a fair form

Posted originally on the Archive of Our Own at http://archiveofourown.org/works/42306537.

Rating: Explicit
Archive Warning: Choose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Category: F/M
Fandom: The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power (TV 2022)
Relationship: Galadriel | Artanis/Halbrand (The Rings of Power), Galadriel |
Artanis/Sauron | Mairon
Character: Galadriel | Artanis, Halbrand (The Rings of Power), Sauron | Mairon
Additional Tags: Basically Copying John Milton's Homework, Wow the Angst You Guys,
Strong Lucifer Vibes, Pining with Eventual Smut, Actually Pretty
Immediate Smut
Language: English
Stats: Published: 2022-10-11 Chapters: 3/4 Words: 7739

a fair form
by properhaunt

Summary

There was a time when, with his speech, he could do and undo things as he pleased. He
could cast his eyes onto whatever he liked—always the beholder, never held. He could
fashion anything with only his mind and make it true, and terrible.

Or: Galadriel and Halbrand in Eregion.

“Did I request thee, Maker, from my clay

To mould me man? Did I solicit thee

From darkness to promote me?”

(John Milton, Paradise Lost, Book X)

The wound was of his own design, but it twists at him all the same—a dog turned against its
master.

He's felt pain much worse than this, pain beyond reckoning even, but he's never had to heal. The
Half-Elf called Elrond had come to inspect the poultice that had been applied the night before, and
he'd made himself small again, imperiled.

Now from the chair beside him, in his little open-air room in Eregion, Galadriel regards him. He
feels it with eyes closed.

“Halbrand.” Carefully, his lids lift in time to see her fold her hands away from her face, onto her
lap. “Can you tell me how it happened?”

Dressed up soft, but it's a commander’s query. Her lips are barely parted. In the lamplight, he can
see a velvety blackness just inside her mouth.

He feels her almost say please, as if the word was under his own tongue.

He has prepared for this lie. He is good for it.

“The Dark Elf—” Her audible intake of breath. The name sticks. Pain comes, and he staunches a
real groan.

The name—he cannot say it. But it is a lie anyway. Best keep to the fringes of truth.

Under her coal-eyed intensity, he feels himself grow heavy inside his coverlet. Another
humiliation. The pain gnaws his ribs.

“We met on the road, after. Leastwise, it may have been the road. The air was choked with ash—I
could not tell… We struggled and I…”

A hard ring is opening inside his throat. He breaks off. Somewhere outside, there is harp music and
clear voices are ringing.

As if sensing this opening, this weakness, her fingertips move to graze the skin above his elbow.
Galadriel’s fingers. She has taken off her gauntlets sometime in the night. It's just her hands now.

They should be warm but meet coolly against his fevered flesh. He imagines a glowing blade tilted
into water, a plunge.

The eye contact becomes difficult to hold, but he pushes through. This is nothing.
A woman, perhaps. A child.

He looks on as Galadriel recalls those very words, sees the memory playing under this moment for
her like a mummery. Her mouth works, a false start.

If he could, he might laugh at her lack of guile. Three-and-a-half thousand years and she's growing
more into a child with each passing day, with each new sad thing that accrues.

He can still hate her for that, at least.

The harp picks up again, galls him.

“But how did you make your escape? And where is he now?” Too sharp, eager. She can hardly
contain herself. An urgency he'd almost thought she'd lost.

Her vambrance glints as she moves her hand further down, against his forearm, almost
unconsciously. He feels the half-moon jut of her nails; more gentling than he would have expected.

Right now, at this very moment, she should be scrutinizing him. Picking him apart like carrion for
every misspoken word, as he would do to her.

The edge of his mouth curls down, and he looks where they are joined. How many times have they
clasped arms now? The question churns in him.

“Galadriel.” He manages to wrest his arm away, pulling it under the covers. “Please.” A brief
close of the eyes, convincing. “The land had just… broken. I cannot say with certainty.”

He says no more. Done badly, but it is, he prays, playable.

He turns and looks out the window, towards the crush of holly trees and parapets beyond. This is
what a sad king looks like, he thinks.

“It’s alright,” she whispers, flushing slightly. “Rest your troubles.”

Her care will wound her.

Though she should be there for his amusement, the state of her flustered in front of him quells
nothing. He feels himself growing disconcerted, and rising out of that feeling, a swell of anger.

Heedless of all this, she turns her eyes down to the wet, red gash at his side, her fingers prodding
and searching as they first did two days ago in the Southlands, an Elf taking stock of her vulnerable
charge, a mockery they are again repeating.

“You know my word is good; we will return,” is all she promises, not looking up.

Her attention preoccupied, he considers her again at unawares. She's taken up a focused expression.
That blond weft of hair, tied in her normal way, and the too-clean smell of her neck.

