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She walks away from the shape of him, from the tidal wave of sorrow she saw in his eyes, the hopeless darkness of a man who hasn’t been anything to anyone for the longest of times. She herself wouldn’t stand not to be known, not to be named; the gasps when she spelled out her name amongst Men in Númenor was a relief.
She walks away because she cannot look at him now, not when she’s all but flayed herself open in her desperate attempt to gain him to his own cause, in service of hers. She pretends, deep down, turning from the heat of the forge, from the smell of fire, metal, leather and sweat that permeate it, that she’s doing it for him.
The truth is every word he has said to her until now tells her she’s doing it for herself. She needs an army. He’s a King amongst Men, a leader that forgot himself or never knew himself fully, and a savior-to-be in the Southlands. She knows Men better than he does, though she’s not of their kind, she has observed them long enough to know them. His feelings are young and impetuous, clouded by his experience in his body, in the few years of his life. They hold nothing to her careful observation of millenia. When he comes to the Southlands, they will raise him to the throne. They will make a crown for him from the metal of their swords, that can only be spared for this very purpose: to give a symbol to struggle.
The door shuts behind her in a rattle of wood and metal, loud enough that if she was anyone else, if she was a simple woman, she would not hear it.
The word, uttered so quietly that only her elven ears, in this whole city, would have ever heard it.
The word, that he must not have meant her to hear, not truly, for he doesn’t know the extent of her senses’ sharpness.
The word.
“Wait.”
She gives him the span of a breath to repeat himself. He doesn’t. He’s barely breathing behind the door, or perhaps the crackling fire has swallowed that sound. She turns around slowly, opens the door and lets it close behind her. She’s expecting this to take a while.
He’s facing away from her still, exactly where she left him, with the pouch in his hand. The redness in his eyes has nothing to do with the smithing.
“Why are you so certain I will rule well?”
The voice is steadier than she expected. The question is not the one she thought he would ask either. There were other questions that should have come before this one, but she guesses he answered them himself, in the depths of his mind and the width of his soul, while she was behind the door.
“You have touched the darkness–”
“You do not–”
“I may not know your darkness, Halbrand of the Southlands, but I understand it for what it is. The test you have failed.”
He inhales deeply, a sharp sucking in of air that makes the muscles in his shoulders tense. The shadows, somehow, seem to lengthen around him. When he turns around and finally looks at her, the darkness of his eyes is foreign, inscrutable.
Still, she continues. “Failure is not an ending. It is only a beginning.”
“I do not wish to be locked in an endless fight. Not when I see the ravages of it so plainly in front of me, in you.”
She tilts her head. That was an unexpected flash of teeth, of something restless and angry in him. He has been angry at her, he has been frustrated at her, he has been weary. He grows frustrated often when she gives him answers that are less than straightforward, when she supports her emotions with columns of poetry and lodestones of history.
He sighs heavily, shakes his head at her, as if realizing the slip up, the mistake, the aggression. As if remembering he is the one who asked her to wait.
“I am certain you will rule well,” she repeats his words back at him, watching him relax as she decides to answer his question in less poetic, less elfish manners. “Because I have seen you.”
He turns his body entirely towards her now. She remembers, suddenly, how large he is next to her. The strength of an Elf is never restrained by their size, but that is less true in Men.
Here, in this forge that is his domain, fire lit for his purposes, knives wrought by his hands, smell of his sweat and his labor hanging heavy around her, she is more than aware of all of him.
He’s staring at her, eyes piercing her like those weapons he has fashioned so deftly. He is good at this; he is right to desire a life here in Armenelos, smithing and creating.
“I have seen you, Halbrand,” she says quietly in this space. “I have seen you dive into the sea for my sake. Fight with strangers for a place of belonging. You hold yourself with dignity. Even when your actions are less than honorable, they are not motivated by evil purposes. You seek home, shelter, the pleasures of food and the recognition of your talents. Those are qualities in a ruler.”
Those are not only the qualities of a ruler. Those are the qualities of a man, neither truly good nor truly evil, but that is what Men are. Good Men are as few as are Evil Men; they hunger for power but their lives are too short for any consequence. Good and Evil is the realm of the Valar, the Maiar, and the Eldar, for they have known Valinor and have known True Good. They both know it. She knows he knows by the huff immediately escaping him. She isn’t taking his questioning seriously. She isn’t saying what he hopes to hear.
“You have seen me. And you see a King.”
There’s an undercurrent of pity in his tone; he cannot believe how blind she can be.
“Why me, Elf?” He continues, shifting to put down the pouch and lean his weight back against the table, crossing his arms, crossing his ankles. He hunkers into position and waits for her to come to rattle him out of them. “I condemned men to die on a boat and on a raft, I condemn men to die as we speak by refusing you, if what you say of the shadow over the Southlands is true. I have stolen and gotten beat for it, gotten imprisoned for it, broken noses and wrists for it. I seek home, shelter, the pleasures of food and the recognition of my talents, yes, but by the swiftest means possible, not the righteous one.”
Every argument of hers stripped of its hopeful gilding and thrown back at her feet, naked and true. His arms shift where they are crossed; she watches the muscles under his skin flex and bulge. He’s not as steady as his voice shows. Still, he stands there and stares back at her with all the righteousness of his kind.
The fire of the forge is the only light here, it lengthens the shadows underneath his eyes, cuts his jaw and cheekbones sharper, and for the blink of an eye, there is almost an equality between the two of them. He looks older than he is, yet younger than he does in the sunlight she’s caught him sitting in, eyes closed and face upturned like a pleased cat.
“I traded you in for a guild crest, that isn’t even true gold.”
It should have come out sarcastic but all it comes out as a plea. Why him, indeed?
