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The first time he thinks of making her a queen, they are in the middle of an empty ocean. They are sun-parched and sailless at the mercy of the tides, nothing but the sky and the sea and the bobbing, aimless drift of the raft. Galadriel sits with her feet in the water and stares down the horizon as though defying land to appear.
“You should watch out,” he says. “There’s dangerous things in these waters.”
“If the wyrm returns I do not think we would be any safer on the raft than in the sea,” she says, not troubling to look at him.
“I didn’t just mean that.” He intends her to think of sharks and blade-toothed eels. He, meanwhile, is thinking instead of Ossë and Uinen, of Ulmo, of drowned Beleriand and whatever ghosts might float up in creeping slowness from its submerged cities. At any rate, none of it matters because she entirely ignores him.
He had seen her before. Through the snow-clad branches of a tree where he lay in the soft form of a lynx; in the shimmering curve of a palantír. Once across a tundra snaked with spring rivers, shouting back commands to her company of soldiers. He didn’t believe in worthy adversaries, really - such a waste - but it seemed to him that she would be an entertaining one and this close, he can see that he was correct in that. She’s all determination and muscle, she’s focus and force and strength. It would be pleasing to fight her. It would please him to let her think she’d won for a brief moment, to see the curl of her lip as she threw him down before her.
He does not wish any of that just now. Now, he mostly wishes she would calm herself. They can’t go anywhere; there is nothing they can do; they are entirely at the mercy of the tides and whatever passing ship might see them first. She might as well.
He stretches out long on his back with his fingers woven behind his head, eyes closed against the burn of the sun. He imagines what it might be like to touch the salt-starched gold of her hair.
His form is not entirely of his choosing and he chafes at its edges like poorly-fitted armour. She, meanwhile, cannot choose hers at all; her spirit is knitted into flesh from its making. Still, it’s her who seems to resent it the most. She hates being limited to the spare dimensions of their raft and does not pretend to hide that. She wants to be fighting again, sword in her hand again, orc blood spilled on the ground before her and an enemy to hunt to ground, and in her will for the fight she has dismissed her greatest enemy as an annoying distraction.
He, meanwhile, has gone to some effort to learn what pleasures his body can give. Some difficulty in that when you’re fleeing through ruined lands with a scattered band of people you’re thinking might raise you up as their king, but nothing he couldn’t get past. He fought, he breathed in the cold air of morning, he drank down clear water and heavy ale and learned the giddy pleasure of drunkenness, he wrenched a shoulder fighting a boar and learned what pain felt like in these muscles. He’d coaxed and charmed a selection of eager Southlanders to play with the other joys of his body in every combination he felt like trying, fast in abandoned barns, slow and languid in spring heather, built up to a peak so exquisite he thought he might burst all the seams of this body apart and be released from it but he never was.
He feels hungry, now. Not for her - although he wouldn’t mind, he would dearly love to suck at her skin through that pale shift, have his mouth fill with seawater and lust - but for food, all sorts of food. Blackened fish and roasted ham, apples baked to softness, pastry that would crumble in his mouth, cream and sugar and rich, smoky stews. If they do end up washed back to Middle-earth despite his efforts he’ll put his own plans aside for a while and see if he can’t persuade Galadriel to partake in at least some of these pleasures with him.
“I was thinking,” he says. “I could try to catch us some fish.”
“We have neither hook nor line.” She is no longer facing the sea but instead sitting cross-legged holding her dagger in her lap, tracing the inlaid gold and silver as if it brings her comfort. “Nor bait. Do you think to talk the fish into throwing themselves aboard?”
It’s probably a good thing he is so weak just now or he’d have done just that to spite her. He leans back on the measured stretch of his forearms. “What’s your problem with me, elf?”
Then she looks at him, truly looks at him. Her blue eyes are perfect and piercing and he fears for a moment she has recognised him - not even his being but all that he’s ever held curled inside it, a legion of whispering warring spirits. “You left those people to die,” she says.
