Trophies

The goblin is dying. One of Legolas's elegant arrows has pierced its gut, and the wound tore further in its vain effort to save its...sister? Friend? Lover? Either way its bony grey fingers clutch helplessly at the wound's lips, as if, should the scraps of ragged flesh align, it might be whole again.


It? He, she, they...when did the rest of the Fellowship get to him, in this brief harried November, to make him think this poor soul it?


It...they, he, it's hard to tell on so gaunt and wiry an armoured figure, the dying goblin...his lips move, soundlessly, as he lies face-up on the stone and his tribesman's corpse. The dead goblin's body is cloven near in half. He remembers that cut. She'd been trying to get to Merry with the wicked little knife now glittering beside her hand.


Stones scrape under his boots as he kneel beside them. He doesn't mind; no sense in startling the dying, he thinks, taking up the knife. Firelight bleeds from its edges. It's very sharp. 

Heartbeats

"I never checked."

Arwen stirs a little, in the cool spring air warmed with their lovemaking.  Dusk drapes its shadows over their long forms entangled in silk sheets the colour of mist; Elessar, the king, Strider, her Aragorn, her husband, had bought them for her, as a tactile memory of her home, and she hadn't the heart to tell him that to elfin eyes they bore no semblance.  For all he had learned since the great Council fifteen years past, he still would not understand that each thread of those sheets held, in the love and care of their choosing, something far more precious.

One More Time

And then, after that, once again...

                 ...and again

Scrimshaw

Most people give first of things; some time, a cup of coffee, a shiny stone.  Perhaps along the way, they begin to give themselves. All Jareth has is his kingdom.  It is not his to give, but he its.  For Sarah, though, it will give him himself - and so, worthless as he is on his own, it is himself he gives her.

He gives her all of him. Never has he been one to offer with measure or with reservation.  He gives himself not in hope of any return, but because she is Sarah, and he is Jareth, and that is what he does.

And when there is no more to give, still he gives her what is left.  She finds him at the last, curled at the side of a dusty road with the dessicated lacework of last year's hydrangeas bowing over him.  She finds him where he has lain since the spiders swelled with autumn, colours sun-leached.  The wind has worn him down to his fine bird-bones with her name writ upon them like scrimshaw, Sarah, Sarah, Say-rah, turning the words in his mouth like river-rocks and honey.

She strokes his tangled pale hair and scoops the bundle of bird-bones into her arms.  Then she carries him home on sturdy bare feet.  It is cool in her house, save in the dusty sunbeams; he moves for the first time, hiding his face in the sage-green linen of her dress.  He shivers as she turns to descend a flight of stairs and shushes him, gently, nuzzling into his hair and plants a kiss upon his temple, and with a click she closes the iron cuffs around his spun glass wrists and leaves him there, in the dark, in the damp, in the dust.

The last gift the Goblin King offers his beloved is the peace of solitude, to tend to her own needs.

Crocuses

Death's doorstep bloomed white with crocuses. He had expected to die, of course. It is not man's lot to live forever. Neither did it surprise him to die in failure. In forty years (no, forty-one, somewhere in the violent dark of Moria) he'd paid little thought to himself, but at least now he knew his mettle – tarnished, base and brittle.

But he had not expected crocuses.

His Brother's Heroes

All the myths and legends are of luminous elves and fair-complexioned Numenorians - one of myriad silent snubs offered a quiet boy with olive skin, but in Faramir, whose world pooled like still water in his brother's strong dark hands, its thistle-claws found no hold. Let the storytellers keep their pale elven saviours. His brother's heroes were olive-gold like him, or dark brown like their Easterling great-grandmother (and, while some were fair, that bore no more comment than that the Anduin was wet.) His brother's heroes were not just kings wielding big swords all tangled in their own names, but farmers bearing plows and goatherds with their crooks, were bookish children with no tool save wits and kindness, were floury-handed baker women who rescued themselves and need no "-ine" to their "hero" and would have rolled their plain brown eyes at the languishing elf-princesses.

His brother stopped telling those stories, over the years. Later, Faramir couldn't bring himself to say "as we grew up" after Boromir gave up his own childhood in story after story, in all the hard lessons and the words of comfort their father never gave, in years - started far too young - as their people's shield.

Rant/Lament

Apparently, you aren't supposed to be human.

If there are elves, please be an elf; they are so very lovely

and quite untouched by mortal foibles such as passion;

Or be a hobbit – after all, it's easy to forgo temptations such as power

when all you really want is to go home and tend your garden;

But don't be human, please, or if you must,

be the special kind of human, with elf blood somewhere up your family tree,

with two hundred years life expectancy

(so you can spend the better part of half a century running away from responsibility;)

Just, for god's sake, don't be an ordinary human,

worn out from forty years carrying the world on your back,

keeping it turning, with broken ribs and bloody elbow grease;

this makes it very hard to say no to power, not for its own sake, certainly not for yours,

but for your people's -

For the tired women keeping their chapped noses to the grindstone, fishing and farming,

buying and selling, weaving and spinning and dyeing, working stone and steel and working

to keep their world working while the men are off at war, working

through their sorrow for their men who are off at war;

For your brother, a sweet kid (of thirty-five) who only wants your father's love,

For the strong, tired women's men who fight and die at your command,

For your grandfather, who wore himself to old yellow parchment

For their sake, alone, until the wind wafted him away -

Just don't you fucking dare be human, because humans fail sometimes, and that, it would appear,

is unforgivable.