“You…”
She steps forward and looks away from him, down at the lines of brand new knives in their brand new sheaths on the table. He had spent hours here, days and nights forging weapons for her cause, a quiet but salient contribution to the war effort. There is no killing an orc without a blade.
There is always the possibility that his labor was due to the crown, to Miriel and the crest on his shoulder. But she has seen him. He is not one to follow orders, not when he thinks he knows better. He is not a foot soldier. He is like her. A Commander. She trails her finger down the still naked blade of a knife, one she interrupted him in sheathing.
The blade is sharp, bright, flawless. There is a shine to it, a motion when the fire flickers over it. It is small, light, easy to hold and easy to wield. She twirls it through her fingers, thinks of Celeborn’s strands of hair and her very own, thinks of Valinor and home, the song and the light she saw on the boat and how the sorrow she felt wasn’t from walking away from it, but from how she couldn’t imagine herself amongst them yet.
“You are sold to our cause already,” she whispers. She puts the knife down, sheathes it, lets it rest amongst its brethren. “You make weapons of war for us.”
“That is where I belong, Elf.” He uses her kind like a name, and here, in Númenor, it is half insult and half praise. It always is, in his mouth. “In a forge, making the tools of your victory. Every swirl of Numenorean swords through an orc’s flesh will be my contribution. You do not need me out there.”
He is pleading with her to let him stay here, in the comforts of his newfound home, in the shadows of the anvil, in the anonymity of being a low man in the home of the Edain. She casts a long look around the forge. Knives and blades are his specialty, they and scraps of metal useless to anything else for now are covering all surfaces. All but one. She sees the sharp glint of stones before anything else. A star shape, a forged cuirass, the metal folded like fabric.
“Did Miriel order you to make this?”
“It is not elvencraft.” He dismisses. “I have no doubt it will chafe against you. But you are their commander, Galadriel. You command even Queen Miriel.”
“And yet… There is one person I do not seem to be able to command. And that is you, Halbrand.”
His mouth tugs at the corners, in that smirk of his, just the right amount of cocky that teases the line of infuriating. He does look at home here, but she needs him out there, in the fight to come. She cannot explain why.
“The tides of fate are flowing ever so eastern.” She calls out, recalling those first words of his to her, looking down from the all relative safety of the raft, with sun and salt bitten skin. “Mine are heading out. And so are yours. If the sea placed me in the path of your raft, then our fates are bound.”
“You have bound yourself to me. I never asked for you to do so.”
She lets out a huff of frustration at the words. He stands at her side and saves her from death by drowning – a most cruel end – and counsels her in human politics, and yet refuses the ties that she offers, the security of allyship. It is confusing and unsteady and she wonders if it is the truth of all human and elven partnerships – if Lúthien suffered so herself – or if she is doomed by malchance and he had been cast out at sea to be discarded.
"When you refused to bind yourself to me out on the sea, I almost died. I will not have a repeat performance.”
He moves finally from his leaning against the table, from the stillness and calm of someone just awaiting an assault in the comfort of towers and behind walls. He stands to his full height again, taller than many men she has met before. He towers over her as he steps in her direction, eyes green as a spring meadow where the chameleon snake has hidden.
“Are you afraid for your own safety, elf?”
“Will you fight as King by my side if I say it is true?” She snaps back, canting her head up to look at him. The fire is no longer playing on his face at this angle; it is crowning him in a wreath of smoke and light. He is handsome, she decides. Much too handsome for a Man.
“Would you lie to me, and to yourself, to gain me to your cause?”
Questions thrown back in lieu of answers, the slithering of a man used to court politics more than he ever let on, more than the glimpse she saw in the cells when he taught her Men’s fears.
He awaits word from her. An answer. Would she? Lie to him? Yes. That is the simplest answer in her mind, when she discards her offense and her frustration. She would lie to him. She would lie to herself. She would manipulate, perhaps.
She opens her mouth to answer, to shame herself with the bare truth once again, but his finger touches her lips before any sound can escape them. Her eyes widen and meet his again, and there is a tenderness, a longing there that make her heart skip a beat. There is an eternity in her chest between one breath and the next, where she feels his skin against her mouth and wonders what it tastes like.
“Why me, Galadriel?”
A plea for truth. A plea for honesty. A plea for what she has been hiding. He moves his finger away, allowing her speech again, if only symbolically. His hand falls to his side.
“I believe in you.” She whispers. “Because I have no other choice.”
She would expect hurt from him. Pain not to be believed in because he is worthy, but there is nothing of it in his eyes, just pure, honest, yearning. Yearning for what? For whom?
“If I believe in you, if you are worth my choices and my defending you to Queen Miriel, then I have made the right choice. When I defied my High King. When I leapt from the ship. When I refused the rest in Valinor. When I refused to go home. If you are not the King, if you are not by my side in the Southlands and we fail, then I will go and cast myself into the Ettenmoors for the rest of time. Knowing I have been wrong. Knowing I have only served to bring upon the end of Middle Earth.”
She speaks in a hushed, hurried tone, as if afraid someone will overhear. She knows no one is listening; even in this emotional state her ears are sharper than the common spy could ever be able to hide from.
“I believe in you. Because I must.”
A shadow passes through his eyes, and she wonders if he’s heard those words before. From a lover, a parent, a subject perhaps. When did this man stop being King? Was he ever? Was there ever a crown upon his brow, other than the one her faith currently laces there?
He sighs, lungs emptying of all the air in the world. And then he falls.
In one motion, smooth and fluid, perhaps testimony of a thousand other situations where he has had to prostrate himself, Halbrand of the Southlands falls to his knees in front of her. She hears his knees impact the stone, the puff of air exhaled then in the hurt of it. She looks down and sees the mess of his sweat and labor-mussed hair, fights the urge to comb it through with her fingers. Celeborn’s hair was as long as hers, straighter by miles, a Man's road to her forest path locks; he let her braid it before he left for the last time. She itches to feel the shorter curls under her fingers.
