Archive of Our Own

Númenor

-Are you there?

Her room has a balcony. That’s her favourite thing about it; the gentle curve of the rail, shaped like the bow of a ship, the delicate marble beneath her feet; the view of the sea, restless and ever-changing, right now sparkling merrily beneath the fading sun.

“Galadriel.”

He is demanding, she has discovered. It is almost endearing in moments like this, where she feels so very content. It was less charming in the raft, when they had little to do but snipe at each other, but now that he's reclining in the seat by the window clad in nothing but sunlight…

She turns to face him fully.

“You are shameless,” she says. She had found a robe to wear before choosing to wander her rooms, but he habitually chooses to go without. She has no idea whether all men are like this, or just Halbrand but judging by the looks he gives her, amused and knowing, she suspects the latter.

“And where does shame get you,” he says, but she can tell he is not truly attending. As if called, she walks toward him and settles on the chaise. He tilts his head, cat-like, and reaches a hand up to tug at a lock of her hair. 

His fingers run smoothly through it, mussed as it is, and he sighs with appreciation. She is used to adoration of her hair, used to alternately guarding it and pretending as if she does not notice. It is a new feeling for her, to watch his eyes glitter with greed as strands of her hair fall through his fingers in a shimmer of gold, and feel nothing but a lazy contentment.

He tips her over gently, so she is on her back and he is hovering over her, removing the silken robe she had wrapped herself in with businesslike ease. He settles between her legs, and she makes room, shifting so he’s in the cradle of her hips. He’s already hard against her thigh, but she’s in no rush. 

She wraps a hand around his neck and pulls him down so they can kiss. It’s slow, and lazy: they’re not expected anywhere. He pulls away to kiss her neck, and she squirms at the feel of the stubble against her skin, still new, and strangely pleasing. She tangles her fingers in his dark curls. He grunts lowly into her skin, and grips her hip, hard. She pushes down on his head, but he’s already shifting down.

Her collarbone, the tips of her breasts, the soft part of her stomach just below her ribs. He knows them all, moves with her, strokes her slowly. She closes her eyes and drifts, lets him anchor her to her body, enjoys the warmth settling in her core and radiating through the rest of her.

He kisses at her hipbone, spreads her thighs apart and scrapes at the soft skin with his teeth. She jolts up at the sensation.

“I thought you might be falling asleep,” he teases. He’s hovering over her centre, breathing on the sensitive skin in the way that he knows drives her mad, fingers idly stroking at her skin. His shoulders keep her legs spread apart, and she allows him to keep her pinned, even as she pushes and squirms to get closer to his mouth.

“You wanted to take your time,” he says. “You’ll find that I-” he stops to nip at her skin again, and she groans, grateful that the Númenoréans had placed her rooms in the furthest guest wing.

“I can be very obliging,” he continues. The light of the setting sun has lit the room with a moody red that makes her restless.

“Halbrand,” she says, closer to a plea than her pride will admit. He leans down and kisses her again, where she is most sensitive, again and again, until her eyes roll back in her head, and it’s all gone, all of it, except for the burn and the heat, consuming her from the inside.

*

They decide to miss dinner, by unspoken agreement. She dozes on and off, and when she wakes, the room is covered in a cool light that deepens the shadow in the corners and hollows. She turns away, disconcerted.

Halbrand is awake next to her. His face is creased in a frown, throat working as if he is struggling to speak. She brushes a hand over his straight, dark eyebrows, the soft hair at his temples, runs the tip of a finger over his funny round ears. 

He turns to face her.

“Hush,” she says.”I’m here.” He blinks. 

“You are,” he says, half a question. 

“Did you sleep?” He shakes his head. She is not surprised; he always seems to be awake when she is, and she doesn’t sleep much. “Tell me what troubles you,” she says. He’s still caught in something, she can see, and it inspires a tenderness in her that she does not recognise. She presses their foreheads together. 

The world shrinks to this room, and the room shrinks to the space between their breaths.

“Pain,” he says, finally. “I dreamt of pain.”

“Pain you’ve suffered?”

“I don’t know,” he says slowly. “Pain to come, I think.”

The sheets have tangled themselves around her. She shifts to free her wrists, brushes a hand over his broad knuckles.

“Pain is all but a guarantee,” she says. “In the life that we live. As King, and a fighter, it will be inevitable for you.” He smiles with one side of his mouth, boyishly.

“Is this how you rally your troops?” he teases. 

“Sometimes,” she says. She used to gild her speeches, used to speak of the glory of sacrifice, until the scores of dead had leached the joy of battle from her bones. Now there is only bloody vengeance.

“When they are old and weary,” she says, and does not add, like me. “When they would put down the sword if only they remembered how, I tell them that it all ends. Everything ends, but duty.”

He is sad for her, she can see. Barely a mayfly in her eyes, and this young king pities her. 

He strokes her cheek, softly. Her eyes flutter closed.

“Duty, yes,” he murmurs. “That is not the only thing that can bind a heart.”

