What Doesn't Kill You

“He loved her so very much,” said Faramir the idealist, staring sadly enraptured at his mother's portrait hanging over the cold cavern of a fireplace in Denethor's study.

Strange, the things the mind divulges, left unsupervised – like a very old person, rummaging aimlessly through a wardrobe that's bigger on the inside, pulling out dusty assortments of mis-memories. It has been at least six months since that conversation.

He'd looked down at the upturned oval of his brother's face, and remembered how they had fought, until the very end. Their mother died the week of his tenth birthday; back then, their fighting had seemed a fact of nature, frightening certainly but neither right nor wrong, like the bone-shatter crack of trees in deep winter. Giants' voices, snapping overhead.

“Let me go home, Denethor!” Across the years, Finduilas's voice screams out to him as it never did then – screams that her anger was all that she had, aside from Faramir, and it cracks over her body's weakness, snaps like glass dashed on stone into a spray of edges. “Just this once, let me go home.” And then, almost pleading: “Let me go home to die.”

“Finduilas, no. No. I love you.”

“If you loved me, you would let me go home.”

“But I would never see you again.”

“Damn it, let me go!”

“No, damn you. I love you!”

And then a crash, his father's footsteps, a loud silence. Almost-ten, silent in stocking feet, he padded down the hall to the forbidden territory of his mother's chambers and slipped softly inside to where she sat at the edge of the bed, blankets kirtled about her waist and tangled around her ankles, with her face buried in his brother's eternally tousled black hair. Her eyes, blue verging on indigo, darted up at him before squeezing shut and she made the low keening of a proud woman trying not to weep.

On the cusp of some nebulous revelation, he hurt for her sorrow so badly the pain verged on physical. He hastened forward, instinctively collecting the book she'd thrown at his father, and perched on the bed's edge, wrapping an arm around her, expecting her to reel her grief into a tight, neat spool so that it would not spill into her response. Instead she looked up suddenly, right into his eyes and she shrank from him.

“Go away, child,” she rasped, illness and something else roughening her voice. “I love you but I can't stand to look at you right now. You look too much like him.”

“Mother -" Never Ma. Mother.

“Go. Please.” She turned away, turned her face to the West, to the crook of his baby brother's shoulder. Stunned, he rose to leave, and paused as a tiny hand touched his, finding himself looking down into eyes filled with the worried resignation of a confused child. He squeezed Faramir's hand, briefly, offering comfort to a brother at the time almost a stranger and then, as Finduilas stirred again, he hurried out, taking care to close the door quietly behind him.

Her face was a splinter, stuck in his mind. If she had chased him out in anger, it would simply have hurt; but when he closed his eyes to blink, to wash, to sleep he saw her despair. You look too much like him.

Was that the last time he saw her living?

Certainly he should remember her more clearly. She was tall; she wore white, and her black hair, long and shining, reminded him of the great river at night, but should it not have been the other way around? The thought wounds him; he tries to curl around the pain but sharper physical discomfort fixes him in a halfhearted arc, an orphaned parenthesis shivering cold in a white bed ten sizes too big, as if he is seven and not seventeen.

Maybe it is a small bed.  That is what fills the House of Healing.  Soft white tombstones. He doesn't know. Why do healers always use white sheets? It does nothing to shake the conviction (irrational, he knows it's irrational) that a layer of porcelain thin as a baby's cry coats the whole world, that if he moves, if he moves at all it will crunch with dull finality, with edges digging into him like eggshell and -

         -terrible things and - 

-and as if summoned his father arrives, sweeping out of the foggy edge of his awareness into the winter light straying in through the window. He moves through time slowly, a fish in molasses, and he does not kneel. Instead he sits, hands braced on knees, beside his stunned son.  He had not expected his father to come at all; a busy man, he seldom visited when either son, as a child, had been ill and this is the first time any has been so badly wounded.

“You've done me very proud, Boromir. Your men think well of you, and it would have occurred to very few to -”

Whatever his father is saying about his tactics on the hard-fought fortnight campaign that won them a vital outcropping overlooking the river loses itself in the fog; part of him hovers in there somewhere, watching himself make the same stupid fucking mistake he did seven years ago, with Finduilas, but worse because this time he does it for himself, but most of him hurts too badly, inside and out, to watch anything at all and he curls onto his father's lap like a singed spider, desperately seeking solace.

For a moment it closes around him, his father's robes with their scratchy warmth and parchment smell, his father's body strong and narrow – then hard thin fingers clenched in his hair, bruising knuckles digging in and sharp pain as the hand yanks him off his father's lap and throws him roughly onto the cold sheets in a fire-burst of pain and he doesn't know if he cries out and it doesn't matter because the whole world is his father's face pale with fury, the grey eyes (changing eyes, ocean eyes, his eyes, and he remembered that Finduilas had loved the sea) pinning him in place.

“I had thought better of you.” Leather bracers creak as Denethor folds his arms sharply. “A grown man and a general – be sure to act the part, child.”

And then he's gone, borne away on sharp staccato footsteps. His son lies as he fell, one hand curled slightly, staring at nothing. If he hadn't broken himself of wishing years ago, he would have wished that Denethor at least had hit him.

But he hadn't. That was it. They were on his own, he and his brother. And if Denethor would cast him off like that, the favoured son...He does curl up a little then, gingerly onto his side, but he doesn't hug himself (not just because of the compound-fractured collarbone) and he doesn't weep. He hasn't in years but now, definitively, it is Over, closed off with the sharp tap of his father's boots.

If Denethor would do that to him, then he is all his brother has.  He was right, not to tell Faramir how their parents fought.