She’s staring in that spot when he looks up and so her eyes meet his, shining with a sort of reverence she is not used to, not anymore. She is an Elf amongst Elves despite her title and record, she is an Elf here in Numenor where her kin is despised. He looks at her like she’s a hero of old, a myth made flesh, a Vala herself.
“I can give you my fealty in this fight, Galadriel, Daughter of the Golden House of Finarfin, Commander of the Northern Armies.”
“That is not what I desire.”
"What?”
She offers him a prism outside of fealty, outside of lieges and lords, a partnership beyond the bounds of servitude and for the first time since they have met, she sees only bone-deep confusion in his gaze.
His hands reach up and he places them onto her thighs, sitting on the back of his, a picture of plea. The warmth of his touch is impossible, it feels like burns waiting to happen through the layers of sea air-light fabric her dress is made of. When was the last time she allowed anyone to place their hands there? When was the last time touch was charged with something else than warm friendship or blood-filled brutality?
She knows the answer. She will not think his name again here. That would be disrespectful, when heat is flooding her this easily.
She wrangles her mind away from the pink of his lips, from the heat of his touch, from the curls of his hair and towards the conversation at hand. It isn’t too hard. She’s well-practiced at this, she’s a warrior of old, millenia of practice in ignoring the fair forms of her sparring partners and focusing on strategy.
Halbrand does not make her task easy. There are still bruises on his face, from the altercation he got in, his attempt at stealing what now rests on his shoulder, the guild crest, the belonging, the recognition of his talents. She has never seen him unmarred. From the very first time her eyes have fallen on him, he has been battered, a bruised apple far from the gardens of Lórien: the epitome of Man.
“I do not ask for your fealty. I have no need for a crowned fool, a puppet or a knight who would die for the light in my eyes. I have need of an ally. You are a King, and this freeing of your lands cannot be done if you do not ride by my side .”
His fingers twitch on her thighs, a small grabbing motion that sends shivers running down her spine. There is a shadow in his eyes, and he exhales, heavy and full. Is it relief? She cannot tell. It is as if his mind struggles against the very principle that he is not owned fealty to her. Or to anyone but the One.
His head tilts suddenly forward, until his forehead rests on her lower stomach, light, gentle, seeking comfort. It is an entirely foreign touch now. She wonders if she can feel his breath over her skin through the clothes or if that is only her fevered mind. When was the last time? When was the last time she was touched like this? Every nerve of her is alight, every breath of hers feels like a great disturbance. Her heart hammers in her ears when she looks down at him, at the curls of his hair, when he feels him breathe against her.
“You would make me your equal.” His voice is rougher than before, and he is still looking down, still kneeling for her, his hands on her thighs, his forehead against her stomach; longing. “You, an Elf, me… Nothing of the sort.”
“You are a king. You are a commander. You are a survivor.”
She lifts her hand, and wonders if he can feel the bare hints of tremor in it, when she touches his hair. He exhales, and this time she definitely feels the air moved from his mouth against her, even through the tight binding layers of her dress. It’s a fever she cannot shake; what would that air feel on her bare skin? There, on that sensitive span of skin of hers below her navel. Lower, even. What would his breath feel like, followed by those lips, by the scratch of his beard, on the wettest, most sensitive part of her?
His hair is soft in her fingers, though a little dirty, and tacky with labor. It should disgust her. It does not. His hands grab her thighs a little harder, dig into her somewhat and it floods her again.
Perhaps she makes a noise then, or perhaps he reads the itching in her breath. He looks up, dark-eyed, seeking, and she sees in the green of his irises the same heat, the same disturbance.
He has been an itch in an unreachable part of her back since the moment they first crossed eyes, when she was reaching for shelter on the raft and he pushed her back into the water. Infuriating in his banter, his refusal to comply, his refusal to allow her to fulfill her duty as she should. She has wanted to smack him in the face like an insulting and misbehaving child for days now, since they set foot on this land of Numenór and he has taken so easily to life here. They both chafed against the city, but he has seemed to carve himself a spot into it and fill it over, and he has the ears and features to belong here. They would always call him low man, but they would eventually welcome him. They would never welcome her.
She cannot help but feel envy tugging at her heart when she sees Elros’ descent watching her with unkind, suspicious eyes. They were once kin. Only Elendil has treated her with any sort of affection, and she sees Elrond in the curves of his eyes, and there is a hint of Ñoldor in his bearing. She cannot tell him, there is nothing truly physical left.
The center of her envy and annoyance, of her frustrations and yearnings is at her feet now, staring up at her with barely-disguised want. Human and dirtied with work, darkened with bruise and soot, in clothes of his order, of his skills, kneeling before her, elven and pale and wearing borrowed clothes they had to tighten and knot to make fit, unarmored, unadorned.
He moves his hands away and she exhales, tension unknotting in her spine. She misses the touch immediately but is relieved it is gone all the same. She is not used to the raging of passion that overcomes her when he is this close to her. They are no longer fighting the sea for survival, proximity is now deliberate, the choice is charged with meaning.
He lowers his hands, and she thinks of stepping away, but she feels, tight and warm and real, his fingers on her ankle. The noise that escapes her makes her blush in the dark, a sigh and a squeak; she is a startled mouse and a windswept weeping willow at once.
She switched out the boots she’s worn for riding and fighting with court shoes. Those do not rise above the bones of her ankle. That is her bare skin he touches so easily.
He keeps his fingers where they are and worse, traces patterns with his thumb, infinite loops around the small hammer bone on the inside of her ankle. All she can feel is this touch, maddening to the point where she almost kicks him off, and then she sees the question in his eyes. He’s asking for permission, permission to do more and she sees in her mind’s eyes, feels almost like a phantom, the way his hands could caress up her bare legs, below the skirts, up her thighs, to squeeze there, to hold there. To find the laces of her underwear and… She nods, quick, dry, as if it means nothing if she does it this way. His hands start moving.
