Chapter Text
“He got kicked out of student housing, Gal,” Finrod told her as she opened the front door to find not one but two men waiting to be let in. “They locked it all down. He’s got nowhere else to go.”
“He could go home,” she said, aiming an icy blue glare up at the man who stood half a head taller than her already tall brother.
“If that was an option, Gal, do you think I’d be standing out here? I’d rather be working on my PhD in our office, but none of us are allowed on campus right now.”
“I know that, I got kicked out of my space yesterday, too,” Galadriel snapped back, noting the use of ‘our’ and immediately putting a name to the face; Halbrand Smith, hotshot environmental engineer and her brother’s latest departmental roommate. Whatever she had been expecting from Finrod’s stories about him, an Australian accent hadn’t been anywhere near the top of her list. Or hazel green eyes with copper coloured lashes that might have been described as attractive on anybody who wasn’t scowling just as fiercely as she was. In fact, now she was having to think about it, Fin hadn’t told her anything particularly important about the man she was being asked to share a house with, noting the battered suitcase sitting on the top step and an equally stuffed backpack thrown over one of his broad shoulders.
“It’ll only be for a few weeks,” her brother promised, trying to calm the increasingly choppy waters between them as he passed her a shopping bag full of ingredients for the batch cooking he always did at the end of each week. “Just until the worst of it is over and the uni opens up again.”
Galadriel took another look at Halbrand, assessing the damage he could likely cause in the time it would take to ‘flatten the curve’ and then huffing out a sigh of resignation. “You better like animals.”
A flicker of confusion passed across his face, his pretty eyes narrowing like she was setting up a trap. “Why?”
“Gal volunteers at a veterinary clinic,” Finrod cut in, sliding past them both to check the cupboard closest to where she was standing. “She brought home a basket of orphaned kittens after the news broke.”
“They have nowhere else to go.”
Halbrand nodded and then smiled, his entire frame relaxing for a minute before his shields went up again. Only then did she notice the glint of the thin gold hoop he wore through his left ear. “I’ve had cats in the past.”
“Good. Then you won’t mind sharing a room with them
then.”
“We’re not putting him in-“ Fin started but Galadriel was already on her way back upstairs, leaving them both to figure out how to rearrange the fridge like a giant game of Tetris.
She stomped up to the landing like she had done so many times before, feeling her long blonde braid bounce against her shoulder with every aggregated step, only that afternoon she stopped and sat there specifically to eavesdrop on Finrod and his friend - who were still talking about her.
“… about that, I should have called ahead and warned her that I was bringing you home but I didn’t think Gal would mind. She’s usually… at least pleasant around my friends.”
“Yeah, no worries, mate,” she heard Halbrand reply, his accent somehow sounding stronger at a distance. “I’ve got a sister, too. And like you said, it’ll only be for a few weeks.”
*
Just as she’d suspected after looking him up and down twice, Galadriel didn’t need a few weeks to make her mind up about Halbrand. All it had taken was a few days to discover that her brother’s most recent mentee was going to be even more of an irritating presence in her life than he had first seemed.
Ten days into what had become a worldwide solution to the latest unprecedented ‘once in a lifetime’ event, Galadriel had come to the conclusion that Halbrand must have been sent to England by some kind of higher power specifically to try her patience. She was now painfully aware that he mustn’t have had to live with other people since leaving home. Making it her problem that he needed more than his fair share of hot water in the morning after coming back from one of his hour-long runs in the shortest shorts she’d ever seen on a man, his choice of clothing showed just how disgustingly big and hairy he was every-fucking-where. He also couldn’t let a plate sit in the sink or leave a piece of clothing in the hamper for longer than a couple of hours - Galadriel having to order another one to keep in her room so he didn’t start on her delicates before she could get to them - and he had taken over two of her scheduled kitten feeds even though Finrod had set him up in their actual spare room and not the walk-in wardrobe cum storage space she had stolen for fostering emergencies. The smaller, upstairs bathroom she’d never had to share for any length of time constantly smelled like him now, all warm spice and citrus, and if Galadriel hadn’t been missing her usual routines before, she was now itching for things to blow over so she could get her personal and private spaces back.
The only possible silver lining to needing to learn how to navigate having another body in the house came at meal times, Halbrand somehow able to make magic out of the basics that were always in their kitchen. He produced two trays of blueberry muffins one afternoon just because he was bored, Finrod risking life and limb by interrupting her back to back online classes to bring her one still warm from the oven. She had appreciated the snack, but Halbrand then followed it up with another round of baking two days later when she was trying to follow an anatomy lecture that really would have been better done in person, making the entire ground floor smell like melted cheese and breaking her concentration.
