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Galadriel

It is a hot summer, a dry summer, a summer of crisply parched grasses and long evenings and short tempers. Celebrimbor leaves Eregion to visit the dwarves again and Ost-in-Edhil dozes its way through the formless days in his absence, doing its best to ignore any simmering disquiet. It is too hot to do anything else. 

Celebrimbor’s gwaith-i-mírdain close themselves seamlessly around the gap of his absence. Annatar, who Galadriel watches for the slightest hint of the ambition that surely lies not far beneath his too-perfect surface, makes no obvious move to lead them. He stays always a little behind and a little to the side; he is polite and careful and quiet. And when a dinner conversation turns to the subject of the next council meeting, it is one of the mírdain rather than Annatar himself who suggests that Annatar might attend in Celebrimbor’s place. 

“No,” Galadriel says. 

Sírwen refolds the napkin by her plate, pressing annoyance neatly into its seams. “Lord Celebrimbor should be represented.”

“He has four dozen smiths by now. Surely you can send someone else.”

Galadriel does not look directly at Annatar – will not give him the satisfaction of it – and so she can’t see him as clearly as she might, but she notes how he watches them, silent, his only movement a too-slow blink. 

“Lord Celebrimbor would wish it to be Annatar,” Sírwen says.

“Lord Celebrimbor is not here.”

“If I may?” Annatar inclines his head when they turn in his direction, a gentle, humble acknowledgement that makes her itch to slap him. “It is of course not my decision, Lady Galadriel, but if I could be helpful – I would only speak to matters where I already know his mind. Or where my own skills might prove of use to you all.”

“My cousin may find your skills pleasing enough to abandon his good sense, but I do not require your presence in any capacity.”

Celeborn beside her chokes on his wine. Sírwen glares. Annatar says “Galadriel! Goodness,” and even has the temerity to look wounded. 

She does not yield. He will not be invited.

When Galadriel was younger she was taught how to move. How to dance; how to jump and run and spin her way through the contests of sport that judged form as sternly as strength; how to fight, first in mimicry and then in anger. What she calls to mind now is not the lessons but the instruction, or rather the feel of being instructed. 

It is a strange thing to balance one’s movement through the words of another. Did she resent it? Surely she must have. Yet here she is now pacing back and forth before her great balcony over the river, bare feet on cool stone, and all she remembers is the reassurance of being once so conscious of every move she made. Balance, Artanis. Move with purpose. Do not overextend yourself. Do not waste momentum. 

She hears Celeborn arrive. He halts for a moment as he sees her, and then walks around her to the writing-desk that sits at the wall where the morning’s light will best catch it. No light now for the dusk is fading and already Ost-in-Edhil’s flock of swifts is coursing low through its towers and then out over the river, calling their high, shrieking cry, the breeze of their wings the only thing that moves the vine leaves in this hot, stifling night. Celeborn takes the map left there and goes with it to the candles lit on the far side of the room.

He has become fascinated in recent years with the islands that may or may not remain of Beleriand and indeed may or may not exist. He shows no wish to see them for himself and gently dismissed her the only time she suggested it; instead he loses himself in each different description of them, this one naming the exact shade of green that grasses grow, that one talking of ghosts and sorrow. She is not sure what it is he is trying to gather. 

“You think I should not have been so discourteous to Annatar,” she says. For he does and she knows he does and there is little use in either of them wasting time in leading up to this.

He waits for her to turn once again in his direction. “I wouldn’t have said discourteous. I might have said incautious. You gave up too much for how little you got from him. Now you look unreasonable and he does not and the mírdain will be grumbling again, and if you are right that we can’t trust him then it will all play to his advantage.”

“And if he is harmless then I have insulted a guest?”

“Can one of the Maiar ever be harmless?” He asks it as he asks many such questions: in genuine curiosity of the answer, but as if he is posing it for a discussion in which it is to be created rather than uncovered. She often finds it one of his more infuriating qualities. “If he is here only to help us as he says he is then it should make no great difference.”

He holds out his hand – a reconciliation, a surrender, either, both - whichever way around a gesture that over the years has formed to habit. She hesitates but takes it, laying her palm on his. Their fingers don’t close. Move only with intention, Artanis.

“And why do you care who Celebrimbor shares his bed with?” he says. This is lighter, a grin hidden somewhere within the notes of his voice. “You surely don’t want kin responsibility for the House of Finwë.”

She squeezes his hand before dropping it, lets what’s there of her smile be seen. “He’s infatuated.”

“So terrible?”

“No, but…” She has suspicions and annoyances and the disquiet that flickers in her chest whenever Annatar is near, but it will not join into anything meaningful and she lacks a whole picture. And Annatar has done nothing wrong. 

No. But.

“All right,” Celeborn says, and she thinks she will perhaps leave it all be for what remains of this evening, curl in beside him and consider the hard-fought peace they have finally found in this place. The night is cooler now. There is nothing in particular they must do tomorrow.

