A/N: This is the first of five ficlets from various times in Aragorn's experience involving the arrival of new life. There are descriptions of childbirth in some of these, and though I've done my best to be tasteful in the presentation, I'll give a warning for the potentially squeamish reader.

Lavish thanks to cairistiona7 and levade, who both read this over for me before I posted it. Seriously, folks, if you're reading LotR fanfic, you need to be reading these two authors. Their stories are magnificent. Go have a look, and leave them a nice review!

All recognizable elements belong to J.R.R. Tolkien.

Nine

The boy stirs slowly, sprawled belly-down and askew on the mattress, pillow discarded in a slump somewhere to the east. Waking is a labor with no daylight to lure him. He has not yet learned to lunge into awareness bristling, prepared for any peril, but he will learn. All in time. Now a softly rocking hand on one bare shoulder blade ushers him up from the dream-caverns. He smells pine and thunderstorms and the sweet dustiness of horse. Elrohir.

"S'dark still…."

"It is very late. Fledge is hunting for a place. Do you still wish to watch?"

Immediately his eyes snap open, bright in the glow of the hall sconce that feathers around the half-open door. He scrambles floorward, snags in tangled blankets, plummets headfirst from the bed. His foster-brother catches his arm and laughs and untangles him.

"Calm yourself. You will crack the tile with your head."

"We will miss it, Elrohir!"

"There is time. Maiden mare, she will not rush. Dress first. It is cool out."

Together they depart the house and the last mere of lantern light on the terrace. They pause on the path for Estel to lean against Elrohir and unwad the stocking in the toe of his shoe, clumped from being donned too hastily. On they go. All the creeping night-things are intent on their courtships and their thrumming sonnets are thick in the air. A bat whirs and creaks and wheels away. The grass is as high as Elrohir's hips and Estel's underarms and rustles with dew, but the boy does not notice when his tunic and breeches begin to dampen and drip. He tries to match the silent step of his companion who glides shadowlike a half-pace ahead, but Elrohir and his long legs keep him on the threshold of a lope. Presently a hand splayed over his sternum draws him up.

"There, in the willows."

The boy's breath catches; in the thin light of the sickle moon he sees a paler shape against the gloom, slim legs and heavy barrel, head low, heaving softly. She bites at her belly and shifts and lies down, her front legs folding first. This arrangement does not suit her and soon she heaves upright and lumbers further beneath the eaves of the weepers.

Elrohir's voice is a puff against his ear. "To the left. We will sit and watch where we will not disturb her."

They creep and settle with their backs against the bole of a fallen crack-willow. If she has seen them she gives no sign. Now they are near enough that Estel can see splashes of sweat on her neck and sides. His sight sharpens in the dark; black turns to violet; all things before him grow outlines and become themselves. He knows this place, knows the goshawk that nests in the pine that stands sentry beside the pond, knows the does and fawns that come to lap the water beneath it. In the blackberry bramble a badger has kitted; when first he heard their mewling he had wished very much to wriggle in and down and bury his head in the burrow and find them, warm and blind and wriggling, no longer than the span of his hand, like stout striped kittens. His brothers would not let him. Their nana will claw your eyes out, Elrohir had laughed. She loves them too dearly to suffer a boy. Elladan had not looked up from his whetting but had said with accustomed austerity, If I catch you hunting badgers, their nana will be the least of your concerns.

The grey mare turns and whuffles the ground and her forelegs break at the knees; she lowers heavily, the weight of her burden denting the grass. Estel has forgotten fawns and hawklings and badger kits. He thinks now only of foals. Gangle-limbed and downy-muzzled, all exuberance and legs. How they sneak up on unsuspecting anomalies—a toad in the grass, a rock turned over strangely—and deem it at the last to be a perilous foe, and whirl away and fly with springed spines back to the safety of their mothers. The thought makes him smile.

But this mare—his mare—she is doing hard work. He can hear the breath huffing out of her, in double rhythm to his own. She flattens onto her side and tries to roll and beside him Elrohir murmurs, "Ai, young one, none of that."

"She is hurting," whispers the boy.

Elrohir glances down at him, his grin a fleeting glimmer in his dark face. "So it must be," he whispers back. "It will not last forever."

"Will we go to her?"

"No! All is well. We will wait."

Estel is not satisfied. He thinks if Elrohir would let him he could creep up, singing softly to her songs of peace and safety, and lay his hands on her and ease the clutching ache deep in her abdomen. He knows that is what hurts her from the way she arches to the side, nipping at her ribcage, from the way she kicks at her underbelly as if it is beleaguered by flies.

But he obeys Elrohir, and huddles a little nearer to him, feels that strong, lean hand rise and knead his hair for a moment before settling again to stillness. He finds he is content after all, to wait here with his brother beside him. He will wait and watch, and remember all he sees.

