an excuse to touch her; partly a way to distract her from any worrying trains of thought like how long it should have taken a mortal man to make something like this; partly because he does, genuinely, want to see how well it fits.
She nods, yes. He runs a finger around her collar to see there’s enough space between leather and metal, turns her wrist to check the vambrace isn’t coming down so low it blocks her motion, strokes both hands down her sides to reassure himself the metal cuirass is snug enough that its weight sits on her hips rather than pulling down from her shoulders. “Not bad,” he says.
Her fingers brush the star on her breastplate, and he braces himself for a question about where exactly he got the idea for that design, but she doesn’t mention it. “Will you take it off, please?”
“Of course,” he says, meaning yes with every beat of his blood, yes with every surge of his breath, yes with every part of his ancient being.
This could be fast work, if he let it be. He doesn’t let it be. He takes his time, and savours the look of his own work on her body.
Arms first. He takes her hand and gently lifts it round so he can reach the straps on her forearm. Then the ones on the soft underside of her upper arm, covered now in chainmail. Then carefully untying the knot of the points at her shoulder that hold it snug to the arming doublet.
The vambrace slides off easily as a single unit, and he repeats the same for the other side, and this time when he gets to the shoulder she turns her head close to him and he can feel her soft breath on his brow.
Time enough for that soon. He unbuckles her cuirass and lifts it over her head, pleased once again at how light he managed to make it. Unbuckles chainmail, freeing her arms, her shoulders, her chest. Unfastens the belt holding her mail skirt in place. All of this requires moving her, a pull or a gesture to manoeuvre her into place, and his enjoyment of how she lets him do this is eclipsed only by the thrill of knowing all of this is what she wanted in the first place.
She’s silent through all of it until he reaches the tying points at the top of her thighs, holding the cuisse firm to her doublet, and looks up at her for permission. So small he should feel, sitting on the low wooden stool at this point, kneeling at her feet like a squire. And yet for her, he doesn’t. “Can I…” he says, and she nods again, yes he can. Yes, he can gently run his fingers into the crease of her thighs before untying the fastenings. Yes, he can run his hands under her to reach the straps. Yes, he can take all the armour off, so gentle, and run his hands over the curve of her calves and the turn of her ankles, and free her down to the linen hose beneath. Another nod, and he can unfasten her doublet and lift that away, too. Another, asked with no words and only his fingers touching the cords of her undershirt, and he can loosen that too and lean in to kiss her cheek; and then her throat; and then down, and down, and down.
“That husband you mentioned,” he says, once his lips have already reached further down than he’s sure she’d have let anyone else kiss her for centuries.
She freezes under him and shoves his forehead away, and he lets his head fall back so he’s leaning up to look at her, bask in her. “It is not for you to speak of him,” she says, her voice tight and closed.
Off limits, clearly. But I don’t want it to be, Galadriel, he thinks, I don’t want anything to be. I want to see you struggle with it, I want to see you give me everything I want anyway, I want you thinking of him and knowing it’s my hand between your legs and crying out my name. I want all of you.
He can feel the blood in his veins, a pathetic mortal imitation of the greatness of his true being, and closes his eyes for a moment as he pushes himself back down small. Not yet. Not yet. Not yet. “Maybe elves do things different to what I know.”
She lets go of his head, looks at him for a little longer than he’d like. “What do you care what elves do.”
He doesn’t. He does, suddenly. Were all elves as fascinating as her, as enthralling as her, and he’d never noticed? Was it something in her that was hammering at him, shaping him like hot metal on an anvil? He’d fought elves enough before but not a single one of them had brought this out in him, this urge to press his fingers into her bruises and then soothe and ease her pain, to bite her until she bleeds then bandage and heal her until she’s mended better than new. His enemy, his pursuer, and he wants to sing her to sleep.
“I don’t want a pack of angry relatives out claiming revenge,” he says. True, if not connected the way he’s implying. He’s had enough vengeful elves to last his lifetime. “His or yours. Could do without making new enemies, for either of us.”
She softens a little at that. “That is unlikely. Although I wonder if I will have anything left but enemies, once I go back. I have not -" She smiles, a concession of what she guesses he’ll say. “I have not always been good at keeping friends.”
“I’m your friend.” And he is, it’s true, he wants it to be true. Her enemy, yes; her friend, all the same.
She strokes his brow, pushing strands of hair back from his face. She’s admiring him much like he’s admired her armour, and for much the same reason: he’s the king she’s created, forged out of hope and hints and scraps of old parchment. He should resent it but he doesn’t. He’ll be her king, all the same, he’ll bend and soften and turn any way she wants him.