Then a messenger arrives from Annatar asking if Lady Galadriel would please meet him by the fountain, and she adds another annoyance to her unnamed grievances.

The lights of the fountain flicker like stars on the water of the fountain. Annatar, sat on the stone lip in blue and silver silk that makes him look like another one of its statues, trails his hand just above its surface. “Thank you,” he says. “I thought you might not wish to see me at all.”

To that, she says nothing.

He rises in order to bow to her, one simple movement neat and clean. For the most part in his face and his bearing he resembles an elf but there is still something unworldly in him, something hard to determine, and she sees it echoed in the way he moves now. He is, she thinks, trying too hard.

“I wanted to apologise,” he says. “You were right. It is not my place to attend your council meetings, nor to speak for Celebrimbor if you and Lord Celeborn do not wish it. I have come to help you and it troubles me to cause discord in this place that has welcomed me so kindly.”

Welcomed him, because Gil-galad and Elrond wouldn’t - but she’s too unbalanced by his other words to think too much on that. “You want to apologise?”

“I have been a little presumptuous, I think. It has only been, what is it, twenty summers now since I came here? I barely know any of you. And that was one of the intentions of sending me here, to better know the Children of Ilúvatar. Others among Aulë’s servants were quicker to this than I was. I suppose I am here as much to learn from you as to teach you, and sometimes in that learning I have – well! Showed the same impatience that Aulë himself childed me for. I regret that anything I have done has caused you difficulty.”

She appreciates this less than he must intend her to, and not least because she cannot even name so much that he has done to warrant the suspicion she cannot put aside. He has named himself as a messenger of the Valar sent to aid the elves and this in itself unsettles her, but he has aided the elves, and Celebrimbor and his jewel-smiths adore him for it, and even in Celebrimbor’s absence the most presumptuous thing Annatar has done is to offer to attend a council meeting and then apologise for her reaction. 

He goes on: “It sorrows me that you and I seem to have found ourselves at such odds. From what I know of you and from what Celebrimbor has said – in passing, I mean – I’m sure he has not broken any confidences – we share much in common.”

Something in her snarls at this, but she is curious now, less about what he might say than in what he is trying to achieve by saying it. “Quite an assertion to make.”

“Both of us have seen the glory of Aman. Both of us feel that Middle-earth should not have been – I won’t say abandoned. I will say that more could have been done, perhaps then, certainly now. Neither of us wishes to see Middle-earth fade and perish for ever. I do not believe it needs to, and you, if I am not too bold in suggesting it, must feel the same?” Although he offers this as a question he does not wait for its answer. “And for the elven-kindreds who dwell here, why should you be deprived of what your kindred in Valinor are given? My brothers and sisters in Aulë’s service continue to teach the elves now, I have no doubt of it. Why should the elves of Middle-earth not be granted the same?”

She had not been one of Aulë’s best students in her brief time in his workshops. There was an impatience in her then, a restlessness ill-suited to the slow and careful crafting of metals. She remembers a young Celebrimbor beside one of his uncles in gloves made for his child’s hands standing on a step to reach the benches; even then she had known he was better suited to this than she was. 

But much of her youthful disquietude has faded now. It was never the tutelage of the Valar that she resented, only the dominion that came with it. To be limited, to be ruled. Watch where you land, Artanis. 

“I do not wish to create any obligation in you,” Annatar says. “Only to apologise for my own missteps and to offer myself – to teach what you wish to learn, and to learn from you what you will allow. And by way of that, a gift.”

He presses something small and heavy into her hand, warmed by his own. It’s a brooch intended for pinning a cloak; a circle of silver and mother-of-pearl surrounding a beautifully crafted white swan, in the exact style of the Teleri. She thinks of her mother’s people across the sea.

She does not trust him. 

All the same, her hand closes around the gift.

Celeborn

What he has lost cannot be counted. But it is the same for many, and there is nothing so remarkable about him. 

For a while he found a kind of comfort in others’ attempts to describe the indescribable. In the earliest days of Ost-in-Edhil there were new forms of song devised for this and days-long debates over which was better for what kind of sorrow. Once Celeborn travelled with some of the others over the mountains to Oropher in Eryn Galen to hear their songs too; but Oropher himself wanted little to do with any of it, only welcomed them at all because Celeborn was kin, and so Celeborn listened to the Silvan elves sing their songs instead in languages half-known and fascinating to him. 

“You’re being unreasonable,” Celeborn had told Oropher then as they walked alone in the shade of trees. “What would it harm you to talk about sonnets?”

“What would it gain me? What’s gone is gone however I sing of it. Our home is drowned, our king is dead, our friends and kin are burned to ash or trampled under orcs’ feet or lost beneath the sea with a Noldor arrow-head in their throats.”