Galadriel is thinking now, he is sure, of how she should have slain Adar in the barn—opened him
just below the jaw, the black blood swelling out of him like song.

Her hair is unimaginably soft about her face. He remembers it crusted in saltwater, then bleached
in the sun. Her hands cease their investigation.

“This is healing well enough,” she says, obvious and almost apologetic about the nicety.
She looks up again, and they regard each other a moment before he can play no longer, and he
shuts his eyes. Better to let her think he has sunk into an exhaustion than to let her see anything he
doesn't have a tight hold on. This is what a king looks like without his kingdom , he thinks.

What a jape. There was a time when, with his speech, he could do and undo things as he pleased.
He could cast his eyes onto whatever he liked—always the beholder, never held. He could fashion
anything with only his mind and make it true, and terrible.

But something has done for him of late. A deficiency of form, perhaps. He can neither speak nor
look as he likes.

Not with this new intense privacy between them, an almost physical force that presses him when
they are together, like when at the forge in Númenor the sorrys came and were not words he fully
owned.

With eyes still shut, he feels a small movement as she leans back into the living branches of her
chair. At last, some peace, he thinks. A slight wind from her movement. He can smell her on the
air: wood, rope, and seawater. A raft or a drowning.

He pretends to dose. Anyone else might consider her sudden silence a retreat, but he knows she'll
be back to prise at him again, seeking the wrong thing, seeking it always, with that coltish lack of
grace.

She shifts, un-Elflike. Behind his lids, he imagines a look of consternation on her face, then a look
of deepest relief. A look of affection. Of high hopes. He tests each idea like a garment, then casts
them all aside.

“Apologies, I'm… tired,” he drouses finally, dry lips sticking as they part, and that at least is true.
The apple of his throat bobs as he swallows.

“Of course.” Quickly now, jolted. Whatever thought he interrupted, without seeing it in her eyes,
he is unsure of.

“Rest and regain your strength, my friend. I'll be here on the morrow.” The sweat is slick against
his face, his hair and lashes, too. Eregion is still against his skin.

She stands, hesitates, then slips something onto the table beside him, something small that makes a
muted clink against the wood.

My friend. He clenches his jaw, imagines what it would feel like to have her under his hands, at his
mercy. That high, tight need to rule her.

Then she's gone. His eyes open under the bowers above the bed.

Too like a room he had of old, its awful living weight upon him like a whole forest floor, forcing
out whatever artifice is left in him.

The air is close.

What's left is only what he lets himself think of. And that, only once—how he was there to hear her
scream his name in the fire of the mountain. First, his. Then another’s. Elendil. Then his name,
again and again, from ash-hoarse lungs, until she fell silent.

The man who is not Halbrand pretends to sleep, and in pretending, a nothing takes him.
 Chapter 2
Chapter Notes

See the end of the chapter for notes

It's an easy thing, handling the weight of a hammer and tongs. It is even easy to find that exacting
ring–the rhythm of hammerfall onto the anvil.

But the real trick to forging, as it so happens, is the constant tending of the fire: keeping the metal
attuned to the right heat, adding and removing coals, lifting out the ash or depriving the flame of air
when the occasion calls. Aulë at least taught him this much.

Now that he's able, he sits on the sill, one leg stretched out, one bent, and awaits Galadriel's return,
looking across the heath to the tower he will visit when he is declared well. A golden, dusky
smoke is rising from it.

Smithing is like politicking. Bending her towards his purpose is more akin to tending the flame
than shaping the metal; she will expect the strike and fail to note the growing temperature of the
room–until she's already pliable.

Until then, he will remain just so: private, secret, submerged. He tilts his head back against the
window's arch.

It isn't long until he hears the spiraling of her footsteps coming up the way. Without so much as a
knock, Galadriel bursts inside, in a complete disregard for human modesty. He is not bothered and
does not pretend to be. She looks flushed, indignant.

"Let me guess. Sedition?" He stands and wipes his palms on his trousers.

That earns him a glare, her breaths stirring a few errant strands of hair. "I see you're much
improved."

He smiles privately. It only seems right that she would chafe against her own kin as well as the rest
of the world.

"And today's adversaries?" He approaches, an arm behind his back, hand tucked to the opposite
elbow. He lets his hair fall over his brow.

Galadriel swallows visibly. His eyes move from her face to the column of her throat.

"It is the High King and Celebrimbor, they…"

She pauses, but has closed some of the distance between them, shutting the door and taking two
footsteps towards him in quick succession. A proximal victory. She used to not draw so near. You
don't need to keep your distance.

When it is clear she will not continue any time soon, he arranges his face into a look of artless
understanding.

"Ah. Elf business. Above a mortal's reckoning, I'm sure."