Not now, though. Now, he takes her hand and brings her wrist to his mouth, turning it just a little further than she’s willing. He bites gently at the flesh of her inner arm, barely a bite at all, really, just pushing his teeth into her skin close enough that he can feel it give. She tastes like spring.
She closes her eyes a little, draws in her breath, but it’s less than he’d hoped. He gets the impression that part of her is absent; away in the future fighting orcs, away in the past with her lost husband. He needs and needs to gather up all the pieces of her. “Galadriel,” he says. “Elf. Where are you?”
She looks down at his hand holding her arm. “Why I chose to do this,” she says, “to ask you this - I don’t know that I can explain it well to you.” He stays very, very still, and watches the fingers of her other hand come to brush over his, stroking in absent, feather-light circles. “The sea brought us together,” she says. “Whatever lies ahead of us after this battle, the land will most likely lead us to different paths. I felt - I wanted - I want this to have an ending that I choose. A goodbye that I choose.”
“Goodbye?” He hadn’t planned on any such thing.
“If it is to be that. I would miss you, I think.”
For all of it, for all of everything, he feels oddly fond of her. “Up,” he says. lifting her her with him as he gets to his feet, and “Turn”, manoeuvring her round so she stands facing away from him. He pulls her close back into him, both arms around her, face buried in her beautiful golden hair. She’s like the sun; it’s easier not to look directly at her.
It seems to be easier for her, too. She turns her head into him, her cheek against his shirt, and makes a soft little hm noise that he’d like to capture forever. He wonders how long it’s been since anyone held her like this. Too long, that’s clear enough. One of her hands comes to rest on his upper arm, and it’s simultaneously a more intense intimacy than he can bear and nothing compared to what he wants of her.
He reaches beneath the hem of her shirt and ever so gently strokes the soft skin of her stomach beneath. She flinches at first as if his touch burns her and he murmurs reassuring things down into her ear, it’s all right, it’s all right, not lifting his hand away. Easy, trust me, and she does. She’s like silk under his hand and he can’t believe this is being permitted to him.
Part of him wants, again, to tell her what he is. Now, just like this, standing in this little, swaying cabin with his arms around her. Or even better, soon when he’s closer, soon when she’s already yielding to the hunger that’s pressing him on. He would tell her when he’s hard inside her, whisper his name when she’s just at her brink, her eyes would fly wide open and her fury would battle her own mounting pleasure and lose and she -
She shifts her weight and the wooden floorboards creak beneath her feet. He reminds himself that he is a mere mortal, a landless king, barely fit to share a ship with her (less still a cabin, less still an embrace). He reminds herself that one day very soon she will hate him.
But for now, here, he’s stopped - and she seemingly doesn’t want him to. She turns her head up and round, nuzzling into the underside of his chin. He feels something pulse through him to his fingertips.
For all he’s learned her, studying her like a work of art, he can never quite anticipate her; a hundred times she’ll do just as he plans, and then the next she’ll turn the other way, be standing somewhere he wasn’t looking for her. She will be his, she will be his, but she’ll never be entirely his. With the thought of it his hands find her hips and dig into her, urgent and sudden. He hears her breath catch in her throat, and with the last scraps of self-control he can muster he says “I’ll keep it slow, it’ll be slow,” demanding it into being so with his words.
She laughs, a light burble against his chest, and he’s lost.
He does slow himself, force himself to savour it. But by then she’s already on the bed and under him and there’s red marks on her bare back where his mouth was, her skin glowing with salt-tasting sweat under his palms. She turns to look back at him, her eyes heavy-lidded and drowsy. “Don’t stop."
The hair nearest her neck is damp with sweat, loops of waves against her skin. He lifts it away, twists his fingers into it until he’s got the curve of her head snug in his palm, holding her fast. “I don’t want this to end,” he says. He means: I don’t want this to end too soon, to end before I’ve explored all of you, to end without letting me drink in every memory I can get of you and store it away forever. But that’s not what he says, and what he says isn’t a lie.
She pushes back into his hand and he takes it as agreement. He leans in close and bites gently, so gently, at the tip of her ear, feeling the shock jolt through her. “You said you’d miss me?” he whispers.
“I said…” She gulps back her breath. “Yes. I haven’t known many like you. You’re, you remind me…” and her voice trails away again into a whimper, echoing the movement of his fingertips stroking tiny circles into her scalp.
“Who?” He needs it from her, so much than his voice is harsher than he intends. “What do I remind you of, Galadriel? Elves?”
She turns away from him again. “I don’t mean. A feeling. This is new to me.”