His nail, short and blunt, traces the curve of her calf, the hard muscle there. It flexes under his touch — she flexes, and flinches and moves like a spooked horse. In perfect parallels, his hands move up her legs, to her knees. There is sensitive skin there, on the back of her knees, soft and untouched and she is shivering with it.
Her skirts are bunched up over the leather bracers he wears to ward against the fire he works with. It’s unseemly. He hasn’t stopped staring at her, the weight of his glance on her lips burns like ice; she wants to swallow it down and let it cool the inferno in her gut. When did this go from talks of war to gestures of passion? When did he stop refusing her and start wanting her?
The answer is simple. This is still a refusal, and he has always wanted her.
She takes a stumbling step back, shivering legs like a colt and she hates the imagery of her as that pale horse she rode to the Halls of Lore, young and unsteady and mindful. She hates that his vision of her has so easily become her very own. He follows when she moves, coaxes her towards the table where she can find purchase, something hard and steady to lean onto.
He crawls after her on his knees. It must hurt, there is only the measly padding of his apron and tunic between hard bone and the stone, but still he follows her, stumbling in her steps, a picture of service. His hands barely slip from where they have grabbed onto her. If anything, they start to slip higher and higher, to places that make her gasp more and more.
His thumb encounters the ridge of scar tissue on her right thigh, a spear wound that had not been healed in time to disappear entirely. She knows it intimately but he hasn’t gotten acquainted with the ravages of war on her flesh yet. She never let him in this close before. She leans her hips against the table and plants her legs wide enough for him to settle in between them. His leather-clad arms push the fluttering blue fabric off of her and she is bared to the air of the forge: burning with the simmering heat of him and of the fire, colder than she hoped, making her shiver.
She is a knot of buzzing energy, focused on the warmth of his palms.
His face disappears in the blue cloud of fabric, and she feels, jolting, keening, the flat of his tongue lick at the scar tissue, from one edge to another, following the path of the spear in reverse. Her hand in his hair tightens, she’s grabbing him now and this is real, tangible, and happening.
This is no fantasy, this is no daydream, this is Halbrand, a Man, with his tongue and his teeth at the inside of her thigh.
“You’re…” She hears him whisper, feels the air of his lips on the wet stripe of saliva on the scar. “There are marks on you, Galadriel.”
His voice is an odd mix of awe and anger, with something she cannot pinpoint in the undercurrent of the words. His mind must be clouded by lust, she has never had a man worship her flaws in such open ways. It is unknown to her, foreign and for a second, she wonders if she should tell him to stop. She should grab his hair and remove him from the slow exploration of the first of many marks of violence that mar her elven flesh.
“War is unkind even to one like me,” she answers. “It leaves memories behind.”
His eyes when he looks away from his task and up to her are swimming in dark waters, deeper than the cracks in the ocean, darker than the night underneath the mountains. His eyes are like the Unseen World and she is breathless with it. He licks his lips. She cannot wrench her eyes from the shine of them.
“Have you killed the ones who did this to you?”
The question is so odd, so unexpected in the kindling of their passion that it startles a laugh out of her, light and breathy, immediately halted by her gasp when his fingers grab her thighs harder.
“Yes. And if I had not, time would have done so by now.”
“Excellent. One less reason for me to leave this place.”
Before she can rekindle the argument of his staying or leaving, he dives back underneath her skirts and she feels his teeth nipping at her left thigh, her heart skipping a beat, her lower belly flooding. The exploration resumes still northward, to where her underwear is laced and getting more drenched by the minute.
The drag of his beard against her skin is delightful, she finds. She’s used to smooth cheeks, from her husband to her she-elf lovers, all elven and beardless. The man between her legs and his hair are new and every scratch thrills her deep in her bones, satisfies an itch she didn’t know she had.
His fingers find the laces of her underwear at her hips and quickly undoes the ties, too confident, too steady, too used to this. Has he been undoing many of these laces on Numenorean women since they have gotten here? The thought burns through her mind suddenly and she wonders how many he’s been kneeling for until now, here, in this forge, in this island. The before doesn’t seem to matter to her yearning mind.
He wrenches the underwear from her once the laces are loose enough, tossing it aside without care and there is a smirk tugging at his lips for the split second she’s allowed to see his face. Satisfied, driven, a single-minded focus that takes her breath away.
“Halbrand!” She calls out. She pulls at his hair, she trembles against his lips. She makes noises that are inhuman and unelven.
His tongue licks a stripe through the wetness of her center as he pulls her right leg over his shoulder and dives into her. He is ruthless, groaning as he tastes her.
A handful of thoughts twinkle in her mind before he pulls her attention wholly on her body and what he’s doing to her. One. She hasn’t had anyone there but herself in a millenium. Two. It is incredible that she is feeling his lips there before she feels them on hers. Three. She was supposed to be the one in control of this.
But then his lips – his lips that snark and smirk and spite her – brush her clit, a light, revering kiss. His tongue traces every fold and line of it before he’sd sucking it into his mouth. She curses, shifts, hips bucking closer, as if she wishes to be devoured whole by him. And he’s trying his hardest to fulfill that desire. She’s running wet as a river.
Oh, the noises she makes, the feel of his hair in her grasp; she’s pressing his face deeper into her. His name falls from her lips. She has no regard for anyone who might hear; who cares what a smith and a maiden are doing on the eve of the departure for war? No one.
She looks down as he shifts away, breaking just an instant for a sharp intake of breath. His eyes over the blue of her dress are dark, wicked, pleased. She can feel a breathy chuckle against the very wet center of her and she shivers from it. She hasn’t felt this way: this wanted, this hot, this wet, in centuries.
