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.

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.

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.

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.

Fearless

His men said the Steward's elder son was fearless; they said he'd killed a troll with a bread-knife once, and calmly gone back to slicing bread for supper. It is easy to believe, as the encroaching storm follows him into his father's hall, tattering the long dark cloak about his calves and playing havoc with tangled dark hair, the wild curls of it matted with sweat and blood.

Sing Up the Dark

Vanka shaves her head in the early shadows of dusk, beside her sister's slumbering shape. She shaves away long lank locks of glossy black; she shaves away her husband's touch, her half-remembered mother's fingertips; she shaves away a lifetime's children who will never quicken, and when the first sob threatens she chokes it out into song, her rasping voice rising with the darkness to the stars' lonely eyes, singing, singing, singing up the darkness – not in the high tongue of the dark lords on their black horses, but in Orsi, her people's language, a tattered shroud of a tongue that refused to accept its own death.

Stewardship

His first memory:

He can't be more than four; maybe three and a half – his mother is well, then, her stomach flat under the graceful fall of her shift. Sometimes he wishes he could better remember her face, more than the curve of her mouth smiling, the sharp bracket of its frown. She smelled of juniper and roses, he remembers. His father always brought her roses. And his grandfather can still pick him up, swooping him off his sturdy little feet to spin him round and round strong bony shoulders.

In the memory, his father is very tall. As childhood memories go, it presents itself in a blur of smell (polished wood, all orange and beeswax; the damp wool of his father's cloak – it must have been winter; the stony scent of ink) and sleepy golden light, which now he knows for candles, with sharp pinpricks of lucidity.