Work Text:
And I’ll dance with you in Vienna
I’ll be wearing a river’s disguise
The hyacinth wild on my shoulder
My mouth on the dew of your thighs
And I’ll bury my soul in a scrapbook
With the photographs there, and the moss
And I’ll yield to the flood of your beauty
My cheap violin and my cross
(Leonard Cohen, 'Take This Waltz')
The news comes a little after dawn: a messenger from Lothlórien carrying a sealed letter from Celeborn, worn and tired from the journey. She had crossed the High Pass where the winter snows have not yet receded and walked through the night to reach Rivendell. Such urgency rarely speaks of good things.
Celebrían reads the letter through once in silence herself and then once out loud to Elrond at their breakfast table, pausing for the questions she already knows he’ll ask. She does not seem as troubled as it warrants - she does not seem troubled at all, really, not in any way that would be evident to anyone who did not know her well - but Elrond feels concern rising in him, greater and greater with every word.
Celebrían is a bright, shimmering thing even in the most ordinary of days. It’s as if the morning light of Rivendell has poured in through the great eastern windows especially to greet her as she rose this morning, bathing her hands and her gilt-patterned plate and the cup of cooling tea beside her and surrounding her in a golden haze that softens all noise and blunts all harshness. It is wrong enough to be offensive that anything should trouble her so.
Elrond quiets down his fear until it runs unseen beneath his skin, breaking through only at his fingertips as they tap against the table.
Celebrían bites another corner of toast and re-reads the letter in her other hand. “He says it’s been almost a month now. But Mother always returns to us when she’s like this - she always returns.”
Why have you never spoken of this before? is a question for another time. “And how long does that usually take?” is the one he chooses instead, and feels faintly ridiculous for asking it. While Celebrían talks of her mother returning it is evident from Celeborn’s letter and Celebrían’s familiarity with it that Galadriel has not left; her absence is one of the mind and the spirit alone.
She touches the water, Celebrían had said. She touches the water in her Mirror and it turns her all strange and shimmering gold for a while and she won’t listen to anything but Nenya. And then she comes back. She always comes back.
Celebrían shrugs with one shoulder. “A few days. Not usually this long. I suppose that’s why he’s written now, but… Mother always does come back to us.” She casts her eyes down again to her father’s handwriting. “Maybe it already has in the time this letter took to reach us.”
It’s naneth she uses - mother in full. She only ever calls Galadriel this when she is irritated with her.
Celebrían has never spoken of this to Elrond before. Neither has Celeborn; neither has Galadriel herself. Elrond remembers his own doubts about Nenya and his anger at Galadriel for putting such trust in it and wonders if this has been kept from him for that reason, though all of that was so many years ago - lives ago, kingdoms ago - and upon his own hand now he wears Vilya’s blue sapphire.
But Vilya is Elrond’s because Gil-galad awarded it to his keeping to protect the elves of Imladris, a royal gift with a royal purpose. Nenya is Galadriel’s because Nenya rolled to her feet and whispered to her.
Celeborn’s letter did not even name Nenya. That ring, he wrote instead. That ring.
“We’ll both go to Lothlórien,” he says. “Tomorrow. Today if you want. I won’t leave you to deal with this alone.”
He thinks Celebrían might dismiss this, laugh it off, tell him it isn’t really needed, tell him she doesn’t truly want to go.
She only nods.
Although they waste little time on the journey they do not travel in as much haste as they might. Doing this would be, they agree through unspoken consensus, admitting that haste is warranted, and that’s something neither of them can quite bear. So they rest enough, and they talk of the twins in Rivendell without them - young men now, well able to be left alone and almost entirely trustworthy in that, although both of them quietly asked Glorfindel to watch over them just as they watch over the valley - and they talk of the forests and the great river and the bridge that once brought the dwarf-road over it from the east, and they pretend everything is well as they approach the edge of the golden wood.
