Chapter Text
Celeborn remembers dragonfire. Even in his memory, it burns with a heat intense enough to split the world apart. Before it there was battle, mud, death; the massed ranks of the Noldor and the shouts of Quenya battle-cries; orc-banners ragged against the sky; the silver sigil of Doriath upon the shields of the soldiers beside him. After it, the world went blank.
He does not remember the halls of Mandos in anything but the vaguest of impressions. It is like trying to gather the pieces of a dream after waking: sorrow and awe, and the coloured threads of a great tapestry vast above him. He does remember being told he was to be given back his body and the indescribable feeling of having it reform around him. He does remember being told: Galadriel needs you; we are sending you back. He does not remember agreeing to this, but he does not remember refusing, either. It seems more that any views he might have had on the subject were irrelevant.
And so he is here, back in Middle-earth, back with his wife. But Middle-earth has changed beyond all his recognition and everything he knew is gone; and his wife looks at him with her face twisted into horror and tells him he is a trick of Sauron’s sent to deceive her.
“Am I?” he says.
And then soldiers are around her and one of them lays a hand on her sword-arm, putting himself between the two of them, saying Galadriel, wait, stop. Stop.
She stops, her sword halfway drawn. She does not take her eyes from him for a moment and he’s held just as still as she is, fixed still in that perfect shade of blue.
They hold him prisoner, although they don’t phrase it that way. They are courteous; they ask if he needs food, water, a blanket, is he tired? (can one be tired after such a journey?), but they keep him in their camp and they guard the perimeter and they watch him.
Galadriel will not come near. She sits apart, her back against a tree, the campfire’s glow warming what he can see of her face, holding whispered discussions with the other soldiers. This does not trouble Celeborn greatly for he hardly had other plans to interrupt and he isn’t quite sure what he would say to her anyway, what he could say, after all that’s happened, after all that’s now between them: the war and his death and Doriath burning and Beleriand gone beneath the waves and all the days she has passed since the bright autumn morning when he rode away to war.
The soldier who first stilled her arm brings him food: a bowl of stew, a hunk of dried bread. Celeborn has almost forgotten food and he notes his body’s hunger with no more than a detached and vague interest but he knows it would be discourteous not to eat. The soldier says his name is Elrond and he is the grandson of Nimloth of Doriath, and there is something a little tentative, something a little hopeful, in his words as he says them.
Nimloth was still a child when Celeborn went to war. He knows that she died of course for spirits seek each other out in the halls of Mandos; he knows who killed her. He has no wish to speak of any of it here. What he shares with Elrond instead is his memories of his niece when she lived: scrapes on her legs from climbing trees, tight-curled silver hair, a sharp sense of humour, a keen gift for impersonation.
“What did we call her?” Galadriel demands of him.
He hadn’t seen her there, doesn’t know how long she was listening, can’t think what she was waiting for, doesn’t know what she wants of him – but this question he can answer. “Lynx cub,” he says. “Little lynx cub.”
The steel in her expression wavers and then blades itself back to sharp purpose. “Sauron might have learned that from his spies,” she says. Then, to Elrond: “Hold him.”
“I’m sorry,” Elrond says, gripping Celeborn’s arm firm in his hands, pulled back at the elbow; he can’t move and even if he could there would be nowhere to go, for there are three guards around Galadriel, swords already drawn. “It’s just a precaution,” Elrond is saying; and Celeborn does not fight him, does not move, does not care to do anything but lean his head into Galadriel’s hand as she touches him for the first time in centuries.
There is – a whisper, a song, something between a voice and the chime of an instrument, something that speaks of water. He feels the patter of rain on forest leaves, the clear chill of a mountain stream, ice on river pools, snow melting on on an outstretched hand. Both repelled and desperate, he remembers what it was like to feel the sensation of things - life and thirst and cold and comfort and Middle-earth and her…
Heal, the chime of a voice sings, heal, heal.
Galadriel pulls back her hand and curls her fingers tight against her palm, hand pressed to her lips. He can see the glint of the ring she wears like a star caught in her grip. “You can go,” she says to the others with a choke of tears in her voice, “you can go. Please.”
She says she is more reassured, but he fails to understand what she means by the word. She says they will take him to Lindon; she explains that Lindon is the realm of the Noldor high king, and then when he guesses “Fingon?” she says no, not Fingon, says he has missed several Noldor high kings.
She says she does not understand why the Valar sent him back to Middle-earth. He says he doesn’t, either.
For her, they had told him, but they had not explained any more than that. For her; but what need has she of one more soldier? And if it’s a husband she needs then he’s not much of one now, lost as he is in this world that is not his own, staring down at his hands in an effort to remember them.
She sits down beside him, the distance between them both inches and eternities. “When they returned without you there were mourning songs sung day and night. You were so dearly missed. Everyone sang for you, your uncle, everyone, and I – I couldn’t. I couldn’t. I never sang one single song for you.”
He is not sure if this is intended as apology or whether she wishes him to know that it isn’t. He had loved to puzzle her out this way once, fascinated by all her different layers, balancing himself for advantage in whatever argument they would later mend in ways even more enjoyable than the arguing. “Does it matter to you?”
“I am not the -” She stops, flexes her hand with the ring upon it. “Yes. There were so many songs I should have sung for you.”
“I never wanted to leave you,” he says. This much he can remember from Mandos, a sense of wrongness. Morgoth’s marring a fault spreading as hairline cracks to tear apart all that should be joined. Separation as injustice.
She blots her tears with a palm. He feels grief – hers, and his own - both immediate and unreachable, as though locked under ice. She says, “We never found your body. I wanted at least to bury you if I could do nothing else.”
“Dragonfire,” he says.
She shudders, or perhaps sobs. He can’t tell. Again this distance, this hellish detachment; why is he here if this is all he can feel?
When she begins to untie the laces of his shirt he starts at her touch even through the cloth. Too much? Yes; and no; and she always had been, and he had loved her for it so much, so much.
“Please,” she says, her hands stilling only a moment. “I need to see you. Please.”
Does she expect to see a dead soldier? The char of dragonfire, perhaps, or the whispers of armour burned into his skin? Still it seems a small enough thing to ask and so he takes the shirt off himself, showing her that he remains unmarred beneath it.
For a while she only looks at him, her face unreadable even for her husband who once knew her so well. Then she puts her palm to his chest, and the ring she wears thrums with a strange, ice-like sharpness like the first frost of autumn; and then she places her mouth beside it.
“Galadriel,” he says. He cannot tell himself if it is warning, if it is welcome, if it is only that he has not spoken her name as breath and lips and life for so long and now will never tire of doing so again. His hands have found her hair anyway, gathering it, craving it, she’s sun and forests and winter and spring.
When she begins to sing he can feel as much as hear it, all the words of grief she has held safe and secret within her for so very, very long.