не разъединишь две золотые нити

[stil8here]

ситуация следующая. я не теряю надежды однажды дописать большой по моим меркам постканонный фик по AoS, но тетрадь, начавшаяся с него, ненадолго завернула в ДК (фикс-ит про 14, который я тоже не теряю надежды однажды дописать), а потом эээээ. эээээээ. тетрадь началась с героически остановленной фуры на трассе и закончилась косой, расплести которую значит утратить связь с прежней жизнью. э - эльфы. последние полгода вместо гб я читала фанфикшен по "Сильмариллиону"; кажется, больше, чем я прочитала фанфикшена за всю предыдущую жизнь. заимела хэдканоны про таких персонажей, что мне неловко от одной мысли. придумала пейринг, который потом не смогла найти на ао3.
и наконец довела до ума одну из идей, по традиции это кода сезона и reconciliation.

Название: Then I Will Know
Автор: Amy Benson
Бета: нет
Кросспост: ao3
Размер: 1782 слова
Фандом: The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power
Пейринг/Персонажи: Celeborn/Galadriel
Категория: гет
Жанр: лирика
Рейтинг: PG-13
Краткое содержание: Galadriel is reunited with Celeborn when she least expects it. She doesn't know what to believe.
Примечание: большое спасибо lethnie и marizetta за фидбек.

Galadriel arrives in camp on foot, one arm in a sling, with barely any news from the south. When the watchman she approaches signals his comrade and walks with her through a splattering of tents set up by the scouts in a forest clearing instead of simply letting her pass, she is too tired to question it.

The elf sitting by the campfire rises to his feet to greet her, and she freezes at the sight of him.

Their eyes lock, and her mouth runs dry.

The world sways, shifts, and she has to root her feet into the ground to keep upright.

His face is grave, his hair dim and cropped unevenly, and he is thinner than she remembers, but she is less than certain if what she remembers is what was once true. In her memory he is willowy, his features finely sculpted, and the man before her looks like he is carved of rough limestone. Yet even with sunken cheeks and slumped shoulders, she still recognizes —

her wedded husband.

‘What happened to your arm, my lady?’ he asks at last, breaking her entrancement.

The belt she used for a sling is digging into her neck.

‘I took the wrong path on the river bank. Lost my footing.’ Shame pinches her cheeks. The moment her boot slipped she knew she could have held on despite the steepness of the slope, but still let herself tumble down, gathering bruises and scratches on the way to landing in the mud, sore and alert, pain pulsing in her left shoulder.

‘It will heal.’ His face softens, and her heart flutters in recognition.

‘Have you eaten?’ she hears herself asking.

‘Kinsmen here kindly provided my most urgent needs. I’d have continued on my journey, but they told me they were expecting you soon, and then I knew what had led me to this place’

‘How do I know this is not a deception?’ she asks him, and herself, and the forest around them.

He smiles and lifts his shoulders in a hint of a shrug, and all Galadriel can think about is how she once chose to forget this smile when she thought him forever lost, and now she can’t tell if it’s a different smile, or a different being, or it is she who is different. She'd recognize the smile of the deception, the deceiver, wouldn’t she? Would it be this open, helpless even? She wills her mind to work it out. It cannot be, yet it must be

‘My lord.’

She reaches out to touch her husband's hollowed cheek and feels a hot tear brush the side of her palm, and then he mirrors her gesture. Her little finger slides down to his pulse and stays there as it rises and slows.

‘I believed you dead,’ she says, looking him in the eye.

‘I hoped you were not,’ he replies with such conviction that she almost believes that it was this hope that kept her breathing in the centuries they were apart when she could have been dead many times over, that this hope tore her off the ship headed West.

‘The High King wanted me gone,’ is all she can say without unraveling. ‘How did you survive?’

‘I was imprisoned. For how long I do not know. When I gave up on escaping, rescue came.’

‘Who was it?’

‘It is a strange tale. My rescuers led me west until I could recognize the stars again. And then as if some force called me towards this place, and I split from my companions, at least for now. But something tells me your tale might be stranger still.’

To his eyes she must seem just as changed as he is to hers. She drops her hand from his face, her Ring suddenly heavy, and realizes that she’s already decided despite the unease, be it Nenya’s or her own, that the question before her is the one she won’t pose to it.

‘You will tell me your strange tale, and then I will know if I can trust you,’ she states and winces at how harsh she sounds.

He looks as lost as she feels in the moment, and almost as tired, his brows creased like he is trying hard to remember something vital. Slowly, he nods.

As night falls, Galadriel unbraids her hair, washes off the dust and the dirt in the ice-cold water downstream from the spring, switches the belt supporting her arm for a softer bandage.

