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Galadriel doesn't answer quickly, she is silent for several seconds, just smiling, before she looks at Thranduil once more. The lightness in him is encouraging--enough that, for just a moment, she forgets that he should be livid with her, that he is the one person who should hold her accountable for this choice. It nearly looks as though he will be neither and the strangeness in that does not occur to her before she speaks.

"If I can, and if he will permit it," she answers without guile. "I fear he may be too reserved to tolerate me long...but it will be sweet, however brief it is."

"It needn't be brief," Thranduil says, and who could he be thinking of other than his own lady. "We are not suited to briefness."

As Legolas had told him, even her own granddaughter had been granted more than a handful of decades of knowing her beloved. As Solas is more their kin than not, they ought to hold onto that hope and that time with both hands.

"'Tolerate'," Thranduil says, dismissive. "I hope Celeborn's stupidity is not a weight about your neck in this."

Leaving your spouse, when they were hale and whole and beside you. Choosing to be apart from them. It sounds and feels like a betrayal. But Celeborn could always be a fool, and Legolas had never lied to him before, possibly incapable of it. That anyone could leave Galadriel astonishes even his most cynical of hearts.

At that, Galadriel is surprised--that is twice in one conversation that Thranduil has managed it and it is something of a record. She looks at him and draws a slow breath.

"I should hope his choices do not weigh me down, but I cannot be sure of that." She replies. It makes sense that he knows, after a fashion--his son had been from beyond the third age, had he not?

"You are not angry with me, for loving again while he lives, however distant?"

Ah, they have come to this. The path from their choices to this conversation is clear; it is not as though her question is unexpected.

"Legolas came to you, and carried no message from me, no warning to prepare for Thedas. I would not allow such a thing to happen. Nor would not allow Legolas himself to come to Thedas without warning. And none of your kin or Haldir find a way to pass along any news to us, and all of them from Arda long before either of us departed. In light of that-- in light of that we find ourselves able to love, I must believe that Eru has a hand in this as much as He did bringing us here."

He did not believe in Eru. No elf did. They knew, they felt the Music, they understood. But he did not speak of Eru, or the Valar, and he only spoke of Melian because he had known her.

"Extraordinary things are being asked of us. I believe that He means for us to take root here, to protect and serve our kin as best as we are able. That we have found love here is perhaps by His design."

Three times in a conversation. He might as well. The solemnity leaves his tone. "And we are both too sensible to beget another Feanor between our spouses, so all will be well."

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