*

Time flows and rushes in uneven streams. She loses hours in bed; meetings with the Queen Regent and her Council blur by. She knows that things are proceeding apace, that supplies are being procured and loaded, trainees are buckling on newly forged swords that they barely know how to swing, and that is enough for her. 

Halbrand is an odd constant: he doesn’t fit in the rhythms of her life, and yet he fits perfectly. She doesn’t want to think about that and what it may mean, only buries her face in the bend of his neck and tries not to think of war.

He is peaceable, when she is awake. Malleable in a way she didn’t expect, and furious in her dreams. In them he shouts, teeth gnashing, grabs at her hard enough that her bones creak. He always smells of blood. She wakes from these dreams uneasy, momentarily wary of the man who now shares her bed.

He frowns in puzzlement when she finally mentions it to him. She sees her own confusion on his face and backtracks.

“It’s just… odd,” she says. Isn’t it? What does she have to fear from any man? Except he takes her hand, and kisses it, and she closes her eyes against the rush.

She leans up to kiss him and he obliges. She revels in the softness, so hard to accept from anyone else, but for him she comes to it openhanded, aching. His heart is beating in time with hers. Her worries float away with the breeze. She feels untethered, as if she has swallowed a cloud.

“Tell me,” he says, when they pull apart, “what troubles you.”

It does not matter, and she tells him so.

*

The sun is shining in her face, thin rays slipping through the fluttering curtains and coaxing her to wakefulness. Today the thrum of needing to do something is gone, quietly smothered by an inner peace. She tries to close her eyes and drift off again, but no use: she is well and truly awake.

Halbrand is asleep next to her, breathing slowly and deeply. Selfishly, she wants him awake. She picks up his arm where it lays between them and moves closer, draping it over her waist and pressing them together. He is pleasingly naked, and she sighs at the feel of him, warm and close and solid.

“Halbrand,” she murmurs, but he does not stir. She pushes her nose against his neck, and breathes in deep. She lets a hand wander up and down his body, following the long muscles of his back.

“Halbrand,” she says again, and nips lightly at his collarbone.

He wakes slowly. It is as if he is swimming up from fathoms deep. She moves up to watch his face: his eyes are screwed shut, and his lips tremble.

His eyes open slowly, a brighter green than she remembers, a verdant aliveness that shocks her. He stares wildly at her for a heartbeat, an animal intensity in his face, enough that some part of her wants to shy away from. But instead she places a hand on his cheek, feeling the bristles of his beard and a faint pulse of blood underneath her palm, and waits.

“Galadriel,” he says, and his voice is both sleep-rough and tired. “Hello.”

“Good morning,” she says, and smiles, and a corner of his mouth lifts up. Still, there is a restlessness in him that is making her uneasy.

“What is troubling you?” she asks, finally, as the silence stretches. He shakes his head. 

“Nothing,” he says. “Just a terrible dream.” His hand comes up to cover the nape of her neck, and she closes her eyes. The feel of him is arresting, overwhelming. She can feel the calluses and burn scars from the forge, the ridges where years of weapons training made their mark.

“I wanted to wake you,” she says quietly. 

“You missed me, then?” She can hear the smile in his voice and opens her eyes to glare. 

“Missed is a strong word,” she snipes, but her heart isn’t in it. He feels… fragile, almost, and for the first time she is acutely aware of the strength difference between them. She wants to treat him gently.

This instinct is borne out when she turns to get out bed - the new recruits will be expecting her - and he holds tight onto her waist and pulls her close and says, “wait, wait,” with such urgency that she pauses, and allows him to pull her back into the cradle of his body, so close that her head is tucked beneath his chin and his feet wind around hers.

He says nothing, only holds her, the ragged sound of his breathing cutting through the room. His arms hold her at her back, her hip, anchoring her. They are both naked, but the hold is devoid of desire, only a need for an intimacy that threatens to overwhelm her.

“Halbrand,” she says. He kisses her softly, and gets out of bed.

*

She knows that the soldiers will be waiting for her in the training ground, but she is strangely reluctant to meet them. Halbrand, too, will be expected at the forge, but he is oddly bent on both of them avoiding their responsibilities. 

“You’ve only left Armenelos once,” he says, while she’s braiding her hair. “And we’ll be leaving… when?”

“Soon,” she says. A fortnight, at most. 

“And who knows when the sea will sweep us back here,” he says. “They won’t miss us for one day.”

It does sound tempting. The knowledge that they will be leaving soon has loosened something wound tight within her, and the past few weeks have been some of the most contented in her life. She’d like some more of that to carry with her.

“One day,” she allows.

*

He meets her at the Eastern gate with a single horse and a bag of provisions. The last time she left Armenelos, they had travelled along the beach to get to the hall of lore. This time, they head directly inland, toward a thickly forested set of low hills.

He tells her that there is a small orchard that they can visit. She has missed green growing things, as beautiful as Armenelos is; the quiet of new shoots pushing up through rich earth. There is a kind of beauty to be found there that she has sorely missed.

They ride quietly. She holds the reins, and he keeps his arms loosely at her thighs, drawing distracting circles. The sun is high in the sky, and beats down on their heads. The hills don’t seem to be getting any closer, and Armenelos is now an indistinct shape at her back.

