The Rescue of Celebrian

~*~
Elladan sank gingerly into a hot tub, alone in the chamber for the first time in a long while. Let Elrohir tease; he could not bring himself yet to visit those pools. He had not meant all those months… almost a year gone now… to interrupt them. His brother might well have been wed, at least in the manner their maternal grandparents had chosen, before that disastrous trip toward Lothlorien. And, thinking on that, he realized that perhaps the interruption had been fortunate. The pain and terror and rage of nearly losing his mother to the goblins could not be nearly as strong as losing a mate; but, for all he knew, the bonds were formed between their spirits before the bond of the flesh had been knit. It was not as though he and his brother had spoken or simply been together in the same ways as they had before the world had tilted so violently off its axis.

It saddened him, truly, to realize that his last memory of the maid who would have been his sister by marriage was the look of interrupted anticipation on her face when he rounded the last bend in the path and saw her watching his twin step naked into the bathing pool. He had turned and left as quickly as he could, but the damage, he knew, was done. Elrohir had been sad that afternoon. Not angry, as was his wont, but sad, and that, truly, scared Elladan more than almost anything he had seen or done in the last year, almost as though his twin had known the missed opportunity would be his last.

It was guilt that drove him to avoid those pools, and that avoidance of those pools that put Niphredil so often in his path. Elladan felt himself still tense in spite of the heat of the water and the scent of the oils he had added to it, thinking of how to explain himself to the maid who seemed more attached to him than he to her. Her name had been used in Elrohir’s successful and yet hurtful plan. Elladan had not wanted this, truthfully had wanted to keep the seeming attachment between him and the girl as quiet as possible. That was, apparently, not to be the case. Worse, though, were his brother’s words before the fight. “Then trust my word on this,” he’d said with the look in his eyes he only got when thinking of the opportunities he’d lost, “you don’t, and you’d be better off ending things anyway.”

Was he better off ending things, or was he, perhaps still too distracted by what lay behind them to evaluate the situation clearly? There was no real impediment to their joining, should they choose to do so, save the misgivings Elladan did his best to keep to himself. But the pairing, somehow, did not feel entirely right, and in trying to look at it from an outsider’s perspective, it certainly did not seem like the sudden ignition and whirlwind of joy that had been his brother’s realization of Nariel’s status in his heart. Nariel with her hair like darkest night, clinging wetly to her neck and shoulder, drifting around the rest of her in that pool, and the onrush of excitement and joy and burning, sweeping lust he’d felt from his brother came to mind again, and his cheeks flushed in shame. No, he did not feel that for Niphredil. He felt affection, esteem, contentment in her presence: he also felt those things in the company of their sister and many of the other maids within the household, a number of which had changed his soiled clothes and warmed his baths when he was a child. She was as family, but not, he realized, as his wife.

Now, to tell her this, he thought, but peered out of the curtained area of the bathing chambers when the door opened.

“You were thinking of me,” Niphredil said, more solemn than her usual, which said much already.

“How did you know?”

“The hue of your cheek,” she said, sitting on a stool within his eye shot but several paces away from the antechamber he occupied. “And the flash of guilt in your eyes when you realized who it is that disturbs you.”

“You are perceptive,” he replied, hooking the curtain around the top of one of his discarded, and mud-caked, boots, freeing his hand for the bath again.

“Perceptive enough that I hear things I am not meant to,” she added, sad but direct. He admired that about her, a trait she shared with his sister. Yet another comparison to his sister, he thought with dismay. This would be difficult.

“It will sound childish, I know, but it was not my idea,” Elladan said.

“I did not think the fight was such, no, but your honesty with your brother before it began?” Niphredil asked, one brow arched. “That was entirely yours, and not feigned.”

They sat studying each other for a long moment over the rim of the tub Elladan occupied before either of them spoke. Still, he did not think it best to begin with an apology, for he was not entirely certain he was responsible for the past months’ misunderstanding.

“This conversation just became infinitely easier from my perspective, did it not?” he asked, and thank the stars, she smiled.

“Likely.”

“I truly am sorry,” he said, finally meeting her eyes. “I cannot explain myself.”

“In a time of loneliness and loss and worry, companionship of whatever kind can be found is a welcome haven?” Niphredil suggested, her hands crossed around one bent knee.

“Yes,” Elladan said, surprised that she saw so quickly to the heart of something that still left him utterly puzzled.

“I have been afraid of that,” she said. “For quite a while I wondered if you were simply in need of a friend during a difficult period, and I think it was with that in mind that I began to spend what free time I had seeking yours. I believe…” She paused then, worrying a finger nail and breathing in such a way that Elladan knew she was holding her emotions in check with difficulty. “I believe that it was fear that led me to overlook what I knew deep down was not precisely right.”