Galadriel shakes her head, exasperated, then presses the palms of her hands to her cheeks, and up
through the tangle of her hair. She is looking carefully at the ceiling.
"Halbrand," she starts. He waits.

"There is something happening to our kingdoms, beyond the shadow in the South–here and in
Lindon. Some evil blight. They said by spring, if we do not cure it, and now maybe sooner…"

The words come thickly and she clears her throat.

This is not information he lacks, but he's astonished by how quickly she's revealed it to him.

"Cure it by what means?"

He reaches out and places a hand on her elbow, over the sleeve of her dress, the perfect facsimile of
tenderness, and feels the glossy texture of a hundred seed-like beads. She meets his eyes.

"Forgive me–I cannot say yet… Only that they would break a thing in order to understand it. And I
cannot let that happen."

He runs his tongue along the inside of his mouth, considering, then drops his hand abruptly.

"What of our mission in the Southlands?"

"What do you mean?"

"You said you would not condemn them to burn."

"And I will not." She is unnerved by the shift in his mood.

"So you will return with me, then? If I left tomorrow?" he presses.

"I cannot leave as soon as that, and neither should you."

"Has it occured to you that this blight is that self-same evil that has left my people enslaved? The
fight here is abroad. Surely the most vulnerable must take precedence."

"I am not asking for too long a delay, I am merely–"

He laughs in disbelief. "Long delay? What do those words mean to an Elf?"

Her face hardens slightly. "You would name me deserter a second time."

"Well, can you at least divulge the reason why you suddenly cannot leave?"

"Perhaps if you would let me speak–"

She has been needled enough.

"Ask yourself this." He cuts her off, seizing the moment before it quells, sealing the remaining
distance between them with another step. "What is it you can do in this world? What can you alone
do?"

There is a pinch in her brow. He continues.

"Elrond is wise–and powerful. He can aid the Elves here in your stead, and his actions would
surely suffice. But would you really force a crown upon my head then leave me king of the ashes,
when there is no other help for me?"

She shakes her head as if he has missed the point. Her kirtle shines like sea glass. It has been a
fortnight since he saw her unarmored, and without her steel, she looks–not smaller–but somehow
more obscured.

"It was you who told me think first, charge later. I would now ask the same of you. I pursued this
foe almost to the edges of my very reason." There is a little twist to her mouth now. "And the
manner in which I did it ended in despair, for myself and for you."

Her eyes begin to well just slightly, pure, wide, and starry. "There are forces at work here I am just
beginning to feel the shape of. And I want the end of this malice to be the final end."

At her words, he feels small hairs rising on his neck, and too distracted by the peculiarity of that
sensation, he misses the movement of her hand until it's already upon his face. He blinks. She
strokes the sides of her fingers gently along the unshaven line of his jaw.

He has never been touched in such a way.

"I told you I felt it, too," she says quietly. "What did you think I meant? I am with you. I am still
for you, Halbrand."

Not for the first time, he perceives the terrible affliction of her virtue. It strikes him that he trusts
her completely. He feels the margins of the room begin to dissolve. He did not predict this turn;
does not quite know what to say.

But it hardly matters, as she is suddenly pressing her closed lips to his.

He is so astonished that his own lips part in a gasp, causing her tongue to meet his, and when it
does, he tastes a clear wine. A groan escapes his mouth into hers, and she muffles it with her
tongue. She is fearless, slanting her head and toe to toe with him, deepening the kiss without
hesitation.

He didn't always have a body, he reminds himself. He doesn't know this one well. His hand finds
purchase on the small of her back, and his hips flex once helplessly into hers. He bites back
another revealing sound.

They clutch at each other like they're near to drowning again. Galadriel's lips meet his hard enough
to bruise, tongue lashing, so in return, both of his hands cup her head, holding her so tightly she has
to search for air. As she breaks away, his hands fall to her girdle thoughtlessly.

They part for a second, and he feels slickness on the edges of his mouth. He almost feels unwell. In
truth, his hands on her belt are trembling.

Galadriel watches him toy with the knot beside her brother's dagger, the boy he killed, looking long
and steady at him. His throat feels intensely dry, and he tries to wet it by swallowing.

She steps just outside the circle of his arms and unties the belt herself. When undone, she sets the
knife onto it. Then, from her thighs, she gathers the fabric of her kirtle and drags it up, over her
hips, her small breasts, the crown of her head. Without the shape of her to fill it, it drifts down to
the stones.

She stands for a moment, chin up, looking up at him. He can't name her exact expression, but
there's exquisite challenge in it.

She is still wearing a thin linen smock, whose shapelessness catches the noon light and reveals the
edges of her body beneath. It's so near the one she wore when she came in on the tide that he sees
the raft in his mind's eye, remembers how it was to be so clasped between hatred and want.
He thinks he will not be able to abide her nakedness. If he touches her skin, he will touch the light
beneath it. For a moment, he very nearly grips her upper arms and hauls her from the chamber,
heedless of who might see her stripped nearly bare outside the doors.

