Aragorn/Arwen, 63
#63 -- tujhe dekha toh from dilwale dulhania le jeyenge
ok so the soulmatism of it all had me going completely nuts (simrans waking dreams.....i need to lie down) & before i knew it i'd re-read their appendix had 3 literary analysis epiphanies and was neck deep in the wiki page on love death and meaning and the paradox of religion and nonreligion in tolkein
i say all that like i didnt just write movie verse kidfic lol.
ellie is a shortened version of "nethel" which means sister in sindarin. in a different time in my life i would have named every single one of canon girldad aragorns "many daughters" & also included 5 of them but alas, at this time i am Busy. so we'll pretend that the other 3 havent come along yet. arwen has magic powers she will be fine.
enjoy!
“My lady Luthien!”
The words come into Arwen's dream in the common tongue, whispered and full of a child’s awe. He is speaking as if to himself — the text has surprised him, or perhaps absorbed him so that he does not realize his mouth is moving, disrupting the Sindarin read privately in his thoughts with an impulsive, delighted exclamation.
To Arwen it is just as mesmerizing. She cannot know why her dream has brought her here, to this garden of her father’s House she has sought refuge in so many a time. She knows him very little, this child, not ten in the years of Men and so very human about it, with lanky limbs folded up against himself to cradle the book and a mop of dark hair that falls down over his eyes and the very beginning of spots on his chin (of endless intrigue to Arwen, who has only ever seen skin unblemished).
She has not met him, but knows of him from her brothers’ letters: her father’s ward, sweet and grave and beloved amongst the Rivendell kindred as any novelty in the shape of a child might be. But Estel earns it, too. He is earning his presence in her dream in the same way, sat in the exact spot she always chooses, under bows of trees she has long considered friends. He earns it, though Arwen doesn’t quite know why he’s here.
Don’t you? ask her thoughts of her self, and she does not answer.
Years pass, and she is home again.
“My lady Luthien,” he says, as she comes toward him, and within his voice is a gentle embarrassment that still manages to tease.
Arwen, firm in her earlier, gentle rejection (he is far too young), cannot help but find this terribly charming anyway. It is just after dinner, and she has found him behind a pillar to the side of where they dine. He holds his cup in both hands. Until her appearance he was studying the carvings on one stone edifice to their side, and seems in every way his mortal age save one: there is a new and convoluted weight in his eyes that was not there in the early afternoon, when he called so clearly and sincerely to her. It seems to have entered like the broken branches of a sapling swept into a fast-moving stream after a storm.
“I should be greatly flattered, Estel, to be compared thus,” Arwen says, offering that weight a smile. Estel drops his eyes back to the pillar. He seems to start and stop a few times before actually opening his mouth, and when he does,
“I should like to still be called Estel, for a while yet,” and there is great vulnerability there, in his young man’s eyes. It sneaks into her breast and cups a hand over the breath she draws, and despite the glade, and his youth, and the Truth her father has now shared with him, she is compelled: Arwen’s own hand slides over his knuckles, and they are holding the cup together.
“I will,” she promises. “I do.”
On the edge of the last word do his eyes flick up to hers, canny in a way that sparks beneath her skin. He lives up to his name, she thinks then (not quite knowing why), and when she writes this to him after they have parted, in the letters they now share, he writes back: so do you.
Before Estel, her experience of Death was altogether different. She knew it first in abstraction and then in keen loss. Now she feels its imminance and urgency, in both grand and mundane ways.
For example, earlier this evening, Arwen thought she might die if she did not kiss him. It was a thought that crept over her swiftly, silent and keen as a fresh ice water brook spilling into open hands, very different from the thundering roar of the river spirits she had summoned to herself – until it was suddenly quite the same, roaring, and it must have shown in her eyes. In the late quiet of the night she came to her rooms and found him, there.
(She has long since known why.)
The employment of her tongue is not new, but pulls a murmur out of him regardless. “My lady Luthien,” he starts, speaking almost directly against her mouth, with a wry amusement that is not so unburdened as to be playful and not yet a warning, either, and then he is properly startled into, “Arwen —!” when her next kiss includes a bite. The rasp of beard against her chin is uncomfortable and delightful. She can feel the rumble of her small victory in his chest. Aragorn has always done so much with just the two syllables of her name.
