Main Characters: Aragorn, Éowyn
Rating: R
Pairings: Aragorn/Éowyn
Length: Short story
Summary: In Dunharrow, not long after Aragorn's birthday
Author's Note: The title comes from a poem by W.G. Simms, which you’ll find quoted at the end of the story.
-----
The tent flap slapped in the soft evening breeze that stirred up from the valley below the camp. It kept him awake because it was not natural. Owls hooting from their haunts and feisty foxes trampling through the pine needles went unheard when he was Ranger. Now he was something else--Strider no more, but not yet King. His was a lingering soul, like the last dregs of winter that howled down from the white mountains.
He’d remembered his birthday earlier that morning, and he’d frowned at the sudden, unwelcome thought of it, pricking his thumb with a slip of the needle he’d been using to repair his breeches. The special day was nearly a week gone now, and countless lives had been spent in the meantime. Winter, it seems, had taken a final, broad bite out of his world.
One more year gone.
Aragorn rolled over and blanketed his eyes with his arms. He sighed deeply, all to aware that it was year-older breath he pushed from his lungs.
He thought of Arwen then, and he couldn’t help himself. Here were his hands, rough and calloused, veiled in a year’s worth of pain. A year was nothing to an elf, and that thought angered him more than anything. Patience was a virtue of Men, but little more than a whimsy of the immortal kind. For the first time since the dawn of their love, he began to wonder why had ever pursued her. Right now, on this precipice, with so much waste behind his eyes, she felt like a lie.
Aragorn sat up then, regretful of his thoughts but unable to shake his anger. He hoped a bit of moving about would usher away his worries, but he’d also reached the end of whatever tolerance he’d had for the tent flap. He needed the woods, but the woods were unavailable. So he needed quiet.
Quiet, however, had plans of its own, and would not come so easily, for when Aragorn raised his eyes to the tent opening, he beheld the one thing that had roared loudest in his ears of late.
Plain as stars she stood, pale head bowed shyly, pale eyes caught in his own. “I might be caught,” she whispered. Her shoulders blocked the tent flap, mercifully silencing it from its frenzied whipping.
“You’re here?” was all he could think to ask, as if she’d granted some wish of his he hadn’t realized. He reached over her shoulder with clinical grace and loosened the knot that held the tent flap. The weighty fabric came down, and the two of them were swallowed in darkness.
He heard her gasp, then saw the saffron outline of her hair as his eyes adjusted to the black--quicker than hers, he could tell, because her eyes danced about blindly as he beheld them. This was pure nighttime, as he had known it on countless cloudy evenings, blanketed by forest canopies or the sable hair of Rivendell’s enduring daughter.
Éowyn reached out in the darkness and caught his wrist between clumsy, thin fingers. He said nothing, but held still as she navigated her hands along his arm, gently mapping every sinew and scar until her fingertips reached the bunched cloth of his rolled-up tunic sleeve.
He could tell she’d regained her vision when her eyes finally focused on his and went wide with alarm, seeing at last the air between them that he’d been warming with his own eyes all this while in the blackness.
So winter breaks down at last, he thought. A smile curled at the corner of his mouth, and it reassured her that she was not alone in the cold and waiting.
Her fingers clung to the the bunch of tunic at his elbow, and they stayed there, even as he stepped forward to kiss her brow with the feathery heat of dawn sunlight through meadow grass.
“I am not yours,” she said, her breath warm against his neck but her eyes cast awkwardly down at their feet, betraying what feelings were stirring inside him just then.
“Nor I yours,” he said calmly.
“I am no man’s,” came her quick response. They were words of ferocity, but they came with a tone of innocence and regret. She was no man’s, but at that moment, she very much wanted to be.
The realization of it caught in his throat, and he swallowed it down like so much medicine. She leaned forward, stretching up on her toes to reach him, and kissed his pulse. Only her mouth touched him, and no other part of her save her fingers at his sleeve, but these were enough.
He brought his hands swiftly to her shoulders, the glacial gales of so many winters frosting his heart with frightening speed, and regarded her sternly. “It cannot be like this,” he whispered.
She knew it, but said nothing, only lowered her eyes once again. She let go of his arm abruptly, as if surprised she was still touching him.
“I am free,” she told him, refusing to meet his concerned gaze. “You will never be.” She turned quickly from him and ducked out of the tent. He closed his eyes and heard the swish of her skirt. He knew she was gone.
He didn’t know what it was that he felt then, whether regret or anger or passion, or perhaps even fear that he would reside in this blistering winter for all his years to come. Whatever he couldn’t name drove him to move, and it drove him to follow her.
