Chapter Text
It cannot continue. All the same it does, for a while.
He works in the forge and she trains her soldiers, and at night she’s his. In the morning too, sometimes, before the city’s awake, when she likes to rise early to watch the sunrise. Sometimes when her teeth graze his skin or when she twines her hands together behind his neck he thinks: if you named me now, Galadriel, you would bind me to you forever.
For her, it seems her decision to take him as a lover has not disrupted anything and she fits him into her life as neatly as anything else. She does not even seem to consider it a matter worth discussing; it seems reasonable to her as everything she does seems reasonable, merely the next step in an inevitable path.
He likes to hold her snug against him in their bed, his face buried in her golden hair, murmuring soft words about how much he enjoys watching her fight. He likes how she’s anything but shy with him and doesn’t seem to care at all who might hear her cries. He likes how when she sits with her books now she’ll sometimes lean back against him, some scroll of Southlands history or ancient bound book about Haradrim trade routes propped on her knees, reading out some trivia or other she finds interesting as he smiles without her seeing.
Once she comes to find him at the forge towards the end of his shift. He’s running a little late after someone spilled a pail of hot ashes over the floor earlier, and when the shout of your elf’s here comes he ignores it at first to finish the points of small buckles he’s working on. They’ve learned he’s good at this fine and careful work and so he gets assigned to it a great deal now. When he looks up after he’s got the curve just right she’s stood near, watching him, not the metal but his hands, and there’s something odd in her face. Puzzled, perhaps.
He dusts his hands on his leather apron. “What’s troubling you?”
“I was wondering.” She seems to consider what she’s saying, more carefully than she often does. “Did you learn this trade before you were taught to fight? Or did this come after?”
A reasonable question. Something in her knows that he doesn’t quite fit into any of the categories she’s tried to place him in, and there’s an unease in that. “This first,” he said. “There wasn’t any fighting to be done when I was young.” He sets to clearing away the workbench, hanging tools neat and precise on the beam above, wondering what will happen if she asks the right questions. Would he lie? Would he name himself? And which name might he give her if he did?
“What sort of land makes soldiers out of its smiths?” she says, but he only laughs.
On their way back to the palace she asks about his brother again and his gaze drifts without his thinking of it to the blue and distant sea. Were they close, she asks. Was his brother a smith too?
My brother made storms, he wants to say. My brother sent the waves to tear apart lands and remake them anew. My brother raised this island from the sea, a gift for the Secondborn, a grand work of penance.
No, he says to the second question. And: Once, to the first. But they had grown distant, they had argued. Such things happen.
He fears and wishes she would ask for Ossë’s name but she does not.
Things might have gone on this way a while longer. He chooses not to think of past or future, for he can see no light in either of them and too much in the present to turn away. Galadriel is lost in both, old grievances and new plans, and he wonders what she might think if she knew how the two overlap now in her bed; how it’s her enemy she cries out for, her enemy she wants.
In all of this this he realises he is not watching Míriel and Pharazôn and Elendil closely enough and may be missing – surely is missing – things he needs to know, things that escape his attention. He realises this, but finds he can’t even care. The knowledge of things not done and undone whispers at him sometimes but never so loudly it cannot be ignored.
(And he imagines he can hear the waves at night sometimes, crashing on the shore despite the calm waters of the quays here, a voice within them: Mairon. Mairon. Mairon. How long can you hide beneath a mortal man’s face and the tools of a forge, Mairon? And he turns to Galadriel and gathers her into his arms, her body as eager as his own, until he can’t hear it any more.)
Things might have gone on this way but they do not, for hundreds of leagues away on Middle-earth the volcano erupts.
They learn of it from the sea guard but it is clear enough anyway, the dark smoky skies, the fall of ash even in waters as far distant as Númenor’s fishing fleet, the beautiful glow of the sunrises. It should not have happened and it should not have been able to happen, not without him there. Mairon thinks of that treacherous little moriondor, of his pet orcs, of his lack of ambition for anything greater than a wasteland of ruins and some farms to raid, and spends the night out walking the city alone hoping someone will pick a fight with him and he can hurl their battered and bloodstained body into the sea. Call it a gift, Ossë.
Galadriel demands more books from the Hall of Lore, a return of those she has already seen. She demands more soldiers. She knows, she tells him, that this is not a coincidence – there is something that caused this to happen. She can feel it. She is sure. And, she tells him, she will avenge his people and his land. She will not allow his grief to go unanswered.
He kisses her in place of an answer, and she’s just as eager now as she ever was.
Her books arrive when she’s out at the training grounds and he looks through them a little himself, seeing nothing in particular he didn’t either already know or decide wasn’t worth knowing. And then he takes one of the papers he hid, the report of a plan to be enacted in case of Melkor's defeat (not quite accurate, but not wrong) and tucks it between some blank pages near the binding of one of the larger books. The seal of the Southlands king he keeps back for now but this she can have. If she finds it, she tells himself, she finds it.