Like Rivendell Lothlórien is a haven of beauty and peace but otherwise the divide between them is considerable. Rivendell is a place of welcome, a place of rest for weary feet and worn-down spirits, where there are always travellers and guests passing through and on any given day there will be someone new drying off cloaks by the fire or practising a new song in the market square. Lothlórien is like stepping into some fragile treasure of the past kept treasured and safe and guarded, where every new foot that falls must prove its right to be there.
When Elrond and Celebrían reach the thin line of birches that mark its northern border they’ve been travelling through heavy rain for hours and their horses are splattered with mud to the knee. They could have sheltered and waited for the storm to pass, but there seemed no sign it would pass soon and both of them were keen to press on. So the heavy hoods of their cloaks hide their faces as they approach; and so the greeting they receive is march-wardens with drawn bows demanding they identify themselves.
Celebrían pulls back her hood. “What kind of welcome is this to my own home?” And the guards throw down their bows and run to her, lifting her down from her horse in a flurry of hugs.
At first all seems that it might still be well. The guards do not say anything of Galadriel and Celebrían does not ask, and so Elrond does not either, letting her lead the way. Lothlórien seems to sing with golden beauty as it ever has; nothing is evidently wrong, nothing is missing, nothing seems even out of place. Perhaps whatever trouble there was has now passed indeed, as Celebrían suggested. Perhaps Galadriel herself will be there to greet them now and chide them for their worry.
But when they are brought to the gates of Caras Galadhon it’s Celeborn alone who is there waiting. Beside him is only an absence.
“Nana?” Celebrían asks quietly.
Celeborn closes his eyes. Elrond cannot look at either of them.
Galadriel is not there when they reach their usual guest rooms, where dry clothes and a fire already beginning to crackle with welcoming warmth await them. Galadriel is not there when Celebrían goes to speak with her father alone later. Elrond stays their rooms alone, waiting, feeling each moment of time pace past, a book on his lap he pays no attention to.
When Celebrían reappears it is clear she has been crying. “She’s just the same. She won’t even hear me.”
He holds her close. “I am sure it’s only -” And at that, he stops himself. It’s not only anything and he is sure of absolutely none of it, and while he would like nothing more than to give Celebrían some reassurance there seems little of that to find. He tells himself he’s not worried, not really, not truly - but…
“I think she may not come back this time. I don’t think she wants to come back.” She blots her eyes with the cuff of her sleeve. “Ada wants to speak with you. Will you?”
What he wants to do is find Galadriel himself, as he should have done when they first got here. Of course her husband and her daughter love her, of course they know her well, but Elrond knew her when she first had that ring and Elrond knew her when she was all cold grief and fury.
But Celebrían has asked and so of course he will do this first.
Celeborn is in one of the high rooms that look out over Caras Galadhon, passing a glass ornament from one hand to the other; it’s a sphere clouded with patterns that resemble stars, although he does not seem to be looking at it. He acknowledges Elrond only briefly before turning his gaze back to the forest. “Did Celebrían ask you to accompany her here?”
“I offered.” As if he wouldn’t.
Celeborn nods. “She has never spoken to you of this before, I know. That was her choice - to tell you or not. I do not make her decisions for her. Nevertheless, now that you do know I will ask you this myself: does your ring ever attempt the same thing of you? Celebrían tells me she has never seen it but it must start as a subtle thing in the mind, the way a great river begins with the smallest mountain spring.”
“No,” Elrond says. “Mine doesn’t do anything like this.” Vilya is chill and cold and clear as mountain air, and Vilya holds great power - greater than Nenya’s, perhaps - but none of Nenya’s strangeness.
“Good. Well - let it not. I feared that greatly when your children were young. Tell me, will there be more children?”
Elrond swallows down his surprise at the question even being asked. “We - The twins were -”
“Ah, listen to me, trying to distract myself with anything but this.” The sphere goes hand to hand, hand to hand, with the even rhythm of habit. “Will you speak with Galadriel? I don’t know if she will hear you and I will own that I doubt it, but as you see - I am growing desperate.”
