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It was a long courtship.
If things had turned out differently, Galadriel would have looked back upon it with more anger, with more rage in her heart for every obstacle, every late night call that pulled them apart to separate ends of the galaxy to face separate crisis.
“We could just get married,” she had said one night as Celeborn rooted around his small quarters, trying to pack a bag for a diplomatic mission to an outer planet which had suddenly decided to pull out of sending aid as if the machines could be reasoned with, as if their resistance wasn’t the last hope they had left.
“No,” he had said, kissing her forehead and she scowled at him, almost slapping his face. “Not yet,” he added, tipping her chin back to give her a proper kiss.
“What are you waiting for?” she asked, cross legged on his bed as he slung his bag over his shoulder. “The war isn’t going to end next week. We’ll probably die first, at this rate.”
He had smiled at her and left. She threw his pillow at the door and slept in his bed, twining a strand of his silvery hair around her fingers from where she found it in the sheets. Sometimes she didn’t understand how a man so young had such silver hair, but it was striking around his face.
Just as her hair, more gold than silver, was striking. When they stood together, it was a beautiful picture. Sometimes she smiled, because there was too much vanity in her heart and she enjoyed the looks of shock and desire they caused.
Other nights she was the one stumbling about in the low light, long hair twisted up quickly into a bun as she threw a flight suit on and tried to convince the mess hall to give her extra rations over the intercom. “If only stupid Maedhros could be convinced, for once, not to do something stupid,” she growled and Celeborn had laughed, twining his hands around her waist and pulling her against his chest.
“Then he would not be Maedhros,” he said. “And we would be losing even more of this war.”
“We could run away,” she said, sagging back against him. “Avoid this war, or only tangentially be involved. We don’t have to try and hold it together.”
“You’d never run away,” he said and that was that.
So she went to her ship, taking a smaller vessel to meet up with the main fleet. Sometimes she missed being a pilot, having her own ship and to feel it thrum and jump at her command. Now she was a general though, standing on the bridge of a monstrous ship that lumbered through space. She still felt it thrum underneath her feet, but she no longer touched it, no longer guided it with her own long, pale fingers. Instead she stood at the center, others running around her and reports and orders flowed through her hands like water.
Because she was a general and Celeborn the most gifted of their diplomatic core, many assumed on meeting them she would be the angrier, the one more likely to yell at them. Except her anger and desires flared close on the surface and passed quickly, and she rose to the rank she did because she remained cool and collected at the center of the storm when everything around her was falling apart.
Celeborn’s anger was deeper, passionate, and his tongue cutting when someone failed.
Sometimes she wondered whose eyes were more haunted when she kicked off the blankets because everything still felt too hot, years after escaping the ice, and he tripped in her quarters because the lights were dim, or when she held him as he shivered and shook through a nightmare, and he would stare at the passing stars as if they held any answers.
“Please don’t cut your hair,” he had said one night, fingers tangled up in it and she had tilted her head back, smiling faintly.
“Why would I?” she asked, already knowing the answer. “You wouldn’t think me less beautiful, would you?”
He laughed, shaking his head. “Perhaps more so. Perhaps that is what I am afraid of.”
She had smiled again and nuzzled against his chest because it was easier than to think of Fingon, who had smiled so easily and now looked like he felt out of place with his shorn hair and dark eyes.
“They’re going to make your admiral,” she told Fingon one day, watching him closely. They were wearing the least amount of layers as anyone on the bridge, and there was a sparkle of gold in Fingon’s hair that had been missing for the last several years.
He laughed, shaking his head, because he insisted on remaining a pilot despite constant pressure to at least make him a general, like her. “No, they won’t. And if they try, I’ll refuse.”
“You aren’t going to manage that for long,” she said, handing off another report. “They need a symbol.”
“They have Maedhros,” he shrugged. “Or… or Glorfindel.”
“Neither of which are you,” she pointed out. “With your blood line of esteemed leaders,” and he snorted, not because he disagreed that his family was esteemed, but because it mattered little to him and he hated to be judged on his kin. “And they both lack what you have.”
