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.

"I have no imagination," he'd insist, laughing; he made himself the butt of a thousand dry jokes about it, and Faramir knew better than to try to tell him that he still told stories. "The other day" replaced "once upon a time" and, as the heroes acquired names and faces Faramir passed in the citadel's halls and the city's streets, he realised they had been real people all along.

With that came stealing, like the heady warmth of mulled wine (on his fifteenth birthday, he got so drunk he rambled all night in his brother's study before passing out on his bed) the knowledge that the unnamed olive-skinned boy whose kindness made peace with dragons and whose quick wit prevented feuds was himself.

Looking down at his long, thin hands, the remarkably un-hungover morning after (he vaguely remembered many mugs of water, and Boromir's deep voice warm with rueful affection telling him to drink,) he waited for that flattering warmth, like the drunkenness, to fade. Sinews danced under his skin as he curled his fingers. He turned his hand palm-up to watch the life-line enfold itself and felt the knife slide in between his ribs, quite cold, but too sharp to hurt.

Startled out of thought, he pressed his hand to his side, and was further surprised to find nothing there. He frowned, shaking off the cobwebs, then smiled, eyes prickling, at the burgundy cloth under his hand - his brother's favorite tunic, to replace Faramir's wine-stained and vomit-spattered one.

Another half-drowned memory; competent, callused fingers holding back his hair, allowed to grow long only in recent years, while he doubled over a ceramic pot. So much for that plant. They never lived long anyway. Boromir spent too much time at the front or navigating the dusty and back-stabbing intricacies of administration to get in the habit of watering them.

The tunic's rich colour made him sallow - his hand upon the rich velvet looked like a corpse's, but it was warm in the chill spring morning, and it smelled of clean, oiled leather, of soap and sage and evergreen, like his brother. He knew before his fingers brushed it that the crinkle in its pocket was a letter; he knew before he opened it what it would say.

I've gone away - to Ithilien, Morannon, Osgiliath, the Marshes... I have gone away.

I miss you.

Take care of our city; our people trust you. Listen to them, and not to Father. He loves you but he does not know how to speak of love, in words or deeds.

Listen to yourself, little brother. You are wiser than you know (far wiser than I.)


He never said "good bye." Faramir had long since ceased to wonder why, but he folded the letter carefully and tucked it back in the pocket to keep it safe until it joined all the others like it, in their cubbyhole in his desk - all the mornings he'd been asleep and his brother hadn't the heart to wake him, in the nine years since Boromir had gone to war.

His brother's heroes looked like the people they knew. Sometimes they looked like the people they fought. Often, his brother's heroes were him.

But his brother never told him stories of the person he admired most. Faramir wondered if he knew the stories told themselves. He wondered if Boromir saw himself at all, or caught Faramir looking at his own hands, whose olive skin those stories had taught him not to be ashamed of, and thought that he might be anyway - shamed not of their darkness, but that they were not darker; not that they weren't elven-thin, but that they were not blunter.

His brother's heroes taught him that it doesn't take fair complexions or willowy bodies to alter the world for the better, but it was his brother's sturdy dark brown hands, with their myriad silver scars and uneven knuckles, which held the world as it spun.