Gifts, Part II

Faramir sings the wrong laments.  He is thirteen; he is angry and alone, and standing upwind of the battlefield's bountiful crop of pyres, he sings some ancient lay in the tongue of long-dead Kings, whose language ebbs and swells like the sea over which they came on ships with sails like the wings of gulls.  Faramir is thirteen, angry and alone, and he sings the wrong laments in a voice whose piercing beauty hasn't yet begun to crack.

It's late May - early summer, the vast plains of eastern Gondor blushing green-gold blending into the silver-violet haze of sage, the high desert of no-man's land where Vanka's people's skins of brown and grey and green lend them an advantage unattainable to even the stealthiest of Rangers.  The air, musical with fat swift-winged bees, had smelled of grasses, warm earth, and far-off rain.  Now that flies had replaced the bees, the field reeked of blood, shit and fear, and roasting meat.  Soon it would smell of burning meat.  War lent no time to bury the dead in un-tilled soil, sun-baked in Gondor's dry summers.

When the monsoons of August and September came, when their mother was alive and their father sane, the water ran off the russet soil in rivulets, curling into hollows, etching out gullies and shooting, sudden and lethal, down the arroyos of years and centuries gone by.  The monsoons seldom come now; and when they do, often, their violence robs the earth of the good they once brought, hail battering to death even the hardy roots of sage and gorse and long golden grasses, winds twisting the limbs of olive trees past what even their gnarled strength could bear.

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.

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.

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.

Gifts - Pt. I

For his eleventh birthday, with some portion of the monies their father gave him or his sixteenth, his elder brother buys him a horse from Rohan – as if it is not enough simply to be there, the young general fresh back from a hard campaign with (somehow – he had always had a talent for miracles) stories to enrapture a child whose interests lay primarily between books' covers. As if it is not enough simply to love the second son, the extra child – as if it is not enough to stride in with the northeast wind of spring at his back and swoop up in strong arms warm as the wind is cold a boy few others even notice and wish him, quietly, in a voice so imbued with affection that the words glow softly golden in the boy's mind, “Happy birthday, little one.”

The Steward's Sons - Body Type Comparison

If Faramir thinks about clothes any harder he may actually turn into a pair of trousers.

Faramir - facial ref. sheet

I subvert things, more or less by existing, and LOTR, despite its in many ways fantastic world-building, is ripe for subversion largely because Tolkein was so very Anglocentric - I mean, he was a British professor writing in the first half of the twentieth century, so it sort of comes with the territory but it's still quite glaringly THERE.

And Gondor is sort of the Faded Classical Culture of that world.

And I like doing character design.

And so I decided Gondorians look sort of Greco-roman, with olive skin, arched noses, dark curly hair, etc.  My friend Pearl enjoys my bizarre ramblings and has been wanting to draw my version of Denethor's sons, and was having a hard time with Faramir, ergo, facial ref-sheet.  He looks considerably less Grecian than many of his people due his Numenorian mum.