Elrond says that he will, of course he will, he will go to her immediately. He does not think it hopeless - he has seen her endure worse - they have all endured far worse, and none of them have fallen to despair yet -
But Celeborn no longer seems to be listening. “I always knew I would lose her to the sea in the end,” he says. “I did not expect the sea to come for her.”
Despite Celeborn’s words, and despite Celebrían’s, Elrond is still not afraid. Concerned, yes - who could be otherwise? But the possibility that Galadriel might never return to herself and that whatever has happened to her is some permanent shift that none of their work can ever undo, this he does not entertain.
Galadriel is within her high-gated garden, kneeling at the edge of the stream that winds its way through banks of roses. The water is almost at her hips; her dress floats out around her like the delicate sea-laver that grew around the quays of his childhood home in Sirion. It is unnerving to see her like this and there is a particular wrongness to it here in the heart of Lothlórien, but it is not until she turns to him with a golden shimmering film covering her eyes that he feels fear.
“Galadriel,” he says, swallowing hard against the tremble in his voice. “What has happened?”
She must surely hear him although she gives no sign of it. Her fair hair is tangled and sodden, plastered against her skin; her dress, he sees now, is soaked entirely through. But Elrond remembers a day long ago when he’d hauled her from the Glanduin and brought her back from Sauron’s illusions by telling her of the day they’d met. He is not defeated yet.
He sits down on the bank beside her. “They say you touched the water of the Mirror.”
“And why should I not,” she says. She doesn’t blink, her eyes do not move at all; it is beyond unsettling but at least she is speaking to him.
“We are all worried.”
She looks down at his hand. “Vilya,” she says.
“Put this aside. Come back with me. You must be so cold.”
“Are you cold when Vilya makes you fly? It must be wonderful to breathe like eagles beneath the clouds.”
“Vilya does not do that.”
“But you should let it, ring-bearer. King’s scion.”
“Galadriel.” He seizes her arm just above the elbow - she only looks at him, head tilted a little to one side, quizzical, that awful golden mirror-light almost entirely filling her eyes now. It’s a foolish move and he should know better even than to try it, for he’s hardly going to drag her out of the stream.
She barely twitches a muscle and he’s thrown back stumbling until he too is down to his knees in the stream. It’s cold as snowmelt.
“Taste the water first,” she says.
“You are not yourself.” She only laughs at that. “Galadriel will you listen - will you listen to me?” And it is irrational to be angry with her as though any of this is her choice but if she would just hear him… “I did not come so far only to let you lose yourself to enchantments now,” he says. “Your daughter and your husband are afraid, they are afraid for you - don’t you care?”
She reaches for him and for a moment he’s hopeful, but once she has his hand she only presses it palm-down against the stream’s surface. She’s as cold as the water is, chill like marble.
Her gold eyes stare at him.
Something shifts -
They are in the memorial grove in Lindon, the way it was in its high glory. There are fireworks lighting the sky and the distant sound of celebration but in the soft-lit night between the trees they are alone. No stream, here; no Lothlórien at all, and there is Galadriel, dressed just as she was on that evening all those years before. She has drawn away from the celebrations of the living to stand vigil with the dead, and he has come to find her, to bring her back. He’s holding two goblets full close to the brim.
“Do you remember?” she says.
He does. He remembers it keenly: how he’d come here to find her, so determined on the task ahead of him he had no space to focus on the grief of saying farewell. How he’d wanted her to know that while she must take the ship over the sea - she must - she had not lost his friendship and she was not alone.
“But I was alone, was I not?” she says now. The light in her eyes is less in whatever illusion she’s brought him to, but it’s still there - that golden sheen like some kind of gauze that reflects back the glow of the lanterns.
“No,” he says. “You never were.”
“My dearest friend had conspired with my king to send me away.”
“I was doing it for you. I thought it was best. You were destroying yourself, you were hurting your soldiers, you wouldn’t know peace, you were damaged -“
“So there it is,” she says.
He swallows. It’s been many years since Lindon, since that brief span where he’d been able to tell her the war is over, Galadriel, it’s over and truly believe it. Still he feels it now - his own youth and ignorance churning inside him, the dread of what’s to come.