But it's all folly; she is a mark he can't miss. He drags his lips to hers once more, gripping the fine
linen of her smock, gathering it up into a rough fist around her waist.

He is aware he is losing control. He uses the bunched fabric to tug her through the middle of the
room until he has her against the nearest wall. Then, he presses the entire length of his body against
her, no longer kissing her, but watching, his breathing harsh.

She is beautiful, yes. But how could this be the order of creation? Perfection, in diminishing
ripples, moving outward from the Elf before him to the basest Southron child, each act of begetting
creating something less beautiful and wise, further from the light of the Valar.

No one understood this but him and his Master–the poverty of that arrangement. The cruelty. Only
they two had understood each other.

Yet here is Galadriel, who would beat her fist against any mirror of the world that would dare show
her what she is. Maybe that is near enough to him.

He stares at her, and she stares back, both pinned against each other's regard in such alarming
clarity that for a moment, he thinks she's realized everything, the truth of every word he's spoken to
her.

It is their duty to disrupt, his and hers alike, so instead of casting her out, he slides his fingers under
her skirt. His hands smooth up her legs, which part for him just enough, and then they cup her
wetness, circling. She makes the softest, smallest oh he has ever heard.

Her arms wind tightly around him, and they come to lie face to face on the floor, him half on top of
her, their faces feeling hot and damp together now with their mingled breaths as he works his
fingers inside her.

This could be how the doom of entire peoples is sealed, he thinks, with her clenching tight and fire-
hot around him.

Before long, she is wresting his hands away, and they are both reaching down together feverishly
to untie the laces of his pants, his wet hands knocking against her dry ones. He takes himself
achingly in hand.

He wants to double and diminish her all at once. He's fully on top of her now. He pushes into her
blindly, all base instinct, and her hands scrabble along his back. Her eyes flutter shut and she stills.
His remain open, and he appraises her, unsmiling.

"Galadriel," he says, but she only furrows her brow. His hand comes down to clasp her hip bone,
and he drags her against him, and him into her, until she opens her eyes again with a look that says,
too much, too full. Her hands wrap so lightly about his wrists. He sees the furious pulse in the
hollow of her throat.

He knows she is letting him do things this way. He has always let her body appear stronger than
his body, no matter his will. The stitches in his side ache and pull, but he begins to fuck down into
her in earnest. She kisses him open-mouthed, and starts making these little punched-out sounds of
surprise every time he moves in her.

The words that leave his mouth next are inexplicable even to him.
"I thought Elves didn't do this," he grits. "Not unless they wanted a child." She groans brokenly at
this, breaking from him and squeezing her face into the side of his neck.

There is high color on her face now–did she like him saying that?–her blue eyes glassy, hidden
from him.

"And not unless–" He chokes back a small moan, striking at some perfect place inside her heat.
"Not unless they are wed."

She is married, he knows, although he imagines she does not realize, shut away as he has been. He
has learned this much in Eregion, where the names of Galadriel and Celeborn touch every hall. It
fills him with a bitter enmity, to be the one to borrow her. He imagines her kingly hand, bound to
his with a length of fabric.

The pain in his side intensifies, and he slows his hips, punishing himself.

"Do you wish to wed me?" he asks her lowly, mocking. Heat stains her cheeks at this, so he strokes
his thumb between her legs, and she gasps, either at the gesture or the profanity of his words.

She is a bit angry now, or even humiliated, but she doesn't stop him. He can see her jaw working as
if she's caught a stone between her teeth.

Perhaps she thought she'd find a tenderness here. Perhaps she will strike him or tear his wound
with her nails. It would be better for her if she did. Better for me if I had, he thinks.

Instead, her fist threads under the collar of his tunic, just below his throat, and she hauls him down
until he is under her. Her ribs jolt against his and he grimaces.

"Stop this." Her breaths coming out to meet his face, little punctures. "This is beneath you," she
pants. His hands struggle to hold her up off him like a shield. "Do not make a mockery of this, too."
She pushes his tunic up to his shoulders, and there is his wound.

Always chastising him. Always so sure of his proof of goodness in the world, his standing.

He recalls leaning against the bars of his jail cell, giving her a burning look up and down. The
admonishing way she said his name then is exactly how she says it now. As if she is not the
adulterer here. As if she isn't the one ruining herself on him.

He makes a noise in his throat at that thought and surges up against her harder. She tosses her head
back and sinks down onto him, pushing him down as he once pulled her up towards the surface.

