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This chapter picks up RIGHT WHERE THE LAST ONE ENDED!

Disclaimer: I own nothing affiliated with Tolkien or Peter Jackson – just Arathell. (and others who are not included in this chapter)

Part Three – We Barely Make It

Fall Out Boy - Just One Yesterday

"If heaven's grief brings hell's rain
Then I'd trade all my tomorrows for just one yesterday"

Boromir trekked forward carefully, his hand outstretched, putting distance in between himself and the Ring. But his eyes followed it closely as it strayed within Frodo's grasp. She held her breath, waiting for it to be in Frodo's possession once more. "As you wish," Boromir drawled, sounding every bit as cocky as a Lord of Gondor would be. It was made so clear in that sentence just how beneath him Frodo was, how beneath him everything surrounding him was, even her to an extent. Her brows furrowed as she found her new glaring target, and though words of kindness drifted through her mind of understanding calm, she couldn't fight the disappointment she felt. Frodo's hand snapped out to grab the Ring and he stared at Boromir with fear, Aragorn's hand placed firmly on the Hobbit's shoulder and then falling from it. "I care not," Boromir drawled again. He traded glances with Aragorn, and there must have been something burning in the Ranger's eyes, because Boromir reached out to ruffle Frodo's hair before backing away and turning back to walk with the Company. She was sure that he could feel them all staring but he didn't comment on their rogue eyes, just as they did not comment on his rogue mind.

Arathell finally turned and gave her full attention to Frodo, noticing now that she had been holding onto Aragorn's arm in a vice-like grip, though he did not say anything to her. She released him instantly and reached to grab Frodo gently. "Are you hurt?" she demanded instantly, feeling the mother in her reach the surface, wanting to take care of the Hobbit.

"I am fine," he replied in that airy voice of his.

"Are you sure?" she asked again. "You will not get any sympathy from me if I learn later that you are lying," she warned, arching an eyebrow.

"I am not hurt," Frodo assured before walking on ahead, though making sure to stay at a distance from Boromir. It was clear that the Hobbit didn't trust the Gondorian, and as sad as it was for her to even think it, it was wise of Frodo not to trust him. Boromir had done nothing but test and disagree with every decision that had been made thus far, even before they left Rivendell.

Arathell lowered her head, feeling unsure of anything and everything. Boromir was a good Man. It was so clear to see, yet everyone denied it and he did nothing to try to prove them wrong either. She always considered herself to be one of the most loyal beings on Middle Earth and it was even something that she prided herself on. And she would stay loyal to Boromir as long as he continued to give her reason to. She would tolerate a lot from him, and she would believe in his good intentions until the day that she died, but she also knew that if he did not care enough to preserve what little good-standing he had left with the rest of the Company, anything she had to say in his defense would not go a very long way. Only he could change all of their opinions, and there was nothing that she could do that would make them all see the side of him that she was able to see. But even then, she thought with a frown, she wasn't even able to see that side much anymore.

A hand fell on her shoulder and she flinched at the touch, but did not push it away. "Please do not say anything, Aragorn. Not this time," she whispered, her head still hanging low.

"What do you think I would say?" he asked in such a gentle voice, it almost made things worse.

"That I should not trust him and that he will be the one who will be the downfall of the Fellowship and his value on this quest is hurriedly disappearing and it will not be long before he becomes a burden that we all must watch and guard to make sure he does not do anything foolhardy," she replied in a breath, choking on the last syllables. Aragorn stayed quiet, validating her words. "I understand that he is troubled by the presence of the Ring, Aragorn. I know that his mind grows darker every day, and I do not need a gift in order to know that. But I do not want to lose him," she whimpered, feeling weaker and weaker by the moment. "He is good; I promise. He can speak so gently and with so much love, and there is no one he could not find some redeeming quality in. All you see is a Man losing his mind to corruption, but I see a Man breaking and tearing, and it hurts me to see it. I want to do something to help him, but I do not know what to do. I speak to him and it is so hard to remember all of the smiles and hidden looks we shared. I wish we could go back to that time, but I do not know how to."