When she has lost all breath she pulls away, and does not pant — sweet air made salty by urgency comes in and out of her lungs in discordant sighs — but her lips stay hot against his ear and she feels every press of his fingers against the slope of her waist, burning. She thinks of death again; she has fought it off. Twice in one week now, in very different ways.
Aragorn does pant, in his own way. He lets out a quiet gasp and drops his head against the side of hers, not trembling but finding some stronghold deep within himself that begets composure.
Slowly she begins to comb her fingers through the hair at his temple. In the dark alcove of her rooms (safe), they sway together.
“Tomorrow,” he murmurs, and she knows: tomorrow the council is held.
“I meant it, earlier,” says Arwen softly, into his hair. It has begun to grey, the strands too hidden yet to shimmer in the moonlight but there nonetheless. Every so often she will catch a glimpse of them and it will leave her wordless, and desperate to touch him. “Your fears are not the truth you think them to be.”
“Arwen.” She can hear the desperation that threatens to choke his own voice. Duty turns the peaceful twilight of her home into a foreboding shadow. There are two large warm hands on her face before she has noticed them move, and then she feels the wetness of her own cheeks: she had not realized she was crying.
“I did not know it would be so momentous to love,” she says, while he wipes at her tears with war-roughened, gentle fingers. So many things about Men are a paradox. So many things about this man.
“Meleth,” he says.
“I meant it.” She repeats herself. “I know who you are in my heart, Estel.”
“You do,” he allows her, and she is not certain he believes it to be enough. No matter, Arwen thinks: her own belief will sustain them. It must, long enough that he has hope for himself as well as for Men, and then they might cross through the door, to the other side of the Dark.
The Queen finds her husband in Faramir’s study, reading.
“My lady Luthien,” she is greeted, words threaded full of the subtle humour that has turned her head for over sixty years.
Arwen clasps her hands over the laden basket she packed without needing any kind of foresight and sighs thinly.
“I did expect, mel nin, that you had gone the whole day without food, but I had thought you would be found holding grave council, or visiting the head healer, or even – forgivably – in the stables. Instead, you are here, nose-deep in an ancient poem.”
“It did not come to you in a vision?” he asks, and raises his eyes just enough to catch hers from beneath his lashes. This does nothing to diminish the focus etched into his dark brow, nor the way he holds himself (always it calls to her – it does not matter the shape), nor the deep blue of his mantle sweeping against the floor; he has not paused to change since returning from the Southern Wall. Whatever peace he thinks his feigned innocence will win him, she cannot know.
“Your Steward told on you, my love.”
“Aaah,” his face falls, so dramatically it is amusing.
She holds up her basket. “I have lunch.”
“My beloved wife has developed the sensibilities of a Hobbit,” Aragorn says, in her people’s language.
“Hobbits are good and noble creatures,” she retorts. She always argues better with him in Sindarin anyhow, “and have traditions from which we might learn.” She arches a brow: “Estel.”
“I am eating,” protests Aragorn, somewhat weakly. “I mean – I will.”
“You might do so now. With me – there is no one else here.”
It is a potent suggestion, she does acknowledge. She watches him think about it, proud to note all the little tells which she has known since he was a barefaced and impulsive young man. The same canny look sparks under Arwen’s skin. Once, decades ago, she had met him in the wild woods beyond her father’s borders in a stolen moment between darkness and duty, and convinced him to bathe with her in the river. She remembers her joy at seeing his wet dark hair plastered all over his forehead. She remembers his own joy, and how it fought off the lonesome blanket of the gathering shadow.
“Your thoughts are of something I know,” Aragorn says now, suspicion arching his tone and narrowing his bright eyes, no longer that of a young man but still full of a life that thrills her. “Some joyful mischief that you’re going to coax me into again, no doubt.”
“There is sadly no river in the palace.”
“Aaah,” uttered in a very different tone from before. His eyebrows twitch out of their focused furrow and his face warms with the memory. He lowers his book a little. “Arwen …”
But he does not move from his spot behind the desk, so Arwen places her basket down and sweeps forward, intent. The silver in his hair streaks liberally now, and lines furrow down his cheeks when he laughs – often – but otherwise Aragorn remains mostly unchanged from the presence filling so little yet so much of the many years of Arwen’s memory. Affection rushes through her, swelling like the river, growing like the trees in Lorien. That glade, too, is a memory full of joy. He is much better suited to a beard, though. Arwen tells him this.
