"No. Nor that name."

"Who are you?"

"Your Ellin."

"Can I come in?"

She steps aside.

"That doesn't answer many real questions," she says, but gestures Luthien in all the same. There's a parlor visible at the end of the hall.

She walks inside and starts gently pressing on their bond, the accumulated grief-loss-love of their years of separation.

She narrows her eyes (hides a flinch). (Her mind's... Resistant, to letting Luthien in. Trying to pull away. But the bond can slip under her barriers fairly well.)

"How did you make this bond?"

"You married me. You came to me and took me away and showed me a life beyond the one I had, and you married me. You said you had fallen in love with me before the world began, Mygwainor."

Her expression's twisting oddly. "I don't - "

"I wouldn't. I stand alone."

She sounds unsure, and she presses a hand to her forehead, looking suddenly pained.

"You don- You remember, don't you? Tell me you remember. I can't do this alone."

"I - "

Her expression twists, her side of the bond rips open with a whirlwind of grief and loss and pain and desperate hope and lancing terror -

And she reforms her raiment into Beren's face, collapsing with a sob.

(She still feels like a Vala, of course, not quite like Beren had.)

Luthien catches her, hugs her tight.

"Mygwainor..."

"Ellin."

"How - "

"You've - never, before - "

"I'm here now, darling."

That doesn't seem to be making her cry any less, actually.

"How much do you remember?"

"Everything. Meeting you in the forest, getting rescued from my captivity, Finrod and Nargothrond, stealing a Silmaril from your simulacrum. Our wedding. ...Up to the fight at Menegroth and the aftermath then- I woke up as a newborn."

"...Have you been through this more?"

Small, broken laugh in between her tears.

"Yes."

"You never remembered."

"Well."

"Did you marry me, before?"

"No."

"It - didn't get that far, or we decided not to."

(...Ellie as Luthien isn't Ellie as Sauron but there's a roaring grief in her head that says she could've married Sauron - her Sauron, her Ellie, the one she had from the start - and she wouldn't have been alone - )

Soft pats.

"I'm here now. And you don't have to be alone again."

She snuggles into Luthien.

"...I'm - terrified it won't last, next loop - terrified I'll screw up and - it was okay if I screwed up because I'm the only one who ever gets hurt lastingly but now you might get hurt - "

"I would suffer anything rather than be parted from you again."

Nuzzle.

"...I preserved your memories each loop. Or - I thought I did. I couldn't - I've never succeeded in giving preserved memories to people, but also I couldn't tell anyone the loops exist. Not verbally, not through osanwe, I couldn't even try to manipulate them into concluding time travel might have happened."

"I - your past loops are complicated. So there's only two for - you proper."

"...It's enough for me that I'm here with you."

She curls into Luthien, relief and vague guilt washing through her mind. "Okay."

"...I. Messed up a lot. In the other two."

Gentle kiss. "No complaints about the end result."