Hands moved to adjust his collar, to work the clasp into place securely. He hadn't thought, on his way to see this lady - this queen - that his appearance needed adjustment. Yet there was something grim about standing in her presence without proper attention to his attire. As though Chloatha or Maeglin or his father would erupt through the door, pummeling him with half-vicious blows as he tried to straighten his clothing. One of the few things a fellow can control is his appearance. In the immortal words of the old wizard, that was the reason you always must be presentable. Once it was settled against his skin, and Ilúvatar was certain that it would remain so, his hands began working the shoulder-clasps that held his cape in place.
That foolish cape.
Her would-be husband, her child, her nation. All of it destroyed in the Breaking. Ilúvatar would not have presumed to imagine how it might feel - in the main because he never wanted to imagine the sensation of ruling a nation - but everything in him thought to offer her comfort. No, she displayed little emotion. She was not cold; but she believed in restraint. It was not his place to comfort a twice-widowed lady that kept her emotions firmly under wraps. It was not his place to try and offfer solace to someone that he did not understand, and never would. As well try to comfort the sun, for the alienation it felt from its creator. Ilúvatar tugged on his coat, straightened the shoulders with a pull from the waist, and then - at last - managed to square his shoulders.
Not his place.
Her eyes were vivid things, unguarded for perhaps the first time that he'd been in her presence.
"I am sorry," he said quietly; now that he was looking into those eyes, he could not look away. "You've suffered a great deal... and I think it's a part of who I am, wanting to make that right. I know that I can't. I started out with a plan. I wanted you to know that ... I understand. Everything that mattered was taken from me, in the years before the Breaking and on that day. My pride, and my steel, are not important. Yet they are all that I have left. And they guided me so well before, helped me find the place that I belonged. I will trust them again. And I hope... that you can come to rely on them, as well."
He sounded like an idiot. Rely on. Trust. It was so simple, and yet so complicated that it made his head spin. Their trust was only recently earned, and even more recently destroyed. If she was telling this to him so that he would make the suggestion, and then planned to abandon him to his fate... to his death? Ramga surely wanted that.
"And how better to do that," Ilúvatar went on. "Than by giving Ramga precisely what he asked you for?"