“Then perhaps the same could be said of me,” Elladan replied, turning to brace his folded arms on the rim of the tub. “I do not think you unlovely, Niphredil; please, understand this. And you are vastly intelligent, and charming. It would take a fool as large as me, I think, to overlook the gift of your esteem. But it is said that those spirits which are destined for one another know it from a very young age, and I, at least, am considerably more than young.”

“We would have known,” she agreed softly, nodding. “I wonder how it is to know,” she mused almost to herself.

“Consuming, judging by what little I have understood of my brother’s bond with your sister,” he replied.

“And I am, in all honesty, not consumed,” she said. “Not that you are not worthy of--” she added quickly with eyes wide in concern at what had sprung from her mouth unconsidered. Elladan cut her off with a laugh and a wave of a dripping hand.

“I understand. It is well, or well enough.”

“And your ruse worked,” she said, standing then and rummaging for clean towels and the standing screens that the elves of Elrond’s valley used for additional privacy while dressing. “Your mother seems to be returning to herself.”

“It was Elrohir’s idea,” he said, closing the curtain again to finish washing. “I, likely, would have remained buried in books until the end of the age had he not chosen to act.”

“You are like my sister was,” Niphredil said from the other side of the curtain. “Content to let someone else rush and decide and direct, while she quietly and methodically went about the business of details.”

“We would have been siblings, had they wed,” Elladan said, sluicing water from his hair as he stood.

“That seems a better fit, to me, now that I think on it,” she replied, a disembodied hand appearing through the gap between curtain and wall to give him a towel.

“Aye,” he replied. “It does.”
~*~

It was quiet at the pools. Deserted too, as it always seemed to be when Elrohir lowered himself into the crystalline water again. He spent much time there under the wavering leaves, letting the fall of water at the far side of the pool pummel his neck and shoulders and back. While not precisely warm, the pool was fed in part by a hot pond some way under the earth, and it sometimes sent vapor skyward on cold nights. It had been Nariel who had found this out, spending so much time at the bottom of the pool one day that Elrohir had grown worried and swum down after her, pulling up short as her inky black head and silver eyes popped out of the gloom. They had swum together naked, had dried their hair in the breeze laid out over sun-warmed rocks, they had spoken of marriage, of children and a home of their own and grandchildren. They had never joined body to body as they had spirit to spirit.

As with any time he thought of what he had lost, and also what he had been spared, Elrohir felt his throat grow thick and his eyes sting. He set out across the pool with a few strong strokes, swimming into the deep area beneath the water fall and stood up into it, letting the aching stone of his muscles send spray off in all directions. It was a matter of time, he knew, until his brother overcame his embarrassment and joined him at the pool again, and it wasn’t until that time that Elrohir thought he could speak of what the damned goblins and that infernal pass had taken from him. Away from this place of peace, the words simply did not come. But once here, in the last place he and Nariel had enjoyed togetherness and solitude, it seemed the thoughts of her were almost touchable, hovering somewhere near his elbow, where she would have been.

With a sigh, Elrohir turned and sat, his body behind the waterfall, his legs dangling down into the pool with water hammering down on his thighs. His brother and Nariel’s sister were also near the forefront of his mind, now that he had seen his mother’s restoration begin. They were meant to be siblings rather than husband and wife, he thought, though having never seen them closer than across a crowded room, he could not be entirely certain. There had been an uncomfortable distance between the twins since the interruption at the pool and the obviously frightened messenger from Lothlorien that came seeking Celebrian’s party some weeks later. Some days, Elrohir felt as though both an arm and a leg had been removed at once; all the completion he had once felt was so quickly ripped away in just a few short weeks. Everything else seemed off balance since.

Idly he traced the edge of the head piece Nariel had worn on her journey with his mother, the only thing identifiable among the remains Glorfindel had found in the mountain pass. With a few careful alterations at the forge, Elrohir had made it into a passable torque, and wore it now around his left arm, his strong arm, the one that he had draped so casually and so often over her sun-kissed shoulders. The feeling of her beneath his hand came back so suddenly, the warrior almost choked. Falling water hid his welling eyes quite well from any that might pass the spot; his loneliness, he knew, would not be so easy to mask when he returned to the residence. But, his brother would not come with him to grieve, and his father was consumed with the joyful return and eventual restoration of his own bride. In the mean time, Elrohir allowed himself the time to weep, hidden safely behind the curtain of water where he had first seen her bare and gleaming and pale and undeniably his. He could not bring himself to do so anywhere else.