Pushing through the tent flap, he was startled by the brightness of the breezy, starlit evening outside.
He spotted her easily as she hurried past tents and smoldering campfires through the silent, sleeping bivouac, her yellow hair alight as Ithil itself. He followed her, hand holding his belt in stealth. Whether by rain or wind, the cycling of the seasons was inevitable, and she was the spring he needed.
He followed her to the far edge of the camp, where the cold, black boulders of the nearby mountain paths stood impassively against the landscape.
When he caught her arm, she made no cry of surprise as he expected, as he had raised his hand in preparation to stifle. She turned instead, her eyes flashing hot and angry at first, then suddenly soft.
“I will take the smallest part of you that you can give me,” he told her. It was not a declaration, and no stakes were claimed. He was pleading. It was his hand caught at her elbow now. Some maddening fear had lodged itself behind his eyes, forcing passion upon her with frightening intensity. She recoiled from him, but caught the front of his tunic at the same time, and in this way drew them both behind the shielding face of one of the larger boulders.
Gone was her frosty visage; the breath she urged into his mouth was hot enough, and stirred like potion the rational mind he so often took for granted. She bit into him, clumsy in her inexperience, and he tasted his own blood between their lips, but didn’t mind.
“I don’t know--” she breathed, her voice choked with fear and surprise at her own startling flood of passion.
“Don’t worry,” he mumbled into her mouth.
Her hands were grasping his shoulders, but he pushed them down to his belt, where they eagerly took up the task of his loosening his buckles, seeming to move at their own accord. His hands, too, dropped between them, bunching handfuls of her skirts upward to expose her legs to the night. She shivered when the backs of her knees felt the cold rock.
The belt fell open, and her hands felt the hardness beneath. He caught his breath at the touch of her fingers, painfully delicate against the tight fabric. He brought his own hand to his waist to complete the task, while her arms caught about his neck, drawing him close, and closer still, until she thought she might climb inside him and stay forever.
He pulled his mouth away from hers to look down, making sure of what he was doing, where he was going, what his name and purpose might be. It all ended with her in this place.
“They will hear me,” she said softly into his black hair.
He looked up at her, suddenly still, his breath caught in surprise.
“Do not let them hear me,” she said.
He understood, and felt his eyes fill with tears at the thought of her concerns, despite her innocence. With trembling fingers, he placed a hand over her mouth as he thrust into her, pulling her against him with his other hand firmly holding her hip. She made no sound, but he saw her eyes go wide with pain, and then rekindle with strange awareness. He felt her teeth against his palm, clenched tight, her lips pressing against the pads of his fingers.
For a moment--barely a breath--he held perfectly still. Even the wind was snuffed, until she shifted her weight to accommodate him, a faraway whimper fluttering in the back of her throat, spilling forward as she lay her head back against the rock. Her throat was exposed to whatever ghosts and demons from the mountains sought to drink her blood, but none did. Only the eager, pleading mouth of her black-haired Winter tasted her pulse, giving himself over to her with all the pain and adoration of ice breathed on newborn petals.
She was melting him, destroying him, putting him to sleep for her own spells to take control. She thought she would die, and screamed in pure silence, the force of his thrusts bruising the skin of her back against the rock of his icy invention. Her legs gave out, and she thought for a moment it was because she had grown wings and could now fly. But without a moment’s hesitation, he caught her weight completely, and in his next breath all that was left of his hibernation and heat was wrenched from his body, spilling into hers in his last gift of life.
He was a year older now, and no less alive, but it did not matter. Spring would come, and as his burning lungs found air in the wake of their love--as dangerous as the lightning drawn from the clouds of the rainy seasons--he knew it would come with her. And it had been his doing.
-----
And the Simms poem:
NOW are the winds about us in their glee,
Tossing the slender tree;
Whirling the sands about his furious car,
March cometh from afar;
Breaks the sealed magic of old Winter’s dreams,
And rends his glassy streams;
Chafing with potent airs, he fiercely takes
Their fetters from the lakes,
And, with a power by queenly Spring supplied,
Wakens the slumbering tide.
With a wild love he seeks young Summer’s charms
And clasps her to his arms;
Lifting his shield between, he drives away
Old Winter from his prey;—
The ancient tyrant whom he boldly braves,
Goes howling to his caves;
And, to his northern realm compelled to fly,
Yields up the victory;
Melted are all his bands, o’erthrown his towers,
And March comes bringing flowers.