There is nothing beneath me, he would like to retort. I am the lowest and oldest point. She leans
down and her teeth catch his lip to gentle him. When that is not enough, she grabs his palm and
sinks her teeth into it to silence them both as she grinds against him.

"Stop fighting me," she whispers against his hand. Her hair threads over his face. "Your fight is not
with me."

But he's done nothing but fight her since the moment he cut her bonds.

He sits up, with her slung over his legs, and wraps his arms around her middle, and bows his head,
breathing in the smell of her, licking a path from her neck to the divot between her breasts under
her shift.

"Galadriel." He groans her name without meaning to, without thinking about it. His hands lift,
 catching on the hem of her smock until it's finally off her, so that she's bared before him at last, so
that he can take one tightly beaded nipple into the heat of his mouth and suck.

"I'm close," she says, hands on his shoulders, and he groans again.

The desire to feel her come around him becomes so demanding and selfish that he feels he must be
the one to force it from her. Releasing his grip on her waist, he drags her back down and entwines
his fingers with hers to hold her firmly in place beneath him until she's shaking and gritting out one
of his many names.

If he can purify himself on her like this, fill himself with her goodness until his body throbs,
perform his little subterfuges forever, he can live as two selves and never need to choose what
manner of being he is, can continue on, doubled.

Galadriel is nodding sweetly and desperately at him now and murmuring words of praise, her teeth
and eyes flashing, and every movement of his feels magnified under her attention, elongated.

The pleasure is too awful suddenly, overflowing, and he bites the inside of his cheek as he comes
apart.

Ragged against her, his head rests on the cool stone above her shoulder. They are pressed together,
breast to breast, his thumb on the nape of her neck, on the floor's white rushes.

He vows this: she will never know which part of him was true and which was false by the end of
this.

Chapter End Notes

Sooooo, how we feeling after that ep? Everyone okay?

No notes except to say I read Tolkien's letters about elf sex to prepare for this, and I
feel vile.

Thank you for your comments! I may actually continue this, since it kind of ended up
mostly fitting in with show cannon.
 Chapter 3
Chapter Notes

See the end of the chapter for notes

"I have clung

To nothing, lov’d a nothing, nothing seen

Or felt but a great dream."

-John Keats, Endymion, Book IV

You begin only once. All else that happens after is an ending.

In fact, there are limitless endings. Old as Sauron is, he has seen winds and rains coax mountains
into hills; cities breaking ground then breaking, from their crude wood foundations to their last
glissade of stone; stars dying; strange songs coming on the wind and going, nothing like them
floating on the air since.

This is why he suspects a new ending draws near, an anticipation he can't yet name. He can feel it
like a breath upon his ear.

Her breath is in his ear. Galadriel has slipped into the dream-state of the Elves beside him on the
rushes, an arm folded on her naked chest, head turned towards him. He's laid beside her for an hour
or so, unmoving in the daylight, looking at the red-black behind his eyelids until a restless, febrile
mood takes him.

He can wait no longer. He turns over quietly and, for the first time since below deck on Elendil's
ship, has the sunken pleasure of observing her at unawares. Her mouth, which he had made wet
with his own earlier, is soft in sleep. The faint light hits her in slivers: moons at her hip, her throat's
hollow.

It is safe now. He leans on his elbow, and then, peering in and tipping inch by inch, he forces his
way into her dreams.

At first, there is a nauseating clamor of color and noise. Then, her mind stretches to accommodate
his, and the dreams solidify into ordered scenes, the buried world where only Galadriel of the
Golden House goes.

He sees a paper boat nodding in the water, which unfurls into a white banner above a glimmering
host.

He sees a crown of gilt leaves being lowered onto her yellow hair, the negative space of its ring
morphing into an obsidian seeing stone, which cracks open into a great wave above her head.

The tide roars at him.

In reflex, he shields his face, and when he lowers his arms and the sea rolls back, he sees–

An Elf in white, eclipsing the sun as he bends down. Finrod. He pauses here and examines this
particular ghost down to the last detail, the dream reverberating as he plucks at it.

Sauron catalogs the wrappings of his leggings, the pin on his cloak and the pearls stitched at his
collar; the way his forehead quirks when he's in the midst of an explanation, and not least, the love
for his sister in his gaze.

Anything can become currency later.

Yet more than what he sees in Galadriel's mind is what he feels, pulled along in the current of her
sleep: every cord that binds her to her life. Her love. Her pain and mourning. Her wrenching guilt.
How she dreams to keep things from ending, the dark stable where she pulls her memories like
horses into shelter.

He leans in, listening, as Finrod leans in. Sometimes we cannot know, he's saying. Whatever he had
not seen of her before, he sees now.

When Adar hewed his chest open, he was split in mind and body. The pain was so complete that it
was almost wonderful. He was sure his mind had rent, but if it had, perhaps a space had opened
into which she could pour her grace and will to heal Middle-earth, like cool water into a basin.

