Disclaimer: I don't own Lord of the Rings.
A/N: Why do I keep jumping fandoms like this? Apologies to readers of From the Shadows; the latest chapter has run into some difficulties and will be delayed, but I hope some of you might enjoy this little tidbit from Middle-Earth in the meantime! Reviews are always welcome.
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Faramir sleeps.
He dreams, fitfully: again he sees the great wave crash down upon Númenor, and the black terror that lay over Osgiliath, and the boat that bore his brother southward down Anduin. He wakes, fitfully: or perhaps it is not really waking, but just coming a little closer to the surface of consciousness, where voices pierce his uneasy dreams. His father. Mithrandir. But he does not know whether he hears true, or only remembers.
The fever burns through him, and he does not fight it. He thinks – vaguely, dreamily, as much as he can think – that it might burn all of him away. He does not think anyone will mourn him.
The King calls him back; Faramir knows it, without being told, he knows as soon as he opens his eyes that his King has returned and he will serve him with all his heart. After this his sleep is easier, and quieter, though when he wakes a second time he is impossibly weary.
He has the vague impression that the King has come to him again, and Mithrandir, perhaps, and other voices he did not recognise in his muddled slumber.
But his father did not come.
He should not be surprised, he supposes: ever has his father been impatient with his weakness, cursing him for not being the son he loved. He should not expect that his father will wait tenderly by his bedside for him to wake. He has done nothing to merit such high honour as that.
With this thought he is calm, and he sleeps again, and wakes, and sleeps, and wakes, and now always he is alone. He thinks that perhaps there is no one else alive in the world but he, that the city which he loves has fallen and he has been left forgotten in this strange bare room he finds himself in.
He finds the strength eventually to stumble over to the window, and then he sees that he is looking out upon the gardens of the Houses of Healing, and that the city still thrives before him – but then the weariness comes over him again, and he just manages to reach the support of the bed before a shadow falls across his vision and he sleeps again.
When he wakes again, he is not alone.
His voice is changed since last he heard it, so much quieter than before, and yet with it he asks the healing woman for news. She blanches as she looks at him, and Faramir forces himself to rise, though he sways where he stands, and he tells her to send for someone who will speak with him. And soon the Warden of the Houses comes in, and he lowers his head to Faramir in gentle deference, and addresses him as my Lord Steward.
"That is not my title," Faramir says, and his head is whirling now, and he must put his hand against the wall for support. And then, because panic is rising sharp and fierce in him, cutting through the daze of long sickness: "Where is my father?"
His father will not be coming, he is told. His father is dead. And it makes no sense, because his father has not ridden out to battle for many years, but he is still in the bloom of health, and Faramir's strength wanes and fades to nothing and he sinks gratefully back into the darkness.
So it goes. He sleeps, and wakes, and sleeps again. Sometimes a healer is there to give him some bitter-tasting herb; sometimes no one. Mithrandir comes, once, and with him the Halfling he brought to the city, clad in the silver and sable of the Tower Guard. The wizard has always been kind to Faramir. He tells him, now, that in a few days a host will ride out to Mordor, but Faramir is not to come: Faramir is too weak, ever too weak to be trusted with his duties. Mithrandir confirms, too, that a great battle has been fought and his city has been delivered, and that the King has indeed returned. But when Faramir asks about his father's death, all he is told is that he is now the Steward of Gondor, and when he tries to press further, Mithrandir murmurs, It is not a tale for one so recently sick. Because Faramir is ever too weak for the truth.
After his visitors have left him, he does not sleep immediately. He thinks of his brother, the laughing boy and the bold soldier and the protector and the friend and all the other thousand versions that were real to him. He tries to reconcile them with the picture of a man who tried to take the Enemy's Ring by force, and he finds it too easy, all too easy.
But it is harder to think of his father, to remember his cruelty and his kindness, the curl of his lip and the cold voice asserting that he wished Faramir had gone in his brother's place, always disappointed, always contemptuous. But Faramir does not think he was an evil man. No one could be evil who loved Boromir so fiercely; and who would not choose his brother over him?
Still he thinks, he did not come to me, and now he is dead. And he does not know whether he is grieving or not.
He dreams that night that he is burning again, as though the fever still rages through him, and he feels the smoke in his lungs and he hears his father's voice, though he cannot make out the words, and he wakes shuddering, and his brother's name is on his lips but Boromir will never come to him again. It seems to Faramir almost that it takes the second loss to make the first sting all the greater; he sits up in the bed in the still blackness of the night, and he knows that he is alone.
In the morning he has more visitors, his uncle Imrahil and Beregond, most loyal of guards, and they are all keeping something from him. The Warden comes again, and the healing woman – whose name he had learned is Ioreth – and though she chatters on she too is keeping it from him.
Then Mithrandir comes again, without the Halfling this time, and Faramir says, "You must tell me."
His old friend's eyes are sorrowful. "It is not a pretty tale, Faramir."
"I am strong enough to bear it." Because his brother protected him, and his father scorned him, and both in their own way thought Faramir too weak, too weak for a command in battle, too weak to ride to Imladris, ever too weak. But it is not so.
The wizard sighs, but he tells the story: how his father's mind and spirit both were broken when Faramir was brought back from the battle, how the palantír turned him to despair so he tried to end both their days on a pyre, how Faramir was pulled just in time from the flames but his father burned.
It is not a pretty tale.
"You told me," Faramir says slowly, "that he would remember he loved me. Ere the end."
"And so he did," Mithrandir says. "He repented of his treatment of you. And he grieved for you greatly, thinking you lost."
Faramir thinks of so many years of always coming second. He thinks of waiting, always waiting, for some smile or tender words, some sign of approval. He thinks of Boromir.
Mithrandir leaves him, and only then does he say quietly to the empty room, "How terrible is it that I cannot grieve for him?"
He sleeps, and wakes, and sleeps again. His strength is returning to him now, and early the next morning he rises, wraps a cloak around himself – for he still feels the cold too easily, and he thinks this is a mark of the Black Breath that will not heal with time – and he goes to watch the host leave the city from a vantage point in the gardens, and wonders when he will ride to war again.
If the Shadow falls upon them, the defence of the city is his duty. He cannot fail them, these white towers which he loves, and which his brother and father loved before him.
He is not too weak for this.
He stands in the gardens until long after the host has passed out of sight, and still, he is not quite sure for what he grieves. If he grieves.
He dreams of Boromir – not corrupted by any ring, but as he was in the old forgotten days, so bright and bold, and laughing, always laughing. He thinks: after all, I have known what it is to be loved.
He walks in the gardens often, after the army has departed, and he thinks of a past that was not as lonely as he is apt to remember it, and of a future that may yet be less bleak than he imagined it.
Inexorably, the memory comes back to him of his father's last moments, or perhaps it had never really left. In the midst of that endless fever, he heard a voice that he long loved and feared in equal measure, saying, Do not take my son from me! The voice is tender and fierce, and he thinks that Mithrandir was right – his father remembered, at the end.
So this is what he grieves for, a love that came too late, and a proud mind broken. In the evening he weeps at last, for all that was not and could have been, and because in the end, his father loved him.