And of course, she does.
There is a time set for their departure for Middle-earth. It’s earlier than he’d expected, the first days of spring, as early as Númenor’s ship captains will accept to avoid the northern storms and chance of ice. There are two ships instead of one and he knows Galadriel is set on a third (and a fourth, and a fifth, and a whole fleet, no doubt). There is a route and a destination – Lindon, still, back to her elves, although there was some discussion earlier of going directly to the Southlands.
Mairon begins to watch Pharazôn, more and more although still too little and too late. He’d thought this would be simpler and Pharazôn conveniently opposed to any interaction with elves. It seems he is not to be so fortunate. Pharazôn has no love for the elves and no fondness for the idea of working with them, but he’s moulded his ambitions around Galadriel’s presence here masterfully. He’s counting, it seems, on the elves not having much love for the southlanders; he’s anticipating some useful but brief alliance, after which the elves will withdraw again to the north and Númenor will take back its lands on Middle-earth to rule over grateful and inferior subjects.
And Galadriel, of course, is content with all of this.
“I think of you returning to your home,” she says one night.
The moon is full and bright; she never troubles to close the shutters. Her hair looks almost silver now as he turns it around his fingers. “I don’t have a home. It’s burned, it’s gone.”
“You must not say that.”
He laughs out loud. “Galadriel.”
“You must not. Listen to me.” She turns to face him, holding him still in the blue steel of her eyes, her hand on his face as though she cannot bear to think of him avoiding what she has to say. “There is always something to rebuild. I have seen so many homes lost, cities burned to the ground. My own, more than once. And I have seen what can be rebuilt from the ruins. There are always new beginnings and people who need them. You must not lose hope for it.”
And he’d had hope, once. He’d had such hope.
“This is my new beginning,” he says. “This island. This is all I need. I’m not going back to Middle-earth.”
It’s not the first time he’s said this, but she never truly seems to hear it. “Of course you are,” she says.
“What’s waiting for me there? Ashes and orcs? Is that what you were picturing when you thought of me returning to my home, hmm?” He tries to keep it light, but too much of an edge comes through in his voice. He softens it with kissing her ear and letting his teeth tug slightly at the pointed tip.
“No,” she says. “It is strange, but I cannot imagine you anywhere there. Not in a forge, not as a soldier. Whenever I try it seems… I am not sure how to describe it. Incomplete.”
“You know I don’t belong there. I swore I’d never go back.”
A slight frown, again. Something in her is uneasy. “Then you were trying to reach here?”
He gives up attempting to distract her with kisses and flops over onto his back. “Where’s all this come from?” he says. When she lays her hand on his cheek he turns his face into her palm, away from her.
“Sometimes it seems to me that a darkness follows you,” she says. “I think you are afraid.”
She is not wrong, although she would likely think herself so if she knew more. He has known fear: what it is to inflict, what it is to feel coursing below one’s own flesh. He has known Lúthien’s beautiful, terrible gaze; he has known his master’s armoured hand; he has known despair and horror and the howling promise of the void.
“I was spared,” he says. “I shouldn’t have been. That first sunrise when I was free, I never thought I’d know a feeling like that again.”
She has seen innumerable horrors herself, no doubt – probably some of his – and she does not question this. She presses her forehead down against his, and says “I am sorry,” and it’s with more luck than care that he realises she’s speaking Quenya before answering.
“I don’t want to talk about Middle-earth,” he says. And when she begins to answer he distracts her with more kisses, running his hand up the length of her thigh, murmuring you know what I do want? into the exquisitely soft skin of her stomach. She plays at annoyance at first but something in her turns again and she’s fierce and greedy and keen, whatever thoughts unsettled her put aside.
There is more he should notice and he doesn’t, he doesn’t. He wants only his golden elf and so long as he has her nothing else can trouble him. The conversations she has with Elendil and Míriel go ignored, the increasing number of Númenoreans around her who speak to her in Quenya doesn’t matter. He cares only that he has her – and for that brief and endless time, he does.
They walk together in the last evening light, she in winter boots now and a cape that keeps out the colder wind blown in from the coast, her hands sometimes cupped around a clay goblet of the sweet tea the Númenoreans like. They bicker but it’s blunted now; she’s fond of him and doesn’t bother to hide it, and there’s a dancing light in her eyes when he teases her. She sleeps held close in his arms and likes this more than he would have expected of her, enough that sometimes if they move apart in the night she’ll half-wake and pull his arm around her again as if it’s a replacement for the belt that holds her knife by day.