His hand wraps around the leg over his shoulder to hold it in place, hold her steady. It’s rough, calloused skin touching hers, smearing soot on her. He’s stronger than she expected. She didn’t think a Man would be able to hold her down this way.
“Who thought,” he breathes against her. He sounds muffled, messy, out of breath. “Elves taste so sweet?” He kisses the tender skin between thigh and center, his beard chafes and she groans. “I would feast onto you forever.”
It is too close to a declaration; it makes her heart skip an uncomfortable beat. Forever and Men and her do not get along. He will be gone in the blink of an eye, within days on the battlefield perhaps. She tightens her grip on his hair, and uses it to push his mouth into her again.
She swears he laughs at her eagerness. She feels it before he moans at her taste again, and before she feels his tongue dip into her center, lapping at the wetness of her as if to coax her open. He’s eating her, savoring her, worshiping her like she is a golden fruit off of a tree in Valinor, nectar of the Valar and ambrosia in one. The noises he makes, muffled against her flesh, are those of a man possessed. She finds herself listening to them in the midst of her own pleasure, quieting her own sighs to hear him better.
Heat is building steadily in her core, every flick of his tongue, bump of his nose, kiss and lick and suck and moan dripping into her and making her warmer, tighter, more sensitive. He is an expert at stoking a fire to melt ore into liquid; she remembers.
“Halbrand, plea-,” she realizes she’s begging halfway through the words and the last consonants die on her tongue.
“Oh,” he grins against her and she can feel it. “Don’t stop yourself on my account.” He’s smug and it’s infuriating.
She’s so mad suddenly, so frustrated, she almost snaps back, she pulls at his hair and hears the low, almost warning groan that comes out of his mouth, feels the vibrations of it against her. His arms wrap around her and shove her back, sit her onto the edge of the work table. He shoves her legs open once more.
When he touches her again, his lips close around her clit, followed immediately by a finger, pressing into her. She keens, pressing herself against his mouth, against his hand. He pulls back too soon. She’s about to curse at him, halfway to furious, when she feels two fingers pressing in together.
The table dents under her right hand, and she can swear he’s losing hair by the minute, but he says nothing, doesn’t ask her to stop, only dedicates himself further to her pleasure. She cannot think anymore. His fingers crook inside of her, his clever tongue runs circles over her clit and she’s done. It’s over.
The tension snaps and she comes, hard, muscles twitching and body aching with the flash of pleasure. She shouts his name and finds no shame in it. She goes mindless in his hands. She could sob with it, she’s certain of it but she doesn't.
He carries her through, fingers thrusting in and out in slow, deliberate motions, drinks of her without shame or care. It becomes this endless, almost aching pleasure that tingles through the very bones of her.
She has to pull him away herself to stop him from bringing her to another shattering orgasm, to keep him from overwhelming her completely with feelings and sensations. She pulls him off of her with her hand still in his hair, and this time she fully tugs at him, rips him off.
He’s groaning at the pain of it, his face flinching, lines carved into his skin, and she can see his mouth and his beard wet with her very own juices. The look in his eyes is the look of a wild animal; there is a darkness, a wilderness there that takes her breath away. He’s panting, she realizes with a thrill of desire, chest rising and falling hard, hair fallen into his eyes.
He grins at her and lets her keep him in place by the hair, and she sees the flash of his teeth before he licks his lips: slow, satisfied, and obscene.
“Halbrand,” she’s out of breath too, and the name on her lips is far from as chastising as she desires it to be. Especially considering she was shouting his name minutes ago.
“Galadriel,” he answers, mirthful. He says it the elven way too, with the rolling r and correct emphasis, but it sounds and looks odd in his mouth, elven tones foreign to his low man mouth. This is not Elendil, raised Edain in the truest sense, or Elrond, an elf by any standard these days.
She lets go of him and he lets his head drop to his chest before pulling himself to his feet. She’s still sitting on the edge of the table, legs open, exposed to him in the warm light of the fire. She couldn't care less. There is no one here, the only windows and the door behind her. And considering the time he’s just spent with his mouth to her folds, a look will not do more.
He rises to his feet, long limbs and tall frame unfolding before her, going from serving to towering. She watches him, can’t help the thrill and heat shoot down into her core again, cannot help how hungry she finds herself still, for him.
He rises, doesn’t flinch from the unscrewing of his knees, but there is a distortion in his clothes, a sizable bump behind the leather apron that wasn’t there before. She spreads her legs further, reaches out with her hand for the sword belt he wears and pulls him to her, closer, head canted up slightly to look into his eyes.
He licks his lips again, groans at the flavor and she almost slaps him for it. His eyes play mischievous to her, daring her to act. So she does. She plays into his little game, rises up to claim his mouth in a kiss. He’s wet and tastes of her, he kisses back with no hesitation, all mouth and tongue and teeth and applies the same dedication to her mouth as he did to her folds.
He’s a devouring man when it comes to many things: he wants and he takes and he burns through with need and passion. She’s seen it, she knows, he’s confessed to it earlier. Taking the easy ways. He would not react well to proper, lengthy teasing. He wants it now, true and hard.
Is it a human quality or is it just Halbrand?
Either way, in this instance, she’s more than happy for it.
He holds her face with both hands now, she feels the occasional edge of the leather bracers bumping against her neck. She surprised him in his forge, in his place of labor and creation; he wears the clothes of it still, the apron and belt and bracers, the guild crest on his shoulder glinting with firelight.
This is no meadow, no bedroom. This is a forge. This is humanity and mortality and need. She adores it in this moment.
Her hands travel down his chest, feeling the muscles below the skin. She has seen his chest through the wreck of the shirt he wore on the raft, seen the muscle there. He has filled out some on the days since then, feasted on clams and wine and bread and she can see it, see the health, feel the mass of flesh underneath the clothing and underneath her fingers. There is no famished look to him anymore.
