Boromir, whom the orcs call Varahai, Red-Tail, after the great hawk that to them is omen of an honourable death, sleeps ill without those windows to the east....when he's home, when he's on leave. It isn't often.
Sometimes as a child he would come to his grandfather in the dead of night, afraid or simply restless. It was there he learned not to fear ghosts, for they are simply people without bodies, and there that he slept soundly curled into Ecthelion's strong old arms with the warm dry voice speaking like a river of he knew not what. That absence aches still, but with the sort of pain that reminds him he's alive.
He didn't know if the narrow bed is the same one Ecthelion had used. Four years had passed between Ecthelion's death and Finduilas's and what domestic rearrangements had happened he'd never inquired but at least it was a narrow bed, which neither devoured space nor tacitly rebuked him for his solitude. Even so it sees little use on his rare, brief stays at home. Its firm mattress feels too soft under a body used to nothing between it and the earth but a worn cloak. He sleeps in shifts anyway, a couple hours' rest followed by another hour awake and working on things that could be done in silence, but those short shifts aren't worth taking someplace so plush.
He sleeps in the window-seat, stretched like the statue of a dead king on his coffin, on a pillow little wider than his broad shoulders. Faramir shudders whenever he thinks of it; Faramir does not think it healthy to dream in such clear view of Mordor.
The eye watches you, he says. Eventually, once, Boromir answers, with a little smile: I watch the eye.
After that, Faramir lets the subject lie.