“And what’s that?” he asked easily, head cocked to one side. People were staring at them, as they often did when Fingon and Galadriel were together.
“Charisma, for one,” she said and he snorted again. “And your odd ability to somehow make out the best in a horrible situation.”
“I have no interest in being admiral,” he said and she smiled at him instead of arguing again. “How’s Celeborn? Still won’t marry you?”
“He’s some stubborn notion in his head or another,” she sighed and shook her head. “I’m not sure what sign from the heaven’s he’s waiting for.”
“Maybe it’s from a slightly less lofty place than the heavens,” Fingon teased, his smile a pale imitation of what it once had been.
“Oh, don’t say things just because you think they sound clever,” she huffed and he laughed, the sound odd and hollow as it echoed off the metal hull of the ship.
Galadriel had met Celeborn after the year on the ice, after they had cobbled together scraps enough to escape. She had met him with her eyes wild and her spine straight, convinced she could take on the machines—and perhaps Feanor and his kin as well—by herself. She wasn’t sure why he had been willing to approach her then, when she wanted to tear everything that tried to touch her apart. Anything that threatened to melt the ice of her rage was a danger, but then he had smiled and coaxed her with a cup of tea and she had thought, maybe not.
Since then, they had been playing hide and seek with the machines, gaining ground to lose more of it from a different direction. She had calmed enough to not tear Maedhros’ eyes out when they met, his face gaunt and missing a hand. She had kissed Celeborn one night when neither of them had to save anyone, climbing into his lap when he was reading reports and tearing his attention away.
“I am tired,” she said, a year later. “Of never having the time.”
“I know,” he replied, smoothing a hand over her hair, down her spine. “This is the worst time to fall in love.”
“We might not have a lot more of it,” she said and he kissed her, instead of letting her ask to wed him again.
It was another year, and she staggered back into his arms, the crowd around them cheering for their general who had fought hard and won a scant victory. “You came back,” he said and his voice was thick. “I wasn’t sure you would.”
“It would take more to kill me,” she said, eyes glittering. “And I won’t leave you. I said so.”
His fingers slid across her cheeks and into her hair and he kissed her with the roar of the crowd in her ears, almost drowned out by the beat of her heart. They had never kissed before in such a public space, never aired their affection for others to see, though anyone that met them knew something existed between them.
“I missed you,” he said with a faint, almost sly smile and she wrapped her arms around his shoulders, resting her head on his chest.
Months later, they were in his quarters, her hair loosely pulled up and falling around her face when he looked at her and seemed to make a decision. “You could ask again.”
Galadriel quirked her brows up as she looked at him. “You won’t say no again, will you?” she asked and he shrugged, a little bashfully. “Why have you refused in all this time?”
“It never felt right,” he said. “We didn’t have the time for each other. Neither of us were capable of it.” She raised her brow higher and he slid off the bed and curled up at her legs. “We could have married, and then would have been obligated to see each other. It would have bound us in obvious ways, that’s true, but that could easily have become a burden, rather than a gift. We’d know each other for a year, love, and spent most of it apart. Whatever in quiet times whatever we had wasn’t enough? You were still adjusting to a life where you didn’t have to claw and fight for everything, and I was still healing from losing my family, my home.”
“You thought we were using each other,” she said, bit behind her words.
“I was worried we might be,” he admitted. “War is not kind to any of us.”
“Marry me,” she said. “Do not make me keep standing alone.” She thought of the desperate way Fingon stared at Maedhros, at the way her father had looked when she last saw him, hunched over and hurting, at the way Feanor’s wife had left him long ago, at the quiet way Thingol and Melian would smile at each other and move in the utter certainty that they moved together.
“You have never stood alone,” he said. “But I will not leave your side again. We will walk together.”
Their rings were scrap metal, but Celeborn had found someone able to twist the silver into a flower shape, and she smiled when she first saw it. “You’re a most sentimental man, aren’t you?” she asked.
At the time, it had felt like too long to waste, too much time they were not together.
Later, it was barely a drop in a bucket.