One of his arms lowers and she feels the press of his hand against her back, inching her closer, wrapping her in the warmth of his frame and she lets him, lets him ravish her as he desires. Oh, how he desires. Her eyes are open and his are closed and he kisses her like he would drink the water of life from her mouth and forever be sated.
His belt is simple in design, and it is easy to take off and hits the ground with a one note sound. He chuckles under his breath, smug still. She has no doubt his mind is filled with the satisfaction of taking apart an elf such as her, so she grins and takes her revenge.
The strategy is simple: pierce his defenses and infiltrate past the walls of fabric. She sees slits on the sides of the apron and though the tunic is long, she knows she is fast. Nimbly, she slides through the leather, her other hand pulling up the linen and in half a second, her fingers wrap around his cock.
The noise he makes into his mouth is ridiculous. Therefore, it is glorious.
He moans into the kiss. It’s rough and dry, only the beading wetness at the tip of him to help the passage of her hand but he bucks into her grip still. A man used to discomfort, a man too needy and too aroused to care.
“I would have imagined you sated,” he tells her, still devouring her every other syllable.
“And I would have thought you with less tame of an imagination. I am not so easily beaten.” She starts pushing against the string of his breeches, attempts to bare at least his lower half so they will be equally exposed. Only for the sake of equality, and not because she aches for him, and for the sight of him.
“This isn’t battle, elf.”
She huffs. “And that is why I will win.”
She bites his lip – his still-healing split-open in a tavern brawl, deliciously red and plumb lip – until she tastes blood. His cock twitches in her fingers, more wetness smearing at the tip. The curses he lets out against her mouth would make her blush, had she not spent the last millenia on battlefields across Arda.
He starts palming her beast over the tight binding of her dress and she aches for more, for closer, for skin against skin again. It wouldn’t be the smartest; they are in a forge after all, but she is reckless here. He’s straining in her hand, gasping against her mouth and her neck as he kisses lower, as she strokes him in a steady, controlled rhythm.
“Disrobe, Halbrand,” she whispers, and he doesn’t seem to listen to her at first.
The wetness of his mouth, of saliva and blood and whatever else, makes a pathway down her neck and he’s sucking a delicious mark on her pulsepoint. Elves heal fast and he does not have the strength in his jaw to hurt her in any way that would show tomorrow. Still, she sighs, falters in her pace.
“Halbrand,” she calls out again, a bit impatient. She’d rather have him naked, feel his flesh under her hands, than clothed and hidden. “I want to see all of you.”
He sighs, heavily, as if he’s giving into something she’s forcing out of him. He shifts away from her and she lets him go, watches him take a step back, then a second. Would he run from her now? She sits there, legs open, inviting. Awaiting. There doesn’t need to be voiced threats if he does not comply; she is not that type of lover. Not tonight, at least.
Not when she sees him smirk and reach for the shoulder of his apron. The crest clinks, a barely audible sound only her elven ears catch, as he unclips it from the clasp at the shoulder of his apron. He looks away from her for an instant, to look down at the golden disk, at the light playing on the filigree.
When he looks up again, it’s to reach out to her, the crest held between index and middle fingers – the ones that were inside of her – and hold it to her lips. The metal is warm from the charged air of the forge but it is smooth, foreign. He keeps it pressed there until she opens her mouth and slides it between her teeth.
“Safekeeping,” he mutters. There is something wicked dancing on his face, she wants to slap him for it, pay back his insult with another but there, she has that smooth metal in her teeth and cannot help but trace the edge of it with her tongue.
“You are much less contradictory like this.”
He must see the threat she lets show undisguised on her face. He steps back, holds up his hands like he’s pleading for mercy, and reaches for the clasp of his apron. Another small metallic sound: pieces of metal sliding against each other, an unbuckling: leather and metal. The heavy garment falls to the ground.
Her breath quickens. The tunic he wears is long, reaches his knees, is messy already from her pulling at it to reach his skin. There is a faded pattern at the collar; she watches his fingers wrap around it, crinkling it, before he pulls it off over his head. It joins the apron and belt on the ground.
She was right. The food here, the life here, has filled out the hollowed places of his body, and there is already a layer of comfortable fat and flesh between the muscle and the skin. It fits the height and width of his bones better. It fits the leather bracers on his wrists, the messiness of his hair, the few days of beard on his cheeks.
There is hair on his chest too, brown curls leading down to the loosened string of his breeches, glinting with sweat and the firelight. She swallows. Her mouth tastes like the gold crest she still holds in her teeth.
He bends to pull the breeches out of the boots, she’s staring at the expense of his back she can see from here. Few scars, tan skin, space aplenty for her nails to dig into him. He straightens back up. His eyes meet hers. His hands travel to the string of the breeches and he does not, for a second, stop staring right into her eyes.
She should tell him to hurry. She should remove the coin from her lips and curse at him. She should go do it herself. She just watches, and drips of wetness at the sight of him.
He undoes the string, pushes the edge of his breeches down and lets the pull of the earth do the rest. She’s barely breathing by the time he’s stepped out of them. He stands naked. The fire of the forge behind him. The shine of labor over him. Tan skin. Brown hair. His cock, hard and erect, standing between his legs. Strong thighs.
She has to remind herself of the guild crest. She almost lets it slip.
“You will let me have the mercy of footwear in my own forge, will you?”
She nods, dismissive. She doesn’t care. Instead, she stands.
She plants her feet on the ground, lets the dress fall back to cover her. She reaches for the tie fastening her binding. She unknots the decorative one, and then goes for the structural, the one keeping her chest in place and her back straight. She’s as slow, as deliberate as he was. She can see on his face, in how he licks his lips, in the bob of the prominence of his neck, that he aches as deeply as she does.