Finally, they get to the base of the hills. They are bigger than they look, and the sun is unmerciful.

“Perhaps we should turn back,” she suggests. Maybe she should have attended training today. Queen Regent Miriel may be looking for her. Her hand twitches at the rein, and he covers it with his.

“Perhaps a break,” he suggests, and dismounts. She hesitates, and follows suit, leading the horse behind her.

The ground is rocky and she keeps an eye on the ground, watching for safe places for the horse to place its feet. She looks up again when she nearly runs into Halbrand’s back. He’s staring at a small cave cut into the side of the hill.

“This will do nicely,” he says. “Let’s take a rest,” he suggests, turning to her. “Get out from under the sun for a while.” He turns and walks into the cave without waiting for an answer. She stops only to request the horse to wait for them, and follows him, reluctantly.

The cave is dark and cool, and the sharp temperature differential is shocking. 

“That is better,” she admits, and he smiles. 

“Here,” he says, and hands her an apple. 

The apple is cool and tart, the sweetness exploding across her tongue. It is refreshing, a cool reprieve.

“Oh, look,” she says. There is a patch of darker space near the back. She walks toward it, and yes, it’s a tunnel.

“Where do you think this goes?” she asks, but she’s already taking the first few steps in.

“Not to the orchard,” he says, but she can hear his footsteps behind her.

The light fades slowly, enough sunlight getting through that she can see that the path is oddly straight and smooth. 

“This looks carved out,” she says. She trails a hand across the smooth walls. No imperfections, or interruptions. The ground is perfectly level, too, a quality of craftsmanship she has only ever seen in the great dwarven cities. 

“It does look that way,” he says. There is an odd note in his voice, but whatever he is feeling doesn’t show in his face.

An icy trickle of unease touches her neck; there is danger close, but she cannot tell the direction. He touches her arm. 

“Do you want to turn back?” he asks. 

“No,” she says, finally. She feels as though she is on a path that narrows with every step, but she cannot turn back.

A few more steps, and the last of the light is gone. She takes her hand away from the wall. It’s a grave mistake; she feels lost, underwater. 

“Halbrand,” she starts. Her heart thumps, hard. 

“I’m here,” he says.

“I can’t see you.” She clamps down on panic with a soldier’s ruthlessness, but the last of the light is gone.

“Yes, you can,” he says.

“The sun is gone. I can’t-”

“You can.” He sounds urgent but she still can’t pinpoint exactly where he is. “You can. Just open your eyes.”

“They are open,” she hisses, and makes a grab for where she thinks he is. “Stop being foolish.” He laughs. It sounds sad.

“I missed you,” he says. “Open your eyes.” 

“I can’t,” she says. Oh, the danger. She had forgotten. Not forgotten, but - 

You can, he says, in her thoughts. Wake up now, love. It’s time. You have to-  

Mordor

-- Wake up. Wake up, now.”

It hurts. Everything hurts.

Light, piercing. She shuts her eyes tight.

“No, no.” A hand touches her cheek, and she cringes away. The hand retreats.

“Stay awake,” and the voice is his, so familiar and enraging, and her eyes surge open again, not hurting any less, but this time she fights.

His face is above hers, concern lining his face.

“There we go,” he says softly. The flame he is holding in his hand dances in the still air. “It’s good to see you again, darling,” he says. She turns her face away. It takes a monumental effort.

Away from the light, her eyes adjust quicker. She is in a dank cell, laid out across a stone slab. The oppressive air of the room tells her that she’s deep within the earth. 

“I-” she stops, panting, her lips trembling. Speaking is taking an effort it never has before, but there is a gaping hole in her memories. She has flashes of recollection, but the truth eels through her brain, ungraspable.

“Don’t,” he says. “Just rest.” She works her mouth, stubborn.

“Sauron,” she says, finally. She cannot infuse the name with the venom it deserves, but she hears his intake of breath, anyway.

“At your service,” he says, and scoops her up, holding her close to his chest. She tries to lift a hand and push him away, and finds she can barely form a fist. She growls in frustration. He leans his head close to hers.

“Quiet, now,” he says softly. “Or we’ll never make it out.” She turns her head away, and catches sight of the slab again, the manacles lying broken on the surface. A remembrance and a terror rises up and out of her, unbidden and uncontrollable.

“Hush now, hush,” he says urgently. “He’s not here, but we are not alone. Quiet, Galadriel, please.”

With a great effort, she manages, and he creeps from the room, silent as a shadow.

*

The cells they are in are dank and dimly lit. The air stinks of malice, and presses her down farther.

She struggles only once to be put down, and her legs immediately buckle under her. He scoops her back up as her head swims with even that feeble effort. He is not smug, as she would have expected, only grimly focused.

She allows her head to rest on his shoulder, tries to calm her mind, and waits for the memories hovering just out of reach in the corner of her mind.

*

They do not come until they are almost caught. A lone Orc wanders the cells. It carries the same smell they all do, of deep roots and carrion, and a new smell, a sharp sting that burns her nose and brings with it a deluge of memory.

