Author's Note: Maybe it's just the lover of bad guys in me, but I can't get rid of the niggle in my brain wondering what would have happened if Halbrand had been just a smidgen more careful with his actions in Eregion and how he handled Galadriel.
This story starts during Halbrand and Galadriel's journey to Eregion and diverges from there.
Obviously the Tolkien estate owns the source material and Amazon owns Rings of Power.
They had been riding for four days, with only brief stops to rest and water the horses, when Halbrand realized that he wouldn't be able to go on. At least not without tapping into at least a sliver of his power and possibly revealing himself to his companion.
There had always been a risk that this form would perish and he'd have to start over with a new body. He had known that and still decided to injure himself, because the potential reward was so great. And because he had thought he'd be able to handle it. He had, perhaps, overestimated the durability of his current form, or maybe just how quickly Galadriel would reach the encampment. He had thought she'd be there within a few hours. Instead he had laid on that uncomfortable cot for nearly two days allowing his wound to fester and waiting for her.
"Gal-" he began, but it came out as little more than a wordless croak. His mouth felt bone dry, but he swallowed as best he could and, though the words scraped painfully out of his throat, managed to say, "Galadriel."
The elf had their horses unsaddled a good twenty feet away, but of course she still heard him. She immediately turned from rubbing down the bay mare the queen regent had given him to give Halbrand her full attention. Whatever she saw must have alarmed her, because after only a few moments she murmured something to the horse (if he hadn't been using most of his energy to keep himself alive, he would have been able to hear her) and then crossed the clearing to kneel at Halbrand's side and press a water skin to his lips.
"I'm sorry," she told him, tone gentler than he could recall her ever using. "I have not been taking care of you as I should."
Halbrand chased the last drops of water with his tongue as she pulled the skin away, then let his head fall back against the moss-covered tree root Galadriel had propped him up against. He took a few seconds to study her. Her brow was creased with worry between her crystal blue eyes, and she had twigs and even a leaf or two in her windblown hair. Halbrand thought that she had never looked more beautiful, although he wasn't ready to examine how much of that was because of the softness in her eyes as she looked at him and how much was just that he liked seeing her so disheveled, which put him in mind of other things besides galloping through forests.
He had clearly reached the stage of his illness where he suffered from wild delusions.
"It's alright," he found himself telling her.
"Halbrand, it is not," Galadriel insisted before he could continue, a hard edge creeping into her voice. She carefully used the fingers of one hand to push his sweat-soaked hair out of his face. "Before we met, it had been many centuries since I traveled with men. It seems that I had forgotten how different your needs are from mine, even if you were not wounded. Still, that is no excuse…."
She trailed off, and Halbrand sighed.
"I don't blame you. I could have said something sooner. But we both know that my only chance is to get to Eregion.
"You will," said Galadriel. "I swear it to you."
Halbrand almost smiled. Getting an oath from an elf was no small thing. He wondered, if right that moment he just let go of the tightly coiled power he had concealed in the deepest part of him and revealed himself for who he was, whether she would actually let him die and let herself become an oath breaker. Probably yes. Almost certainly yes. If anything, she would kill him herself rather than wait for the infection to finish the job.
In truth, Galadriel was still wrong in her estimation of men's needs. If Halbrand had actually been of the race of men, he would have died at least two days back. And that would only have been if he hadn't tumbled headfirst off his horse from exhaustion and broken his neck even before the sepsis took him. He was very lucky that she was so clueless about what his supposedly human body should be able to handle, or the game would have been up long ago. He could only hope that the elves in Eregion had similarly little contact with men in need of healing.
Still, he did need some sort of intervention now, before they continued their journey, if he didn't want to either reveal himself to her or let himself die to avoid it.
He sighed again. "Galadriel, I am not going to make it to Eregion."
"Don't say that!" she cried and grabbed his hand. Even that slight movement of his arm on the injured side of his body jostled him enough to send a spike of pain through him, and he drew a sharp breath in through his nose (which didn't exactly help his abdominal wound) and clenched his teeth to avoid the yelp that wanted to escape. Galadriel let loose a string of curses in elvish so impressive that, even through his pain, Halbrand had to fight to keep his face from showing that he understood her. "I am so sorry," she finally said in the common tongue, "but please, you must not say such things. You will live, Halbrand."
He allowed a tight smile. "I have met mules less stubborn than you, but I don't think that even you can browbeat death into submission."
The fact that she didn't even flinch or frown at that comparison must mean he looked absolutely dreadful.
"You can't die," she said instead, although it wasn't stubbornness that colored her voice but something Halbrand couldn't readily identify.
"I'm pretty sure I can," he replied.
Galadriel did scowl at him then. "You won't, then. And I won't allow you to. You saved my life and I will save yours. And you'll live, Halbrand—you will return to your people and rule them, and help them find a new home and new lives, and you will have everything a man like you deserves to have. Respect and admiration and peace. A lady who loves you, and children to spoil and to teach."
It seemed like she might keep going in that vein, but Halbrand didn't want to hear it. Not from her anyway, when he knew very well that as soon as she found out the truth she would regret every word of it.
"Are you offering?" he interrupted, and she mercifully stopped talking and offered him an inquiring quirk of her brow. "It was strange, as marriage proposals go, but I doubt I'll ever get a better one." When an expression of utter shock passed over her face, he couldn't keep himself from adding, "We would make magnificent babies—I'll be in charge of the spoiling and you can take the teaching."
Major delusions, like he thought.