She feels the fabric loosening around her chest and soon she can just pull it away, let the ribbons of dark blue fabric fall onto the table, tangle with his metalworking tools. The crest is still in her teeth; she’s still breathing around it, still tasting metal when she swallows. She doesn’t know what compels her to keep it there.
The dress is loose around her body now. He crosses the distance between them, reaches for her arms and helps her out of it. She’s blinded by blue for a moment, and when she sees him again, he throws the dress to the ground and takes hold of her. His teeth steal the crest from her mouth and he spits it out onto the pile of clothes, she can barely hear the noise it makes as it impacts because he’s already onto her. He kisses her, pulls her up into his arms to carry her back to the table. His body is warm, strong, large when she wraps her legs around him. She can feel the hard length of him against her, can feel the tension in his muscles that yearn for her, and she yearns right back.
His hands roam over her the second she’s settled back on the table, mapping the curves of her, caressing her sides. One of his palms, roughened by the leather bracer he still wears, cups her right breast and she presses up into his touch. She’s an ember in the firepit, an electric eel in a storm, she feels alight with something foreign and instinctive at once.
“I have wanted you…” he whispers. “For so long.”
She remembers feeling his eyes on her on the raft, on the boat, in the cells; she remembers the prickling of his attention. She tells herself she was busy surviving to see him for what he was: a deeply attractive man, but it would be a lie. She’s not above lying.
“Incredible, reckless, infuriating, Galadriel,” he praises her, his mouth skimming over the side of her face. He pushes back strands of her hair and she feels his lips – barely a kiss and yet so much – against the tip of her ear.
“More,” she moans, immediately. It is barely more than a wordless plea but he understands, and he licks the shape of it, sucks the tip into his mouth, that clever mouth of his, that reduces her to shattered pieces of glass.
She reaches for his cock again; he deserves a reward as much as she wants to feel his need for her pulsing in her palm. She strokes him, feels the heat of him, feels the emptiness inside of herself where he would fit so beautifully. He’s larger than she’s used to, the size of his body proportionate in all accounts, but he’s right. She is reckless. And she hates not getting what she desires.
She shifts, tilts her hips towards him, guides his cock towards her entrance with a steady hand – the only thing about her steady in this moment. Her heart is pounding, her breath is coming out hard and fast.
Once she can feel him brushing where she needs him to be, she looks up. He’s looking down at her, awe and want carving shadows all over his face, lips open, hungry. He looks ready to beg, ready to give her a throne, and a crown, and the world if she seemed to desire it.
Her mind brings forth old feelings, Galadriel a thousand years younger, and her aching for a throne of her own. All she does is nod at him, let go of him, and he starts pushing inside of her.
He is large indeed, but he seems aware of it. His shoulders tense with control as she forces herself not to, as she forces her body to welcome him in. She makes herself pliant and melts against him, feels the hard length of him filling the hollowed place in her and it is wondrous. It’s a slow, wonderful stretch. Keening noises fall out of her mouth, echoing the grunts from him, and they take their time and savor this, savor the feeling of joining when he’s finally settled as deep as he will go.
Green eyes overcome with pleasure and hunger meet hers. She could come apart from this alone. A heartbeat. Two. Three. Perhaps a few more, she stops counting when he starts to move again, pull out of her and push back in. Her legs tighten around him, her arms wrapping around his shoulders to hold him against her.
It only starts slow. Soon enough she needs more and his own dam breaks and he is holding her to him, holding her steady, just as much as she is. One of his hands travels up her thigh, squeezes over the flexing muscle of her leg, feeling for her strength and settles there, grabbing her, keeping her in place as he drives himself harder and faster into her.
She digs her heel into his flesh, urges him faster – who's the horse now? She thinks to say before he catches her on a particularly deep thrust and she groans.
“You ruin me, Galadriel,” effort and pleasure deepen in his voice, the growl of it shuddering down her spine. “All that will… be left… Ruin.”
She claws at his back as he fucks her, forgets the language he understands and moans in Elven, and she can swear he groans when she calls him filthy names in that tongue, even if she knows he can’t understand her.
The storm brewing in her guts is back, threatening and dark and she rushes towards it, fucking herself back onto him, forgetting all but the rush of pleasure, the feeling of him inside of her, of his arms and his back and the heat of him. She feels sweat rolling down her back; she knows she’s a flush mess.
“Don’t stop,” she begs under her breath, in what she can only hope is a tongue he speaks. It’s ridiculous how he unravels her now. It’s wonderful.
His hand not gripping her thigh rode up to knot in the mass of her hair. She whined as he pulled her head back – not harshly, but hard enough to be truly, deeply, felt, to make her tighten around his cock–, to bare her throat and allow him the space to assault it. She felt his mouth on her pulse point, his teeth dragging at her skin, the growling of moans in his throat coming to die against her flesh.
Her fingers dig into his back, that smooth plane she’d thought to mark earlier, and she knows it hurts from the noise wrenched out of him and from the punishing thrust she wins in revenge.
“You like it rough then, Man?” She asks, and she hates and loves the cracks in her voice at that moment. She wishes to sound unaffected. She wishes to sound utterly wrecked.
“You are a blade. I choose you in full knowledge.”
“Stop thinking poetry,” she answers. There’s a blush staining her cheeks now, even with the heat. “Satisfy me, instead.”
He shifts, pulls her even closer to the edge of the table, hooks his arm under the thigh he was gripping and she feels splayed open under him, brought closer even than before. His cock hits the depths of her with his next thrusts and the howl of pleasure and surprise that escapes her would be humiliating if dignity was a concern.
“You are not good enough an actress… to make me believe… I have not satisfied you already… I can still taste you, elf.”
Suddenly, it is a sparring match again. They’re both moving to make the other shatter first, her cunt tightening, his thrusts relentless, her nails dug into him and his hand in her hair holding her head still so he can maul her with his mouth. She cannot help the smile that slips between noises and curses.
