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.



She is drifting in them, a slender white boat on a grey sea of silk stirred by a breeze redolent of rain-wet flowers.  His words take a long moment to reach her, and when they do she turns toward him, shivering a little at the wind's cool touch between her shoulderblades, where his body's warmth had been.

Instinctively she knows he does not speak lightly, even by his own standards.  Sure enough, she finds the ghosts inside him for once laid bare, not hiding from the glance as usually they do.  His eyes, dark blue like those who have never seen the sea say that it is, beseech hers and the words pile up behind them; his lips part on a sound like a feather breaking.  Arwen places fingertips moth-light over his rough Ranger lips.  He kisses them, sweet man, and closes his eyes just long enough to make the ghosts queue up.  When he opens them, the spirits spill out one by one.

"I never checked his heartbeat.  He closed his eyes, and I could not see him breathing.  The other two, Legolas and Gimli, they were watching me.  My foot was going to sleep, from how I'd knelt and I could not see him breathing.  I took his bracers.  They're good bracers.  He would have wanted me to have them, he always used the goods of the dead."  At last he pauses, long enough to swallow hard and draw a shaking breath, forcing the ghosts to concede to the needs of the living.  "He told me the orcs find it sacred.  That thus they honour the fallen.

"He would have wanted me to have them, Arwen.  But I never checked.  We laid him in the boat, his hands clasping the hilt of that great sword, and..."  Wordlessly, she wraps her arms tight around him and, tucking her face into the curve of his shoulder, sees his face no more.  She inhales deeply as he speaks and lets the scent of him, of soap and silk and sweat, fill her.  "He was a brother to me, Arwen.  But we had to rescue Merry and Pippin.  He died defending them.  He would have been furious with us...furious with me," and Arwen's smile unfurls against his damp skin, "if we'd burdened ourselves with him so badly wounded."

This time, he holds his silence so long a mortal might think him finished.  No; not all mortals.  One at least would have watched him, still as deep water from grey eyes habitually narrowed but with crow's-feet of kind laughter coming up around their corners.  And another, eyes as blue as Aragorn's, with a shape to them like the other's...the folk who know him.  Arwen, who knows him best, snuggles closer and nuzzles into the crook of his neck.  At several thousand years of age, the time it takes for a ghost to draw its dying breath through the grief-choked throat of a living man is not even a wait.  She traces her fingertips down his chest, feeling the breath hitch where arrows had pierced the brother he never had.

"I would have had to kill him, Arwen."  He swallows a sob.  "I did not think I could.  So I did not check.  I ran away..."

At long last, she looks up at him, a gentle smile curving up the corners of her face.  She presses to his lips first her fingertips, and then her mouth, and when the kiss is done, she whispers to him, breath into breath.

"It was the last time you ran, Aragorn.  The last time you hid."  Her years lie on her like the evening as she pulls back enough to look into his eyes.  "I cannot speak for him, but I forgive you.  I love you no less."  Something in his expression cracks and, for a moment more the mother than the lover, Arwen kisses him between the eyes.  "Nor, I think, would he."