She does not realise she was screaming until she tastes blood in her mouth. The Orc lies prone before them, its corpse smoking and steaming. He removes his hand from her mouth and examines the bite mark on his palm ruefully.

“So,” he says. “You remember.”

*

It had happened like this:

The sky had torn open above Númenor, and through that wound Morgoth had come. 

He had come with all the fire and fury of an age in the void. The ocean had boiled, and Númenor drowned.

This time, the Valar did come. Tulkas, laughing still, and Ulmo, angered by the attack on his realm. 

Middle-Earth had heaved with war, and she had fought. And killed, and killed, and killed.

And then the ambush. Her company left bleeding in the dirt, and she tied onto the back of a horse, carried away - 

“Hush,” he murmurs, and she realises she is making a sound again, a low keening that sets her own teeth on edge. “We’re not safe yet,” he says, and she smiles with something that would have been amusement, in another life. 

*

He walks on for some measure of time, following roughly hewn tunnels further down, always finding a new, secret path to take. She does not pay attention, still reeling, and they do not stop until he has wrenched open a rust-flaked door set into the wall.

The space is small, and smells as if they are the first beings to inhabit it in an age. Even the feeble light from the passageways is gone here, and she tamps down on panic in the pitch black. She cannot bear to be held so close and twists convulsively, spilling herself from his arms.

She catches him by surprise: he drops her with a muffled curse and she hits the stone floor hard. It knocks the breath from her, but she still has enough energy to shove at his hand when he touches her. She still cannot see, but she hears his sigh, can picture him shaking his head as he takes a step back.

She is not equal to standing and she doesn’t even try, only levers herself to a sitting position and drags herself back until she hits a wall which is warm in an unpleasant way, like fevered skin.

“I am sorry,” he says, the first word he has said since slaying that stray Orc in the tunnels.

“Do not,” she says.

Silence, for a little while, but she can feel the words on his tongue, waiting to spring forth. She finds the anticipation of waiting for him to speak is more tiring than the actual conversation. 

“When did you do it?” she asks. He is nothing but a voice in the dark to her, and she imagines him as she always has, that arrogant Southlander who had been hers. “How?”

“Celebrimbor,” he says. “I spoke to him, in dreams. I showed him how.”

“And in doing so,” she says, “you nearly doomed us all.” 

The ambush - she had been certain she would be killed, but she remained untouched. Then, in Morgoth’s stronghold, dragged before the beast himself, she had braced herself for torment and worse. She knew what had been done to Maedhros, to Húrin.

But he had appeared in the guise of an elf, tall and dark and pale, with eyes of burning obsidian, and kissed her hand, and bade her welcome. She did not speak. And then he took her to a table heaped with food of the like she had not seen since Valinor, and sat her at his right side, and bade her eat. And she did not move, except to turn her head aside. And then he had taken her hand again, and gazed at Nenya with a covetousness that made her stomach turn, and the hand that held hers turned rough and beastlike, nails lengthening, and he had said - 

She blinks, gasping.

-He had said something in Valarin that had made the world shimmer, and when she came back to herself she was bound hand and foot in a dungeon.

Her body hurt, as if she had been taken apart and reassembled, but Nenya remained on her finger. 

“Release it,” he had ordered, sibilant, and moved to wrench it off her finger. Nenya sang in her head, and the ring remained unmoved.

“It was supposed to protect you,” Sauron says. He sounds ashamed. “From everyone. From me, even.”

Nenya could not be separated from her, unless she wished it, she had discovered, against Morgoth’s screams of rage. Unless she truly wished it. Torture would not do, Morgoth had decided, while she had glared from her shackles. If her mind broke while the ring was on it, Nenya may well be lost forever.

And so they had brought in captured elves, and humans, and dwarves, some of them strangers, some of them her allies. One or two of them her dear friends, and he had killed them in front of her. Some quickly, some not.

And still, somewhere in her deepest heart, she could not surrender Nenya. Over the years it had sat on her finger, she had discovered that its power far outstripped the other two, blanketing their lands with a protection even Morgoth could not see through. It was reminiscent of the Girdle of Melian, if not so blessed in origin. Her troops had huddled underneath its protection, allowing them to strike with little warning. She would not be responsible for such a weapon falling into Morgoth Bauglir’s hands. 

“We thought that only the elves had a hand in the making of the first three rings,” she says.

“Well,” he says, and even through the shame she can hear the faintest note of pride. Braggart. “Mostly. I didn’t change Nenya’s basic nature, or try to subvert her to my will. I simply honed her natural abilities to a fine point; I knew they would partner well with yours.”

“You couldn’t have known she would be given to me,” she murmurs. Her head pounds. Too much, to still hold Halbrand so dear to her and yet deal with Sauron murmuring in the darkness.

“Who else? All that cool reserve, matched with your fire. Even Gil-Galad would see it. You would have been safe-” he bites the rest of the sentence off. 

In the dark he is totally unknowable to her, and she is further disconcerted by the knowledge that he can most probably see her as clearly as if they are standing under a starlit sky. Her heart pounds. The silence stretches on, and he says nothing. He had taken her from that living tomb, yes, but she has not seen him since he fled Ost-In-Edhil, and that has been almost a century past. 