In the grip of all she feels, he is fully awake, his eyes burning, and when he presses his cold hands
against his eyelids, a few tears spill hotly out. They are not real, so he doesn't seek to dry them but
stares at them on his palms, fascinated.

He pivots hungrily into the next sequence of her dream, a glade shimmering with shadows and
starlight.

Whether he's in Lindon or some other place, he doesn't know. The light of the stars is in her hair,
on her brow. She walks alone in a glade of thick grass and ancient fallen leaves, barefoot and
plainly robed, her hands reaching up from time to time to touch a barkskin or part a bramble. He
keeps apace with her intently, like a student struggling to understand.

How did she differ from him? What essential quality was in Galadriel that he has lacked since he
was taken from the light?

If he were to follow the path she walks as he does now, he senses he would never again breed
suffering and malice, but instead, beauty would instantly spring from his works–he would be
beloved again. Everything he is and was would be cleansed in true reconciliation.

And yet. To serve and not to reign. To want and not have wrings at his chest. And mixed with it,
the smallest and most foolish hope, an unexpected match struck in the river-colored shades of the
grove.

She had promised him he could be free of it.

As soon as the thought arrives, Galadriel stills in the glade, a tremor and a waver working through
the dreamworld; slowly, she turns and tilts her face up to where he stands beside her, impossibly,
eyes sliding to his.

"Halbrand?" Her voice is timid, confused.

Galadriel's mind shifts and sticks like a spiderweb breaking across his face, and he retreats.
—

"How did you come to be so learned in this craft?"

In the two days since, much has changed. The pieces are moving.

"I suppose I've always had an affinity for what comes from the ground," he shrugs to Celebrimbor.
"Iron, steel, copper; cast or wrought…"

He's attaching the chains that hold the anvil fast to the base so the anvil will not walk, his hands
covered by chainmail gloves so close-woven they feel like silk–such fineries he has not worn in an
age.

"Yes, clearly–but were there many opportunities to apprentice in your youth?" The Elf nods to the
journeyman placing briquettes on the hearth. "It's been years since I journeyed east of Ithilien, but
Iast I saw your homelands, I do not remember them being…" he breaks off politely.

"Did you spend time as a foster princeling among the Rhûn folk, perhaps?" Celebrimbor asks.

"Nothing so pretty," he answers. "I was indentured for a while. To a great house."

He does not enjoy building up this lowman's history. He chose the humblest form to occupy, yet
daily, it occupies him.

The close space and the hot fires of the forge do little for his temper. But if he wants to be retained
here, he must tell some truths and some lies–and ensure all assemble into a good story.

"I gave them power over me, when I yielded up my freedom. But while I was there, I saw that
blacksmiths use their own tools. So I took up the trade."

The anvil secured, he takes heated metal from the furnace and gestures to the striker, who comes to
deliver a few shaping blows, each one smelling of earth, fire, and white coal.

"Although I would never pretend to be your peer, Master Celebrimbor," he adds, rounding out the
vowels of his accent even moreso, breaking into an embarrassed smile as he examines the
softening metal.

When he looks up, Galadriel is standing there, framed by the doorway, looking for everything like
she has never seen him before. He had felt her as an agitation upon the air.

She tips her head, unsmiling and rather imperious in a white gown, and when she turns her back to
him, he has the barely suppressed urge to bury his fingers in the weight of hair at her neck and steer
her backwards, slotting his mouth to hers in front of the entire forge.

The striker resumes, but the stock has not been properly heated, and the rod breaks apart in a
sputter of sparks. His mouth crimps into a grimace.

Celebrimbor looks between him and Galadriel's retreating back, sees a mortal and an Elf, and
miscalculates.

"I'm sure the lay of Beren and Lúthien is still famous even with the children of the Southlands,"
Celebrimbor says to him, such a stab of misguided pity on his face that he imagines the Elf's flesh
riddled with arrows.
The smell of her hair and skin is in his nose, and he turns abruptly to the wheel that cranks the
bellows, hefts it downwards.

Yes, the lay is still widely known. But for mortals, it is apocryphal– he lived it.

He remembers his Master in an iron crown, the three Silmarils fixed in them, their awful silvery
light. How it was such a great burden for his Master to wear, but how he never took it off.

How the crown rolled away on the ground in a crooked arc, scraping the stones, and the intensity
to the fear that accompanied its fall is that same fear that enables him to cast his eyes down under
Celebrimbor's stare and nod.

Wisteria and crossvine vie for sunlight on the columns as he cuts down the steps.

He finds Galadriel sooner than expected; she has not gone far, but has been stopped by something
that lies on the balcony ledge. With his weakened eyes, what first looks like a pouch is revealed to
be a bird as he nears–some kind of dead, unremarkable thrush he would give short shrift to.