With that competitive pace, any hope of lasting long is dashed and they’re soon gasping, losing air, losing words. He lets go of her leg to find her clit, snakes his hand between the crushing of their bodies and she sees stars.
“Let go, Galadriel. Let me see you come,” he groans into her ear. “Let me feel you come for me.”
The raw yearning in his words, the rolling of his fingers on her, the friction of his cock, the hand in her hair, it all hits her from a thousand angles and she shatters in his arms. The wave is electric, time slips between her fingers. The first sunrise had nothing on this.
“Halbrand!” She calls out. He only removes his fingers from her clit to hold onto her tighter, hold her in place as he follows after her, a few thrusts behind. She can barely hear it but she can feel his mouth shaping her name over and over again, a prayer in four syllables.
They stay curled around each other, breathing hard against each other. The grip on her hair loosens, but his hand stays. She soaks in the feeling of his skin, of his warmth. She wants to stay shattered a little longer, but reality is setting in already. She is leaving in the morning, leaving for war and for battle and though she is unlikely to die, she is just as unlikely to ever come back to Numenor.
He moves, pulling his softened cock out of her and presses his forehead against her. Her heart skips a beat. Elrond is the only person that treats her this kindly, this closely anymore. And he pushed her into exile.
She doesn’t want there to be space between their bodies again. He seems to understand her wishes, for now, as he doesn’t let go of her hair just yet, reaches up with his over hand to hold her face and kisses her.
Wordless thanksgiving, burning embers of desire, a goodbye. It is sweet as the sun-drenched grapes of autumn and bitter as red wine pulled from them. This will make for an excellent memory for the both of them. That kiss itself is already a ghost, but she kisses back just as soft. Her hands trace down his chest again, mapping them into her mind.
They part. The forge fire has stopped its roaring. Perhaps it never roared at all, perhaps that was just them, just her, consumed by another fire and unable to distinguish reality from it.
His face isn’t as soft as his kiss was when she looks fully at him again. There is a hint of shadow, a hint of emptiness, an endless hollow where the sparks usually are. He has gone cold with some of his thoughts. Is it regret or something else? She cannot tell.
“Is your mind still set to stay?” She asks, if only to break the odd silence now stretching between them.
He cocks his head just a bit, the shadow shifts and the smirk that pulls on his lips is odd. It’s a cold fire now, compared to his usual warm flame. The fingers knotted in her hair tighten. She realizes what she has done with this question just as he opens his mouth to answer it.
“Now, I wonder if you really needed me to teach you courtly manipulation, elf.” He mutters. “Though I imagine you knew sex was not a weapon you could use with Miriel. How you thought you could use it on me…”
He’s not moving away from her, not doing anything to clothe himself, they are still standing there, still bare, still intertwined and she can see a threat in his eyes, a threat so large and looming it makes her shudder. It doesn’t seem directly at her fully, she does not fear for her safety, but there is fury there. Cold, burning, fury.
“I did not. Seduction has never been my weapon. I leave it to others gracefully.”
He seems to search for something inside of her then and she is more than happy to show herself in her most open sincerity. She doesn’t have anything to hide from him. She wanted him. She still does. He has not lost any of his appeal to her. She wasn’t using him.
“Too bad,” he mutters after a moment and his face softens again, smile lines reappearing, body relaxing again. “I would have let you manipulate me again. Or at least attempt so.”
She exhales, secretly relieved that there is no great breaking, no anger to immediately sour the moment. He kisses her again, light and playful and finally lets go of her, of her hair and of her face. He steps away, moving to retrieve his clothes and she watches him move, all that towering height of his, those well-worn muscles. He has the body of a warrior more than a smith’s aide, knows how to wield weapons as well as he can forge them.
“Were you ever only a smith’s aide?”
“I was. But when your whole world, when your people are at war, you learn the arts of it young. Whatever desire for creation and craft I had, that talent, when it came to war, I had to cast it aside. I learned to defend myself and others. It made me a better smith. It made me understand how to forge for utility as well as aesthetics, how to make weapons for kings that will not see battle, and how to make weapons for those who will die in the mud.”
This is the most she’s ever learned of him, and he’s putting his clothes back on, turning his back and she sees the tracks her fingers left behind. It must hurt. He says nothing, pulls his tunic back over it.
“Were you ever only a commander?”
His question, her turn to answer. She leaves her perch on the table and gathers her dress again, feels the wetness of his spend escaping her.
“I became one when my brother died. I took the warrior’s mantle in seeking the Enemy. Before that… I used to sing, and dance. I spent many years with a Maia relative of mine… I was softer then. Kinder. Never entirely soothed, but I was not the… reckless colt you see now.”
The look he casts towards her is incomprehensible to her. There is awe and there is sadness, darkness and light. She knows he wouldn’t prefer her to still be the softer version of her; she still feels the phantom feeling of his lips on that scar he’d found. Still, there is a world that has been lost to her and to the world in their fight against Morgoth and his servant.
They finish dressing in silence. Those words exchanged ring around them, somehow more vulnerable and intimate than the feeling of him inside of her, of his skin against hers.
“I have work to finish,” he calls out. “Before you and the troops depart in the morning.”
Those words do more to push her away than a physical shove would have. It’s closing the door between the two of them, closing hope that he will join her. It is making this a goodbye. She picks the gold crest from the ground and places it on the table, doesn’t give it back to him directly. She walks away.
“I will wear that armor proudly,” she says as she stands on the threshold of the forge again. “And remember the name of the smith who forged it. Halbrand. King of the Southlands.”
“I know you will, Galadriel.”
There are a few hours of night left for her to sleep. She does not. In the morning, the armor, with the sigil of her house decorating the front, is delivered to her quarters. It fits perfectly.