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.