She does not hail him, but waits for his approach, and speaks only when he has reached her side.

"When these birds fly west into Eregion, they can become exhausted from their passage over the
mountain pass of Caradhras," she explains with a sad smile, softer now that they are in their own
company. "You'll often find them stunned here–I've seen many over the ages. Sometimes the heat
of your hand can revive them."

She places her narrow hand upon it, and curves her thumb around its creamy breast, its small
brown face.

"It's still warm," she says. They wait. It does not move. The wind lifts its feathers under her slender
fingers.

"Let me try. I've been at the fires–my hands are like to be warmer." He steps in and replaces her
hand with his own, feeling the collection of tiny hollow bones.

With whatever grace he has left to him, he knows no command can fully call it back.

But this is no chance meeting–finding her in the courtyard with the bird–the way it was not chance
when she swam half a sea to his raft. And so he summons the memory of it instead. The thing in
flight. Its particular song at dusk. Its shivering brood.

After a moment, it blinks and then shrinks out from under his touch, a soft wedge of darkness now
animate, and she draws a deep breath.

They watch the thrush slip from under his hand, reshape its beak on the stone ledge, then flit down
the drop into a copse of berry-studded holly below, a memory amplified.

He does not have healing hands. He wonders if Galadriel cannot sense its wrongness, its
disobedience, even through her half-smile.

Or maybe she cares less for the laws of this world than he'd first thought–she is the only one in all
Middle-earth who sees any merit to him, even in this form.

When the thrush departs, so does their shared point of focus, and awareness hangs thickly between
them.

As if the bird has given her an answer she sought, Galadriel turns to him, an indefinable tension
lifting from her.

"I would caution you to watch Celebrimbor's methods," she says slowly. "He has an eagerness for
greatness that has sharpened of late."

"I've seen it in him." He furrows his brow. "That's what you were saying before… You were
talking of breaking a thing to understand it. What are you trying to tell me, Galadriel?"

A coldness creeps into her voice he that knows is not reserved for Halbrand. "This is not the forge
in Númenor. To experiment so here… This is a thin place, where the seen and unseen are not so
divided."

She places her elbows on the balcony's rail and leans forward, looking ever the soldier, tracing the
flight of the departed thrush. "Elrond and I believe the blight is an unraveling between these
boundaries. A reality collapsing, the rotten tree its sigil."

"I don't understand. What does this have to do with our work?"

"There is a mountain-face in the stretch of the northernmost wastes, a fortress. That is where my
company mutinied against me." She looks over her shoulder and they lock eyes, each remembering
that conversation privately.

"There was a door there disguised as a mirror. And behind it, an anvil bearing the mark of the Dark
Lord."

As he listens, he is the very soul of courtesy.

"Surely you don't expect the same craft from Celebrimbor's hands?"

"Intentions can be fair or perilous..." Her tone shifts–not quite accusatory, but afraid, he realizes.
"Halbrand. I thought you wanted to return to the Southlands as quickly as possible. What
changed?"

He puts his hand on her shoulder, turning her gently but bodily to face him, and her clavicle feels
strong as an iron blade beneath the impress of his fingers. He could cut himself upon her if driven
to.

"You did," he says lightly, though in truth, the need for a swift return has been all but shucked
away.

"You changed my course," he continues. "I know it chafes at you to be idle here. But lean on your
friends now and again. On me."

He continues. "You've done the hardest part, carried us all here. Now let us carry the rest a ways. I
don't think Celebrimbor will act in haste. His cause is good."

"You may fall unknowing," she whispers, and in the blue of her eyes he swears he sees a great
wave. There is such hesitancy in her still. He gropes for command of the right words, true ones.
"I've thought about what you said." His voice is low. "I was afraid you would cast me aside–when
you said you needed to remain a while. But now that I know you won't, now that we're…"

He trails off and lets her complete his meaning. As of yet, it's the baldest acknowledgement either
of them has made of the fact that they have lain together. He takes his hand off her slowly, makes
her feel its absence, and his fingers curl and flex at his side.

He sets his jaw and bows his head.

"If I can help Celebrimbor in whatever small way I can, and he can save your people, then maybe
we can form an alliance not seen since the War of Wrath. We can return–as one power, together."
He is aware the words are slipping out quickly now, manic, and he stops abruptly.

His heart is in his mouth. To the last moment, it could go wrong.

Galadriel is avoiding his stare yet again, as she always does when thinking now, pressing her lower
lip under her tongue to wet it.

She is looking down into the greensward–whether from some animal intuition of the perils of
looking at him too long, or to conceal a certain depth of feeling, he cannot claim to guess.

