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A forge is a noisy place to work, but there are always quiet things to hear for those who are listening. Sauron, lieutenant of Morgoth, betrayer, deceiver, lord of innumerable horrors, listens now to all of it: to whispered gossip, petty rivalries, grumbled complaints across the benches. And then to an order given to Lôminzil, one of the junior apprentice jewellers, so apprentice she’s barely more than a sweep - go and take measurements for the elf’s armour after you’re done.
He looks over, on the pretence of stretching out his aching neck, and sees her sullen and annoyed. “But, I’m finishing at -”
“Do it.”
Lômi nods, and picks up the tray of tiny pins and nails she’s holding. Carefully sorted. Must have taken an age.
Sauron waits until she’s passing his bench, and then steps backward just at the wrong moment, sending the girl staggering sideways and the tray and its contents all crashing to the floor. As she kneels down to scrabble after them in the dirt and soot he joins her. “I’m so sorry,” he says, “that was all my fault. Here, let me help.”
She shakes her head, blinking back tears. “You’ve got to do shields.”
He has indeed got to do shields. There’s a whole army to equip. He turns the three tiny nails he’s picked up over in his palm. “But I’ve upset you.”
“No, no!” She doesn’t look at him the way a few of the apprentices look at him, the way he’s noticed their eyes on him, but she’s still a bit in awe of the crest on his shoulder. “It’s just… I was already meant to go and measure the elf for her armour after finishing here. And it’s going to be -” She shakes her head fast, cutting herself off before the word late can make it past her lips.
“Ah. You had plans.” She doesn’t reply, and he leans closer on the pretence of picking a few more fine pins out of the dust. “What was it, a boy?” Drops them softly into her palm. “A girl?”
Still no answer, but she looks up at him with a shy hint of a smile, a little shared confidence.
“Tell you what,” he says, whispering a bit more than the situation warrants given nobody near them is listening. “I’ll handle the elf. Not much trouble for me to do it.” Half the people here already think he shares Galadriel’s rooms - and her bed - as it is, and he doesn’t correct them. (Galadriel would be appalled if she heard, but then Galadriel is never listening.)
“Really?” Lômi’s enthusiasm sounds so very young. “Oh, thank you, that’s so kind -“
“It’s nothing. I owe you, remember?” He claps her on the shoulder as he gets to his feet. “Have fun, now.”
As he certainly plans to.
It’s growing late when he gets there, bag of cuffs and gauntlets and measuring tapes over his shoulder. Galadriel is puzzled. “Halbrand? Why -”
“Armour,” he says, walking right past her into her room as if he’d been invited. “You told the Queen Regent you wanted plate armour. I’m here to fit you for it.”
“No…” A little flicker of doubt plays over her face, the very slightest shadow of a frown. “I said… I think I said I would usually wear plate, for... I didn’t intend it as a request.”
No, it wouldn’t have been. She didn’t stoop herself to ask for things. She demanded, or else she didn’t care. And he had no doubt at all that she would take on an army of orcs barefoot in a shift, so long as they gave her a sword in her hand and an army at her back.
He’d like to see that. He’d like to see her in armour even more. His armour, made with his own hand. No secondhand Númenor tooled leather for her, not now he’s decided that she’s his in some way he can’t yet say in words but can say with his hands and his making.
“Why do you think they asked you?” he says. “Anyway, what they want isn’t my business. I’m just meant to do as I’m told.” Shrugs, gestures at the bag he’s holding, come on, Galadriel, give a little.
“There will not be time to forge it new,” she says. “Surely.”
Oh, won’t there. Watch me. “There’s a fair few suits lying around already made. Would just need a few measurements to make sure yours fits you right.” This is true, although irrelevant. “And I brought you some food.”
He throws the bread to her without warning and she catches it in both hands. It’s still warm from the ovens, he knows; he bought it on his way here, the first batch baked for the night shift workers. Even the act of buying it thrilled him, the feel of the copper coins, the clink as he passed them into the hands of the baker, the nod of acknowledgement, the smallness of it all. He, buying his own bread.
“Why?” She looks down at the little circular loaf in her hands as though it’s the strangest thing she’s ever been given.
“Peace offering. And I thought you might be hungry. I’ve barely seen you eat since we got here.”
“Thank you,” she says, more out of reflex than anything else. She presses it lightly with her fingers. “We do not feel hunger as keenly as you, I think.”
“So eat it because it tastes good, then.” He isn’t sure yet what his own body needs, but he’s learning a lot about what it enjoys. “You’re not leading an army yet, you don’t need to act like you’re on battle rations.”
She lifts it to her face and smells it, and then takes a small sweet bite from its edge. He can almost taste the honey and spices along with her. He wonders what it would feel like to kiss the tiny crumbs from her lips.
“You should be leading that army with me,” she says.
“I’m not here for that.”
“You know I’m right.”
“I know you won’t have any armour if you don’t let me fit you for it. Hold out your arm.” She doesn’t move. “Arm.”