But he had done it for her. He had. And he isn’t that youth any more.
“Wounded, then,” he says. “Is there any shame in a soldier being wounded? You’d fought so many battles. I wanted only for you to heal.” And he passes her one of the goblets he holds, the honey-coloured sparkling wine he’d insisted they find for her while he waited impatiently in her absence.
“I would prefer river-water.” The glass falls from her hand, released rather than dropped as though she could not be troubled to hold it any more. She’s becoming absent again, drifting away from him.
“Galadriel,” he says. “Please - I’ve told you, I’ve told you a hundred times I regret it.”
“You were my friend.”
“I am still your friend.”
“We all placed such hope in you. All those royal lineages brought together, united in you - and you were good! You were good. Even Maedhros and Maglor loved you. Elros we lost but you were ours. You were our hope.” And then she’s closer to him, forcing his own cup to his lips until he tastes not wine but the sharp briny taste of seawater.
He spits - it’s foul. “Stop it,” he says, “whatever this is, stop.” He can’t pull away from her without a struggle and so he doesn’t risk trying to pull away from her at all, letting only the snap in his voice show his resistance.
But: she has brought him here. Perhaps there is a part of her - however small, however silenced - that wants him to argue with her now, that wants him to convince her to stay as he once convinced her to go.
“Look at them all,” she says, turning his face to the tree memorials around. Here Finrod watches him, and Angrod and Aegnor; here Lúthien with the great hound Huan beside her; here Nimloth and Dior, his grandparents who died when Doriath burned; and there is Fingon beside them, proud and bright, and Aredhel with her bow at her back, and so many others, rows upon rows, their wooden eyes watching him in silence from the past. “Do you imagine them watching you?”
He says - nothing, this time.
She releases him. “It was too heavy a thing to place upon your shoulders. You were too young.”
Hard not to bridle at that: when was he too young, when has he ever in his life been too young. He’s been picking hope out of ashes since childhood. It has been so many long years since he’s had to defend himself to her, of all people; he doesn’t want it, he doesn’t want any of this and he doesn’t want to be here dragged through the past with her, held up for her judgement and found wanting. But he’ll endure it for her.
“I think I have done well enough,” he says.
She softens and she smiles and for a moment she is back, there before him, not this thing the ring has made but his friend just as she ever was. She rests her hand upon his face and it’s gentle this time. Then something in her shimmers, and she’s - gone, once again. “Do not be afraid, Elrond. It is only the sea.”
We have all endured worse - had it really been only today he’d said that? So confident, so well assured, but now he thinks he’d known nothing at all. He’s losing her now before his eyes, not in one defiant farewell but in echoes and fragments and pieces of her that he can’t hope to hold together.
“Your daughter,” he says, “your husband, your people, my own boys, they love you, they need you. You cared so dearly for duty once. Would you abandon us all for whatever that ring has done to you?”
Her eyes cloud more, almost solid gold now. It’s useless; he’s losing her no matter what he does. But she hasn’t removed her hand and he leans into it now imagining it melting away beneath him like snow.
“Galadriel, please,” he says.
“Once it was just you and I.”
His hands clasp the silk of her shoulders. “Stay for me, then. Stay because I want you to.” She is watching him with her own eyes once again; she is silent. She is listening. So he keeps talking: “Do you remember when I first met you upon that beach? There was smoke and death everywhere and I thought there was no kindness left in the world and you knelt down beside me and gave me water. You are so dear to me.”
She presses her forehead against his. Around them is still the dark of the grove, the silent statues, the lamps. He wonders if this place is a test of some kind - if she even knows herself.
Once, yes, once it was just the two of them. Once he was the only one left she would listen to, the only one left she would trust. He had been sent to her that day long ago to persuade her but he knew none of his arguments had made a difference; what put her on the boat, in the end, was knowing at the end that she had lost even him.
“You are so dear to me,” he says once again. “You have always been so dear to me. Fight this, please fight it, I don’t want to lose you.”