"I will be the last Man to question your judgment, Arathell," Aragorn soothed, trudging through the snow and slowly pulling her along with him, though she barely noticed. "If you believe that his heart is good, I will not doubt you. But what you say is true; we lose more and more of him every day, and someday, I fear that it will be too hard to bring him back from the brink that he already stands on. His heart may be good, but it is not strong." She wasn't sure what to say to those words, opening and closing her mouth repeatedly with no words coming to her lips. "When the time comes that he is lost, Arathell, and that time will come, you must be ready to let him go. You must be ready to accept that he is beyond our help."

"Do you think that I am going to give up on him?" she demanded, feeling as though he had slapped her.

He chuckled mirthlessly and stared at her calmly. "You would not come from the lineage you do if you gave up on him. I expect you to fight for his sanity. I expect you to hold him away from the edge and to keep him enraptured with you. Maybe it will be enough. Believe me; I would love to be wrong about this. Maybe you would be the one to keep him tethered. Maybe it will be the idea of a future with you that keeps him from going down the wrong path. But I do not think it will be that way. He may claim to love you, but Love and Obsession may both favor different muses, and do not think that you will always be the object of both."

"You think he would choose the Ring over me?" she asked him, feeling the anger that was in her dwindle as fear and hurt took hold in her soul. She didn't want to lose Boromir in any way, but she especially did not want to lose him in that way. He was the first to look past her lineage and see her. He was the first to see past the beauty of Arwen and see her ruffled appearance. Arathell Duvainith was selfish when it came to Boromir of Gondor, and she wanted him to stay.

"I wish I did not think that, but I do," Aragorn agreed with a sigh. "The Ring is powerful, and you must remember that. Whoever he is without it around cannot be compared to how he is around the Ring. The Ring manifests itself in his mind, and there is nothing else that can find its way in. You saw how difficult it was today for him to give the Ring back to Frodo. We are not even halfway to Middle Earth and he struggles this much for it."

"And you do not think that I can bring him back?" she whispered. "You think I cannot save him?"

"Prove me wrong, Arathell. Please prove me wrong. I only wish joy for you, and if it is in this Man that you find that joy, then please prove me wrong. The world is too hurt already to have to see you broken at the hands of one who is not even the Enemy."

She smirked ruefully and huffed as the wind pushed against her body harder. "I assume we are past the disagreement we had earlier today?" she mentioned lightly, not eager to start another fight. Already, the distance between her and Boromir was growing by the hour, and she refused to lose everyone who was important to her. There already were so few of those people left, and she couldn't afford to lose another.

He let out a stray laugh that evoked a larger smile from her. "You should know that it is rather hard for me to stay terribly angry with you, Arathell, regardless of what you do."

She chuckled. "I will definitely remember that the next time we have a disagreement then," she teased.

He nodded, the smile still a grand expression on his face. "I don't ever remember us having this many disagreements before though," he stated, and her smile slowly fell from her lips, and she watched as it did the same for him. "In fact, before we left Rivendell, I think there was only one instance where we ever fought."

"After our first duel," she agreed. "We moved past it quickly."

"It did not matter then," he added.

She cast a glance at him. "It did matter, but I decided that it was not critical enough at that moment for us to keep fighting about it. And then, I also really wanted to spar with you again, and I would not be able to do that if we were still angry with each other. I was worried I would accidentally kill you if I was still in my rage."

"It would have been you to have been killed, Arathell," he remarked with that faint trace of a crooked smile that made her feel warm will all of the memories of a time where the world was not so evil. She could still remember when it was still something that resided in the distance away from their constant thoughts. It was happier than.

Arathell vigorously shook her head. "You would never hurt me," she told him with a warm smile. "You have always been in better control of your emotions than I ever have. You would not have let yourself go so far as to actually hurt me."