And she had searched. Everywhere she went, if only for a moment, she had looked for him.

He has not been seen fighting alongside Morgoth, but that means little to a being with powers such as his. What if - this could be an elaborate ruse, to coax Nenya off her finger.

Her heart begins to pound, and a cold sweat breaks out on her brow. 

“Peace,” he says. “I will not harm you.” He sounds wounded at the notion, and it makes her blood boil.

“You,” she says through gritted teeth, “have harmed thousands of my kinspeople.”

“Yes,” he says, in what she is sure he thinks of as a reasonable tone, “but I have never harmed you. Not after knowing you.”

“Does that matter?” The dark, the dark. It weighs on her the same whether her eyes are open or closed. Where is here? His voice echoes in the room. She pictures him gliding closer, hunger in his green eyes, and bites her lip hard. 

“It matters,” he says. “Doesn’t it? It matters that I know you. It would hurt more, if I were to betray you now. Galadriel,” he says, when the silence stretches thin. “Númenor-”

“Don’t,” she says harshly. The air of the room lies oppressively on her shoulders. She wishes she could stand, but she cannot bear the thought of stumbling where he can see.

“What is the matter?” her breathing has picked up; her heart thunders in her ears. “Are you unwell?” she doesn’t answer, only pulls at the neckline of her shirt. It feels as if it is choking her.

“I can’t see,” she blurts out. “I don’t - where are we?”

There is a hand on her knee: she jerks away. He sighs. 

“Fine. I can’t make a light, I’m sorry. I can’t draw attention. But, oh, I shall tell you what it’s like.” He pauses, most likely to see if she will object again, but she doesn’t.

“This is one of the cells in the lower levels. Magma used to flow through here, an age ago. That’s why the floor is so smooth. Touch it and see.” She places her hand flat, feels the uninterrupted expanse. “There’s another flow about half a league down, it keeps it warm.”

“What a kindness to your prisoners,” she says.

“The frostbitten don’t listen as well as I’d like. There’s a pallet in the corner, but I wouldn’t use it. Orcs sleep in here, sometimes. The ceiling is sloped, it’s lower nearer where we are. You could touch it if you stood up. Untidy, but I didn’t have time to finish my designs before-”

“Before Morgoth came.” He is silent. Now she knows he is close to her, she pictures his face set in anger, like that first day on the raft. Even then she had sensed the shifts within him, and the potential couched within it, free for her use. She pictures him looming over her in the way he had, of a being used to striking fear with his very presence. She had found it quaint, at the time.

“You didn’t know,” she says, and allows the sentence to hover in the air, a half question. 

“I didn’t.”

“You are not allied with Morgoth.”

“I swear it.”

“You came to save me.” This is said in a whisper, despite herself. 

“Yes.”

She wants to say more. There are fathoms of sentences she wants to hear from him, promises she wants to drag from him. She wants to know where he has been, what he has been doing, if not plotting with Bauglir, but suddenly the air is no longer fighting her, and her clothes are no longer choking her.

“I swear it,” he says again. 

There is no divine promise in his words, no binding, but something within her loosens anyway. 

She lets her head list sideways until it finds his shoulder. He is wise- or kind - enough to be silent, and she allows herself to rest.

She is so very tired.

*

She wakes to a rocking motion, the thump of a familiar heart underneath her ear.

“Steady, it’s just me,” Sauron says, when she attempts to jerk upright. “I thought you might need the rest.” From her disadvantaged viewpoint, he seems happy, a smile ticking the corner of his mouth up. His stride is tireless as always, even with the added burden of her weight, and the narrow staircase they are traversing. It can’t be more than a few feet in diameter, and it seems to stretch both up and down for an endless distance. It makes her dizzy to look up.

“Sweet dreams?” She scowls.

She had, actually, something indistinct involving an old bathing pool in Menegroth that she had loved, and a basket of cherries. It seems frivolous to dwell on now, and she elects to keep silent.

“The Elves have been frantic,” he says. “Looking for their lost Commander. Elrond has been beside himself. He’s been waiting to receive you back in pieces.” Her heart seizes. “Do you think they’ll give me a Kingdom for saving you?” Always needling her, even in the belly of the beast, her helpless in his arms. It’s strangely comforting.

“You have been working with Elrond?” She twists to look behind her, as if her dear friend will appear behind them, smiling and reaching for her hand, but he only snorts.

“Of course not. They’ve gotten lax, without your Nenya to protect them. I barely had to shapeshift to spy.” He sounds unconcerned. An affectation, she’s sure, and she digs her hand into the muscles of his arm.

“Who has died?”

“No one you know. Or, no one you know well, as far as I could tell. But they’ve taken heavy losses, lost some important outposts. Pelargir is gone, and the attacks they’ve made on Mordor have come to nothing. I heard that the Orc armies appear out of nowhere, appearing out of-”

“-Mist.” She looks at her finger, where Nenya rests, and fights not to be sick. She had delighted in that trick, slaughtered hundreds of the enemy. “How?”

“He does not create. He only twists and deforms that which others make.” The bitterness in his voice makes her look up. 

