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It is Celeborn she asks to prick the memorial marks. He is a warrior, silver-bright as Aegnor and Angrod were gold, and his own wrists are ringed in black halfway to the elbow with the bands of loss: comrades, family, friends. And of all the souls in Doriath, he sees most clearly the grief she masters, outwardly. He knew her brothers, knows her, understands - she feels, with certainty - the depth with which she mourns.
She does not flinch beneath the strikes, over and over, around and around; the piercing bite of the thorn and the sting of the charcoal that follows draw no tears to her eyes. But the quiet of his presence moves her. Celeborn’s hands are gentle, almost tender, and the searching look in his deep brown eyes is kind.
Galadriel refuses that silently-offered sweetness.
She has no desire for a kinship of sorrow, beyond the ink he weaves around her wrists. And she has seen what loving does: to Aegnor, a husk whose heart had already flown, even before the burning, and Finrod, whose mad search for tenderness in Amarië's absence sends him barreling toward some bleak ending she can sense but not define. Let Celeborn take his fine eyes elsewhere, gaze with that limpid softness on some maiden of the Sindar. Artanis will be no one's willing bride.
It is not until he laughs that she realizes she has muttered her rejection aloud.
"But I have not asked you!" he grins, as she curses the slip of her mind and tongue in mortification. "And anyway this ink is wrong for lovers' marks. Those must be mulberry, to form the purple beneath the skin."
Celeborn touches his own body with his careful fingers. "Here," a brush against his collarbones. "And here," below his navel. "And here," a small, slow circle around the tender peak of each firm breast.
He watches her flush, with that calming stillness that draws her so.
"We do not join while we are in mourning, either," he says, in what she takes as reassurance.
Then Celeborn wipes the spots of blood and ink from her wrists with a cooling cloth, and lifts her arm to brush his mouth against her skin. The world narrows to his warm breath and his gentle clasp and the sparking hint of his tongue against her hammering pulse - and his deep eyes holding hers, no longer laughing.
"But when you wake and call for me, Galadriel," he says, with his lips still light and hot against her, "know this: I am already yours."