Author's Note: I should really be focusing on finishing the next chapter for The First Dance, but Muses can be fickle. This plot-bunny has been peeking at me from its hole for ages and it's just yesterday that it came out to play. I couldn't ignore it. Have a lovely holiday season!
The Fifth Day
—
'She did not answer, but as he looked at her it seemed to him that something in her softened, as though a bitter frost were yielding at the first faint presage of Spring . . . And so the fifth day came since the Lady Éowyn went first to Faramir; and they stood now together once more upon the walls of the City and looked out.'
— The Lord of the Rings, Book 6, Chapter V: The Steward and the King
She looked over the garden towards the nearest wing of the Houses of Healing, waiting for him. The sunrise had been dull, holding no warmth, and a constant breeze chilled the morning. In times past she would have chosen the cosiness of indoors during such grey weather, but Éowyn had grown fond of this pattern they had established and did not want to disrupt it.
At last she saw him emerge and, as his eyes found hers, a touch of joy lifted her spirit. Too long she had lived with no close friends about her – her acquaintances, her own brother even, understood little of her soul, were blind to the invisible shackles binding her. This man, the late Steward Denethor's secondborn, had within moments perceived what others could not: that her maid's body was a prison, condemning her to mean tasks, robbing her of true freedom. He had seen her through her own eyes and accepted her for who she was.
Studying the swiftly approaching Faramir, the White Lady of Rohan smiled.