“So he twisted me.” She remembers Adar, and shudders. 

Still they climb up, with only weak light to guide them. She wonders where it ends.

“He tried. He trapped you, instead, and tricked you into doing it for him, but he could not pervert your nature. You are difficult to reforge.” He does smile at her, but it does little to alleviate her misery at the thought of all the death she unwittingly caused.

“Why are you telling me all this, now?” He does stop, and sighs.

“We are leaving the lowest dungeons soon. They are mostly empty but we’ll have to pass through some occupied tunnels to get out. You’ll have to trust me, Galadriel. They won’t be changing your guard for another day and a half, so we can make it out if we’re quiet, but we’ll have to be, or they will catch us, and he will torture me while you watch and put you back to a sleep so deep that you will be lost to us. So, please, I am asking, trust me.”

He puts her down, and balances her against the curved wall so she can support her weight. She doesn’t know whether to be offended that he places her two steps higher, so they are face to face.

Even in the dim light, his face is careworn and pale, lines of strain at his eyes and mouth. Worry looks odd on him; he wears it like ill-fitting armour, and she is moved by a wave of pity. It is this, more than anything else, that has her nodding.

She is seized by an urge to touch his face: it is still so dear to her. Instead she reaches out an arm to his, and waits for him to grasp back. When he does, she nods.

“I will trust you,” she says. 

*

She expects to feel weak, after that concession. She expects that he will gloat, as he does, make digs as he loves to. Instead he swallows, as if she has handed him a terrible burden with her agreement.

He places her down when they finally stop climbing the stairs and finally step into a dark,  narrow landing. Her legs threaten to collapse out from under her, but she is tired of feeling incapable, and she takes a deep breath and steadies them.

She closes her eyes to centre herself. There is so much to wade through: the subtle feel of rot and terror that seems to be everywhere here, a malevolence that lurks in every shadow. She remembers it well, in the time before Morgoth put her to sleep, remembers alternatively facing and cringing from every shadow, certain that at any moment, a new monster would unfurl itself But underneath it is Nenya, murmuring quietly. The bond between them is stretched; frayed by Morgoth’s misuse; the effort of protecting her mind from his attacks had nearly shattered them both. 

She whispers a thank you, feels the familiar warmth spread up her hand.

“Are you alright?” A heavy hand lands on her shoulder. Sauron’s face seems to float out of the dark. She nods, and he takes her hand. She cannot bring herself to chastise him for the liberty - he waded through her mind to pull her from her dream prison, and she supposes they are still in mortal danger, so she squeezes back harder than is strictly necessary.

He only raises an eyebrow at her, before leading the way.

“Not far now,” he murmurs. It is not as dark as she feared: narrow windows cut into the ceiling high above send weak light down to where they are. Sunlight, she thinks, and bites her lip with longing. They must be further up than she thought. “This path will lead us straight out. I had it built myself, I know it well.”

“Straight” is a misnomer, they turn so many times that she loses count, climb up and down smaller flights of stairs and even take a passage concealed behind what appears to be an abandoned pile of scrap metal. She keeps stoic for as long as she can, focuses on her steady steps and, but before long she notices that he is pulling her, rather than guiding her. He slows.

“Do you need a break?”

“No,” she says. She has spent decades of her life trudging through snow and desert and wood, living on only what they can find, or nothing, if needed. She can manage a few more steps, especially now that she can feel the sun on her face, if only barely.

“Hmmm,” he says, but keeps going, although he does slow down. She bites down on irritation.

“It would be a shame,” she says, “if you did all this work to rescue me, and we got captured because you insisted on ambling along.” He shoots her a look that says he knows what she’s doing, but responds anyway, as she knew he would. He’s never been able to help himself.

“It was quite a lot of work,” he says. “Slew dragons, incinerated thousands of Orcs and Goblins, evaded Morgoth himself-” she doesn’t know what he notices, whether his eyes, keener than hers, see the blood drain from her face. Perhaps it’s her fingers, clutching convulsively at his.

“He’s not here,” he says quietly. “He’s somewhere in the South, doing something regrettable in Harad. I’m sure,” he adds. “I waited.”

Unbidden, an image comes to her of him doing just that, hiding in a cave close by, watching for movement, killing the unlucky scout that came across him. Her prison had been empty, the little she had seen of it. She wonders if there had been guards that he had killed, or if she had truly been alone, dreaming beautiful, impossible lies.

She opens her mouth to say - something, she does not know what, but there is an ache growing behind her breastbone and she wants to dispel it, when Nenya sings into her mind and says, hide.

At the same time, he stiffens. They are in a narrow hallway, piled with what looks like discarded armour. They move as one, her weariness forgotten, and dive for one of the bigger piles. It seems to be mostly boiled leather and metal odds and ends, and she crawls underneath while he shifts things around to make room, and the edges of her mind begin to burn. They lay on their fronts underneath the piles of junk, hands clutched together like two children playing at a deadly game.