"I've hurt you before," he told her.

She shrugged. "Cuts and bruises and even broken bones are not what I would consider to be true hurt. I can heal easily from hurts like that. You have never hurt me in some of the ways that I have been hurt." She grew silent for a moment, thinking distinctly of Arwen. Sometimes – well more than sometimes – she wondered how the world saw Arwen as the queen as she appeared when her words were sharper than any other she had encountered. She would gladly have taken Thorin Oakenshield over her sister any day. To know though that Aragorn had given his heart to her sister was perhaps the only thing that had truly hurt Arathell. Her best friend – her confidant – loved the person who had hurt her the most.

"You are thinking of Arwen," he said with a grunt.

She didn't meet his gaze. "I thought you did not like me bringing her into conversation so often. You cannot get mad at me for doing something you apparently cannot resist either."

"I am not mad, Arathell," he groaned. "I was making a comment, not an accusation."

She clicked her tongue but did not argue. "How did you know I was thinking of her then?" she asked.

He sighed and gave her a sad look. "You gain this dismal expression on your face. She was the one to hurt you the most, wasn't she?" Arathell nodded briefly. "You won't ever tell me what she did to cause you this pain?" he tried again, as he had done for decades now, but she had refused him every time.

It was not something for him to know about his lover. Arwen would reveal her true self in time and then Aragorn would know Arathell's hurt without being able to blame Arathell for causing it. "Maybe someday you will know what she did to hurt me. Maybe you won't. It does not matter. My hurts do not need to become yours."

"They would not hurt so much if you shared them with others."

"My brothers know the story well enough," she justified.

"And they only recently bothered to reach for you again. You have said nothing of your pain to them other than the conversation you had with them hours before we departed Rivendell." Her head snapped to him, wondering how he knew that. "They told me while they were bidding farewell to me," he explained.

"Do you look at them as brothers?" she asked curiously, eager for the subject of their conversation to be moved away from her sister and the pain Arwen had caused her.

Aragorn gave a thoughtful look. "They taught me much of what I know. I respect them just as highly as I respect your father. But they were grown by the time I was born, and I never saw them as siblings. I never saw any of you as siblings. I saw you as people to learn from and people who had the knowledge and the ability to teach if I asked nicely enough."

"You never asked for my help," she complained.

"It is not very fitting for a Man to ask help from a Woman when it comes to skills in combat," he countered easily enough.

"I am better than both of them in the province of war," she reminded, though he already knew this. He had beaten both Elladan and Elrohir dozens of times in sparring practice, while the twins had managed to score few wins, even when paired together against the Ranger.

"How was I supposed to know this at the tender age of twenty?" he rounded with a twinkle in his eye. "They taught me well enough anyways," he continued with a smug smile. "If I am able to beat you, even only part of the time, then they have done their job well at teaching me."

She conceded that point with a nod and stared up ahead. "We are almost to the mountain," she said uneasily. "I have never had the desire to come this way before, and I have always found ways around it. Aside from one dreadful experience, of course – do you remember? You were with me."

"Yes, I remember quite well. We were with my people. You had joined us in our search for Gollum," he replied with a fond smile.

"For a time," she agreed. "And then I became bored. I never understood why we needed to go this way."

"It was the fastest and we did not want to lose him," he pointed out.

"Yes, yes, yes, but you were also abandoning his trail completely in hopes that you would somehow find it again on the other side of the mountain. You were in great need of luck, and I grew bored with the cold and the smell of your Men."

"They were enraptured with you," he commented with a chuckle.

She shivered, thinking of one particular Man who had been rather vigorous in his pursuits. Aragorn had had to threaten him harshly. "Yes, he was another deciding factor that caused me to leave your company."

"Nevertheless, it was clear that you hated this pass. You were used to being on your own and it was easier to hide. Here and now, we are ten, and some of us are larger around the middle than others and slower as well. The skill and cunning of the Elves is not with all of us."

