Home

After his mother died, Denethor II's heir moved into his grandfather's rooms.  Ages past, the spire's architect had built the suite narrow and long, its east-facing windows occupying the vast majority of their exterior wall.  Back then, few wanted it for the drafts that skirled in through those huge windows.  After the stirrings in the East began, fewer yet wished to live under the eye of Sauron.  They had never been meant for a Steward, or his heir.

Boromir, whom the orcs call Varahai, Red-Tail, after the great hawk that to them is omen of an honourable death, sleeps ill without those windows to the east....when he's home, when he's on leave.  It isn't often.

Sometimes as a child he would come to his grandfather in the dead of night, afraid or simply restless.  It was there he learned not to fear ghosts, for they are simply people without bodies, and there that he slept soundly curled into Ecthelion's strong old arms with the warm dry voice speaking like a river of he knew not what.  That absence aches still, but with the sort of pain that reminds him he's alive.

He didn't know if the narrow bed is the same one Ecthelion had used.  Four years had passed between Ecthelion's death and Finduilas's and what domestic rearrangements had happened he'd never inquired but at least it was a narrow bed, which neither devoured space nor tacitly rebuked him for his solitude.  Even so it sees little use on his rare, brief stays at home.  Its firm mattress feels too soft under a body used to nothing between it and the earth but a worn cloak.  He sleeps in shifts anyway, a couple hours' rest followed by another hour awake and working on things that could be done in silence, but those short shifts aren't worth taking someplace so plush.

He sleeps in the window-seat, stretched like the statue of a dead king on his coffin, on a pillow little wider than his broad shoulders.  Faramir shudders whenever he thinks of it; Faramir does not think it healthy to dream in such clear view of Mordor.

The eye watches you, he says.  Eventually, once, Boromir answers, with a little smile: I watch the eye.


After that, Faramir lets the subject lie.

Crocuses

Death's doorstep bloomed white with crocuses. He had expected to die, of course. It is not man's lot to live forever. Neither did it surprise him to die in failure. In forty years (no, forty-one, somewhere in the violent dark of Moria) he'd paid little thought to himself, but at least now he knew his mettle – tarnished, base and brittle.

But he had not expected crocuses.

Shadows

Peregrine Took is no good at sneaking. Maybe it's the big fuzzy feet, or maybe it's the worried little sniffles between attempts to hold his breath. Either way, Boromir keeps scrounging for kindling under the sad icy scraps of old snow, offering Pippin the small mercy of choice in whether to speak of whatever has him so much on edge, or simply to slip away and pretend he's stayed in camp with the rest of the party.

The not-quite-silence stretches. His own boots scuff on the rocks as he crouches to gather another bundle of moss and furze and offer a brief,equally arid thought of thanks to whatever powers might be that the mountainside hasn't thawed in a very long time. A leathery sound tells him Pippin's doing the nervous-foot-scuff thing.

The Sky Has Claws

Creaking in the New Year's cold, the old man peered into the crevice between book-cases. In its depth lurk a few forgotten nibs, much darkness, innumerable dust bunnies, and a recalcitrant grandson. In his younger days, he thinks, he might have discerned more than the hint of a form, solid and stubborn in the shadows.