“So we should only name our grief if it can bring back what is grieved. No elegies, no laments. Only stern prose. Perhaps some sort of list, even -”

“My own cousin a guest in my home, mocking me.”

“It’s not mockery.” Well, perhaps a little. “It’s not only mockery. I do mean it. What do we do with a grief we can’t even sing of?”

“Tell me how you sing of it, then.”

But he didn’t have songs of his own. Not yet, he’d told Oropher then; he couldn’t, still; all his attempts had failed, for all the forms he’d learned seemed inadequate to describe what he’d lost. And so: this.

“Well,” Oropher said, and they’d let it be.

He had told Galadriel all of this after, once they returned to Ost-in-Edhil in the spring. He hadn’t told her of Oropher’s parting words: that Celeborn might return whenever he wished, but none of the Noldor were welcome in his realm no matter who they had married. 

Celeborn has collected many laments since then. He has written down the words of others, both the songs they sing and their views of the best forms in which to compose them (sometimes acrimonious, at least once to his knowledge ending in an actual fight). He still has not found words to make any of his own. 

Celebrimbor stays with the dwarves as days turn to weeks. Still the summer air feels tense and heavy over the city, a muffling, humid heat. Celeborn wonders whether Celebrimbor will arrive before the much-needed thunderstorm comes to clear the air, and thinks probably not if his last message is anything to judge by – that he and Narvi are working on something new and fascinating, that he must see this through to the end and that he trusts his smiths will continue in his absence until he can begin the next phase of this work back in Eregion. 

Celeborn watches Annatar when this letter arrives. He sees the brief movement of a true reaction beneath his so-calm, so-placid exterior: he is annoyed and he is… worried? Jealous? It’s hard to say. It’s certainly hard to say in someone as strange as Annatar. 

The reason he is watching Annatar at all is because Annatar is watching Galadriel (and Celeborn, and the two of them together), and Galadriel is by turns irritated and curious about it. “It’s like some kind of courtship,” she complains one night after another day of Annatar appearing wherever she was, strolling down a street in the opposite direction or just happening to have arrived somewhere a few minutes ahead of her: ah, Lady Galadriel, I was hoping to find you, I wanted to ask – question upon question. Might it not be possible to divert the floodwaters more efficiently come spring? Had she considered culverting one of the smaller mountain streams past the new cellars to keep them cooler? The crops gathered in from the east had remained at the same level for several decades now, he had noticed from their records; might he be permitted to suggest a few ideas to improve their yield?

“Maybe it is,” Celeborn says. “Maybe he thinks Celebrimbor’s abandoned him to the dwarves and now he needs someone else to seduce with jewel-craft and clever ideas.”

“Don’t say that.”

“Quiet me, then.”

She’s at his chair in two paces, climbing onto his lap astride him, her calves snug against his thighs, the warmth of her so delicious in his arms. It was a gamble but a reasonably safe one; he knows her well enough to know when she wants to be distracted, when she would rather have her energy directed from anger to pleasure than have it calmed. 

“Tell him I wouldn’t share you anyway,” he murmurs against her neck. He runs a thumb down the length of her spine, the cloth of her gown fine enough that he can feel the heat of her beneath it. “Not unless he’s prepared to give us a gift like Melian’s.”

It had only been once. A wedding-gift, Melian had said, for both of them; to teach them of each other and themselves; to show them what she knew of the way the living things of Arda flourished within their own forms, like flowers turning to the touch of the sun.

He remembers it now as a kaleidoscope of memories out of sequence forming a new pattern every time. Melian’s kisses turning to soft spring leaves upon his chest, and the way her dark hair had looked against Galadriel’s thighs when Galadriel twisted and cried out, and the feel of a smooth-barked branch twining around his wrist to hold him still, and Melian’s mouth on him beside Galadriel’s, and her hand over his to guide him, and touch falling into the whisper of summer breezes in leaves, into the nectar of flowers, into the heady scent of bluebells. Like this, she had said; like this, like this, like this. He had thought there was nothing better than to be alive.

Galadriel pulls back from him now, steadied against his hand. She’s surprised – he’s had little generous to say about Melian in centuries. But there’s a light in her and a joy at the memory and when he kisses her again, soft and questioning, her lips warm against his tongue, she responds with an eagerness that is its own answer.

In darkly comical irony, it is Annatar who brings up Melian the next time. “I had not thought,” he says, weaving through the marketplace crowds like a dancer to keep up with Celeborn. “But of course, you’re from Doriath. You would have seen what she did to protect it when the rest of Beleriand grew dark and rotted all around.”

“Obviously,” Celeborn says. “What does that matter?”

“It seems a particular kind of cruelty for her to have given you that and then to take her protection away. I imagine – I wouldn’t think well of my kind either in your place. We failed you.”

“Is there a point to this?” He is not particularly interested in hearing apologies on behalf of the Maiar. Even in this marketplace there are Noldor, there are dwarves; the pain he carries for Doriath is not a thing he could find a name for here. 

