Chapter Text
"I am absolutely not meeting your family looking like this."
This was told to Gildor in a very determined voice by Erestor, who had not enjoyed the voyage. None of them had enjoyed the voyage - the ship had been crowded, the air cold and damp, the food basic - but as far as Glorfindel could see, he looked none the worse for wear. It would take more than a sea voyage to disguise that bone-deep beauty.
"You'll give your hair a good shake and put a smile on your face and get on with it," Gildor insisted.
Early on the journey Gildor had confided in Glorfindel that he was taking no nonsense about this meeting with his family; it had to be done and the less Erestor was allowed to build it up in his head the better. The couple’s arguments were known to their fellow passengers, and it was Elrond who led Erestor aft to watch the dolphins and unwind whenever the conversations got heated. Even a full Age after their affair, Elrond was still one of the few people he would listen to. The other was Glorfindel himself, and he had done his best while dealing with his own doubts.
Glorfindel picked up the bag Erestor had put down and apparently forgotten and then touched his shoulder, smiling when he jumped.
"You'll be looking for this," he said.
"Oh good, I can disembark with you instead. Not an immediate eye magnet - that red hair is a curse."
Gildor's eyebrows went right up. He was more used to his hair being admired. Glorfindel shook his head. "And then my parents, or some member of my family, will see me come down the plank with you and jump to conclusions I'll have to spend days denying. No thanks. Start as you mean to continue."
"Erestor, stop being an ass, you're holding everyone up," Elrond snapped from behind them. Erestor startled again, clearly his nerves were a mess.
Gildor took his arm firmly. "All right, let's go. If they look too horrified, I can always say I just met you on the voyage and were helping you get your land legs after watching you battle seasickness all the way from the Havens."
"Don't you dare, you bastard."
“Try not to call me that where my mother might hear.”
They walked down the gangplank, still bickering. Suddenly Glorfindel found himself alone with Elrond, who was looking out towards the crowded quay with puckered brow. They glanced at one another.
"Do you see her?" Glorfindel asked. Even as a friend, it felt an overly invasive question.
Elrond shook his head. "Too many people. And she's not tall...how that happened with her parents I never understood. No, I'll just - hold back a little till things settle down. Watch Erestor get enveloped within the Finwëan bosom..."
"Elrond, why? Really." He wondered in some tiny corner of himself if Elrond's reasons were that different to his own for hanging back a little and watching from the security of the ship.
Elrond looked tired beyond words, had done so for years if truth be told, but the past few, since the breaking of Sauron's power and the diminishing of the rings, had left him drained, with lines and creases where none had been before.
"Galadriel should go first," he said simply.
Galadriel, who had lost her only child and then helped sacrifice her granddaughter, both in their way casualties of the war, though Arwen would be infuriated by the description. It was right that she should be the first to greet Celebrían on this side of the sea, if indeed she was here.
Glorfindel rested a hand on his shoulder, nodding wordlessly. He was the one who had taken Celebrían on that final journey to the Grey Havens, the place once known as Mithlond, where he had come back to Middle-earth and found life and love and purpose. He remembered the shell he had carried aboard the ship specially commissioned for that journey, the proof of the true extent of her mother's authority as a princess of the blood.
He shook the memory away. It had no place in this bright new day and this legendary land. "They nursed me here on Tol Eressëa before they sent me back, did I tell you?" he asked casually.
Elrond relaxed fractionally. "Yes, in a little cottage by the sea that you missed for a very long time. You only admitted that years after we met."
"I had a lot to adjust to," Glorfindel said with a slight smile, "and some growing to do."
"You grew. I don't see him, but he'll show up."
Glorfindel didn't ask who. "Erestor said perhaps not today, perhaps later, more privately - not have everyone speculate."
"That's very Ereinion, yes," Elrond replied absently, craning up to see something or someone. He was frowning slightly. Galadriel, whose disembarkment he had been following, had stopped with Gildor and Erestor to talk to someone and appeared to be making introductions.
"She's trying to be helpful?" Glorfindel guessed. "She does that occasionally. I think Erestor being with Gildor amuses her."