They talk – or she talks, mostly – for she’s quiet and taciturn in much of her life but on the right subject she’ll speak at happy and detailed length, and he learns that he much enjoys finding out what those subjects are. The past, mostly. A life she knew when her brothers were still alive, tales of Middle-earth when it still seemed to her new and vast and wonderful. Her husband she rarely speaks of but sometimes she mentions him too, an anecdote reached through some circuitous route of memory; she doesn’t seem to intend this and if she realises she has will go quiet, her hands wrapped into a knot, her head bowed a moment. And then she will return to whatever she was saying as though the interruption had never been.
And he cannot get enough of her: not her sharp blade of a mind, not her heart set on vengeance, not her hunger for him, the perfect shape of her limbs, the way she moves, the taste of her, the feel of her beneath him and above him and around him. He cannot get enough of her and this seems to be something she shares, for it all blurs together into one long and wonderful memory and nothing else around him matters. When he kisses her it’s as if he’s drinking the light of the Trees themselves.
And so although there is more he should notice, he doesn’t.
She is waiting for him one afternoon when he returns from the forge, a jagged scratch from a broken chisel across the back of his hand still stained with blood and with soot smeared into his sweat-damp skin. She has been to the baths and her hair is still wet, and she is barefoot in nothing but a light gown. He wants her, very badly.
“We are to go to Romenna,” she says. “There is another ship, a good one. But I must speak to its captain myself.”
He does not ask why he too is expected to go; by this time, it seems natural that he should follow her.
Romenna is a great port and busy shipyards, industrial vastness where Armenelos has regal grandeur. It’s still wondrous in its own way and he wishes he’d thought to see it before, and hopes there will be time now. He may not be so fortunate, though. The weather is turning today and Romenna is further out than Armenelos, built on the eastern coast. He can see vast clouds gathering out on the ocean.
Galadriel has been a little more distant with him all the way here, but this, he assumes, is merely the distraction of the ship. She wants it very much and has told him already of several things she believes might convince its captain. Elendil, who it seems knows the man, tells her that such things cannot be predicted and that he’s from a line of sailors whose hearts are never truly in port. Elendil rides with them; Isildur, this time, does not.
Galadriel goes with Elendil to speak with the captain and Mairon is shown instead to a boatyard, a workshop, a place where barrels are rolled into cargo holds to be carried around the coast. He’s shown the ship itself, too, at a distance; it is indeed a greater vessel than the two Galadriel has already secured, its great sails all furled now and the sigil of the white tree on its side.
He is shown so much of the city that the storm is already close to them when they return to the cluster of buildings where he left Galadriel and Elendil. The wind blows a loose bucket across his path; shutters bang closed around them. Even the ships in the sheltered port are beginning to bob on the water, and beyond the harbour wall the sea-spray seems to soar higher with each new wave.
“Where’s Galadriel?” he says, but no-one seems to know.
The rain hits them like a sheet blown in from the sea, a whirling wall of storm wrapping itself around the city. One of the guards saw Galadriel and Elendil leave to walk to the docks, but they are not there now. The harbour hand, pulling a cloak up over his head, shouts over the wind that they never came to the ship itself and wouldn’t have been permitted aboard anyway with this storm coming in.
He does not panic; such things are not for a being as old as he. But he cannot find her and the storm seems to be the force of the sea itself, and oh, how he hates the sea.
It is Elendil who sees him first, seizing him by the arm. “Speak to her,” he shouts. “She won’t listen.” And he turns Mairon around to see the sea wall and the lone figure standing upon it, her golden hair soaked in the blown spray from the waves.
She does not even seem to hear him call her name although he’s sure she can. She ignores him entirely until he’s close enough to touch her, and then she turns to him, disinterested, barely noticing him at all.
“Galadriel,” he says. “What are you doing? Come back.”
She’s wearing a dark cloak, something the Númenoreans here must have given her for he’s never seen it before, but the rain does not seem to be troubling her at all. She turns back to look out at the raging sea and shrugs his hand off her shoulder.
“Come back,” he tries again, for he can’t leave her here. He doesn’t want to drag her and she’s too close to the edge to risk having her pull away from him and slip. The roar of the waves is louder now, the wind howling as it turns rain and sea and foam alike into a maelstrom where even the cliffs across the bay are invisible. “Do you want to drown?”
A strand of her hair is plastered to her face with rain. “Would it not be strange if we drowned here?” she says. “After all the journeys we have made together, you and I.”
The wind grows stronger still, so strong that they have to hold on to each other to stay upright. The rain has already soaked through his hair and now runs unimpeded down his neck and under his collar. “Come back,” he tries, a third and last time. “Galadriel. Please.”
Each slap of a wave against the sea wall is higher, now.
He closes his eyes when she kisses him, folding her close against his body as the rain lashes at them. She alone is warm - his one haven in all of this. And yet it is not even a surprise when he feels the cold point of a knife against his side.