Annatar sidesteps around a pile of baskets, grants a smiling apology to the trader he brushes against. “A moment of your time?”

There is clearly no use in trying to shake him. Celeborn gestures to a covered archway between buildings away from the crowd, and Annatar bows his head in thanks as he follows.

“Am I annoying you?” Annatar says when they have space enough to face each other. “I fear I am annoying you.”

Galadriel would say, yes. But even Galadriel seems a little more curious about Annatar recently despite her reservations. Annatar has not yet managed to convince her to look on him favourably, but somehow he’s managed to interest her. 

“I don’t understand what you want,” Celeborn says.

Annatar takes this as a question, which it wasn’t. He arranges himself into a neat gesture of acknowledgement, hands folded before him in perfect symmetry, head inclined. He is almost disconcertingly beautiful. “From you – to learn. So many of the things which must be second nature to you are still so new to me. I imagined that by watching you I might develop a better understanding.”

“Which things?”

“How you and Lady Galadriel rule this city when in Valinor the elves live beneath the guiding hands of the Valar. And how you have rebuilt after the wars – not Ost-in-Edhil, I mean, but all the allegiances there are now. All the history you must deal with. And your marriage! Of course the Maiar are permitted such things but I never found myself having much of an interest until Middle-earth. To love another and to make something from that connection – to act upon it until it becomes in itself a creation built anew every day over time, for years upon years – this remains such a mystery to me. The mechanics of the body are simple enough and yet the greater craft is, remains, enigmatic to me, and I feel my own efforts are sometimes clumsy and careless and not received as I would wish them to be. Yet for you and she it seems so effortless. Is – is this an inappropriate thing to discuss?” 

If he is pretending doubt, which Celeborn is half-convinced that he is, it is a good pretense. “I’d certainly not recommend raising it with Galadriel,” he says. 

Annatar nods. “Thank you. Of course. I apologise if my curiosity has sometimes exceeded my manners. I do so very much wish to learn but this creates no obligation in you to teach me.” He bows again and the sunlight dances in his hair. “You are kind to welcome me here.”

Celebrimbor had welcomed him here. Celeborn had followed Galadriel in regarding him with caution and distance from the start, but if Annatar truly realises this he gives no sign. Perhaps this is a gesture in itself of attempted reconciliation – an offer to regard their agreement that he might stay as enough of a welcome, and no mind the way Galadriel had regarded it – still regards it - reluctantly and begrudgingly. 

“One thing,” Annatar says. “For you. Sírwen told me you collected songs?”

Celeborn expects – well, he isn’t quite sure what he expects. Discussion or an attempted persuasion, perhaps, an enticement to consider an offer until he gives in out of annoyance if nothing else, some gift of books or music Annatar has managed to lever out of one of the mírdain’s distant kin in Edhellond. But what he gets is the song itself.

Annatar’s voice has a noble beauty to it and a richness that Celeborn did not expect. It enchants, it illuminates; it weaves in his mind pictures of grief. Annatar could not have known any of those dead but to Celeborn’s relief he doesn’t try to describe them, singing instead of a different kind of sorrow. Doriath’s careful order, its light, its growth, its strength, its well-planned and well-tended creations, all ruined and fallen to the dark horror of entropy. 

For a moment Celeborn forgets where he is. He loses the clamour of the marketplace and the heat of the sun; he loses Ost-in-Edhil itself, and all within it.

“A gift,” Annatar says.

Annatar

The summer goes on. It rains a little – not much. Sometimes the clouds over the mountains begin to darken and grow heavy and everyone talks with relief of the storms that will surely break, but no storms come. The air weighs the city down like a smothering hand. 

Celebrimbor writes back from the dwarf city. We’re making such progress. You’d find this so interesting. I do hope you will come with me the next time. It’s encouraging, although Annatar has no intention of leaving Ost-in-Edhil for a long time yet. He has moved very, very slowly with Celebrimbor, always allowing himself to seem the more hesitant one. He will not hurry his plans now.

Annatar has learned many things from his past of defeat and failure. He has learned that he can be patient. He has learned that he is more interested in the elves than he presumed he would be. He has learned that his best work has always been done with another. He has learned never to rest all of his plans upon that other. 

Galadriel disliked him from the first time they met. She is suspicious, and he presumes her suspicion is both that he is not the servant of the Valar he claims to be or that he is what he claims to be and the Valar plan to extend their control over the elf realms here. She lived for a long time in Doriath under Melian’s rule, he knew; she cannot be entirely opposed to one of the Maiar being here; but she and her husband left Doriath and went west to seek out their own realms. That they are Lord and Lady here, not King and Queen, is an interesting show of humility but, he assumes, a temporary one. He knows the Noldor; he knows ambition. He knows what he sees in her Tree-lit eyes.