She has only seen them once before, on the other side of a battlefield in her youth, but it comes back to her in a rush; the blistering heat, even in a smaller, human-like form, the despair that pulls at the centre of her and makes her want to prostrate herself and beg for mercy. She does neither, only thinks of cool water and babbling brooks, the feel of a petal against her lips, its gentle scent in her nose.

The Balrog doesn’t appear to be hunting: the malice pouring off it in waves seems incidental, rather than targeted. She tries to slow her breathing, tries to think of calm. Through a gap in the pile, she sees that it stands at the end of the hallway, swaying slightly from side to side. Sensing them, or sensing something.

Next to her, Sauron is panting harshly, his hand in hers clutched so tightly that it starts to hurt. He makes a convulsive movement, as if to stand up, and she squeezes his hand as hard as she can, thinks no, in a targeted blast that makes him wince.

Traitor, he is probably thinking, and how curious for him, that yet another underling has betrayed him. She spares a thought for Adar, speared and hung from the parapet when Morgoth returned. How betrayal seems to wound him, the deceiver. And still, there is a kernel of pity she cannot stamp out.

Is he mightier than a Balrog? Almost certainly, even in this form, but they are meant to be sneaking out, and he will not be able to best all the fell beasts that Morgoth had called to his side. She will not be much help, her head swimming, her muscles trembling after a still-unknown period of captivity. Her heart quails at the thought of the chains, of immobility and threatened pain.

Her breath escapes her throat in a whistle that she cannot help. His hand in hers is slippery with sweat. She moves back, slowly, so their arms are touching; the scant comfort slows her heart and calms his breathing.

The Balrog is moving slowly, but aimlessly, she thinks. Bad luck, nothing but bad luck, she tells herself, as its hot glance passes over their hiding place. She cowers, she can’t help it, and he bristles, but it moves on, and they are alone again.

She doesn’t allow herself to think, only turns into him, and inhales the anger and fear and the smell of man rise off him, opens her mouth to taste his skin, shifts to get his hair out of her eyes and thinks of the pale imaginings of that dream Númenor, of the hours whiled away in that gilded prison, and how none of it was a tenth as real as this moment, him holding her tight and saying, never again, not again, I won’t I won’t let him take you and the want of the sun that nearly splits her apart with yearning.

His tears taste like sea salt.

“We should go,” he says finally, and she nods. She allows him to pull them upright, refuses to let him carry her, but takes his outstretched hand. 

*

After everything, actually getting out comes as a surprise.

They’re in a tunnel so low that she has to crawl, and he has to shuffle along on his belly behind her. 

Then the tunnel widens, and the air is fresh again. He leaves her to press against a section of earth and it crumbles away. 

The light hurts her. She hadn’t been expecting that, but her eyes burn and sting even in the gentle moonlight.  Still, she presses on, filled with an almost animal need to taste fresh air once more. She doesn’t know how long she was held captive, and Sauron has not told her, but something in her bones tells her that it’s been seasons. 

Sauron stops right behind her, and breathes deep, and together they stand, eyes closed, savouring freedom. 

“We won’t have long,” he mutters, finally, and takes her hand again. “The Orcs will move faster than we can. We should be as far away as possible before they discover that you’re missing.”

“But you can shapeshift,” she says curiously. “Can’t you?” She’s heard the stories from the people who fought him in ages past. He had favoured wolves, she was told, and she had once looked forward to meeting him in that form, thrusting a sword through a bloodthirsty yellow eye. He looks uncomfortable.

“No,” he finally admits. “I can’t.” He drops her hand, and walks away from the tunnel they escaped from. She follows after as fast as she can, cursing her still-weak body.

“Why not,” she says, breathing heavily and trying to hide it as he stalks away, eyes fixed on the dark horizon. “You could transform into an eagle and carry us away.” She is being slightly cruel: she can tell she is pressing on something raw. It is unfair, given he has just rescued her, but the feel of starlight on her skin is making her reckless.

“Galadriel,” he says, in a tone that means that he knows what she is doing and does not appreciate it. “We have a ways to go before we are safe.”

“You could have helped us,” she says, suddenly furious. “We’ve been fighting and losing for decades. Where have you been?” She is suddenly close to tears: her throat constricts as if it is closed in a vice. 

“I came to save you,” he says, and stops, finally. She does too. 

Mordor is desolate, even in the night, all traces of the lush Southlands trampled by the presence of two dark lords in little over a century. All is ash, even the air, which carries an acrid tang. All she hears is the whispering of the wind and the cry of carrion birds.

“My power is not all mine, at present,” he says. She shivers, cold and angry with herself for her outburst. He says nothing else for a while, and finally adds, “I am working on a project. Something that will provide enough power to rid Arda of Melkor forever. But it is taking longer than I hoped. And I am having to make sacrifices to get it done.”

“A weapon,” she says. He nods, and takes her hand again. He lifts it up to his mouth, and places a gentle kiss on her fingers. No, not on her fingers - on Nenya. She narrows her eyes in sudden suspicion.

“Let us go,” he says, and she follows.

*

They creep from Mordor in the light of day, while the mountain slumbers.

It’s easier, out in the day. She feels real again, a part of the world. She wants to lay in the ashy soil, acrid as it is, and breathe. 

