I didn't see much of Galadriel in the time leading up to our second appointment. There were occasional meetings similar to the one we attended on the first day, but things were kept strictly related to the topic at hand.

To be fair, though, I didn't spend any time seeking her out up to then. I was afraid if she spotted Glorfindel and I sliding around on her trees that she'd rat us out to Elrond, so I was happy enough to stay out of sight and, hopefully, out of mind.

The day that we were due to meet up for her follow-up session came and all but went and I didn't see a trace of her. It was only while I was lying in bed, Glorfindel already fast asleep and curled around me like a strangler fig, that I saw a hint of a gently glowing figure outside through the balcony window. The person was walking down the hall, quite some distance away from our room, but slowly drawing closer. Nobody shone quite as obviously as Galadriel did, and I knew that my chance for our session had come at last.

Over the course of the next two minutes, I managed to untangle Glorfindel from around me and rearrange him into a comfortable position, throw on my robes, and slip out to meet her.

"Hello there," I said pleasantly as I strode over to her.

"Good evening, Rhodri," she said with a smile.

Something told me she had walked past intentionally, as though a hunch had told her I would go to her to enquire if she wished to talk awhile. To ensure there was no room for misunderstanding, I always spoke in very clear terms with clients. Before I could ask her whether she was interested in having the session, she shot me a mysterious smile and kept walking, but her pace dropped a little.

"If I am reading you correctly," I said to her in my head, "you wish for me to follow you."

"That is quite accurate," she replied, saying nothing more as she carried on.

I kept my expression blank as I strolled beside her, wondering quietly to myself if she wasn't overdoing the Woman of Mystery trope just a tad. Still, though, if she got her jollies from acting as elusively as Carmen Sandiego, who was I to judge?

We didn't speak as we wound our way along the corridors and up the stairs to the same place where the first session had been. As we sat down, the silence continued, but for some reason, Galadriel seemed to be watching me expectantly.

"Are you ready to begin our follow-up meeting?" I asked after a moment.

Another enigmatic smile. Galadriel nodded invitingly, and I knew that she had much she wished to tell me.

"All right," I said with a gentle smile. "So fill me in on what's been happening these last two weeks."

Galadriel looked at me in puzzlement.

"Oh, sorry, that was dialect," I said quickly, chuckling. "I meant to ask that you apprise me of what has been going on since last we spoke."

"No, I understood you the first time," she replied as she shook her head. "But I made my mind perfectly open for you to take the thoughts and see them for yourself."

"It is not my practice to simply step into someone's mind and extract their thoughts for my own perusal," I answered, shaking my head gently back at her.

She looked taken aback. "But you can do it, can you not?"

"Probably. I don't know," I shrugged. "I've never tried to. Only the direst of circumstances would possibly persuade me to do it, and so far, such a situation has never arisen."

Galadriel frowned ever so slightly, not taking her eyes off me as she waited for me to speak again.

"Again, just because you can, doesn't mean you should." I reminded her benignly, raising my eyebrows. "And particularly in my case, it is, for the most part, a foolish endeavour, because I am here to help you examine your own thoughts and come to terms with them. I'm not supposed to spoon-feed you answers, merely point you in the right direction."

She seemed to accept my response pretty well, nodding and chewing her lip pensively. "You are a very strange Maia," she murmured.

"I'm aware," I said with a convivial snicker. "Now," I continued, navigating the dialogue back to the topic at hand. "Tell me what you've gotten up to these last few weeks."

According to Galadriel, she had indeed found three trusted advisors (one of them being Celeborn), and had spent a week and a half in an understandably stressful phase as she filled them in and trained them up to her liking. Now, though, it seemed she had things arranged fairly nicely, and the fruits of her labour were manifesting in the form of free time. Now, however, that had started to lead to its own problems.

"I find I grow restless now," she admitted as her eyes seemed to gaze at some far-off place.

"Tell me about it?" I prodded gently when she failed to elaborate any further.

Galadriel sighed. "There is so little to do in the absence of work," she said regretfully.

"Is there? Only last session, you had told me that you enjoyed socialising and playing the harp whenever you could get the time."

"Indeed," she lamented, "but I cannot enjoy them without guilt for neglecting my work. It seems that I have given up my duties in exchange for time to punish myself for shirking them."

I looked at her carefully. "Galadriel, when you say you are punishing yourself for taking time off work, what do you mean?"

She looked slightly abashed as she said, "I do not allow myself to socialise or play anything now."

