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The bond dulls before you’re consciously aware that it has. When Gil-Galad asks, catching your hand as you pass by him in the hall, you snatch your hand away and insist that it’s fine.
It isn’t.
You want him to do something. To say something. To ask. Instead, infuriatingly, he simply nods and backs off. You don’t speak much for a few days after that. Not until he invites you to join him for dinner and a late-night game of chess, which you always thrash him at. He isn’t bad by any means. You’re just better.
Tonight, he beats you. You simply shrug and say you’re tired, trying to laugh it off, and get up to make both of you tea. Gil gives you a look but doesn’t pry. Instead, he fills the silence. You take your own steaming cup of tea and sit on the plush rug by the crackling fire, trying to listen and engage with him but his voice just floats by you like water, too fluid and ebullient for you to catch in your hands.
That is how Gil has always been: vivacious, sharp, good-natured, endlessly kind and bright. Tonight, when he turns his usual warm regard to you, you shrink away from it the way a snake slithers beneath the shadow of a rock to escape the full heat of midday.
It isn’t fair to him, you reason to yourself. So what if Gamdir had passingly joked about all the time Gil had been spending with Iarthil lately? He has to. She’s his spymaster. So what if the others at the table had remarked on her sparkling green eyes and fair face? What was that to you?
“She can match him wit-for-wit,” Gamdir said with a sly look. “You should have seen the way he laughed at the joke she made about the Númenórean ambassador.”
Gil had always liked your jokes.
It comes as a horrible shock when you realize Gil has stopped talking altogether and has been calling your name for a while, now. You snap back to your body and tear your eyes away from the abandoned chessboard, trying to meet his.
“What’s the matter?” he asks.
“Nothing,” you say at once, because again this isn’t fair to him, and the last thing you want is to ruin what lies between the two of you-- this precious, rare constellation.
“You are the worst liar I have ever met.” Gil-Galad’s voice is a strange mixture of fondness and worry. He gets up and comes over to join you on the floor. He’s always so steady. Every single movement he makes is efficient and precise.
“I’ve been monopolizing the conversation,” he tries.
“It isn’t that.”
His next guess is: “I’ve...” he pauses, “I have been neglecting you?”
“No,” you insist almost before he’s finished saying it. It’s a frequent worry of his, so much so that he often overcompensates.
“I can feel how you pull away from me. Whatever it is...we can sort it out.”
Your throat constricts, and without meaning to you begin to cry. It just sort of...happens, like the great snap of the last crumbling support beams in a very old house. Mortified, you helplessly try to shrug it off and get up, rushing to the window just to put some space between the two of you, because being so close to him -- you can hardly breathe.
“I don’t know if we can,” you manage through your tears. Your hands are shaking. You wring them together. “I only wish for your happiness. Even...even if that isn’t with me.”
A long horrible silence stretches through the room, and in that silence you feel the bond between you and Gil pull so taut it threatens to break.
When Gil-Galad next speaks, his voice is low and shaky like the first warning tremors before an earthquake. “Why are you saying this?”
“Because...because if I’m not enough--”
“You are enough,” he exclaims indignantly, shooting to his feet.
You back away from him, still starving for space.
“If-- if what we have isn’t enough--” you correct the phrasing. “You deserve so much, Gil--”
“Please,” he interrupts, taking one slow step toward you, hands up, palms out. “Please-- just...talk to me. Whatever this is, whatever I have done--”
He looks so utterly confused. How can you explain this to him? The terror that grips your heart in a fist so tight it crushes? It’s happened before. You lose and you lose and you keep losing, because there always comes a point when this isn’t enough. When they’ll find someone better. And it doesn’t hurt so much... it doesn’t hurt so much if you’re the one that leaves first.
Gil-Galad stands there in the middle of the room, just three feet away, but it feels like three thousand. That distance is a pit that threatens to eat you alive.
“I cannot mend something I cannot see.” In his tone, he’s pleading. He’s begging.
“Iarthil.” It slips out of you in a breath.
The confusion in his face only deepens. “What about her?”
“You’re...you’re close,” you finish weakly.
Gil-Galad waits for you to elaborate. His gaze is a hook that yanks the rest out of you, because you can’t stand the way he’s looking at you.
“She’s better for you. Clever, and brave. And witty. And she’s so...she’s so fair. And I’m-- I’m me. And I don’t--I’m sorry--” Your voice fails you, shattering. “I’m so sorry. I don’t mean to be jealous. I don’t have any right to be.”
Gil closes the distance between you faster than can be believed, taking your shaking shoulders first, then holding your face in his hands, tilting it up towards him.
“Listen to me. It matters not whether she is clever, or witty, or fair. I care not. Melda, arimelda, she is not you.”
He says it so ferociously that it knocks the air right out of your chest. Gil leans down to press a kiss to your forehead, warm, full of deep affection.
“So...let us not speak of better, or best. I love you. I choose you. On purpose. For your incredible mind and your generous heart and your deep loyalty, and--” a sparkling smile, “for the way you can thrash me at boardgames.”
Tearfully, despite yourself, you have to laugh.
He gives your face a gentle, fond squish. “You have got to stop having such a poor opinion of yourself.”
You open your mouth to apologize, but he stops you before you can get there.
“None of that,” he says. “Come and thrash me again, won’t you?” A nod toward the chessboard, lying with its pieces arranged and forgotten on the tea table.
You dry your face with the back of your hand. The bond between you slackens and strengths once more, warming again with pure, sweet sunlight.
“Well...if you insist, my king. Then I shall thrash you thoroughly.”
“Good!” he laughs. “Someone has to.”