If Galadriel hadn’t been so mad that she missed a whole section on complications of the gastrointestinal system in horses because their new housemate couldn’t stop himself from singing along to whatever he was listening to - just like he did when he was in the shower, waking her up early on the days she didn’t have anywhere to be - then it might have reminded her of simpler times. She had a few semi-decent meals in her repertoire but her own idea of baking came from a box. Her mother, however, used to set hours aside every Saturday to make all sorts of scones, cookies and cake bars that ended up in lunch boxes over the next week.
She rarely stopped long enough to let herself reminisce about those mornings with her mother, not wanting to miss the idea of sitting on the countertop, kicking her legs and stealing chocolate chips or chunks of grated cheddar. Galadriel wasn’t a fan of dwelling on what could have been generally, preferring to set her sights on the the next obstacle in her path - finishing vet school so she could secure a good internship in equine practice - and then the next and the next, but every now and again she simply couldn’t shut the door on the darkest corners of her past, her mind firmly dividing her life into a before and an after.
Ever since their parents had driven off one evening for a charity event two towns over and never arrived, it had been just her and Finrod. Galadriel had been all of thirteen the day things had changed forever - just old enough to be left for a few hours with a phone in her hand and a film on the big tv - her brother nineteen going on twenty and away at the same university they were both now studying at. As worried as she’d been to find herself alone the next day it wasn’t the first time she’d woken up to an empty house, her parents’ friends known for throwing parties that went on all night. Though she had never been left without a note, a call or someone being sent to check on her before. Still, she knew how to pack a lunch, lock up the house and get herself to the bus stop without help, but when one morning stretched into two and none of her messages to Fin were getting through, her hopes and fears began to battle each other during the long hours of noticing how much the house creaked and cried as it cooled down. It was only then that one of her teachers noticed something was off, although even the threat of a whole week’s worth of after school detentions wasn’t enough to make Galadriel spill why she’d talked back in class.
She arrived home that third evening to find someone had officially reported Finarfin and Eärwen missing, her secret finally out in the open before she had to spend another night alone. Galadriel was only allowed back in that big, old house again to pack a couple of bags, though, an old, kindly police officer letting her phone as many people as she needed to so she didn’t have to go into care with all the other orphans. There had been other times she’d lamented only having half a dozen numbers in her phone, making and keeping friends not really one of her priorities when the girls and boys in school could be so mean, but never like this and never when it meant there was no one local who wanted to take her in even on a temporary basis. Instead, in full view of the rubbernecking crowd that had gathered, she was taken away in the back of a police car like it was her fault her parents had disappeared off into the great unknown, left to stew and fret and pace for another thirty-six sleepless hours until her brother got back from his rugby trip abroad and everything hit him at once.
Galadriel threw a tantrum like no other when he’d turned up straight from the airport with two teammates in tow and the people in charge of the home still wouldn’t release her. ‘A man like that is too young to raise a child,’ the woman who’d been put in charge of her case told her, not listening when Galadriel tried to tell her that she was already a teenager and didn’t need much raising any more. Even with his daily visits being reluctantly signed off on, she didn’t make it easy for any of them after that. Running the staff through an increasingly petulant gauntlet before refusing to eat until they let her go, when that tactic failed spectacularly she then tried to run away to the bus or train station. Fin had to be brought in to talk her down, from both a figurative and literal edge, promising that he would find a way through the red tape that had been wrapped like barbed wire around her case.
She was inside another week while the paperwork went round in circles at City Hall - where the Noldor name still carried a lot of fucking weight due to her Uncle’s former MP status - and even in hindsight it felt like a lifetime. In the end, her grieving grandfather was the only person deemed fit enough to take her out of the prison she’d been put in through no fault of her own, although Galadriel knew they were being watched by people just waiting for him to falter, every toeing of the line presenting an opening for her to be snatched away from the life she knew again.
However, even walking on eggshells, in a new school by the sea, with new friends to make and new activities to try, Galadriel found there was still joy in the world.
For nearly two years she was allowed to just be, given a chance to forge a way forward, to try to piece her broken heart back together again, and to discover a real aptitude for science right when the choices for her future mattered most. Content for the most part but never truly happy, it still meant the world to her when, after he graduated with a first class degree into a job at one of the best engineering companies in the country, Finrod had asked if she wanted to come and live with him again. It wouldn’t have been long before Galadriel would have aged out of the system that still liked yearly check-ins given the continued media attention around her parents disappearance, she could have left school at the end of the next year if she’d wanted to without permission, so there wasn’t any pressing need to make her change of guardian official, but, following an unexpected meeting with their uncle on her way back from school one day, things changed again. And not for the better.
It was never for the better.