He thinks she means the southlands for a moment, and then - perhaps earlier? Has he… But no, no. She means the others on the raft although they showed her little kindness. “What was I to do?” he says. “How powerful do you think me? You heard me try to quiet them. They didn’t listen. Are humans so mighty where you come from that they can face down monsters?” Think me weak, Galadriel. Think me weak. Think me a mortal with a life brief as a mayfly that you can cup in your hands to protect.
She softens and it’s worked, and her blue eyes now seem instead the shine of gems scattered through Aulë’s fingers. He turns away from her.
She is tired, he learns.
He sleeps himself and at first it’s a pretence and then it isn’t, dreams surging over him like the fog coming down over Thangorodrim. His mind is still too tangled with this body like roots dug into river-mud and he can make no sense of what he sees. It’s a few hours of this, here and there, the sun having jumped a few degrees through the sky when he wakes again.
Once he is lost in smoke and turning, turning, his hands fall down like broken slate and his blood turns to clay. Then there is warmth and it’s Galadriel’s hand on his face, turning him back. He lets himself drift to wholeness under her and sees she is - afraid? He is used to fear, he can taste its varieties like the finest of wines on his tongue, but this is something almost new to him.
“You were not breathing,” she says.
“Think I was.” He was, he surely was. He would not allow himself to be so lost in the hollows of his mind that he could lose his control of his own form. He rolls up to face her, notes the slight flush in her cheek and the way she bites momentarily at the inside of her lip. She was afraid, he realises, for him.
“I wouldn’t leave you here,” he says. “You sleep, if you want. I’ll watch you.”
She shakes her head, too strongly, as though the thought (of sleep, of him watching, of him falling away like the mortal thing she thinks him) has already occurred to her and been defeated. “Elves do not need to rest the way you do.”
“Not elves who’ve swum across half an ocean?” He can reach her without touching her; she all but flinches away from him. “Not elves who all but drowned until I came down to cut you free?”
“No,” she snarls at him. “And stop mentioning that.” But he hasn’t mentioned it once before, not since their faces broke water desperate and reborn in the calming storm.
Maybe she is afraid she will dream of it: the endless ocean, the nameless depths, sinking down and down and down as the last of the air was squeezed from her lungs. Maybe there are other nightmares she fears. Because she thinks him mortal and weak she does not understand that he could be worse than all her horrors, that he could curl around her and hold them at bay.
There is an injury on her leg, on the inside of her calf. When the mast splintered a shard of the wood embedded itself under her skin and now as she works at it with her fingertips a thin ribbon of blood runs down around the bone of her ankle. He both does and does not like to see her marred.
“Need help?” he asks her and she shakes her head, lost in concentration.
Though it must cause her pain she does not even flinch. He allows himself to imagine her doing this in the hall of some great distant fortress on a rug beside a blazing fire, his prisoner or his guest. There would be a glow of flame on her skin and he would bring her - soft things? She did not seem someone who would welcome soft things and so he might do it anyway, watch her unsettled and distrustful at his kindness.
He does not have great fortresses now.
She frees the little wedge of wood and slaps her hand hard over the wound it’s left, letting herself wince for the first time he’s seen. He offers her the water-skin again and she dismisses it. Though she’ll be thirsty, he’s sure of it - elves are tough but they’re not beyond need - he suspects she’s sparing it for the sake of his weak mortal body. Despite him saving her, despite all she doesn’t know, she has decided at some point that she wishes to protect him. In truth he’s not escaped the need for water himself, not in this form, but the saving he’ll take from her is something more. He wants to coast in the wake of her knife-sharp purpose.
“So much water and nothing to drink,” he says.
The sun glitters on the broken waves around them. He’s never liked oceans much and he wonders if Ossë is watching him, somewhere, in some guise of fin and foam, but there’s a beauty to its empty stillness now.
Galadriel smiles and it’s beautiful on her. “I spent years drinking melted snow once. I have never taken water for granted since.”
“Is that some elf tradition?” It’s not, he knows full well, but he thinks he knows what she’s referring to and he hungers for more of it.
