Title: Translation
Summary: Faramir learns to speak a new language. Pure F/ É fluff.
I watch her, from a distance, as she picks up a white cloth embedded with gold thread, a sea of knotted symbols and words I do not yet understand.
The sight of it tugs at some hazy memory; an afternoon spent with a tutor, his voice fading into silence as I become absorbed in my latest find, a tome of Rohirric song. I imagined myself a mariner then, seeking treasure amid the loneliest shelves and palpable doom of library dust.
I allowed my fingers to pass across the indentations of the page, savouring the absence and presence of each mark. So strange, so violent the letters seemed to me, like the slash of a dagger on pale skin. Mortality bound in the very language they speak, captured in the very words they utter.
She lifts the cloth, almost reverently, upon the bier; then stands in silence, her head bowed to her work. Her dress, I notice, is dark; her hair intricately woven, held in place by a delicate circlet. I have never seen her like this before, her beauty so restrained; and I resist the sudden urge to pull apart the silver rope, to see her hair fall, unbidden, down her back, like the early summer dawn across these foreign meadows.
She moves suddenly, and the cloth rises above her head like a plume of smoke. Her fingers trap it by its corners, forcing it down, finally releasing the cloth as it drifts, slowly, upon the bier. Her hands make quick work of the wrinkles that remain, tugging this way and that, smoothing the edges, her touch gentle and deft. Practiced.
Twenty-four, I think. She is but twenty-four. And it occurs to me, suddenly, that this is not her first burial. Her parents, cousin; now uncle. How many times, I wonder, has she prepared a bier for its passenger, passed her hands over the cloth and thought of her own death?
"Éowyn."
She turns abruptly, her eyes wide with recognition. The cloth, I notice, is now slightly askew.
The distance between us closes as she rushes to me. I feel her weight in my arms, and consider, with some amazement, how I had managed to live without her in them. Not well, I realize.
She looks up, her eyes shining. "You received it," she asks breathlessly, "My message…"
"More like a command," I say, smiling. It was but two lines, yet sustained me an entire fortnight's travel. "I had to obey."
She reaches up, holding my face in her hands, her gaze piercing and troubled. For a moment, she does not speak, though I can see the rush of thoughts in her eyes. I pull her to me more tightly, as though to quell the chaos, and she buries her face in my chest.
We stand there quietly, listening to ourselves remember each other; my heart betraying my happiness, her listening to its peculiar, accelerated rhythm.
"I am glad you are here," she murmurs finally, her speech muffled by my tunic.
I bend my head to rest upon hers. My cheek recalls the softness of her hair. I breathe again, it seems, for the first time since she left.
"I will always come when you call," I reply.
Later, we lie together, still listening to our bodies as they remember each other. My heart beating fast, her ear still bent to its strange music.
I let my fingers pass over her pale skin, feeling the indentations where her bones were broken, where death came but did not conquer. She shivers a little, then raises her face to mine.
I meet her lips, and tell them, wordlessly, of all the nights I dreamt of her. Of all the times my fingers passed over the pages of a book, and I wished it was her. Of the strange fire that consumes me when she is near, the unbearable void left in her wake.
She does not reply, but bends towards me, like a flower seeking sunlight.
And before all reason flees from my mind, I remind myself to speak with my uncle in the morning, to tell him I will stay behind when he leaves.
For I cannot abandon a language I have only begun to learn.
Author's Note:
First, I would like to thank all the reviewers for their comments. However, some have noted that the Rohirrim did not have a written language. This is not true, however; and I only correct this because it seems to be a popular misconception. In Appendix E of LotR, under section II, "Writing", Tolkien states (with my own emphasis added):
The Cirth were devised first in Beleriand by the Sindar, and were long used only for inscribing names and brief memorials upon wood or stone. To that origin they owe their angular shapes, very similar to the runes of our times, though they differed from these in details and were wholly different in arrangement. The Cirth in their older and simpler form spread eastward in the Second Age, and became known to many peoples, to Men and Dwarves, and even to Orcs, all of whom altered them to suit their purposes and according to their skill or lack of it. One such simple form was still used by the Men of Dale, and a similar one by the Rohirrim.
The Cirth, according to Tolkien, was one of two alphabets developed by the Eldar. Since I could not find an example of it anywhere in the appendices, I have based my fiction on a composite derived from the Angerthas table in Appendix E, and images of Norwegian runes that I researched independently. I imaged the book as being written by one of Faramir's ancestors, after a visit to Rohan.
And about the supposed pre-marital sex in the last section . . . I actually tried to leave that open-ended. Eowyn's scars would have been on her arm, and "lying together" does not necessarily imply in the biblical sense. Not that I object to F/ É sex, though, in any way, shape or form. ;)