Whether she even hears him or not is unclear. She sings something in a language he doesn’t recognise, a language he isn’t even sure is a language outside this illusion she’s drawn in around them. He thinks: I can’t stop this. I never could. And he does not know when he begins to weep, but she kisses the tears from his face as though she is gathering them into herself.
He can feel the quiet lift of her breath and her hand combing through his, her fingers slotting neatly between his own. “Am I alone?” she whispers into his skin. “Am I alone? Do I have you?” And before he can answer she kisses the corner of his mouth - just a little, just lightly - not even enough for his own lips to part at first, although even then he wouldn’t call it chaste.
Well - this is not a time for propriety. He has kissed her before in circumstances that feel to him no less desperate than this, and what she is to him is beyond the need for any distinctions of etiquette anyway. They have known each other so long and so well that there is no place for aversion . So he lets her kiss him and he softens and yields for her, granting her victory over his mouth in the hope it’ll sate her. Let her win if winning is what she seeks.
He will remember this later. He will recite it to himself in quiet rooms, justifying himself to the merciless court of his own conscience. It might even have sufficed for that had this been all she wanted of him - but this is Galadriel, and nothing has ever been enough for Galadriel.
Her hand against his back pulls him closer into her. She bites at him a little with the edge of her teeth and he - he doesn’t act, not in this moment, but he lets himself be supple and held against her just as close as she wishes. If it is a test let him pass whatever trial she wishes to set him, and if it is something she needs of him somehow, a way to fix her dissolving spirit against his solidity, then she may have that too, so long as some part of it works.
Let her pull him so close there is no space between them. It had only been the two of them once; let it only be the two of them once again.
The white silk of her dress is smooth under his hands. He thinks of ice glistening under the sun, the force of river currents running hidden beneath it; he thinks if he can hold her like this, keep her just like this, perhaps he can hold her together.
“You have me,” he says when she breaks away from him and fixes him with a question in the form of a glare.
Her eyes shine, they shine so. “Then why do you look at me as though you fear?”
“I would hardly fear my oldest and dearest friend,” he says, thinking believe me believe me please believe me. He lifts her wrist to his mouth and presses a gentle kiss between the faint tracks of veins and tendons.
The golden light flickers again over her face, glowing a little beneath her skin now as well as in her eyes.
He does not flinch. “You are still Galadriel,” he tells her, “whatever this has done to you. You are still the one who found me as a child upon that burned and ruined beach. I was surrounded by the ocean and parched with thirst and you are still the one who brought me water.” Let her remember that: water as something safe and kind, the water of the half-filled flask she’d given him then, not the roar of tempests, not the ruin of ice.
She smiles, just a little. “I remember.”
“You are so dear to me,” he says a third time, and kisses her again before she can disappear into shimmering gold.
He is still telling himself that he is playing a part. He is still telling himself, scrambling for compromises and consolations, that what this may look like on the surface is not the real truth of it and therefore can be disregarded. He didn’t seek this; he certainly didn’t suggest this; she would not want this if she was in her right mind and he does not want this now, and all he is doing is intended to humour her for long enough to bring her back to sense. There is no betrayal in any of this.
He is still telling himself this as she murmurs his name and he catches the faintest scent of jasmine from her hair. He has never thought of her in this way - well, perhaps not never - sometimes, then, but only when he was newly grown to his maturity and she was still tangled in his mind with thoughts of safety and gentleness and home, and that hardly counts, he certainly wouldn’t have -
It’s only when his body stirs in keen response that he realises he is not so far removed from it after all.
It is betrayal and he is drowning. It is betrayal and it will surely ruin him if it continues, he knows that with a dull inevitability, and still he can’t bear to break away. It is betrayal, and he’s never before wanted anything so much as he wants to bite the soft curve of her shoulder.
When she brings him down to the ground with her he sees dimly that her own eyes are blue again, but all the leaves they lie on are that same unearthly gold. Around them the blank wooden faces of the statues all look down, silent, unreadable.