“We were travelling,” she says. “Some of my family and our companions. The sea was half-frozen and there were no streams, no lakes. Everything was ice. So we gathered snow and we melted that, when we could find enough kindling to burn. This was a great many years ago. I was young then, but I did not feel it. The young never do.”
“That’s a difficult journey,” he says, imagining Galadriel walking over the ice of the Helcaraxë with the ease of a dancer.
“A terrible one, I think.” An interesting choice of words to combine with the almost wistful look in her eye and the way she flexes one hand like a cat’s kneading paw as she speaks of it. He corrects his mental image of her a little: brightening out the fear, shading in instead a determined hope. An admirable thing, to be so determined for your own lands and your own will that you would leave behind Valinor for the crushing cold darkness.
He looks up at the endless sky before she can seize him again in the force of those cool blue eyes. The sun, unshrouded by cloud, blazes down at them. He can’t shake the vision of Galadriel with ice in her hair and snow caked on her boots. “Wouldn’t mind some snow now,” he says, to make a joke of it, to dismiss all of this and be Halbrand again.
“The snow was the worst of it.” She is speaking quietly as though the seas themselves might hear her. “There were great mountains beyond the ice, covered in snow. We thought it would be safer to walk before them than to risk the breaking ice and the sea. But the snow came down on us like a flood - it roared - I had never heard such a thing before.” She shivers and it seems to him that she has almost forgotten he is there, or perhaps that she is there herself and not back in the endless winter hundreds of leagues to the north. “I was young,” she says again.
“Sorry,” he says, and isn’t even sure if she hears.
“You think we’ll bake to death in this sun?” he asks her, once again lying on his back, this time with Galadriel closer beside him. They have lost another piece of the raft and a barrel with it. The water laps at their fingers. “Or drown?”
“I do not intend either.” She has softened a little and she does not seek to hate him quite so much, and he finds it delicious, a wonderful sweet thing, that her reason for doing so is to save her energy for hunting Sauron down in Middle-earth.
“Well,” he says. “Good luck to you, if you make it and I don’t.”
She looks at him, tense and pained, and he could almost feel guilt in it. His constant need to tease at her and push hard at her bruises will surely be his undoing. No-one has looked at him like this in so many millennia and now for it to be her of all people is a fascination he cannot put down.
Near them, a bird swoops low down over the water. It might mean they are near land but neither of them can see any and they have had this argument already twice, and so he does nothing but watch as the bird seizes a fish in its claws and beats its wings, higher, higher, to pull away. Then another bird, battering down from the sky. They collide and the fish falls between them, is seized again, is torn at by beak and talon as they fight over it. The fish flops in the air and he thinks of Melkor and Galadriel both clawing him to ruin.
Her eyes keep flickering closed, her head jerking back slightly as she fights against sleep. He sees her nails curled sharp into her palms. She is a drawn bow, a bright blade. She is like the vast ocean and the endless sun, both of them merciless and beautiful in equal part. She wished Middle-earth healed from him and in that at least they are of the same mind.
“Go to sleep, Galadriel,” he says, and she must indeed be close to collapse because she doesn’t even protest, just allows her eyes to close at long-fought last. Her breath eases: a soft sigh.
She has fought so long.
He is perhaps verging on delirious - the heat of the sun or the want of water, or the final realisation of what has become of him - but he realises that this is perfect. She is perfect. She, somehow, in some way he is yet to determine, must be the saving of him.
She sleeps with the ocean beneath her and the sun above, both vast beyond mortal imagining, both of them vying to crush the last of the life that she so stubbornly holds onto. She should not be subject to such things. She should learn with him to master them.
You need not fear, he thinks. And then he says it out loud so that his own ears will hear it spoken: “You need not fear.”
She shifts, slightly, but does not wake. He does not dare touch her.
“I will make you a queen,” he whispers, and something that is almost peace flickers briefly upon her. “Fair as the sea and the sun and the snow upon the mountain.”