thelioninmybed:

Please, let’s go home/ I love you, they said. I love you.

The war had called to his brothers and his sister, and all their quarrelsome children. It had called to his own bright sons and his fierce, lovely daughter. 

 And the war had claimed them, all but one. 

In Treelight, he and Artanis had walked the beaches of Elendë, the white sand soft beneath bare toes as she splashed in the shallows and demanded he name every sea star. Upon the ragged new shores of this eastern land, they wore stout boots, for they were all torn rock and silt, and the waters colder than the Bay of Eldamar. And Artanis was Galadriel now, and if her name was softer, it was all of her that was. 

“How wroth would Fëanor be to see Melkor come to ruin by your hand?” she said. Her golden hair was bound back from her face which made her sharp cheekbones stand the starker. “Perhaps it’s a mercy he is gone beyond that knowledge.”

Finarfin saw no mercy in the fate his brother had made for himself, and held his tongue. It was often so – they spoke in strategy and memories but when they tried to talk of what was or what would be, beyond the next forced march or battle, they spoke past each other. 

“I have changed too much, o my father,

and you have changed too little,” Galadriel had said and Finarfin had held his tongue again, though he thought her as wrong about that as she was about his brother. 

From the beaches of Middle Earth, one could not see Tol

Eressëa or the white tower of Avallónë but still Finarfin found himself seeking it, a point of reference in the dark-scummed sea that slumped against the shore. “The war is done,” he said, because that he knew was true. “Please, let us go home.” 

His daughter did not look towards the sea, but up at the dark stone cliffs and beyond, to the churned battlefields and felled forests of a wounded land. “I am home, Father.”

“We miss you.” Another truth. “We love you.”

A point of certainty.

“Just as I love you,” she said, with a defiant clench of her sharp jaw. “But I am not finished with Middle Earth, any more than it is finished with me.”

“You always were a prideful girl. You would linger and linger when Telperion had waxed and you should have been long abed. ‘Just one more game,’ you’d say. ‘Just one more page’.”

“I’m not a young girl dawdling in the gardens part her bedtime, Father,” said Galadriel, who had not liked being treated as a child even when she had been one. “I will come home. But not because the Valar called. And not because you called me either.”

Finarfin saw he would not move her, any more than he had moved his brothers those long years ago. He had changed though, whatever she thought, and would not have them part in bitterness and grief once more. “No. Not a girl. A prideful woman.” He kissed her brow – she had to duck her head that he might reach. “Don’t keep your mother waiting too long. Or me.”

“Before we part, I would ask one favour,”

said Galadriel, who had been Artanis and was still his daughter now and evermore.

She bent, slim fingers slipping beneath the surf, and came up with a sea star cradled in her palms. “Give her a name.”