Elrond didn't reply. Glorfindel followed his line of eyesight to two tall men in some kind of uniform, who escorted a third person, a slender woman with long, dark hair. People parted before them and then turned to watch them pass; he could almost hear the whispers as they huddled back in together.
"I wonder who that... El?"
Elrond turned to him slowly and for a moment Glorfindel was looking at the boy he had known back in Mithlond. "Glori,” he said softly. "I - think that's my mother."
They watched her approach, her escort urging people out of the way. Galadriel saw her and bobbed a half curtsey. Glorfindel knew better than to say he had now seen it all. Instead he took Elrond firmly by the elbow and shoved. "Get down there and greet her," he said firmly. "It's probably as frightening for her as it is for you."
"The last time I saw her...."
"El, that was two and a bit Ages of the world ago. We're all older and wiser. And she and your father bought us rescue from Morgoth. The same father," he added, "who guided us to port. Now go and meet her. It'll be all right."
He watched Elrond walk down the gangplank as though in a dream. He had come expecting, hoping, for his wife. His mother, Glorfindel was almost sure, had barely crossed his mind. Two and a bit Ages --- a very long time ago.
He found a place to sit where he had a view of the quay and watched the homecoming, barely noticing the ship's soft motion after weeks at sea. Elwing was talking to Galadriel but then she saw Elrond and stood absolutely still, waiting. Elrond could do that, he remembered - that stillness that Glorfindel had thought he learned from Erestor, but which he realised after a time was part of who he could be. They looked at one another and she put out an uncertain hand. Elrond took it and bent to kiss it and then Galadriel came forward to smooth the way - she was being unsettlingly helpful, Glorfindel noted. Erestor left the conversation between himself and Gildor and a small group of people who looked vaguely familiar to Glorfindel and joined Elrond. Time moved on its track, the stars wheeled and changed course across the sky, but Erestor would always be there when Elrond needed help.
"Are you hoping to catch a ride back east?" a voice behind him asked. There was humour in it and curiosity and a tiny hint of uncertainty almost foreign to its normal absolute confidence. Glorfindel could even remember the first time he heard that tone, on a windy night in the king's bedroom in the palace overlooking the bay of Lhun. He felt his heartbeat speed up, there was a weird, hot, fluttering in his stomach, and for a moment he could hardly breathe. Then he turned slowly and looked, barely able to believe his eyes.
Gil-galad had not changed much. He wore his hair a little shorter, possibly a local fashion, and he was dressed very simply in grey and blue, but his personal emblem held his cloak at the shoulder and the circlet around his brow was set with small sapphires. He was as tall, as broad, and his smile as deep and mischievous as before.
Glorfindel realised his mouth was open. He closed it, took a breath more mental than physical and clenched his hand shut so that his nails dug into his palm, assuring him he was awake. "Where did you... I can see the gangplank from here."
"How do you think the baggage gets off? Not through the front door. I was taking a look and then saw you. Well, I saw your hair, figured it had to be you. No idea what you're doing up here though. Everyone else is down there except the baggage handlers."
"I didn't see you arrive." Glorfindel knew he was being stubborn now, but it was easier than trying to think straight and manage the reality of Gil on the ship itself. Of all the many ways he had imagined them meeting - and he had imagined some very unlikely situations in the long nights of the crossing - this was not one that had come to his mind. "I suppose I thought if you were there, I would see you come through the crowd. You're important, crowds part..." He was almost stuttering. Briefly his mind went back to the early days in Lindon, himself newly returned, shy and uncertain of every new experience - he sounded just like that.
"Place is overflowing with kings," Gil-galad said cheerfully. "Not as important as I might think. No, I was here before you docked so you wouldn't have seen me. Got side-tracked with getting us something to eat and then thought I'd let it all thin out a bit, keep an eye on where you were going."
As though it had been said out aloud, Glorfindel heard 'and who you were going with'. "I was waiting to spot my family, failing which I was invited to spend the night wherever Elrond ended up."
"I think they're having a family gathering down at the big house," Gil-galad said. "Indis uses it as a summer house, plenty of room in there. I see Elwing found him. She was determined to be the one to greet him even if the idea of the crowd and how he might react scared her half to death. Brave girl still."