The punishment gluttony that ruled the lives of people who had climbed their way to the top of the food chain was a worrying thing to observe. Imagine thinking that a day off now and then was a crime worth forcing yourself into reclusion over. Well, I didn't have to, really. Galadriel was engaging in the mental equivalent of self-flagellation, and for what? Recognising the importance of maintaining her own health and wellbeing?

The problem with Galadriel was that despite her impressive age and wisdom, her moral compass was still very much in a binary state of good and evil with little to no room for a grey zone, or even neutral things that didn't belong there in the first place. Such an outlook often hinders judgement, because how could she prioritise things from big to small when they all evoked the same response? How could she decide which is the lesser of two evils when in her mind, they both simply registered as evil? It must have been exhausting, constantly being on such high alert all the time.

"Tell me about why you feel you don't deserve any time for yourself," I said gently.

She fixed me with a quizzical look and answered, "I never said that I felt that way."

"Perhaps I am being a little hasty with my conclusions," I admitted. "Let's take it back a bit. Why did you decide to heed my suggestion and appoint three advisors?"

Galadriel was quiet for a rather long time. Not because she didn't want to answer, but because she was genuinely considering my question.

"I suppose because you recommended me to," she said eventually.

"I think there is a little more to it than that, Galadriel," I replied, raising an eyebrow a little. "You are not the kind of person to mindlessly follow the directives of others. What would you have said if I told you to put Lothlorien under Elrond's administration, flee the place with Celeborn in tow, and spend the rest of your days sunbaking on the beach in Edhellond?"

Galadriel's eyes widened, and she said, "You are being ridiculous now, Rhodri."

"Am I, though?" I countered. "There had to be something in you that decided that it was sensible to take my advice. What was it?"

Appearing rather discomfited now, she thought awhile again, and then a quiet, "Yes," seemed to escape her lips in spite of herself. She seemed annoyed with herself for a moment, but then, accepting the horse had bolted, elaborated. "I felt it was in Lothlorien's best interests."

There was no doubt about it. Galadriel was definitely one of the more reticent clients I'd had. It wasn't like she was short on words in general, but right now you'd think she only averaged one sentence a week the way she cached her thoughts. I got the impression that emotional overdrive was in full force right now and giving her a thorough lambasting.

"Tell me what you're feeling right now, Galadriel."

"Annoyance," she said stiffly. "And guilt."

"Can you explain a little about the annoyance? What is it that's making you feel that way?"

Galadriel's eyebrows knitted together in a rare display of distress. "I am not certain. I believe it is a mixture of things."

I nodded, making a gesture that invited her to expand on that. She sighed. "I believe acted in Lothlorien's best interests by getting advisors. And I am tired. I wish to have time to myself so that I can gather my strength for the days that lie ahead. And yet, now that I have it, the guilt attacks me, and the only way I can placate it is to forbid myself from enjoying myself."

Ah. Now we were getting somewhere. She was gradually starting to come to the problem herself.

"What do you suppose it is you feel guilty about?" I probed.

"That others do my work while I take time out for my own leisure," she answered, her lip curling in evident disgust at herself.

I nodded. "You know, Galadriel, I think the issue is that you are approaching this situation with a rather skewed set of morally acceptable values for yourself. Would you be open to trying a short role playing exercise with me?"

Galadriel raised a sceptical eyebrow at me, but nodded slowly.

"In this scenario, you are you, and I am one of twelve workers at your library. As well as being a librarian, I am the only one of those twelve who can draw maps. You asked me to draw you a large, detailed map of the entire continent of Middle-Earth that you needed ready by today. You come in to collect it and see that I am only half done and looking very fatigued. Thus our scene begins."

Galadriel nodded again, and I morphed into a worn-out, sickly looking Elf as I said, "Oh, I am sorry, Lady Galadriel, but the map you asked for is nowhere near done."

"You seem very distressed, Rhodri the Librarian," she said to me, seemingly impressed that I looked the part so well. "Why is that so?"

"Well, truthfully, I am weary in the extreme," I replied heavily, rubbing my brow. "I am still doing my librarian duties through the day, and am completing the map whenever I am not working. I am barely sleeping, only taking one meal a day, and not doing anything pleasurable any more, but I am so tired that I can scarcely draw the map and am making substantial mistakes."

"Why are you still doing the librarian duties when there are eleven others who can share that load?" she asked me, looking at me in small disbelief.

"This is my job, my Lady," I said, faking shock. "I cannot simply give someone else my work. That means someone else has to do it. It would be wrong."

"But I do not want for you to suffer so that you can do your work," Galadriel replied, shaking her head. "It is better for you, and better for the task I have assigned you, if you simply accept some assistance and allow yourself some room to take care of yourself properly."