Her Sinda husband is harder to read. It is unclear what he wants; it is unclear why he has what he has (a Noldo wife?) and why he lacks what he might rightfully take (Thingol’s crown as king of the Sindar, for Elrond Peredhel clearly won’t). So much about him is unclear; where Galadriel has the lucency of pure spring waters, Celeborn calls to mind heavy mists over forests, ruins buried beneath centuries of leaf-litter, trees so dense the path cannot be seen. A challenge. Annatar enjoys challenges.

 Neither of them can be moulded as he would like just yet. They are cooled metal that will resent being turned against its grain. But he can work a great deal with them as they are, in these days when the summer’s heat leaves everyone a little careless. 

He begins at the weakest points in the join soldered between them. He does not seek to do anything so artless and crude as outright turn them against each other; only to find the faintest of cracks, to be himself the thinnest, most imperceptible end of a wedge.

To Galadriel, he speaks of possibility. A shame, he says, that so much of Middle-earth should still remain desolate and dark. There is no reason for it. And yet it seems that Gil-galad in Lindon is content with the limits of his realm, and the elves of Middle-earth are content to live in faded shadows of what could be. Even those who lived within Melian’s realm! Perhaps – he wouldn’t presume – perhaps with so many of the brightest spirits of the Noldor gone, and with the Sindar, well, as they are, there are simply none left willing to see a better future and lead others toward it? 

She does not say she agrees. She does stop sending him away.

With Celeborn, he plays a different hand. It was a great tragedy, he says, that Doriath was lost. It sorrows him that Melian decided she could not stay. And yet, perhaps it was inevitable (he notices Celeborn flinch at this very, very slightly) for truly it always felt as though none wanted Doriath to stand. Not Morgoth, whose orcs paced around its borders; not the Valar, who summoned Melian home. 

He does not say, not the Noldor, who destroyed it. He does not need to. 

The days and the weeks go on. He cannot tell if he is making progress. And then, they invite him to dine with them.

Annatar would have preferred to deal with Galadriel and Celeborn separately. It’s so much easier to manage one alone and the knowledge that both of them seek his presence suggests the troubling possibility that they have discussed him together. 

Still, he has little time for this – Celebrimbor will not be gone for too long, and there’s a limit to what he can pursue in Celebrimbor’s presence, sweet brilliant prideful Tyelpe who is already falling in love with him. (Falling and not yet fallen; despite many unspoken assumptions among the elves of Eregion, and despite Galadriel’s very clearly spoken ones, Annatar has not yet done more with Tyelpe than the almost-accidental brush of a hand against his. This work is not a thing to be done in a hurry. This – Tyelpe, what they will make together, what they will be together – this is to be a masterpiece.)

And so here he is in Galadriel and Celeborn’s home, eating fruit and cream off patterned porcelain in a room flooded with sunlight.

There is something in Galadriel that shimmers. The Noldor all have an unearthliness about them, a light that can’t quite be contained in faded, marred Middle-earth. Here, she sits at this dining table with a glass at her lips and the leaf-dappled sun playing over the forearm of her simple silk dress; in the Unseen world her form is a blazing spirit of light. If Annatar lets his focus drift a little he can see both, the one overlapping the other. 

Can her Sindar husband? Presumably not. Melian either did not or could not grant her subjects the ability to know such things and Celeborn’s certainly never been anywhere but Middle-earth. He watches her now with that same odd calm, a half-there smile lost somewhere in whatever it is he is thinking. 

“Annatar,” Galadriel says, and her voice is like music. “My husband tells me you wish to learn of our marriage. Is this so?”

Damn. He’d been really quite confident he had Celeborn turned just as he wanted; now he’s at the third point of a triangle, both their attentions focused on him.  

Annatar casts his eyes down and presses his lips together in an embarrassed smile, a performance of shyness. “My apologies, my lady. Sometimes my enthusiasm for knowledge distracts me from my manners.”

“I wish to know what curiosity you sought to indulge.” She’s – curious, herself? Amused? Almost laughing. The way she looks at him makes him feel like a vessel of clear water held up to the light. “This is hardly one of your experiments. I am not an ore to measure or an alloy to mix.”

Annatar steals a glance at her husband, but there will be no aid there; Celeborn is watching him with that same unreadable calm.  

“I would not lessen you so,” Annatar says, inclining his head again a little (but only a little - no need to overdo the contrition). “If you would permit me an analogy? Many metals can be made stronger or more beautiful by forge-welding them to another. The qualities of each complement and are amplified this way. The craft itself can be immensely difficult, for many metals will not be worked so and for those that can even the slightest carelessness might turn each against the other. When it works, and well – it is a wonder. Forgive me if it seems impolite to compare you to a jewel-smith’s craft but I assure you it is the greatest of compliments.”

“Hmm,” Galadriel says. Then to Celeborn she commands, “tolo” – Sindarin, now, come here – and he does. 