Of course, Gil had known and been fond of Elwing. "Elrond looked nervous, but Galadriel smoothed things out, her and Erestor." He still found that idea odd.
"Good, good," Gil said, craning up to see over the crowd to where Elrond had been drawn into the group surrounding Galadriel. Elwing was still at his side. She seemed to be the only person not talking. "She can tell him about Celebrían when that all calms down. She can't have yet, he would hardly stay to talk."
"She's well?" Glorfindel asked quickly, the fear that all had carried on that voyage of not finding her well or even alive sliding back a little. "We were afraid..."
"She's well," Gil said. "Not strong, and that pack down there was more than she could manage. It's why Elwing offered. I was happy to be the one to tell him and my aunt, but she insisted. She had so little time to be a mother..."
He tapered off and they watched as Elwing, who had been leaning up to speak quietly to Elrond, finished, and he said something to Galadriel who swung away from the tall blond man she had been hugging and who Glorfindel belatedly recognised as Finrod Felagund. Moments later she and Elrond left, following Elwing back through the crowd, the way opened for them by her escort.
"Seems Finrod can wait," Gil said dryly. "I suppose we should be going too. Your bags already off or... That blue one over there, that yours?"
"It's - yes, yes that's mine. Gil... I wasn't even sure you'd be here."
Gil-galad, about to pick up the battered old blue bag, frowned at him. "Why would I not be here for your homecoming?"
"I thought, and Erestor said..."
Gil leaned against the topside as an overworked mariner came past and carefully avoided looking at them beyond a brief salute. "I'm sorry, what has Erestor done now? Nothing changes, does it?"
"I thought you would have moved on with your life. And then you weren't here but Erestor said you might come looking for me more privately than on a crowded quay..."
"All right, he gets off this time. I did think of that. But then your parents were going to be here, and Bri, and Elwing, so it seemed a bit pathetic, skulking away in the shadows till later. Have you moved on?"
The question was direct and unequivocal, just the way he'd always been. His eyes were fixed on Glorfindel's face.
"I'm here, waiting for you." A memory of Erestor on a winter's night, snowflakes on his lashes, laughing, came to him. Denying it would feel like denying the friendship. He cleared his throat. "There was a time... but it was for then, not forever."
Gil reached for his clenched hand. His fingers were warm and solid in a way that almost took Glorfindel’s breath. "For then and not forever is what counts. I can say the same. We don't have to dissect it. I'm here because I want to be and it feels as though not much time has passed at all. You're still you, the person I love. I hoped you'd feel the same."
Glorfindel intertwined their fingers, then looked up at him - he had needed to look up at very few people over his two lives - and felt himself smiling. "You could never change," he said. "Even death wouldn't change you. You're still you, the person I love."
The general noise and clatter seemed to fade into the background for a minute, and Glorfindel recalled again that night in the palace in Lindon, a torch flaring, a shutter knocking, Gil's voice hesitant but firm. Their eyes met, held, both serious. It was like repeating a vow without words.
Gil-galad was the first to look away. "Come along, your parents will be tired of waiting."
"My parents... damn it, I can't keep up."
Gil-galad smiled, that special smile that warmed his eyes and deeply creased the famous dimples. "Your parents, yes. Celebrían's become quite close to your mother on account of having known you after you were sent back. She introduced them to Elwing so they're almost peripheral family now - we make our own connections here, some experiences run deeper than blood. She was waiting with them, so if we hurry we might still run into El and my aunt. I'm looking forward to seeing her, there was a rumour she'd mellowed. "
"I think that's a relative term." Glorfindel grinned.
"Oh, about your mother's condition...."
"Her condition?" A family group had found each other somewhere on the quay and the shouts and laughter carried above the general buzz.
Before he even had a chance to be alarmed, Gil drew an abdominal bump in the air. "Your new brother or sister. Due in late spring I think Bri said."
Glorfindel stared at him blankly. "You have got to be joking!"
Gil picked up the bag, chuckling. "I wouldn't say that to them, it won't go down well. Just - thank them for the very unusual ‘welcome home’ present? Welcome to Tol Eressëa - I don't think you're going to be bored.”
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alu
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