With that last sentence, a lightbulb seemed to go off in her head, and she looked at me with wide eyes.

I quickly shifted back to my usual self. "What is it, Galadriel?"

"Is this what I have sounded like this entire time?" she murmured to me.

I nodded grimly. "I'm afraid so. It would seem that you have a very different set of expectations of others compared to what you expect of yourself. Do you think that that is fair?"

Galadriel pursed her lips. "But there are things that only I can do," she protested.

"There were things only the map-making librarian could do, as well," I replied. "Did she deserve to live poorly because she was specialised in some way?"

"Of course not," Galadriel snapped. "It made no sense for her to have to live that way!"

"Why not?"

"Well, because she was unhappy, and it made her do her job worse."

"So you would say that she needed to live well so that she could do her job properly?" I clarified.

"Certainly."

"Was it worth the eleven other librarians taking on a little extra work to fill in the gap?"

"Well, yes, absolutely," she nodded.

I said nothing for a moment and looked at her, my eyebrows raised a little. She looked straight back at me, biting her lip a little.

"Like I said in the last session," I reminded her, "Don't hold yourself to a higher standard than what Iluvatar expects of the Valar. You're special, but you're not that special." I smiled. Galadriel laughed a little at that, and I could see that it was slowly sinking in.

"Look," I continued, "it takes an age to unlearn habits like what you have now, so you probably won't enjoy yourself completely at first, but you need to start intellectualising this and looking at overall benefits. There is a benefit to you taking care of yourself, which is that you personally flourish. That alone is reason enough to do it, but the natural consequence of living well is that you more effectively rule over Lothlorien and protect it- your specific duty. Ignoring your needs invariably means that you consequentially ignore the needs of your realm."

Galadriel touched a long, slender finger to her lips in thought. "That is most imprudent."

I nodded. "It certainly is. What I want you to do is to change your perspective to this: Lothlorien and its people's wellbeing are your priority, and how effectively you take care of them depends on how effectively you take care of yourself. Your basic needs are no different to your people's, and they must be fulfilled in the same way." I jotted down dot-points of these conditions on a scrap piece of paper and handed it to her.

"You know what I think might help you get into the mindset," I ventured, "is to wait a couple of weeks to make sure everything is under control, and then come back with us to Imladris for a short break. Stay for a month or two, unwind a little. It will restore you that much quicker, and when you come back, you will already be in the habit of looking after yourself. What do you say, hmm?"

Galadriel tapped her lips pensively. "Perhaps that would be wise."

"Excellent," I said with a broad smile. "We can show you how to trampoline."

Her face snapped into a look of bewilderment. "Tram- what?"

"I'll let Glorfindel explain it a little later," I said with a wink. "He'll be so excited." My toes tapped the floor as the anticipation built up.

Galadriel looked perplexed by my animated behaviour, but took it in her stride well enough. "Very well," she said with a cautious nod, raising an eyebrow at me.

"And of course, you can come and chat with me in my office at any time," I added with a smile.

She seemed more and more convinced by the minute. Deciding that was enough for one session, I wrapped it up. "I think we've made a lot of progress in this session. How about we leave it here for now, give yourself a bit of time to digest it all, and see how you're feeling about coming with us to Imladris in a couple of weeks, eh?"

Finally looking a little relaxed, she nodded her head, giving me a tiny fatigued but genuine smile.

We got up and made our way back downstairs- at considerable stress to me, because there was a particularly tempting looking branch that appeared to snake down to exactly the floor on which Glorfindel's and my sleeping chamber was found. Suppressing the urge to simply hop the balustrade and slide on down was pure torture.

When we reached my floor, I took my leave from Galadriel with a friendly wave and slipped into my room, shutting the door behind me. I changed back into my pyjamas and realised there was no way I would be able to ease into the position I was in prior to getting out of bed- nothing that wouldn't wake Glorfindel, anyway, who had managed to completely cocoon himself with our blanket like some sort of Elf burrito.

Shrugging to myself, I lay down on the other side of him as gently as I could so as not to disturb the bed. I felt pretty satisfied that I had been very subtle about it, but seconds later, I heard a "Nnnnggg…" and looked over in time to see Glorfindel turn over to face me, reaching a blanketed arm out and dragging me over to him until he had completely entwined his arms and legs around mine, his nose threatening to poke my eye out if it moved one centimetre to the left. One small, satisfied grunt later, and his deep, rhythmic breaths had resumed.

I chanced a look at him. Sleep well, climber vine, I thought to myself with a smile as I (barely) shut my eyes and summoned unconsciousness to drag me off for a while.