He’s never -
He’s never wanted -
She is so soft beneath him; the cruellest, cruellest thing.
“Show me then how dear I am to you,” she tells him, and he does; may all of Arda forgive him for it but he does. He whispers poetry into the sweetness between her thighs, he kisses each faint battle-scar that marks her skin, he lays his head down upon the blanket of her golden hair. What resolve he had left unravels beneath her touch and the sound of his name said in a tone he’s never heard from her before outside those long-dismissed dreams of his youth.
He wants her to hold him so closely that he becomes part of her, lost inside her, wrapped in her beauty. He wants to drink from her until he drowns.
He is settled now between her thighs. He stills a moment but her palm smoothes down his back and all his tension melts into the obedience of a shudder.
“It’s all right,” she says. She shifts her hips a little ready for him. “Do you understand why I brought you to this grove?”
“You are angry with me -”
“You are angry with me.” She tilts her head up to take his lower lip between her teeth. “Feel it,” she says, and bites.
There’s truth in it. Even his mind acknowledges that, reassuring him that he has reason to be - she’s abandoning her family, she’s abandoning her duty, she’s abandoning him, after all they’ve been through together she’s abandoning him and he can’t he can’t he can’t allow it.
His body’s response is less eloquent.
Deep inside her, driving her down into the leaves, the heat of her is near overwhelming. She releases his lip and gasps out a little; her head falls back and she arches to take him deeper, her hands still bracketing his hips to keep him in place.
It was only the two of us once, he thinks. Only the two of us.
The first time she reaches her peak comes almost immediately after this and seems to take even her by surprise, as though the force of their coupling is itself satisfying her. The second is because he insists on it, his hand working at her steady and regular as though he’s knapping a flint to sharpness, knowing from her reaction it’s almost too much when she’s still so sensitive, just at the edge between pain and pleasure - and continuing anyway until she breaks against him once again. After that it’s hard to even tell for she seems lost in a sea of it, wave after wave striking her and him through her. He is doing this, he is pleasing her like this, he is -
He realises the memorial grove and that long-ago evening in Lindon are gone; realises they’re lying on the bank of a stream in Lothlorien, her soaking wet dress pulled up to her waist, her hair lying in the the loamy earth around them.
Horror floods him. “No,” he says; meaning Celebrían, meaning Celeborn, meaning the betrayal upon betrayal this is of both of them and they must not even be so far away now while he’s doing this, while they’re doing this; meaning, I can’t, I can’t, even though he’s not stopping, I can’t with each thrust inside her - there’s something stronger and deeper in him that isn’t listening -
Her hand presses down upon the small of his back. “Do this for me,” she says. “Do this because I want it of you. Now.”
And it’s just - so - easy to forget everything but that, as all of him breaks into one shattering climax.
When his senses return to him he can taste blood.
He feels incapable of much beyond that. He watches Galadriel get to her feet, adjust her dress, wash her hair in the stream and then wring the water out of it, look around her as though she is a little surprised by her surroundings. “Is it raining?”
“It’s been raining for days,” he manages. His heartbeat is slowing from its hammer-fast pace, his breath returning to normal. It feels sickeningly wrong that his body’s response should be so ordinary.
“You’re bleeding,” she says. “Your lip - here, let me heal -”
He wrenches away from her, from Nenya. “Don’t touch me.”
She takes back her hand but does not draw any further back. “Then it will not be healed and you must explain to all Caras Galadhon whose teeth have marked you.”
“Perhaps I should. If I can do something like this then I - can surely -” Face the consequences of it, he means to say, but the horror of even considering any of that or even of even naming it strikes him to silence.
The gold has entirely gone from her eyes. When she takes his hand light in hers, she is warm once again. “Your care for me brought me back,” she says softly. “I am indebted to you for that. The form that care took… Water does not understand the distinctions between things. That is all.”
But I do, he thinks. I should. We should.
And still, he lets her place her hand upon his mouth, lets the cooling murmur of Nenya wash the mark of his guilt away.