-o0o-

The ragged eastern horizon begins to wash with pallor. The moon is setting behind the pines and all through its descent the grey mare has shifted and panted and groaned. Elrohir has not moved, and the boy has matched his watchfulness, though his seat is beginning to ache and grow cold, and his left foot crackles with nerves from sitting trapped beneath him for two hours or more. But in the dimmest dawn the mare throws her forelegs out before her and pushes her chest up, barrel and haunches following in a heave. Elrohir bumps Estel with his elbow.

"Soon," he says.

Her tail is kinked. Beneath it is a silvery bulge that recedes a little and then emerges again, doubling in length, and so it continues for some minutes. Estel sits entranced, feeling as if he is soon to witness a thing through which he should not breathe for fear of sullying it. And then, in the most sudden occurrence all night, the bulge ruptures in a gush and revealed are tiny hooves and a long muzzle, the pink tongue peeking out, and then comes poll and neck and shoulders and the grey mare gives a last rally and her son slithers forth and falls and sprawls in a sodden jumble in the grass. He is black with wet and thrashes feebly and Estel tries to stand, a soft cry lurching in his throat. Elrohir catches him by the hip and pulls him down and snug against his side.

"She will tend him. Watch."

And she does. She turns and finds him in his nest of ryegrass and laves his backbone with her tongue. It seems to Estel she has forgotten all the pain the foal has cost her; in her own parlance of touch and rumbles she speaks to him of love.

"It happened so quickly," Estel whispers.

"Mares are swift deliverers," says Elrohir. "And foals swift to their feet."

Already the dark colt is attempting his first rise. Soon he gains it and staggers sideways and crumples and must gain it again. The mare whickers encouragement and tries to aid him with her nose, but upsets his elusive balance, and the effort begins again.

"Perhaps we should help him stand," Estel says carefully. His fingers ache to feel that black coat, wiry with damp, to trace the hard, new muscles bunched beneath the hide. He wants to lay his hand flat on Fledge's forehead and tell her she is a good girl, a brave girl, tell her he is very proud of her.

Elrohir laughs, as softly as the grey mare murmurs to her child. "Have a care your desire to help does not turn to meddling," he says, brow firm and eyes merry.

"He is strong," says Estel, paying the reprimand little mind. He stares as the foal, standing now on tremulous limbs, begins to totter and nudge along the bulge of his mother's belly.

Elrohir lays a hand on the boy's shaggy hair and scrunches it so it skews to one side. "In two or three years he will be stronger," he says. "Strong enough to bear a boy."

For a while there is silence. The dark foal nuzzles and the black head vanishes beneath a grey flank. The mare lifts a hind foot, her ears sweeping back against her head. But she does not kick or sidestep and the ears come forward again and she licks her lips and curves her neck and nibbles the base of a black tail.

Elrohir murmurs, "Good girl."

Estel stirs beside him. He glances down to see the boy's knees drawing up and his chin coming down. There he sits, all his lankiness gathered up within the containment of his arms. He looks thoughtful, and a little troubled, and so Elrohir knuckles beneath his ribs until he squirms and laughs and arches to the side.

"Speak, stripling," says Elrohir. "I see some question festering; have it out."

Estel's eyebrows crumple together. For a moment his lips thin with thoughtfulness. Then, "It does not seem a very good… method."

Had Elrohir fewer years' practice schooling his features, the amusement he feels at this statement may have shown in his face. Instead he trains his eyes forward and says, "Elucidate."

At this command Estel begins to fidget; he runs his thumb and forefinger up a long stalk of fescue until all the seed fronds are gathered in a spray from the top of his fist. He opens his hand and lets the first breeze of dawn sift them away before he says, "He seems a large foal. And it is not so large a… doorway."

Elrohir ruthlessly smothers a laugh. When he trusts himself to speak without betraying it he says, "You think it a faulty design?"

Estel ponders. "I am not the designer," he says at length, deliberately.

"Indeed not."

"I do not understand how wounds knit, or broken bones, but knit they do."

"If tended correctly."

"And eggs become chicks, and tadpoles turn to frogs, and the cutworms on the cabbages become white butterflies."

"And all warm things with skin and hair that nurse their young must do as Fledge has done."

Here the dark brows furrow, and Elrohir waits patiently for Estel's thoughts to coalesce. He knows they have been incubating in the boy's head for as long as he has been aware that new life is no well-ordered thing, but comes forth in heaves and gushes and sodden blood-streaked floundering, crumpled wings and phlegmy breathing, cracking and stretching and secret labor in the small hours before dawn. He has watched eggs hatch and hounds whelp and now this scrap of hooved shadow that suckles wetly a furlong away.

He lifts his head and asks of his brother, "Elves as well, and Men, by the same method?"

Elrohir nods, his mouth a study in solemnity.

Estel scowls. "I think Eru was kinder to the birds and frogs and butterflies."

-o0o-

Thank you so much for reading! I'll try and post the next in the series in a few days.