The way she kisses him is far from the polite, chaste affection the elves reserve for their public appearances. Annatar knows well that isn’t all they are but it’s like a shock resonating through him to see it’s not all she is. She is hungry, bold, she pulls her husband down against her without pause or patience and he in his turn shapes himself to her will, a hand slipping around to cradle the back of her neck. That it is simultaneously something that Annatar should not be permitted to see and something done entirely for his eyes fills his mouth with the taste of forge-hot smoke.

“Immensely difficult?” Galadriel says. “How sad that you should find it so.”

“You have the advantage of practice, my lady. So many things are new to me.”

“And do you wish to learn?”

From the first day they met he knew Galadriel would be his greatest opponent here. He has been careful since then to give her no reason to distrust him, but she distrusts him all the same. Even now there is a mocking, teasing look in her eye, the dance of a smile playing over her face – but she is curious with it. This is a challenge. She wants him to accept.

Annatar gets to his feet and her husband steps back. (A problem, maybe – a complication, certainly – but no effort can be spared for him just now.) Galadriel does not rise from her chair and only tilts her head as she watches. She is, perhaps, expecting Annatar to kiss her; she is certainly expecting him to do something; and he takes a certain delight in seeing the dart of surprise in her as he kneels at her feet. 

“I would be grateful for anything you might teach me,” he says. 

He knows he is beautiful. He knows he must be beautiful to her now, arranged in neat and perfect symmetry: his hands folded before him, his eyes not quite raised to hers, the silk of his gown pooled on the floor. He has always known well how to kneel. 

A small eternity passes in the waiting. He is still. If this is to be a seduction, let her think it hers.

Then she takes his chin in her hand, lifting his face to hers. He imagines himself as he must be in her eyes: one of the Ainur here at her feet, seeking her wisdom, subservient before her power. She is clever and disarmingly insightful and if any of the elves find him out it will be her, but she is proud too. She did not come to Middle-earth to be humbled and limited.

The pad of her thumb is soft against his lips. 

She looks up then, and past him. “Show him, please,” she says to her husband. And when she holds out her hand Celeborn winds his fingers through hers and lets her draw him closer, and kisses her: the curve beneath her jaw, the soft line of her throat, then her lips, gentle at first, and firmer, and firmer. Galadriel makes a very soft sound.

“Like that,” Celeborn says, drawing back from her. His eyes on Annatar are like mirrors; he’s calm, he’s opaque. It would be wonderful to see him come undone. 

Annatar follows in careful precision. Beneath his lips Galadriel is softer than he would have thought, and warm. There’s the faintest flicker of a pulse deep in her throat and for a moment it’s hard so hard not to think of her as prey, but he is controlled. He will be controlled. 

Galadriel does not make the same little breathless sound again (admittedly a disappointment, and one he determines to remedy before long) but she seems pleased enough. “Good,” she says. “That is a beginning.”

“My thanks for the opportunity to learn.” He doesn’t hide a smile; she does not seem someone to enjoy too much affected coyness. “If there should be more lessons you will both find me a most attentive student.”

There is an easy grace to her movements running down from her half-smile through the curl of her shoulder to her hand as she lifts two of his fingers in hers. She looks, again, at her husband. “What do you say to this?”

Celeborn steps back once and then twice, onto the great circular rug that lies below their window. “Tolo,” he says.

Annatar knows how to put on obedience like a veil. It has kept him concealed and unsuspected and over the years it has become a comfort, a form whose familiarity he can settle into. He knows how to ensure each step now is careful and small enough to seem humble; he measures out precisely how much air he breathes, the angle of his head, the exact shade he will allow for the blush that reddens the tone of his cheeks. 

They are elves and they are nothing, they should all be nothing: tools to turn in his hand, subjects to kneel before his glory. His vision chants in his blood with the beat of bellows and hammers. But such a vision will take time and time is made up of a hundred thousand small deceits, and so now he will do as they wish. He will let Celeborn take him by the shoulders and hold him still, considering. He will wait.

“I think she should see you,” Celeborn says. 

Galadriel nods, pleased, and settles back against the window-sill to watch as Celeborn’s hands undo fastenings and clasps, one by one. He moves with a quiet and steady confidence. He loosens surcoat and shirt and then places his palm against Annatar’s bare chest.

His touch is unsettling in a way that Galadriel’s wasn’t and it’s not even what he’s doing, it’s something about him. Something in him. She still has the sharpness and light and beauty of Aman about her; he is a child of Middle-earth, and under his touch Annatar feels worn away like stone is by a river, like mountains are by winter. He shivers a little despite himself, and when Celeborn mutters some quiet comfort to him it’s despite himself that he accepts it. 

“Is this what she wishes to see?” Annatar asks, glad that his voice is still as he wishes it (soft and melodious; not too loud). 

