The Shape of Water by Isilme_among_the_stars  

The Shape of Water

Celebrían is not among the throng when Elrond’s ship docks. This is not because its arrival takes her by surprise. She has known of the ship’s approach for some time. Nor is it fear that holds her back, for she has resolved already to meet with acceptance whatever manner of affliction may crawl off the deck with Elrond. The desire to hold her husband again at long last is not in question, and nor is his want for her. The reason Celebrían keeps her distance, in truth, is that she has seen many ships come to dock these last centuries and witnessed all manner of reunions.

Some are simply buoyant, as suffused with relief and completion as the last buffs polishing rough edges from a craft. But others? Once, such keening had cut the air that even the gulls ceased their haunting cries. Many are the loved ones who have fallen to their knees in shock. Others turn away, overcome with bitter disappointment. Many meetings has she seen, and Celebrían knows better than most that the long anticipated joy of reunion does not preclude grief. This is why she waits far behind the burgeoning crowd, where white shores give way to green, for too many of her and Elrond’s personal griefs have played out on a public stage, and none have the right to their joy or pain, except they. To have another witness this new baring of hearts, like some kind of emotional voyeur, is unthinkable. So, when the ship comes in, and Elrond disembarks, she catches his eye, sees that he understands, and patiently waits.

A heady fug of sentiment hangs in the air when Elrond makes his way to her at last. By now the crowd has dispersed, shattering into smaller units fused by inexorable forces of yearning, grown insistent over long years apart. Elrond, however, learned to curb such yens aeons ago. He does not run to her, not as Arwen used when she spied her father returning from a journey long ago, dashing headlong across the ford, heedless of the Bruinen’s chill waters. Instead, he comes as the walking wounded, like a soldier making his weary way home after a long and arduous campaign. He is unhurried, seeking his rest, assured of his heartland’s warm embrace, and it sets something aglow in her heart, this quiet certitude with which his heart has defined her as home. Elrond, Nienna bless him, never doubted she would reclaim herself in time, or else has hoped beyond what little Celebrían could muster.

For the longest time neither speak. There is only the strange shape of a familiar embrace between them, as changed as the world is under cover of night. So insubstantial is her husband in her arms, that it seems every care weighing heavily on him this past age has claimed its due from his flesh.

“Oh Celu,” he speaks at last with reverence in his voice, as the familiar weight of his brow presses into the hollow of her neck. “How I have missed you.”

“And I you.”

Celebrían pulls back that she may look into those steady, starlit eyes. Grey, they are, like so many of their kin, yet unmistakable. What other gaze holds all the pain of Arda Marred made soft, transmuted into liquid warmth?

None could cause Elrond to break, just as the great sea can never be broken. It is said that Melkor tried, succeeding only in sending clouds billowing into the firmament and freezing water to ice, giving rise as he did to infinite crystalline motifs. Even the hardest stone may crack, but water only changes it shape, never shattering. So too is Elrond mutable. Spare as the clouds though he now seems, inevitably comes the rain, and with it will life creep verdant into him once more. It always has.

Later, secure in the deep solitude of night, they trace each other’s scars under the cool light of the moon. Old and new. Seen and unseen. There, amid faint lines intersecting haphazardly across Elrond’s shoulders, concern for their sons has buried itself too deeply for her crooked fingers to knead away. And beneath an old puckered slash that near bisects his chest, a new paternal wound bleeds for love of their daughter: this, a self-made souvenir from the war of the ring come to join that of the last alliance. Softly, Elrond brushes unblemished knuckles over the rough terrain of her ravaged cheek, wiping away the tears that come, for matching maternal wounds now burrow deeply into her own breast.

“She lives a good life,” he says, smiling sadly as those insufferably kind eyes shine with yet another ache.

“One we will never now share! Why did you not stay, Elnín? Just a century longer…” comes her futile plea.

But Elrond does not answer. Softly though her words were spoken, they have stabbed at his heart, and the cruelty is that she needn’t have spoken them at all. The answer is made plain by the jut of each rib and wan cast to his fair skin. For here is the truth of his long survival: Elrond is only as mutable as water because, unlike stone, he knows well his limits. Each reshaping, unlike that of the ocean, has been a conscious thing. For Arwen, and for their sons, Elrond would have bound himself to Ennor for another age, were he not utterly spent.

Sometimes, Celebrían wonders if it would be less painful to shatter.

“Arwen has her brothers, and they her,” she soothes, and it is as much a declaration of her acceptance as it is comfort. For, did he not accept without question the limitations of her strength? Had she not also chosen to forsake their children rather than break? Such knowledge, of course, can do little to ease the ache they both feel.

“Your father too,” Elrond says, his words mournfully quiet. “They have Celeborn too, and he shall love them well, as ever he has.”

To weep together as they do now is a small intimacy reclaimed, one of many lost in the months before Celebrían sailed. Her eyes had ever been stubbornly dry then. No less deep, nor wide is the chasm that stands between them, but over that terrible abyss now spans the rudiments of a bridge. Once, the crossing seemed insurmountable. Now, it appears inevitability tugs them surely toward one another, and though the journey shall not be easy, one day they will find themselves in the middle. It is only a matter of time.

The morning, when it comes, is bright and clear, and Elrond, when he wakes, takes her hand in his own. Through the window, in the wide world beyond, the sun rising golden over the sea seems a promise. And when Celebrían eagerly steals a first kiss, her husband’s soft lips are just as sweet as she remembers.