Brought up to be polite, but to trust in her instincts and not let the fact that she was small, blonde and pretty make her subservient to anyone, Galadriel refused to let the man she hadn’t spoken to since the funeral give her a ride home. Fin still hung out with some of their Noldorian cousins from time to time, keeping them all tangentially linked to their father’s brother, but she was too young to join him in their basement and sitting at the kitchen counter letting Feanor watch her eat ice cream had felt stomach twistingly uncomfortable for too many years now. Saying ‘no’ to him again would almost certainly bring her short term pain for a, hopefully, longer term gain, not knowing if he was going to frog march her back into the office to throw his power and influence around or find a way to strip her of her own as she stood checking bus times still in her school skirt and blazer. The insistence that her friend’s sister in the sixth form always took the girls to the stables on Tuesdays wasn’t even stretching the truth a little, but his jaw clenching, engine revving reaction did nothing to stop her suddenly growing suspicion that the person who had called in a request for a welfare check a few weeks back hadn’t been just a ‘well meaning bystander’. And so, with their grandfather’s financial backing, Fin had been forced to put up the fight of the century for custody against an uncle who suddenly wanted a daughter after his eighth son had been born to a dutiful mistress during her time in captivity. She was promised that nobody would take her away from where she’d been thriving, but as uncertain days became hesitant weeks, weeks dragging out into months, there was nothing she could do but tell the truth every time someone called her in to answer a question. Galadriel would forever be grateful to the judge - and the small army of psychiatrists and administrators - who took her wishes into consideration and didn’t force her to go off with a man who made her skin crawl despite his wealth and influence. Especially after she’d felt unable to face Nienna’s wooden panelled room again and had pulled the fire alarm on the day she was meant to give her final statement, taking the kitchen scissors to her hair the night before as if it would help sway things in the direction she wanted.
Walking out of family court triumphant was supposed to be the end of it, though she and Finrod were brought back in for another handful of chats before she turned eighteen - most of them friendly, some of them not - a fierce and fearful internal monologue laying roots. Promising that no matter how bad things got, something worse could always be around every damn corner, it taught Galadriel to start looking over her shoulder as if checking for a puppet master that never showed his face.
Given the choice then between hiring a tutor like the parents of her friends had done or putting her in therapy as she started in the sixth form with a handful of insomnia driven goals in mind, Fin chose the later, needing to curb her brief spiral into criminality before she was involved in more than that one physical fight and a little light shoplifting. For the most part it worked, the hours Galadriel raged in that office apparently reducing her risk of spiralling into more and more dangerous behaviours or burning out completely, and when her therapist signed her over to the university’s services after she started vet school it felt like she had won a battle she’d never wanted to be a part of in the first place.
*
Like everyone else she knew, Galadriel had hoped that there was some truth in the idea that things would be back to normal after the Easter holiday, but once the initial, shared spikes of anxiety wore off and it became clear that a ‘few weeks’ weren’t going to do anything, it didn’t take long before it felt like the walls were closing in. No matter how hard they tried there was no escaping how much she, Fin and Halbrand were on top of each other, all three of them having been forced to settle into new ways of living, working and studying. By some miracle Galadriel had been kept on the rota at the clinic while they were accepting emergencies only, beyond happy to have a good excuse to be out of the house even if she was elbow deep in shit half the time. Finrod was usually out grocery shopping when she got home, with Halbrand holed up in the room she’d already started to think of as his. She could still hear him though, groaning and grumbling at whatever part of his project wasn’t coming together the way he was expecting.
Only, as she went to shut the door and opened her mouth to let him know she was back, the sounds Halbrand was making suddenly didn’t feel so innocent anymore. Heat immediately bloomed under her skin, painting her cheeks a deeper pink than the still bitter spring air. She could have lived without knowing that her new housemate spent his alone time in her home releasing tension.
Taking a second to stop a filthy memory from forming - Halbrand sweaty and breathless, Halbrand dark eyed and riled up, Halbrand hard and holding himself over her - and then slamming the door, Galadriel went to wash her hands. Again. Like she had played some part in his unravelling and his mess was now all over her. She had started on dinner before he showed his face again, changed into another all black outfit with bare feet and gently slicked back hair like he’d just ran his damp fingers through it.
Answering his guarded look with one sharp enough to kill as if they had both caught the other doing something taboo, she watched Halbrand’s nostrils flare before he ducked out of her sight and disappeared into the living room. The now familiar jingle signalling the start of a suite of god awful quiz shows he watched nearly every afternoon made its way to her ears and like battle lines had been drawn, they didn’t leave their chosen rooms or say a word to each other until Fin got back.
