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. 

He wonders if its bearer crafted it. Vanka's people require such a bond between an individual and their little sharp knife, the length of its bearer's hand, used for such close work as cleaning hides and giving mercy to the dying. Perhaps these mountain folk do the same. Faramir would know.


Faramir has been in negotiations with some tribe near here for over three years. Did we just slaughter my brother's diplomacy project?


The goblin stirs and struggles, choking on blood, and the man speaks softly in Orsi, inane words of comfort, while his hands find the waterskin at his hip. He has done this so often he could do it in his sleep. He knows, because he's done so, and he sees, in the dying goblin's eyes, relief and pleading replace fearful disbelief.


Behind him, Legolas and Gimli count the bodies, making a game of it with edges to their voices. He cradles the goblin's head, helping it drink. The hand that holds the knife gently strokes its tangled hair until it closes its eyes, holding the taste of water still clean, for all its proximity to life has left it tepid. Then he slips the sharp blade deftly between the vertebrae at the base of its skull. The little goblin dies with a smile.


"Merry!"


The clever hobbit whirls at the sound of his name and reflexively catches the sheathed blade the man tosses to him, astonishment registering only after his fingers close around the hilt.


"For close fighting," Boromir calls over to him, "and giving mercy." He holds Merry's gaze to be sure his words, both spoken and unspoken, sink in. Since they do, it is with equal portions pride and sorrow that he turns back to his methodical sorting. The piled-up years have made so easy it takes hardly a glance to tell the useful from that better left; a wish brushes catlike against his mind,yearning to better know these people so as to tell what might, while useful, be too personal. Vanka would laugh angrily if he assumed these folk just like hers simply because they shared skin tones.


Legolas catches his eye as he crouches beside another corpse and too late he catches the glint to the elf's gaze.


"And how many did you slay?" The emphasis on you makes it a challenge he has no desire to touch. The words' individual import comes after that, with anger following swiftly on its heels. 


"I don't know." He memorizes the play of gold light and blue shadow over gravelly ground and a dead hand. Easier to not argue with the ground than a belligerent companion.


"Why not?"


Dammit! His hand freezes, halfway to a mostly full pouch of rations. He forces it not to clench and his jaw to un-clamp. No sense in breaking his teeth over someone else's idiocy.


"Do you not remember?"


"Legolas-"


That is Gimli, a warning. Keeping the peace, or taking his side against her people's traditional rivals? Please, Gimli, let it be the latter...
"Too many?" asks Legolas, filling the air with unspoken "or too few."
Boromir finally looks up. The elf, close enough to touch him, stumbles sharply back, blanching.
"I do not keep count. The life of a living creature is no trophy, nor is its death." 
This time, his hand has clenched, so tight around a copper brooch that its edges dig into his palm. The world has gone very very cold and very still, very silent. Sounds persist but each one separates, leaving around it a mutely screaming space. The elf's easy breath stills and he opens his mouth to say something, with the whites of his eyes showing around their golden-green centres.
Then he barks a laugh and shakes it off.
"That is fair enough,if -"

The if dies stillborn under an unflinching stare. The prince of Mirkwood turns hastily away, toward Gandalf and Aragorn. Boromir closes his eyes tight, tight, tight til the red glow under the lids dances madly in time with his racing pulse. Breathe. In, out. Taste the air, let its chill remind him it is warm blood that his veins carries, warmth at the core of him.


When he opens them, Gimli sits on a rock, watching him, holding a goblin's stone axe across her knees. What of her face shows between beard and helm hold the stony stillness of her musing, so often underlying her bluster and, now, bared. Thus he takes no offense from her question.


"If you won't count them as trophies, then why do you take their equipment and their weapons?"


Only when he let out his breath does he realise he's been holding it. 


"To the orcs of Mordor, at least, to not do so would give offense, for waste is the first and greatest crime, from which all others spring. Of these, I cannot say for certain." A tight ache in his chest roughens his voice. "One may ask the dead, but they will not answer. But their craftsmanship, their symbols are close enough to suggest some similarity."


Slowly he loosens cramping fingers from the brooch and holds his hand out to Gimli. She steps closer in a crunch of boots on gravel, her eyes never leaving his face as she extends cupped hands, palm up. The brooch sticks in his hand for a second; relief courses through him as it drops into her palms with no blood on its edges.

Gimli peers into his eyes for a heartbeat, two, three. What she hopes to find there, he can't say. She looks at last down to the brooch and traces with a callused, stocky finger the shape of a wing, sparsely detailed but powerfully evocative.

“Bird?”

“Red-tailed hawk. Omen of an honourable death.” A smile twists his lips. He folds Gimli's hands gently over the brooch. Their heat feels like it comes from far away. “In Mordor, I am called Varahai, which means red-tail. It is yours.”

“If you are Red-Tail - “

“It is not mine to claim, but theirs to give. But you, from whom it is no claim, have every right to a fine brooch which would elsewise go to waste.”

A fine brooch, it is. Gimli's face shows that clearly enough, and metalwork knows no higher compliment than a dwarf's regard. There's something else there, too, but what he can't begin to say – something like awe, or longing, in blue eyes green with reflected copper. She looks up at him and her smile looks as off as his a moment ago had felt.

“Your eyes have gone pale as the sky, lad. Here.”

It is his turn to stare while comprehension filters through, at the rough hand extended. It has been longer than he can recall since he's seen a hand up from this end. He takes it, after that hesitation, glad of its presence more for the contact than for what little assistance he asks of it when the knee that hasn't worked quite right since that long-ago day in the Marshes reminds him there's a storm approaching.

Something sharp jabs his palm. He looks down, to check, and sees instead his and Gimli's hands, brown and pink, his pocked with little silver scars, overlapped. Between them, invisible, lies the brooch. Even so, her hand, or maybe his, lingers for a moment for warmth in the cold evening. When she releases his hand and strides away, leaving him to follow, there is no blood. The next morning, she wears the brooch in place of her wrought steel cloakpin.