“It is,” Celeborn says, and moves the shoulder of Annatar’s surcoat further aside, slowly and attentively enough that it is clear what she wishes to see is not only what is revealed but also the revealing itself. 

Galadriel says, “She might wish him to move a little faster.”

“You can wait and be patient,” Celeborn says in her direction.

It surprises Annatar that that is permitted, but Celeborn is smiling, a little, and Galadriel says nothing to it, and he can’t turn to see her without taking his attention off Celeborn and the way Celeborn’s hands look on his body. He swallows; a swell of anticipation rises in him. “Might she also wish to see you, my lord?” 

“I would,” she says, and there’s a purring satisfaction in her voice.

Annatar moves faster at this, for it is what she wants, for he is only as patient as he needs to be. Celeborn allows it. He only takes Annatar’s wrists once he is already bare from the chest up and then it is not to slow but to guide, running Annatar’s fingers over the faint furrows of his ribs and the notch above his hip. There’s a pale crease of an old scar at his stomach that looks like it was made by a blade.

Annatar observes all of this in the same way he has observed everything else since he came here. He has noticed enough about Celeborn already to have seen which other scars mark him. There is a very, very faint line of anger within him that Annatar might not have even seen if it was not disarmingly similar to his own; it will be easy, it will be delicious, to pull it through him like thread. 

“My people failed you,” Annatar says as a whisper against the elf’s chest. Galadriel can hear no doubt but he wants Celeborn to feel it. “Let me do what I can for you.”

For a moment Celeborn holds him tighter, and a spasm of something unspoken trembles under his grip. Then: “She’s waited long enough.”

Annatar had hoped he might be permitted to undress Galadriel too, but it seems he isn’t. He is permitted (instructed, really) to kiss her and this time he doesn’t restrain himself nearly so much for she’s greedy and keen and she melts into him like she’s sunlight, almost too bright to cast his eyes upon, bright as the Silmarils, bright as the Trees, bright as the Lamps. He wants to drink her in. 

She pulls him with her as they sink down together onto the rug that’s soft under his knees. He’s vaguely aware of her husband behind her, his arm around her chest as she leans back against him, but all Annatar cares about is that this makes the practicality of it easier. She is soft and golden and gorgeous and he is almost, almost lost – but not quite. Not in this nor in anything else will he lose control for he is not the servant of his form but its master.

“Let me please you,” he says, and she curls beneath him like a cat in the sun. 

She tastes wonderful, which is no surprise. Nor does it come as any surprise to him that when he looks up to her she’s watching - that the sight of him with his head between her thighs delights her. Her husband is nuzzling kisses into her neck and, catching Annatar’s eye, pauses for a moment to whisper something to her, and she drags together enough attention for a distracted nod. 

Her hand strokes over Annatar’s head more gently than he expected. It occurs to him – a floating thought – that there might be a gentler version of her that Celeborn has seen and Annatar has not, or at least not yet. He is glad of its absence now. Tenderness is a different type of battlefield and he is less practiced in what it requires.

“She’ll need more,” Celeborn says.

“More?” He doesn’t want to stop – he’s not going to stop for that – and she hardly seems unsatisfied at present. He pulls away long enough for a teasing bite to her inner thigh and very much enjoys the cry that brings forth from her. “Is this insufficient?”

“I advise you give her what she wants,” Celeborn says, and Annatar has misjudged this slightly, has allowed himself to become careless, truly needs to pay better attention, because Celeborn is clearly enjoying watching this at present. 

“What would you like, my lady?” he murmurs against her without lifting his head. “More of me?”

“All of you,” she says with a snap in her voice, and her hand closes in his hair and pulls him up to face her. “Now.”

All of him as though she could even imagine what he is, as though he had not laid waste to the lands of her kin, led armies that besieged and destroyed her people; all of him when he sung the world into being, helped craft the rivers she loves and the stars in the sky and the stone beneath her feet. He does not laugh at her arrogance but if he did it would be in delight. 

He wastes little time in positioning himself and he kisses her throat as he enters her, and it’s so easy, so easy, and she keens under him and Celeborn bites half-gently at the tip of his ear in what he’ll take as a reward. 

He is not a creature easily mastered by his own desires. Still, his blood thunders in his veins, as his mouth sets itself with anticipation, as the heat of her drives him on and he can feel how much his body responds to it, wants it, resonates in harmony with her pleasure, he’s – fascinated, is the best way to think of it. He isn’t to be mastered by his own body but he will gladly be mastered by hers. 

“Back a little,” Celeborn says, and he rearranges himself to grant enough room for the elf’s hand to touch her above where they’re joined. The lean muscle of his forearm is beautiful, a muted contrast against her paler skin beneath, and Annatar wants to watch them together too, wants to see her kiss him again, wants to see their bodies wound against each other, and the thought of it is heavy in his throat, and when she comes it almost overpowers him and she’s beautiful and he has never, ever seen her lose even a moment of control and here she is undone, for him, for both of them.