Galadriel needed an extra ten minutes to finish cleaning up at the clinic the week after, rolling down the windows and turning her music up as she chose to drive the long way home in order to drop off a bottle of wormer with a client who couldn’t come in to pick it up. She didn’t think about Halbrand or what he might have been doing more than once - or twice - while she scrubbed down kennels, returning to find him downstairs in black jeans and a nice shirt, his sleeves rolled up as he worked through prepping a pile of green vegetables beside the kitchen sink.
“You’re back late.”
There was an insinuation dancing between his words and she liked hearing it less than being made into an unwilling voyeur. “A dog threw up on me right as I was meant to leave.”
“That’s fucking unlucky. Unless… could you really not stop yourself from making any new enemies today?”
“Nobody stupid called into the clinic if that’s what you meant to ask,” Galadriel said, her nose scrunching at the tone of his follow up question. “It’s only when people don’t look after their pets properly that I have a problem. And if Mrs Tar doesn’t count as an enemy, then her dog doesn’t either.”
“If you say so,” Halbrand nodded like he was trying to understand, despite having never met the woman or her yappy little terrier. “Before you go and shower, I’ve been told I’ve got to check if you have any requests for dinner.”
“What does Fin want?”
“Burritos.”
She hadn’t come home especially hungry, almost tired of talking about what their next meals would be, but the promise of food suddenly sounded too good for her stomach not to growl. “Done properly in the oven with cheese like-?”
“Last time. I got it. Are veggie ones still okay for you, Princess?”
“Don’t call me that.” Only one person had ever thought to refer to her as a princess and if she hadn’t enjoyed the nickname then, when she’d been young enough to actually want to live in a castle, there was no chance she was going to start now.
“Okay, darling.”
Rolling her eyes at the term of endearment he drawled in his ridiculous accent, Galadriel hoped that her replying sigh as she turned on her heel said more than any number of words could sum up.
*
With nothing better to do, the first properly warm weekend of spring Galadriel found herself sitting on the grass to watch two men attempt to build a bar at the bottom of the back garden. She would have prefered to have spent the time outside in the sun by herself, but Halbrand was even more stubborn than her brother and neither could be talked around into doing the improvements another Saturday when they would have been of sounder mind. She was sure the idea had only come to them after they had found and finished both bags of gummies she’d been prescribed for anxiety - and despised taking unless there was absolutely no other option - but all she could really do to keep them from hurting themselves was hover in the background and supervise. Throwing out a dozen engineering jokes a minute as they’d stacked the perfectly even shelves with whatever Halbrand had been able to fit in Fin’s car the day before, both of them at least seemed to be enjoying doing something out of the ordinary.
Even less so than normal, Halbrand hadn’t been able to hold his tongue while talking to her. But, rather than warn her about grass or pollen stains, he called her beautiful when they were done, barely able to tear his eyes away from where she’d peeled off her sweater and laid out to bask in the rays after the longest of winters. Galadriel did what she always did, shrugging off the compliment like she hadn’t heard the same thing every time she had spent an evening in the Union bar avoiding the rugby club boys who thought they might have a chance.
The thing was, unlike what she had heard from her so called peers, it felt like Halbrand really, truly meant it. Like it wasn’t the kind of thing he said on a whim even on days when he didn’t have his inhibitions stripped away. Closing her eyes as she rolled over onto her back, the warmth seeping through her t-shirt down to her skin, Galadriel only smiled when she realised it was Fin’s shadow spoiling the moment rather than his friend’s. With a grin, her brother presented her with a breakfast tumbler of gin and juice like he was just happy to see her attempt at happiness.
“Happy Birthday, Gal,” he said a little too brightly and she had to quickly schooled her features away from concern into a more peaceable expression. “Sorry you’re stuck with just me and Halbrand this year but we do have cake.”
He wasn’t kidding, disappearing back inside for a minute and then returning with a wobbly layered Black Forest gateaux that would take them far longer than a week to eat. Galadriel had been planning on waiting to acknowledge her birthday this year, but there was something nice about not having to gallop from activity to activity all day, and she actually ended up enjoyed the celebration she hadn’t wanted to have more than she thought she would, all of them staying out until the moon had replaced the sun in the sky.
Since that weekend, whenever the capricious spring weather allowed it, every night one of them needed a change of scenery or just a break from the reality of the world right now, they took out plates of finger food into the garden and had a drink together at the well made bar like a group of normal students. Although Fin was at least keeping an eye on the nightly news briefings, there was still no confirmed timeframe as to when he could safely see his girlfriend Amarië again - or when Galadriel’s own significant other, Celeborn, would be able to step on a plane without being made to spend a fortnight in a hotel afterwards - but with an upgrade to their internet service to allow for higher definition video calls, the three of them were managing to rub along again without too much friction.
For now.