Instead, they walk, and creep, and hide. 

Four nights after their escape, the ground shakes with a force that sends her to her knees. Sauron blanches.

“They know you’re free,” he says, and hauls at her arm. It’s unnecessary, because she is already on her feet, reflexively reaching for her dagger - originally his, but handed over with little grace two nights ago - and moving fast.

They break into a light jog and make for the mountain ridges in the distance. They had been steadily growing closer for the days they had been travelling, but now reaching them is imperative.

The ground does not shake again, but the air is restless in a way that makes her uneasy. She is glad when they reach the outcropping, and squeeze into the shadows and hollows below. 

They are not a moment too soon: a few breathless moments later, a shadow blocks the sky, and one of Morgoth’s winged wyrms passes overhead. She waits to see if it will swoop down on them, but it heads north west without stopping, most likely for one of the Elvish strongholds in the Western forests.

As soon as it is out of sight, they stand with unspoken agreement. And run.

*

They switch to travelling by night, and slow by necessity - she has had barely anything to eat, and there is little to forage, even as they move further away from Mordor. No matter, she knows how to survive, but he disappears for long hours and comes back with skinny rabbits hanging from his belt, or a handful of berries. He will not eat: claims he doesn’t need to, and he does not sleep.

It is disconcerting to watch him shrug off the pretence of mortality so easily. She presses berries into his hand to watch him eat, sets up a watch rotation when they stop to rest. He acquiesces with some grace and not a little condescension. 

He is a creature of abstract need: for revenge, and retribution, and a need for recognition that she knows exists in herself as well. And need for her, although that is not so abstract. All the time, he watches her. And for power. His eyes settle on Nenya often, before softening into a daydream. It fills her with foreboding.

It all snaps when they have stopped one night - they have found a ridge in the Firien wood overlooking a stream, and he is restless beside her.

“If you had Nenya,” she says. “If I were to lift her off my finger and hand her to you, what would you do?”

For half a moment, his face is lit with avarice, and she recoils. He scowls.

“Don’t test me,” he says. “It is tiresome.”

“Then answer the question.” She is not truly expecting a satisfying answer from him; the look on his face was enough.

“I know what you are planning,” she says. You will become a monster. Yes, you may defeat him, and then we shall rally the banners against you, when you rebuild Mordor in your name. Is that what you want?”

“Would you be in the host?” He is angry, she can tell, despite his easy tone.

“If it was required, yes.” He raises his eyes to hers. 

“You would kill me? Me, of whom you dreamed so ardently? Morgoth wanted to hold you, he created a world that you would not rebel against, and he placed you with me.” He stalks closer, serpentine. She reaches for her dagger. 

“Anywhere in the world. And it was me. Not Valinor, with those of your kin who were not banished,” and she winces at that, but he doesn’t stop. “Not with your beloved Elves. Or that husband of yours.”

“Stop.” Her voice is tight. Her eyes feel hot.

“Why is that, Galadriel? Why didn’t I pull you out of your husband’s bed? Why didn’t I find you in a glade, fucking him? Did you even think of him?” She slashes with the knife. He stops her easily, and holds her wrist.

“You were with me,” he says. The air between them tastes like lightning. “Kissing me. Wanting me. All the stories in the world to tell yourself, and you chose ours.”

“It wasn’t you,” she says. “It was never you. It was a hope, nothing more.”

“I have only ever been myself,” he says. “No matter what you have thought. Or hoped.” He turns away and heads down the ridge before she can reply.

*

He returns when the moon is high, and settles a few feet away. He is silent as stone.

“All I will do,” he says, “Is heal. That’s all I’ve ever wanted.”

He believes it. She wishes to believe it too.

The grass is soft and springy where they sit. He doesn’t move as she drags her blanket closer, arranges herself so her back is pressed against him, even as he stays sitting. His hand reaches for her unringed one, and holds it tight.

An Ending

She spots the signs of an Elven outpost hours before they get there. He does, too. 

“They’ll be back soon,” he says, and nods towards the faint tracks. “If you hurry, you’ll be singing under a mallorn tree with the rest of your kind before sunup.”

“Come with me,” she says suddenly. “I will vouch for you.” He smiles.

“Thank you,” he says. “But I have my own plans.”

“Where? In the North, still?” She has braved it before. She thinks she would do it again, especially with help. 

“No,” he says, and touches her chin gently. “Your people have missed you dearly. And I have a debt to pay.” His calloused thumb sweeps across her skin, and she swallows against the tears that threaten to rise. 

“I do not want to be without you,” she confesses. It seems too soon to say so, and a century too late. He leans down and kisses her, gently, little more than a brush of mouths.

“Then live,” he murmurs against her lips. “Live, and fight until our foe is defeated.” Her face is wet; his tears burn her skin.

“Please,” she says. “Remain someone I can love.”

She does not know how long they stand together, only that the stars have started to rise by the time she pulls back. She is set now, despite the ache: she gathers her few belongings. 

He has retreated to the shadow of the treeline, little more than a dark suggestion, his green eyes reflecting the meagre light, catlike.

“Go,” he says. 

She does not look back.