Disclaimer: J.R.R. Tolkien, intellectual property, insert your own 'if-I-owned-that-character-I'd-have-better-things-to-do-with-my-time-than-write fanfiction' comment here.
Thanks go to Lackwit for her helpful comments.
She remembers her childhood in pieces, shards – flakes of ash, for ice maiden though she may be called, the mind beneath her candle-hair is burnt, burnt, burnt.
(Once a year her head blazes itself hollow and fills with smoke, coiled in on itself again and again within the confines of her skull until it lies thick as oak behind her eyes. Once a year she goes to lie down on her bed and leaves her garden for the day.)
Here a piece of sky, washed by sunset with all the shades of bruise; here the curve of a man's arm underneath her head, vibrating her ear with the unmistakable hum of mirrored blood singing in their veins. A broken memory here, and here, and there, there, a patch of thought too brightly colored, too sharply defined, where she has welded together the edges of close moments with imagination.
Faramir's memories are not like hers; his life has sunk its passing into him as rain in soil, in lands where there is no sun to draw it back. His history is engraved within the river-rock of him; carved, no doubt, in his own immaculate gossamer hand. She delights in the excerpts of this long unbroken scribbling, when he is willing to read them to her.
(She is afraid to ask him for these recitations, afraid that asking might shatter that clean whole into can be told and can't. But he reads her perhaps less literally than she does him, for with more and more frequency he looks for now and not for lore – and in his company wanting takes the place of asking. She feels sorry for him when she finds herself unable to repay his kindly timing, by turns thrusting unsolicited bursts of her past at him or finding something in her garden that needs fixing when he expresses more curiosity than she wants to satisfy.
Someday, she vows, she will find enough of herself to repay her debt. In the meantime, he waits.)
Her smoke-day is coming soon (her garden is safeguarded by spring damp), and this evening Faramir knows that she will need something of stone to carry down with her into the darkness. He secures her head against his cheek, closing the gap between lips and ear.
And from his long narrative he pulls a morning of his ninth summer; less than a morning; a piece, fragment, moment. He tells her of water, of salt drying into a mask (upon the same cheek that flutters its hidden-veined heartbeat down into her now), of having been cradled and rocked in a web of foam, of brother and uncle and father turning away from the ghost in the sea.
His silence falters when he is done; she knows in her clumsy way that he would like to know of her, now.
The silence taps its fingers on her skull. Well? it asks.
And slowly, slowly, slowly – the words fall out of her more haltingly than trees do from their seasons – she begins to speak. Of her own sea, grass grown long and wild and supple as waves out beyond fort and city walls, grass that turned from white to silver to gray under the scrutiny of sun. Of the brother and not-brother who came together in search of her, two beloved golden-haired boys (still two now, though mixed into one – the dearest – who is brother by blood and cousin by marriage) who came and laughed and sat patiently by her as she played at drowning.
Her memory stops here, abruptly and unnaturally, and silence folds around them again. But this is not quite silence; it is a hush, and has room within it for her head beneath his cheek.