“New?” He gets the rest of her clothing off with ease, his hand between her legs finding the softness at her core, how wet she is, how much she wants him despite or because of or entirely regardless to whatever memory it is he’s struck in her. “This is new to you?” He’d meant to be slow and gradual but his intentions are already fraying at the edges and he’s neither, his fingers rough and urgent on her and in her and bringing the most delicious little gasps of breath from her throat. “Can’t be that new, weren’t you married?”
“Don’t,” she half-sobs, and he feels less guilt than he might but still more than he expected, and mends it by kissing her and kissing her as he continues working at her with his hand, calling her beautiful, glorious, his shining warrior elf, barely able to keep enough control over himself not to say it in all the languages he knows and shouldn’t, until she comes hard and gasping and twisting her face down into the sheet to muffle her cries.
“There, now,” he says, stroking the curve of muscles flanking her spine as he considers what to do with her next. “There.”
She wriggles out from under him and curls herself into a tight knot at the end of the bunk, facing away from him. “A moment, please,” she says, her voice firm and oddly formal for what they’ve just shared. But he grants it to her, watching over her in silence as though he’s keeping guard, not so much as to allow her the privacy of her thoughts but because he already knows full well what they’ll be.
Elves don’t. Elves shouldn’t. But there are so many things that elves don’t and shouldn’t and yet there elves are anyway, all over Middle-Earth where they’re not meant to be, warring and conquering, murdering and thieving, fighting with dwarves and men and each other, all their houses and families splintering to turn on their own as regular as the seasons. The most beautiful children of Iluvatar and, well. So why should she feel any shame for this? The husband’s dead, presumably, and for all she knows Halbrand’s a noble king.
“Galadriel.” He holds out his hand to her, not quite touching. “It’s all right. It is.” And she folds herself into him and holds onto him like he’s kind.
He had already decided to keep her. He reminds himself that he can’t plan to keep her like this, thinking he’s something he’s not and less than he is. Whatever he has of her now is something different to what he’ll have after she sees him fight those orcs and kill Adar, when the cover and the self-control and the restraint are all cast off whether he intends it or no. He’s done better at this than he thought, but there is only so much force in the world that can hold him back and he’s burned through most of it already. She’ll see, soon. She’ll know, soon.
“Were you married?” she asks him.
“No. No, it’s always just been me.”
He rubs a thumb soft over her temple, nudging her back to what they’d paused, and this time when she kisses him it’s full and keen and she doesn’t hesitate. She holds him set in that blue, cool gaze until she’s drowning him in it, and he goes spiralling off into depths endless and beautiful and long-ago-forgotten.
He forgets himself. Willingly or not, it’s all the same after a while. He forgets himself in the sight and the taste of her, the feel of her rocking on his lap, the sound of her whimper that’s almost but not quite pain as he holds her firm and drives his cock deep inside her, again and again and again.
He forgets there’s anything in the world but the two of them, her teeth biting down into his collarbone; then her golden hair under his hand as she takes him into her mouth; then the shape of her body, against him, above him, below him. Kneeling against the bed as he chokes out his own pleasure with one hand on her shoulder and the other finger-woven tight to hers. On the floor with his mouth between her legs, her hands tight in his hair as his tongue brings her to another peak, with the swell of the waves swaying them both. Then towards the morning on the bed again, pressed into her back again, but this time deep inside her, his cock and his hands working together to bring both of them to bliss.
He forgets what he’d planned, where he’s going, what he wants; forgets what he’s done and what he’s doing, what he’s trying to get from her, whether he even was trying in the first place. Forgets everything but her, and him, and this, and the knowledge that they’re both of them exiles, both of them turned from their lands and refusing Valinor, both of them lost soldiers from a war that others have long since stopped fighting.
A sudden wave rocks the ship hard and his hand is on her mouth before he knows it, and he's pleading with her to be quiet with an urgency he didn’t mean her to hear. She looks up at him, puzzled: “It’s the sea,” she says. “It’s only the sea.” And he doesn’t know how to tell her that he knows, that it’s the sea he fears will hear.
“Elves don’t say goodbye,” he says instead. “Someone told me once. You don’t have a word for it.”
Her hand holding one of his, turning it, tracing the faint veins that run through its wrist. “We say namárië. It’s a farewell and a greeting both. It means, be well.”
Ossë, he thinks, let me have this. You only turned against our master because Uinen called you back. You only stayed loyal to Ulmo because she kept you held. Let me have my warrior elf, Ossë; maybe she can hold me back, maybe she can keep me in the light.
He doesn’t believe it, not truly, not really, not deep. But here with her, wound tight close to him, he forgets for a moment that he doesn’t have that sort of hope any more.