She puts the bread down (but carefully, in a way that suggests she intends to return to it later, which brings him a chill of pleasure). She holds her left arm out away from her, and he measures shoulder to wrist, easy enough. He makes sure not to show the force of sensation that almost overpowers him - the cool silk of her dress, the softness of her skin. He’s wielded armies, he’s turned the tide of the world. These are such simple things to bring him almost to his knees.
He measures the circumference of her wrist, lifting her hand slightly to reposition it - a necessity, not an excuse. Her armour will fit her perfectly and she will be glorious. He takes her elbow next, but it’s smothered in the layered sleeves of her ridiculous Numenorean dress that he finds himself no longer so fond of, and he can barely feel the outlines of her arm through its folds. “This won’t work.”
“Hmm?” She blinks as though he’s pulled her from a daydream.
“This, what you’re wearing. I can’t tell what’s you and what’s dress.”
“Oh.” She touches the ruched fabric at the dress’s neckline absently, and then snaps back to herself, Commander Galadriel of the Northern Armies. Steps away from him and says “Turn around, please.”
“Of course.”
He doesn’t look. Tempted though he is to see more of her, that would be a poor, clumsy way to do so, not befitting her or what she could be to him. Even that what is unformed as yet, best expressed not in speech but in the thunder rush of blood in his veins when he thinks of her, but this much he knows: he doesn’t want to take from her so much as he wants to coax, to smooth and surge the tides of her so that she’ll be the one moving to him.
When she gives her permission for him to turn again, she’s wearing a simple dress that reminds him of the one she was wearing when he pulled her from the sea. This one is pale grey, though, with little suns stitched around its collar. He realises it must be something they’ve given her to sleep in, and realises almost in the same moment that the they must be someone, a person, someone who has chosen her clothes, maybe smoothed her bed-sheets, maybe run a hand thoughtlessly over the pillows she hasn’t slept on. He is incandescently envious.
“Better,” he says, and wraps the linen measuring strips around her bare elbow, then her upper arm, noting how the surface of her skin dips slightly under their pull. He measures the space between her shoulder and her neck, and she tips her head sideways to let him. He wonders how many times he can do this, how many parts of her he can chart and number and contain, before she suspects anything of him but kingship.
The linen tape is useful, but barely necessary. He’s measuring her with his eyes, too, calculating each curve, each span, each space and shape of her. His body might have the limitations of a mortal man but his mind and his skill are Maia, still. This armour will fit her body as well as his own hands would.
He hesitates at her hair, the golden beauty of it, and she says “I don’t think you need to measure my hair” with an almost-smile playing at her lips.
Oh, he wouldn’t mind; he’d like to run his fingers through it, feeling it part and give for him. But no. “I meant, it’s in the way here,” he says, gesturing at her shoulders. “I didn’t want to touch it without your say.”
She takes it in one hand, twists it into one thick gold rope around her wrist and brings it over her shoulder, the slightly annoyed snort he can just about hear making him think that she maybe wouldn’t have minded after all. Not because she wants him to touch her, he’s likely a long long way from that, but because it would have been quicker and more efficient. She’s a soldier, he’s armouring her for battle.
Shoulder to shoulder, he measures; the span of her back; the circumference of her neck, this with her chin tipped high to let him, looking at him and yet not; the circle of her waist, this done from the side, just in case she has any lingering suspicions that he lacks the propriety he absolutely does lack. And then he steps back and gives her the tape. “You should do the rest, here.”
He’s got something with this, he can tell; she looks close to amused at the awkwardness he’s feigning. “Haven’t you done this before, smith?” she says, adeptly measuring the circles of her he wouldn’t dare (yet, yet) touch, bringing the tape around her chest, across her breasts, marking the measurement for him, and then bringing it again around her hips. His arms could be there; he’d like his arms to be there.
“Not for one like you.” A little clumsier than he’d have preferred, but it only nudges her half-smile a little closer to a full one. If he was hoping that it’d nudge her much more than that, though, he’s disappointed. Even as she sits on a low wicker stool to measure her thigh, then the distance down from her hip to her knee, looking like a poem given form, she’s all business; she’s a soldier preparing for battle.
“Should let me do that while you’re standing,” he says. “It’s different dimensions when you sit. I don’t want to send you off to fight orcs in armour too big for you.”
And to his utter surprise, she laughs.
“Galadriel,” he says, not sure what else he can say. He’s never heard her laugh before. Was this what the elves saw of her? Or was it something buried in her for centuries, a joyous hint of what else he might unearth?
She shakes her head, gathering herself back into the soldier she is. “It’s not this. What you said. It’s - you reminded me of a memory I have kept from many years ago, of my husband. They were fitting him for his armour before he rode to war and it was too big for him. I teased him for it.”
Husband. No mention of a husband before. “Where’s he now?”
She looks away from him and down, fast, the hint of a tear welling in her eye. He hasn’t earned this from her but she’s given it anyway, and his hunger for her is torn between the beauty of her hurt and the desire to remove it from her. “The war,” she says.
The war generically is an improvement on Sauron killed him specifically, so he’ll take it. “Sorry to hear that.”