“It was my brother’s dagger,” she says. “He died in your dungeons, at your hands, a place of horror, a terrible, terrible death.”
He doesn’t let go of her, doesn’t try to fight, doesn’t even take the hand that’s pressing the dagger against him with a force just shy of breaking the skin.
He wants to pull her off balance into dreams and speak to her in a way she’ll hear him, step quietly into her mind and promise her calm and peace and reassure her, she knows he’s not what they’ve told her, she knows. But he’s too weak, still, or else something else is wrong here – it doesn’t work. She doesn’t even waver.
She is furious, he can see that much, but her fury has cooled into something hard as obsidian. “You deceived me,” she growls at him.
“Not in anything that matters. I told you – no,” as her hand raises the dagger and he grips her wrist tight despite the slipperiness of the rain, “no, you’ll hear me. I’ve helped you -”
“Helped me?” Even close as she is he can barely hear her voice through the howl of the wind, but she can be heard if she wants to – she was near shouting only a few moments before. She’s shaken, he’s shaken her. “You tricked me, you lied.”
The wind is so strong now that the rain stings his face, the sea a whirling endlessness below them. “It doesn’t have to be this way,” he says. “It doesn’t have to be an end. We can both be free of it – listen, Galadriel, listen -” as she pulls back against him – “You freed me once. You freed me. I was trapped in the darkness in that fortress, nothing but weakness and fear and I was alone, I thought I’d never know the light again, and when you smashed that wall -”
“No.” She hadn’t known, he realised. “No, no, you weren’t there, I searched -”
“You were the first light I had seen in centuries. You were the first bright thing since he was defeated. You know I’m more than that name you give me. You know it.”
He watches her breathe, tense but not striking at him, caught between one choice and the next. He watches her hand turn and grip his own wrist, hard. And then she looks back to the sea and calls out another name.
The waves pull apart like torn cloth and through them Ossë rises. He seems part-water himself, a beautiful form not constrained by flesh, shining and shifting, bright as sunlight on the waves. Mairon, he calls in a voice of whalesong and breaking waves. Mairon, my prey, my foe, my prize, come with me.
A trap, a trap. Of course. For Galadriel has hold of him, now, and will not release him. There is this moment, this storm-filled roaring moment, and either side of it there is no hope at all.
Come with me, Ossë sings. Come with me, Mairon, an end to my trial, a proof of my loyalty, a vow to my future, a strike to my past.
“They sent you,” Mairon says.
Ossë tips back his head and laughs and pearls tumble down to the water. Set a thief to catch a thief.
Galadriel’s hand tightens on his wrist, her nails burying themselves in his flesh. But it’s not as if he could run anyway. Back through the rain that sweeps through the quayside he can see soldiers gathered, dozens, more, their swords already drawn.
Had Ossë still to prove himself, then? Was Mairon to be deposited at Manwë’s feet like the gift of a hunting cat? Ulmo had taken Ossë back, he knew that much, but maybe the others had more caution. They were already deceived by Melkor once through their inability to understand what lay beneath his obsequious apologies. Who better to send to find Mairon than one who had been just as seduced as he, once; who had turned back but would never be entirely free of that darkness he had known.
Or perhaps it was not the Valar at all that Ossë sought to prove himself to. Perhaps it was Uinen - loving Uinen, generous Uinen, Uinen of jewel-like corals and filigree-fine seagrass, Uinen who calmed the tempests. Uinen who had gone after her husband in the face of all counsel. Uinen who had torn at Ossë with storms even greater than those he could summon, who had beaten down his anger with a greater anger of her own, who had dragged him back, bitter and weeping and half-drowned in despair, to beg for Ulmo’s mercy.
“Ossë,” Mairon says. “Justice is not ours, Ossë.”
His brother’s scoff is the scream of a calling gull. Let the Valar rule on justice.
“Arda is for the Children of Ilúvatar now. Not them, not you. Not I.” The rain and the sea-spray are so great now that he feels he’s breathing in more water than air, and if he let go of Galadriel – if she let go of him – he’s sure she would be swept down into the ocean and lost.
She is still standing through will and fury alone.
“I surrender to Galadriel,” Mairon says. “She sought me and found me and caught me. I’m hers by right.”
Ossë folds his great arms and looks down on them, and the rain hurls itself again, harder, and even Galadriel stumbles under its force.
“You understand!” Mairon yells against the wind. “You of all of them understand, Ossë, she found me, she found me, nothing could turn her back. I am hers. I am hers.”
Ossë laughs again - and then his form dissolves into snow that spirals up and out and falls back down on newly calm waters. The clouds drain away into blue skies. The wind stops as rapidly as it began. Mairon and Galadriel are still there together on the edge of the sea-wall, each with a wrist caught in the other’s grip, and she with her dagger still close to his throat.
“I’m yours, elf,” he says. “Do what you will.”
And he lets go.