#pls tell me the saw you from across the bar thing hasnt already been done w them ill cry

[balrogballs]

happy valentines day to everyone but especially to ✨ wife guys ✨ as a treat, have a little Celedriel ficlet about how much they love each other because they simply are not leaving my skull atm:

The Homecoming

“They face everything hand in hand every time they must, from hornets to sorcerers, blinking and bewildered by what the world has become. Long oceans and lost homelands; floors of green grass grinning below treetops, they are limitless.”

He first met Galadriel under an upside-down tree and she had asked him whether it was his tree. Celeborn was not certain as to whose tree it was but in the face of her hair he felt himself succumb to spontaneous moral depletion and barefacedly told her that it was not only his tree, but that it was him that put it upside down, because he thought seeming artistically inclined would work in his favour with the Nolde. On the evening they exchanged betrothal vows he felt so ridiculously guilty about his little lie that he admitted it and watched her laugh until she cried and frankly, felt quite pleased with himself.

Celeborn enjoyed sitting around just looking at her and there were people who said that such pursuits were pointless for an elf of his lineage, militaristic credentials and bearing.

Absolutely, he would agree quite seriously. They absolutely are pointless. This is such a problem, thank you for pointing it out. I’ll sit right here, just where I am, look out of the window into her garden, and wonder what to do about it, say for the next few hundred years. Now it is a difficult task, please, leave me to it.

“Most know my father is like a raincloud if rainclouds shat gold,” Celebrían once told Elrond, who apprehensively glanced at the fearsome commander he spent a century under siege alongside, as if he would twist off his head for not only conversing shamelessly with his daughter but gossiping about him. “But few remember that my mother picks up every coin and spends it with glee.”

She does indeed.

Galadriel never did anything as Celeborn as sitting about gazing adoringly at people, but that was only because she, with her strange and awkward stubbornness, wrestled the vague shape of him into most things she beheld. She could be on a deserted shore and she would trick her own eyes into finding him atop a marvellous shipwreck or petrified salt-rock. Every space and time in her life which required courage to pass through, she would conjure him and he would appear like a — no, not a phantom, Celeborn was too easygoing and frothy-laughed and light-footed to be particularly good at melancholic hauntings, he’d be far too happy drifting about in the empty spaces of the world. Perhaps a poltergeist, then. Or a very controlled mirage.

Lothlorien was intimate solitude, the quiet before fireworks. They never told others of how they love and live, they were the two of them, and then one day their remarkable Celebrían. Cello-baby, he called her because she hated it. Monkey-child, Galadriel named her, because she was. They shared each other wholly and without care and it meant all their joys were tripled and it meant that when Cello-baby left for good the loss was thrice as unbearable than it would have been otherwise.

Nothing endures for so long as love between the Eldar. As the centuries pass, their love shapes the world and shapes itself to it. Galadriel, scrying mirror and treelit hair, the world in her hands and Celeborn in her heart. They shape the forest and through the forest, the world: the Cello-baby shaped vacancies between their embraces, the hunting grounds and tree-top love affairs. They covet sameness and turn it to difference. The slow rot spreads across Arda and they cling to each other through time to feel alive in the dying world, like bees suspended in a jar of sticky honey, fleas in the rough, matted neck of a stray-cat. They do not cling to a folded-down page in history but burrow their way through the book itself.

Mithrandir once asks her if she does not feel inconsequential in the forest. Without the marauding ranger circle around Imladris, away from the corrosion of Mirkwood, he asks her if she never longed to fly further. Whether she could not see the forest for the trees.

“Perhaps our landscape makes you feel inconsequential, Mithrandir,” she says dryly. She doesn’t wear shoes at home — a habit her daughter carried to Imladris and passed on to her three, and then to Eldarion, and then ever onwards. But yes, Galadriel spins in a dizzy circle in the little room and says, “but I have all the world I need. I can see what I must, and I will do what I will when the world and the Valar will it. But inconsequential? Amidst hornets nests and horsefly season? In the forest fire of the previous year, this sunset and the next, for these little things I am time and space itself. We are.”

Celeborn has Galadriel feeling limitless even in the smallest of rooms. They face everything hand in hand every time they must, from hornets to sorcerers, blinking and bewildered by what the world has become. He has her back and she has his heart. With his solid weight behind her she can swallow future after future with dangerous abandon. He is not the risk but the reason for it: he is so alive it is almost irritating. Long oceans and lost homelands; floors of green grass grinning below treetops, they are limitless.

Age after age rolls by and they do not stop loving each other in their strange, incomprehensible way. An oddly domesticated love language seemingly apathetic to external perception, the way the spool predicts the pattern of its unravelling, how even on the darkest nights they can reach out to the other and find the little hook where their truest selves hang, trusting in the mnemonics of homecoming. They are an arithmetic problem that never asked to be solved. They are simply Galadriel and Celeborn, under an upside down tree, always and ever.