Faramir Fiction Archive

I, Faramir (PG-13)

21 February 2011 | 7582 words

Day 3

You know, writing about it yesterday made me think back to the early days of my marriage with Éowyn (she didn’t let me call her Wynnie for more than a year, and even then, she said, “and never at court, unless you want to wake up the next morning with your best bits gone!” She had her ferocious moments, my Wynnie – still does, the Valar bless her!)

Anyway, I was put in mind of a rather odd bedtime conversation we had shortly after we were married. You have to remember that Éowyn and I had a very unconventional courtship: we met in the Houses of Healing, both of us recovering from wounds of both body and spirit. Aragorn was the one who had brought us both back. And we were trapped there in Minas Tirith, trapped by our healing bodies, as all the great events transpired in the East without us – as the great man who held a large part of both our hearts went out to achieve his destiny. We stood looking eastward every night, and Aragorn was there for both of us, with us in the midst of our own quietly flowering love, just as much as if he had been there in his own complicated, complicating, beloved person. Éowyn was still very much enamoured of him when we first met, and that unrequited passion was quite literally killing her all over again. She’s proud, my Wynnie – it’s one of the things I love most about her – and she was bound and determined to put on her armour again and get herself killed rather than live for the rest of her life with the shame of having given her heart to a man who couldn’t love her back.

If it had been any other man in the world, I would have hated him for that. Even though the last thing he wanted was to hurt her, and I knew it, I would have hated him for the pain he caused her. But Aragorn I could not hate. Not then, not ever.

I’ve never tried to put into words before what I experienced at his hands in the Houses of Healing. I fear I can’t – it will emerge as a syrupy mess; it will fail to convey the depth and the strength and the joy of the feelings. All I can tell you is that I was in hopeless torment; I burned but I could not expire. I was in despair. And then suddenly he was there. He walked with me in my fiery darkness for what seemed like days; he listened patiently to the horrible confessions of my tormented mind. He saw all the worst parts of me, the parts I have tried so desperately to suppress: my resentment of Boromir and the easy way he earned my father’s praise; my terrible anger at my father for his ruthless dismissal of my judgment and my hard-won battle-skill, not to mention my wrath against his contempt for Gandalf, whom I revered for his wisdom and secretly wished for as a father in Denethor’s stead. Aragorn saw all my memories of my own fears and my self-contempt for those fears. He saw all the stupid, petty faults that ate away at me and made me despise myself. And instead of turning from me in revulsion, he simply accepted me, and soothed my forehead, and told me that soon the worst would be over.

I’ve never quite understood how, but I saw his face clearly during that terrible time, and recognized him; knew him both as Aragorn and as the King. I saw the pure nobility of what he wished from me – simply that I would let him lend his strength so that I could be healed and come back to him, come back to his acceptance and his love. (You can have no idea how long I hesitated with my pen before I wrote that word, but it is the right one, the only possible one). So when the fire was suddenly driven away by a fresh wind of joy and I opened my eyes to find him bending over me in the very flesh, it was only my recalcitrant body that kept me from kneeling before him and kissing his hands. Instead I said, “My lord, you called me. I come. What does the king command?” I have never forgotten the gentle smile that passed over his face when I said that.

And, Aragorn being Aragorn, what he commanded was that I eat and rest and get better, so that I would be ready when he returned. I didn’t realize at that moment that he meant when he returned from saving the whole of Middle Earth from the Shadow – that I would have to wait that long before I could pledge him my allegiance. But I have loved him and been ready to serve him ever since.

So you see, even for my proud, noble, best-loved lady Éowyn, I couldn’t bring myself to hate Aragorn. I believe that they are not loves in conflict, nor in competition within my heart, but that each one makes me stronger in its own way. And it is my dearest wish never, ever to let either one of them down.

Oh yes, I was going to write about that bedtime conversation with Wynnie – but no, she was still Éowyn then. Even though we had been wed nearly a year, and she was soft and loving to me, I still sometimes wondered in my weaker moments if I could only ever be second in her heart. One night, in the slackness and carelessness of sated passion, some demon seized my tongue, and I asked her whether I was indeed an adequate Aragorn-substitute. Well-justified she would have been to slap me and leave my bed at that moment, but instead my Éowyn just turned to me and stroked her long white fingers across my chest, punishing my nipple ever so slightly and thoughtfully with her fingernail.

“Never say that,” she scolded me. And then, shocking me, she added, “Indeed, ‘Mir, I sometimes wonder whether I am an adequate Aragorn-substitute for you.”

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