"When you return home, it will not be the same," she says. "You will find it altered, perhaps
forever. We Elves once knew only joy and beauty. It clothed me. And no longer." Their eyes catch.
"But yes, that is what I want, too–an alliance." She opens her mouth but falls silent for a time.

A wind ruffles the mass of leaves in the copse beneath them.

"I dreamed of you," she says suddenly. There is the minutest hitch to her voice. "I was walking in
Doriath, and you were there." She falls silent again.

Doriath, then. His blood is singing, and he cannot help but think about what he might take from
her in secret.

This forum has too many watchful eyes, but all will know soon enough. He reaches out, places a
thumb on the pale inside of her wrist and strokes her pulse beat there and upwards, feeling
gooseflesh prickle, his gesture fully concealed to anyone coming down the steps behind their
backs, furtive and quick.

"Come to my bed, Galadriel," he murmurs near her ear, his breath caught in his chest. She must
feel his gaze heavy on her neck, her bared collarbone, and she blushes.

He would smile if there weren't a pit opening in his stomach.

His lips and incisors find the tendon that joins her shoulder to her neck, thumbs pressed there, his
teeth light across her skin.

It isn't until his mouth reaches her breast that his hands abandon her neck to pull at her skirts,
rucking them up unceremoniously around her waist.

They are already beyond words, having made it into the inner room of his chambers, her hands
easing carefully over his half-healed wound.

She is so distracted by the scrape of his teeth over each nipple, the slick touch of his tongue
through damp silk, that she allows herself to be eased onto his bed on top of him, the pale vee of
her legs locked against his clothed ones.

He tenses his thigh and lets the long line of muscle press firmly between her legs, down where she
is hottest. She makes the sweetest, smallest moan.

His hand wraps around the small of her back to her opposite hip, and when he pushes her down
fully into the meat of his thigh, she groans aloud, and he has to use his free hand to silence her.

He does it again, then again, teaching her until she mimics him, until she's falling quiet from the
concentration of grinding against him and gasping through the heavy weight of his palm against
her mouth.

"That's it, Galadriel. Use me," he urges beneath his breath. "Use my thigh to come." You've used
me well enough already.

He moves his hand from her mouth to her hair, trusting her to be quiet now, tangling the wheat-
colored strands. He longs to use it to debase her, to pull her backwards as he sinks into her heat–
he's so tight with the need. But he can be patient.

More than she. "Halbrand, please," she whispers, and he never would have imagined she would be
like this, not if he hadn't touched her, not in a thousand years.

The plea passes from her body into his, rumbling, the echo of lightning strikes beneath the water.

And who is he to deny her. His eyes fixed on her, he lets his fingers seek her out between them,
into the wetness between her thighs, parting her.

The intimacy of being inside her is the same as being inside her head. He knows both now.

He hooks his fingers inside her and holds them there, pressing in but not moving, and she has to
make do, riding his hand to seek out what she needs.

Still bearing down, Galadriel reaches determinedly for the laces of his trousers as she had before,
all flint and tinder.

He laughs low in his throat. "Will you never be satisfied?"

"And will you never cease your infernal smugness?" she bites, but her voice is high–finally, he has
gotten her to speak.

"You kissed me," he accuses softly, drawing his hands up to smooth the disarray of her hair
backwards, fingers sliding gently along the base of her skull until she looks him squarely in the
eyes, blushing intensely atop him. Her hands fall from him defiantly.

"You bared yourself to me." He reaches one hand down to undo the lacings of his trousers himself
while he talks, not taking his eyes off her, the blackness of her pupils. "You told me you were for
me. I asked you for nothing."

Subtle and treacherous he may be, but never false. He wants her to remember this, and surges up to
kiss her before she can argue.
 Their lips meet, and then their tongues, and he feels it, where the rift is, where the break is between
them–he feels the search to close it will be ferocious and chronic and last forever.

"Will you pledge yourself to me? Come to me always?" he asks against the dual plushness of their
lips.

Galadriel closes her eyes at this and does not answer, as if she knows the self-same trick as he,
which is to never believe yourself safe–not once, not anywhere. This is a tie, a tether, holding her
back from him, and it must be loosened before he can master her.

She forces herself onto him, her hands braced against his chest, and by degrees, he comes closer
and closer to the idea of two.

Chapter End Notes

Lol oh hi. Well, this has been the busiest week of my life, but managed to hammer this
out last night.

I've been pretty overwhelmed by everyone's kind comments, so I hope this one doesn't
disappoint. If you're sad about the lack of, ahem, action, I'll just say next chapter is
gonna be pretty wild...

Notes for the nerds - I realize Sauron is not a literal necromancer, but I'm envisioning
him casting an illusion here. And Doriath is where Gal met Celeborn, so yes, I'm just
further trying to erase him from the canon (lol).

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