Fearless

His men said the Steward's elder son was fearless; they said he'd killed a troll with a bread-knife once, and calmly gone back to slicing bread for supper. It is easy to believe, as the encroaching storm follows him into his father's hall, tattering the long dark cloak about his calves and playing havoc with tangled dark hair, the wild curls of it matted with sweat and blood.

Opponents' blades have cut deep into his black leather armour; the end of a broken sword sticks, on the left, where the breastplate adjoins the shoulder-guard. If its point reaches his flesh, he shows no sign. His heavy steps are drums, low as a heartbeat.

In the storm, the Steward imagines the boy's dead mother. Son of the storm, he thinks – my mighty son.

As for the son, he feels small, under the marble stare of statuary and the opalescent almost-sentience of his father's Palantir. Fresh from the front, he smells his own sweat, and the blood caking on hair and armour. The world at large has shrunk as he grew; sometimes it seems he could reach out and stroke the undersides of the clouds, but his father's hall has only stretched. His right knee threatens to give, halfway down the hall, but he steadies his step and steels his face. He is the perfect son, after all – but his father doesn't have to know how much of him aches for a nice hot bath.

He watches his father's face, steadily, the features of it clarifying out of the haze of exhaustion. Few will look his father in the eye, now. In vain he tries to remember if they ever did.

Closer to, he offers a smile, and knows it comes out tired. Even so, an answering one briefly humanises the avian contours of the Steward's features. A wintry smile, it prods old aches to waking; he is glad his father's perspicacity extends little to human intricacies.

At ten paces, he bows, liege to lord. One bony hand lifts momentously to beckon him forward, so forward he comes. His father lives for the day the kings return; himself, he couldn't begin to care for kings, or the lack thereof, and so has no qualms in kneeling at his father's chair at the foot of the old dais, so as not to loom over the elder man. On his feet, the Steward stands half a head taller, but long gone are the days he would rise to greet either of his sons.

It feels good to be off his feet, despite the cold floor under a wrenched knee. His father's voice recalls him; raising his head, he realises he'd let it come to rest on one hand, loosely clasping the arm of the chair. His father has been speaking. His own grey eyes briefly search the Steward's sunken ones.

The aquiline face hollows further, every time he goes away. He shakes himself a little.

“You look weary, son.”

Son. As if I'm the only one.

“I came straight to you from the front.”  He does not point out that he always does, when his brother is with him; when his brother has stayed home, he stops to greet him, for enough time to exchange a hug, a hello, and then, always, to hiss father..

“You must be tired indeed, then. And hungry.” A sharp frown throws into relief the brackets framing the Steward's face. “You may dine, before you make your report.”

“I sent for food to be brought here. I'll sup with you, Father.”

The defiance doesn't go unrecognised, but he is the golden son, so his father welcomes it with another frozen smile, terrible on his gaunt face. And that is why I defy you, on this. When is the last time you ate? Few dare disturb you, at that...thing.

His father is talking again, on kings or battles. His own gaze lingers momentarily on the gleaming stone. It ought to be covered – like an eye without a lid, it is painful to look on, and holds a gruesome fascination. Tearing himself away, he draws up another chair, and a little table for the eventual arrival of supper, from a discreet nook behind a curtain, and sinks gratefully into the chair. It is hard and spare, like everything about his father's hall, echoing its solitary stern occupant. Little mars the polished wood. Against its gleam, his rough soldier's hands seem quite obscene.

“It is good to be home,” he offers to the silence which has stolen over them.

“Yes.” The Steward's voice falls like a rock onto ice. “It is better yet to have you home, for once, without that child.”

Anger stirs from its coils under the heavy fug of weariness.

“He is a brilliant tactician, and a brave man.” He is kind, too, and he has worlds in his head; but you don't care about that, do you? The anger tightens its coils. His brother will be in the stables, tending his horse – Faramir takes to the cavalry in a way that leaves his elder brother, awkward with horses, quietly in awe. He would envy his brother's gentle strength, but that he loves him too much for it.

“He is a goddamned fool, and a blight on our House.” And where did such gentle strength arise from, with such a father? “You've been aloof, since I let him go with you. He will steal you, my son.” The Steward leans forward, hands clutching the arms of the chair, dark eyes burning into his elder child's face. This close, he can see the spittle on his father's lips. “He will steal you,as he did your mother, as he did my youth. He will steal it all.”

Don't rise to it -

“Would you stand by that, father, save in anger?” Once he would have yelled. Now he pitches his voice low, a trick he learned from the man before him. It is the Steward's turn to squirm. “Would you go down in history as a man coward enough to blame his misery on a child, his own son, who trusts him?”

He thinks he sees his father flinch; it breaks the spell. From sorrow, and not anger, he speaks again, to the tangled iron curtain of his father's hair, hiding his averted face. Perhaps he should not do this; in the long run, it will fix nothing – but this once, he will be brave. Peacekeeping is well and good, especially with such precious little peace to keep, but he cannot always manage his father. Its omnipresence makes the deep ache of needing to do so easy to ignore, though sometimes difficult to speak around.

“Was she all you had, Father? What of our people? Did you truly loose it all, when she died?”

The hard hand catches his face before he has a chance to react. It is a bird's hand, clawed and terrible; the tips of the long fingers dig into his cheek and jaw and the calluses feel more like horn than does the horn itself, which his right hand has fallen to reflexively, an assurance of his place in the world.

His father's face is haggard and terrible, lips thin and spittle-flecked, working silently, his eyes mad embers, cruel and pleading. In middle age, the Steward is a nightmare of an old man. I remember when you were no kind of nightmare, his son thinks, unflinching grey eyes meeting wild  bloodshot ones, darker only for their dilated pupils, even as his father's hand leaves blue-black fingerprints on his face.  His father's eyes are the same colour as his own.  He has a difficult time with mirrors.

“I have you.” The voice rasps flint on steel, steel on ice. The hand pulls him in, off-balance, kneeling again, breath held lest it stumble at the unexpectedness of contact. The Steward has never been physically demonstrative; even his favoured son can count on one hand the times his father has touched him, and now he grabs him, clutches him, while his eyes seek to hollow him out, like a seabird with a crab. “I have you. Don't I?”

Gently, the son raises his hand, a soldier's hand, the long lean fingers blunt and scarred, the bones straight as blades save where injury has left here a knuckle larger than the rest, there a pinky awry. Despite its horrible strength, his father's hand feels fragile. The skin would tear at a sudden movement, the bones crumble to dust. The strength to wound does not imply the fortitude to withstand.

“You have me, father.” He squeezes the hand gently and leans forward to plant a chap-lipped kiss between his father's eyes. The floor is cold under his knees, cold as his father's smile, and the marble eyes watch them, and the skinned eyelid of the opalescent orb. “I promise.”

And the Steward's fearless elder son is very much afraid.