Annatar keeps his pace in all the even movements and gathers himself without letting the gathering show. It’s a challenge but a surmountable one, well within his power. Then Celeborn grabs him at the back of his neck and kisses him hard and between that and Galadriel all molten gold beneath him he balances on the edge for a moment, wavering, weak. 

“Please,” he says when their lips part, the word a surrender. 

Galadriel looks at him through unfocused half-lidded eyes, still lost in her own pleasure. It’s Celeborn who says “No.”

This is unexpected and yet in its own way welcome, for even as Annatar bows his head in acquiescence he is coming back to himself. He draws upon what he knows of Celeborn’s people which is more than he’ll admit. When Melian left Middle-earth the elves of Doriath begged her to stay, he knows; they pleaded with her not to abandon them, not to lift her protection from this refuge of a realm. This silver-haired prince must have been down on his knees in the litter of beech-leaves with the rest of them. None of it mattered. Melian left and Doriath fell.

Would you like to have one of the Maiar beg you, prince of Doriath? Would you like to say no? 

Annatar doesn’t quite change his shape, but he allows his eyes, his face, the manner of his look, to take on the shimmer of Melian’s. “Please,” he says again, and he’s pretending but he’s not and his sincerity is a mask in itself. “Please – I need -”

“No,” Celeborn says again, and oh there’s a pleasure in it there even if he doesn’t let his show the same way she does, tight in the tension of his throat, heavy on his lips. And then he’s softer: “Not yet,” he says, stroking Annatar’s hair.

Galadriel’s kiss is sharper, harder, turning into a bite that almost draws blood. “More,” she says.

Little surprise really that she’d prove so hard to satisfy.

Obeying at least is simple enough. He’s let himself be tempered into obedience by the hands of others before and he will again. There’s something primal in it that goes beyond pleasure and resentment, that he can’t fully name and turns his mind from trying to. What matters is only her hand on his back, disarmingly smooth, and her beautiful voice whispering “that’s it, that’s good, that’s it” until she breaks apart again.

He would keep going still – he’s learned in many ways and in many forms that he can be remarkably good at self-restraint – but she pushes him up and turns to kiss her husband. Annatar watches, silent, patient, until Celeborn releases her and she returns her attention to him.

“Maia,” she says, her hands framing his face, the clear light in her eyes holding him more strongly than chains. “Have you learned from us?”

“Very much.” And he has, he has.

“A most attentive student,” she says. “I think you should learn more.”

He feigns a flutter of uncertainty, looking down at his jewelled hands held in hers. “If I might -”

“Hush,” she says. 

Then Celeborn’s arm slips around his waist, his lips grazing the back of Annatar’s neck, and he echoes her, “Hush, hush,” and Annatar sees Galadriel smile and the understanding of how much she wants to see this almost overcomes him.

He lets Celeborn mould him with his hands, lets himself become like rippling metal that smooths beneath the elf’s touch. It’s fast and he’s glad of that for his patience for waiting is beginning to fray and so it seems is Celeborn’s. Celeborn groans as he pushes into him and it’s good, it’s good, the sense of being filled and held and pressed down, of being bound into place in a way that he wants to hate and can’t quite manage to.

Galadriel wets her lips and watches.

Annatar is close, now. It’s like a flooded river rising in him and rising, closer and closer to bursting its banks, finally beyond his control. He reaches down – it won’t take long, he’s so close that the brush of a palm alone might do it – and Celeborn grabs his hand and says, “No.”

Annatar whimpers. It isn’t dignified, but he’s considerably beyond dignity.

“No,” Celeborn says again, and takes him harder, and Annatar remembers himself and what he’s doing enough to beg – please and please and he needs this, so much, have pity, be kind – and Celeborn laughs, and Annatar hates him for it and wants more of it and he can’t bear much more of this, the conflict of his own deceits will undo him, he can’t contain everything, he can’t -

But Celeborn’s mouth nuzzles at his ear. “I’m not cruel,” he gasps out between breaths, and he slows his pace a little. “She decides when.”

And then it’s Galadriel holding him and all pretence of control is gone. He ruts into her grip once, twice, another few beats and then his climax tears through him and the force of it is almost more than he can bear. And Galadriel doesn’t let go, and Celeborn kisses the side of his neck and says “there, that’s good, well done, well done” until he comes too.

At dawn in Ost-in-Edhil the birds begin their song, throats dry and parched. Another day with no rain.

Annatar walks back to his rooms alone through the still-empty streets. He was a creature of night, once; he walked on wolf’s paws through the dark and made it his own. Now here he is in a city of elves, and the sun is rising.

His body is full of sweet aches and points of tenderness that he never anticipated. They will mend but the memory of them will not, not as long as he does not wish it. Currently, he does not wish it.

This is the beginning of something. He has yet to decide what.