Sorry is not a word that has ever come to him easy. He remembers sobbing it to Eönwë and the other banner-bearers of the Valar at the end of the war, broken and ruined and defeated (no, Mairon, return to Valinor and face your judgement there). Then not until Galadriel, in the forge. Sorry about your brother. Sorry about all of it. Sorry, sorry, sorry. It’s as if her very existence has snagged some loose thread in him and he’s unspooling with every new step she takes.
She nods, very slightly, an acknowledgement that needs no words, and hands him back the tape.
He kneels beside her to measure her calf, her ankle, the length of her leg, the angle of her knee. Not specifically necessary, that last one, and definitely not if all he planned to do truly was to sort through old plate armour to find the best fit. But that’s not what he’s planning - and the press of his hand against her is all he needs to feel the curve and angle and strength of her, in a way that gives him more knowledge for the armour he’s going to make than the linen tape ever could.
All of this means he has to lift the hem of her dress up to her knee, and feel the light weight of it on the back of his wrist as he works. His mortal body finds this harder than he does, translating his desires into muscle and blood, something heavy and pulling and oh, so tempting.
Sauron thinks of materials. Something to stand out when she’s at the head of her armies, something to suit her, something that lets her move as easily as she needs to. He toys with the idea of bronze. Maybe a cape, too, attached at the shoulders so she’ll stand out to the armies following her. Could he get away with the crest of the House of Finarfin stitched in gold? Sauron would quite like one of his own symbols, so that when she finally does track down the sullen little traitor currently calling himself Adar he’ll get to see that coming for him before he dies, but there’s no chance Galadriel wouldn’t recognise them.
There’s a thin silver line of a scar on her leg, starting at the ankle and wrapping up and around over the swell of her calf. He rubs a thumb over it. “What fight did you pick here?”
“Something picked a fight with me. ”
“Bet you made it regret that.”
She doesn’t exactly laugh again, but something about her voice is lighter. “Yes, I did.”
Part of him, a weight inside him, a tide pulling against him, wants to stay on his knees and lean into her, feeling the thin linen of her dress against his face and the warmth of her skin beneath that. He has had physical forms for a long while but he has never had a body like this one, and its treacherous weakness intrigues him. It serves his will, though, and he gets back up to his feet.
She is looking at him more softly. He isn’t quite sure why - it doesn’t seem to be as a result of anything he has done, or at least anything he understands that he has done - so pleasant though it is he chooses to ignore it, for now. “Move your sword-arm back. I want to see how your shoulder turns.”
“Which sword-arm,” she says, and he mirrors her grin, remembering her fight the overconfident boys in the market square with a blade in each hand.
But it’s only the one arm she moves up, out, back, slowly and deliberately. He puts his hand on her bare shoulder, not hesitating for an instant, and says “Again,” and feels the ripple of her muscles move under his palm. “Perfect,” he says - meaning the measurement, and the movement, and her.
She kisses him.
It’s so unexpected, so beyond anything he can conceive of being able to expect from her in this moment, that his mind fractures time into the millionths of a second and drowns him in the feel of each one of them. She tastes like spring air, like the light of the Trees, like the silence of the sea. She is warm against him. He can feel his own blood in his veins as if it cries out for her.
He pulls himself closer with an arm around her back and leans into her, hungry, starving, knowing this won’t last but needing more and more and more of her. He expects her to stop but it’s as if something in her has ignited just as it has in him; she leans into him, fitting him perfectly, breathes the softest sigh of a whimper, her hands running up his back, in his hair, drawing him close, close, he can feel how she wants him, he can feel how she wants him -
And then in an instant, she jumps away. One hand touches her lips as though she’s no longer sure they’re hers. “Halbrand. I am so sorry. I don’t know what - I don’t know what I was thinking.”
“Don’t say sorry.” She doesn’t need to be small.
“But, it’s…” Her breathing is still fast and if he lets the constraints of his mortal body fade a little, blur around the edges, he can hear each breath exquisite and light. There’s a flush of colour in her cheeks that wasn’t there before - he can’t tell if it’s embarrassment or something better. Either way, the effect is that she seems like something hunted, something prey, something cornered and in fear. But she caught him, didn’t she? You’re the hunter, Galadriel. Believe it.
No, not bronze. Not for her. Something cold and bright and radiant for her armour. She will shine like captured starlight when she leads that army.
“I’m hardly offended,” he says.
She swallows, and he sees the quick movement of it in her throat. “I think - you should go. Or I should go.”
No, Galadriel, he thinks, no - what I should do here is press you back into the wall and lift your dress up to your waist and make you show me how much you don’t miss that husband. Or how much you do miss that husband, I’ll take either. But, no, no - not yet - not now. She has to come to him, and she’s so close, so tantalisingly close, but she’s not - quite - there.
“Of course,” he says. “I need to get back to the workshop anyway. Remember that bread, it’ll go stale if you don’t eat it.” And he bows, going for polite with just a hint of more if she wants it. Sweetest dreams, Galadriel.
She nods, jagged and staccato as if she’s at war with every muscle in her body.
“I’ll bring your armour when it’s done,” he says.
“Yes. I’m - I’m sure it will be -” She swallows again. “Thank you. I never said thank you.”
“Thank me when you see it, Galadriel,” he says. “I promise. You’ll shine.”