“So you have said many many times,” Aragorn says, chuckling. “I have no plans of removing it from my face, beloved.”
“I know,” Arwen hums. “I am only observing.”
Slowly she comes around the desk, on even steps, until they are very nearly touching and she can fold her hands over the top of his book. She takes a long moment to look at him, and though she in her chosen mortality no longer carries the same potency of power that Tinuviel’s blood held before, she conducts her habitual scan of his spirit, the truth of it ebbing through her fingers where they touch. Beyond her duties as Queen (of which there are many, and she both capable and willing) this is what Arwen knows most deeply in her heart how to do.
Finding Aragorn no more burdened than usual (though perhaps a little distracted) she leans in to whisper in his ear.
“Ah –” he clears his throat and touches two long brown fingers to her arm. Unexpectedly, then, Aragorn stage whispers, “We are not … as alone as it seems.”
“What exactly do you mean?” Arwen, paused very close to his mouth, is compelled to whisper back.
And then,
“It’s alright!” comes a familiar little voice from seemingly nowhere, and all at once Arwen looks down to see the outside shape of the King’s voluminous cloak wriggle. Her mouth parts in surprise. The whisperer continues importantly, “You may kiss Ada if you like, Naneth. We are not looking!”
“Ssssshhh!” materializes a second, equally familiar little voice.
Arwen tilts her head, mystified, as her husband sets his expression into something communicating exclusively the secrets and patient indulgences of fatherhood. Then he jerks his chin towards the door, eyebrows raised and everything, not a moment before there sounds the sharp cadence of what can only be a young boy’s footsteps (and Arwen would know this boy’s as she knows her own heart) and into the library bursts their only son.
At the sight of his parents, Eldarion comes to an abrupt halt, and tries very hard to compose himself.
“Ahem,” he says, straightening. She sees the way his body moves to mimic his father, and also the grass stains on his knees, and the disheveled mop of his curls that means he has definitely spent the last hour running around in the gardens. Arwen is unbothered by this. “Hello Ada, hello Naneth. Have you – have you seen my sisters?”
The front of Aragorn stays conspicuously still.
“Your sisters?” asks Arwen, clasping her hands demurely before her.
“I am afraid my attention has been elsewhere,” says Aragorn gravely, holding aloft his book.
“Indeed,” adds Arwen. “So much so that he has forgotten to eat.”
Minutely, the cloak quivers.
“Hmmmm,” says Eldarion, lost in focus. “I must find them to create an alliance with the brave rangers in the North,” he speaks, almost as though to himself – he is really giving this quite a bit of thought. He is so absorbed that she could be in Rivendell again, drawn by a dream into her beloved, occupied glade … “For we must defend the townspeople but I cannot do it alone.”
Arwen blinks. Her heart is filled with tenderness.
“They have assigned you the role of orc again?” Aragorn is guessing, sympathetic.
Eldarion droops only a little before springing back up with full confidence. “Yes! But I am determined that we will create an alliance. I am a good orc, you see.”
With hasty goodbyes, he rushes away, taking the excitable sound of his footsteps with him.
A moment of quiet passes. Aragorn’s cloak begins giggling, so he spreads open his arms and herds them out one by one.
“You must go quietly now, down the hall and into the gardens,” whispers their father.
“Naneth,” begins their youngest, halfway out the room, “Naneth, do you think if we formed a nalliance –”
“An alliance,” corrects Aragorn, still whispering.
“Shhh,” interrupts the other, “or Eldarion will find us!”
“But he must be getting lonely!”
“Oh, ellie …”
Their little voices trail out of the door.
“I believe an alliance would work,” Aragorn offers Faramir’s many inert books, speaking at a normal register once more. The study now empty, Arwen turns back to her husband. His eyes are twinkling. She does not say anything, but moves toward him, as she has done so many times before, and lays her head to rest against his shoulder. In moments the book is tucked away, and the warm hands she knows so well are cradling her arms.
After a moment he says, “You are well? Arwen?” a gentle question in her ear. Arwen nods. She can now say what she knows, and why they are here:
She sustained them, and there was hope to be found.
Aragorn’s fingers rub over the gauzy sleeve of her dress. “Did you have your heart set on lunch?” he asks quietly.
“I did,” Arwen says, and turns to hold his eye. “I do.”
34 notes
·
View notes