Galadriel stared at him with wide eyes and her mouth hanging open just slightly, for just a few seconds, and then she grinned at him and, somehow, inexplicably, started crying at the same time.
"Halbrand," she half laughed, half sobbed his name and squeezed the hand she was still holding. "Oh, Halbrand, you have to live because nobody else infuriates me as much as you do or has made me feel so alive in the last thousand years, and it would destroy me if I were the reason you died."
She paused to gather herself, but she looked down at their entwined fingers rather than meeting his eyes. Halbrand was a bit annoyed by that, because without being able to read her emotions in her eyes he felt like he was back out at sea with no land in sight. He had been devoid of any major emotions besides pride and anger and despair for so long that he found himself depending on observing her emotions to anchor his own unfamiliar feelings in reality.
Eventually, she rubbed her thumb against the back of his hand, to comfort him or herself he couldn't have guessed, and confessed, "I knew you didn't want to come here, but I did everything I could to force or cajole or manipulate you into coming anyway, for my own gain. So you see, if you die here then it will be my fault. And I don't want the burden of your death on my heart, not only because it would be my fault that a good man died, but because it would be my fault that a man I have come to care for died."
He was glad, then, that she still wasn't meeting his eyes, because his emotions were warring between what he thought were joy and guilt, and he was sure it briefly showed on his face before he could conceal it.
She hadn't said exactly how she cared for him, of course. Maybe it was as a lover or maybe just as a friend or even just as a comrade in arms. Maybe it was only in the sense that one might come to feel a reluctant fondness for a stray dog that hung around for long enough. But it was enough to make his long-forgotten heart swell with hope… and to make the small, almost forgotten part of him that felt guilty for the things he'd done shove its way to the forefront of his mind.
He hadn't sought her out. It wasn't his fault she'd encountered him in the middle of the sea. It wasn't his fault she had decided to bind their fates together—other than that he'd saved her from drowning, which he didn't think even she could hold against him, not even when she found out who he was. It wasn't his fault that she had pestered and argued and cajoled him into agreeing to leave Numenor, even though his plan had always been to stay there.
He had always told her the truth, although not always the entire truth, and he hadn't always corrected her faulty assumptions about him. He'd been more honest with her than with anyone in living memory, even if that memory belonged to an elf. Or a Maiar.
She wouldn't see it that way. He knew that. She would only see the half-truths and the omissions and would blame him for letting her come to care for him, the being who had ultimately been responsible for her brother's death.
But if she cared for him—if she cared for him enough to admit to it and to shed tears over him and even to vow to see him live—then maybe there was a small hope that he could reason with her. After all, her brother had snuck into his fortress; it wasn't as if he'd deliberately gone after the elf.
"Alright," he found himself saying with genuine emotion, "but if you're going to make good on that promise then you're going to have to do something to tide me over until we can reach your elvish city."
Galadriel stared at him unblinking, her luminous blue eyes still shining with tears. "Like what?"
Halbrand let out a noise that was somewhere between a laugh and a huff. "I don't know. I'm just a smith's apprentice." Technically true, again, if not the entire truth. "Didn't the Commander of the Northern Armies ever learn basic field medicine?"
"You aren't just anything, certainly not just a smith's apprentice," she replied almost off-handedly as she released her hold on his hand and gently lifted his shirt to survey the bloody bandages running across his stomach and down his side.
He couldn't stop the wince or the sharp grunt that escaped his mouth or the way his hand automatically fluttered towards his side as if he could do something to stop the pain. The healing woman in the Southlands had done her best, but the wound was simply beyond her. Halbrand had fully intended it to be that way when he'd cut himself, but he was regretting that now, in this moment, as Galadriel's sword-calloused fingers delicately prodded along the infected edges of the gash. Her mouth tightened and her free hand soothed its way up his arm and to his face, but she didn't stop her examination until she was satisfied.
"I only know the most basic things," she finally allowed, as she once again swept his hair off his damp forehead. "I am afraid that I may do more harm than good."
Halbrand pressed his cheek into her hand and somehow managed a small upturn of his lips. "I sincerely doubt that anything you do could make things worse."
Since he was already going to die if she didn't do anything, but he didn't think it'd be helpful to point that out again.
"You're right, of course," she acknowledged, though clearly reluctantly. "There should be some herbs hereabouts that might help. If nothing else, we should be able to dull the pain to make it easier for you to ride."
With that, she darted off without waiting for him to respond. Halbrand's agony was too great to smile or, Valar forbid, laugh, but he was amused by her single-minded determination to accomplish her task once she'd set her mind to it.
It was one of the things he would say that he loved about her, if he felt that he was still capable of feeling such a pure emotion as love. Or if he thought that he still deserved to feel it, even if he were still capable in the first place.
That decided matters, then. He had told her mere days ago that he wished he could bind the way she made him feel to his very being, although she obviously hadn't realized exactly how literally he meant it. At the time, Halbrand himself hadn't fully realized it, but now he knew that he needed her by his side. More than that, he wanted her to be with him always.
He had been so focused on his grander plans for the elves that he had convinced himself he didn't care if she found out the truth. He had told himself that she was ready to know, and that he would just proceed and let matters with her land as they may. But that wouldn't do anymore. He would need to accommodate her in his plans, to arrange matters so that she would come to trust him and care for him more than she already did before she finally, inevitably, found out the truth. And then only from Halbrand himself, in the manner he thought she would take the best, when he felt she was ready to hear it.
And on that day, when both of them had full knowledge of what it meant, Halbrand (and Sauron and Mairon and every other name he owned) would ask Galadriel to bind with him.