He is still sitting by the campfire when she returns. The fire is out then, and he is so still that for a moment he seems to her a vision, a trick of moonlight. But she blinks, and he is still right there, watching the stars. She follows his gaze to the clear skies above them.

She dreamt of Doriath the night before she headed south, she realizes, a recurring dream of trees and caves and unbanishable cold lurking deep in her bones. She’s long known how it ends and always slips away ere blood is spilled, but before that she walks familiar paths, ground soft under her bare feet. And some nights the trees keep changing, and the path before her is strange, and her bones are warmed through by the aged Sun, and her steps are heavier with some unfamiliar weight. That was such a night.

She sets her bedroll five steps away from him, on the other side of the campfire; lies down, her good arm under her head. Her hair is still wet, but the night is graciously warm. Her eyes trace familiar shapes of constellations absent-mindedly, but she’s long abandoned ascribing them with meaning. If she can’t sleep, she can at least rest before she has to determine how much of the ghost of her husband is true.

The thought of captivity was one thing she could not endure, and so she forbade herself to think of that for him. Everybody perished. Her own survival seemed at times a mere quirk of fate. Back then she believed death to be undeniably better than dungeon. But now when Celeborn might be returned to her, changed and hollowed out, but alive still, that conviction seems laughable.

He turns to look at her, uncannily, unbearably familiar, and she sits up, compelled to break the silence.

‘Had I been lost and captured and had you not searched for me from shore to shore, from deepest dungeons to highest peaks, I don't think I could have forgiven what I’ve done. What I haven't done. Yet I beg you…’

‘Good thing I am not you.’ Words drop into the forest moss like sea stones, solid and smooth. ‘Do not beg, my lady.’ After a moment he continues, voice thick with emotion, ‘If your joy at our reunion matches even a fraction of mine, then I am blessed, for my joy is boundless.’

Not just limestone, but marble that was always there, underneath the lithe bark; now dimmed and chipped, but firm and beautiful still. Tears hit her cheeks before she knows she is crying.

‘I fell. I fell before I ever knew you and after you were lost to me. I fell and dragged others along. I fell for seduction. I almost fell off the edge of the world.’ She stops herself before truth gives way to self-pity.

He inhales sharply as if to say something, but then doesn’t and instead looks at her for a long moment before turning his gaze back to the sky.

‘When I was rescued, I thought the stars looked different. The light of the day in those parts had been hard, you see, and so had been the dark of the night, and the air had been thick and silent. It took me days to realize that it was not the stars that were different, but my memory of them. In my despair I forgot.’ He turns his head as if following a scent, and the line of his neck is as delicate as her memory of it. His frown dissolves. ‘Can you hear it?’

‘What?’

‘The music. The stars, the leaves, the creek. Mice, and owls, and bats, and frogs.’

‘And midges?’ she teases.

‘Them too,’ he replies, unruffled. ‘I missed it so.’

She tries. She squeezes her eyes shut and listens until she knows the shape of the creek all the way to the river, and the force of the wind that is yet to reach them, and which trees harbour owls.

When she opens her eyes, he is standing tall three paces away from her, and she jumps to her feet on instinct, so as not to be at a disadvantage. He steps closer to her, a peculiar step, and there is that smile again, but now she remembers it from earlier. He raises his elegant arm and sways, unsure, and steps again, to the side, and then towards her, and back.

Galadriel draws in the night air - there is a linden tree still in bloom nearby - and looks to the stars, and now there is a rhythm to them, and so she taps her foot on the soft ground, and then Celeborn catches on, ta ta ta-ta-ta ta-ta ta-ta ta ta-ta-ta-ta, it’s almost silent, yet her heart soars at the resonance.

She takes a deep breath and spins on the spot, twirls until she feels blood rush to her cheeks, her loose shirt a tulip around her thighs. He turns too, around and again, slow and unsure at first, but still graceful, and then steps towards her, and she moves as well, towards him and then past, until they’ve switched places. She extends her good arm to him, and he takes her hand with a flourish. Their feet trace a circle in the grass until they’ve switched places again. The next figure is more intricate, and they have to watch their feet as they maneuver around each other, before their eyes meet again and they close the distance between them with simpler steps.

He waits for her to speak, but she is unsure if she will plead or tease or threaten, until the words fall from her lips.

‘If you slit my throat in the night,’ says Galadriel, ‘I will die of heartbreak before I choke.’

His eyes flicker towards her ankle, where he knows a dagger to be strapped even now, concealed as it is, and then return to her face, slightly narrowed, searching, but only for a moment.

‘Likewise,’ he responds with a small nod.

He looks her in the eye, warm like the night around them and solid against its haze, and this she recognizes.

High above them a robin begins to sing.