"It is with you well enough, Aragorn. You do not need to pretend otherwise." Again, he gave her that crooked smile that coaxed a smile from her as well. "I would like to spar with you again," she commented lightheartedly, despite the wind pushing against her skin faster. "It has been too long."

"It has not yet been a month since we last sparred," he retorted. "We have gone much longer than this without sparring."

Arathell sighed and tucked a hair behind her ear. "I cannot explain why I miss it, but I do," she said. "With all of the stress that seems to be radiating off of everyone, I wish that there was some way to relax their tender nerves. Perhaps if they saw you and I making light and merry, they would be more comfortable doing so as well?" she suggested, though she knew that her answer did not come close to why she really missed sparring with him. She did not know why, as she had told him, but she knew that everyone's frayed nerves were the last things on her mind. She was still a selfish Elf, after all.

Aragorn seemed to know that as well and he gave her a dubious look. "If we find the time to spar, I will gladly do so with you, Arathell. You know that I would never turn you down for practice. We keep one another in balance with our skills and exploit the areas we both need to focus harder on."

She gave him a smile, thankful that he did not question her further on her reasoning. "The last time we sparred, my ankle was swollen for days from when you hit it with your pommel."

He shrugged. "I wasn't exactly expecting you to lash out and kick me in the face either. The second time you tried, I wasn't going to let my nose be bloodied any further."

"I could not walk!" she exclaimed playfully. "I hobbled like a gimp of a Man!"

"And I looked like a Dwarf of Erebor!" he retorted.

"Insolent Man," she begrudged with a huff.

"Reckless woman," he taunted back.

"I told you not to call me that," she reminded.

He shook his head, his breathing starting to hasten as the hike was getting more tiring for him. She was sure that the others aside from Legolas were doing far worse. "I think that it suits you," he claimed. "And if you continue to pursue Boromir the way that you are, it seems that it will be more accurate than it even is now."

Arathell's feet shuffled along uncomfortably, and she nearly tripped by the time all of his words had been spoken. She avoided meeting his gaze, looking down at where her feet could not push themselves under the growing snow, and seeing very clearly how Aragorn was slowly being devoured by the force of nature. "I have thought about it," she commented. Now it was his turn to stumble, though she couldn't be sure if that was because of her words or whether he was beginning to struggle with his footing. "I have often wondered what it would be like to forsake the gift the Valar have given me. Not just my ability to see into others' minds, but the gift of being an Elf in general. There are not many of us left here anymore, and each one is precious beyond measure, even the breed Legolas belongs to. We are either dying or abandoning the posts we have held for thousands of years. It seems wrong to do such a thing, and I will not deny that I would much rather remain here where the world is more or less predictable. It is all I have ever known. Kara is here," she added. "I do not want to go to a place where she cannot."

"It sounds as if you would elect to give up your immortality even if you did not have Boromir," Aragorn commented, sounding colder and wearier by the minute, though he hid it well.

Arathell shrugged. "It had not been such a grand thought in my head much before Boromir came into my life. He made me consider it, and I think that ultimately, I will forsake my heritage." The words came out hollow and she had to swallow. "I have never said that aloud before," she murmured, mostly to herself. They paused in their trek and Aragorn looked at her with a concerned expression. He rested his hand on hers, squeezing it painfully tight, but it helped. She blinked back the tears she didn't know were there and met his gaze calmly. "I simply do not know if I would give it up for him or for another reason, like Kara."

"You would be free to be with him either way," he reminded her.

Arathell threw him a glance before focusing once more on ascending the mountain. "I like him very much, Aragorn. But Love is such a word that I do not know what it really feels like. I know how it feels in relation to my daughter – that much is clear to me. But when it comes to another individual completely free to me to choose my level of liking, I do not know anything."

"The same basic principles apply surely," he offered. "You would do anything for him. To see him smile makes you smile. His hurts are your hurts. You do not need the constant touch of him to know that he is there, and sometimes talking relieves pains more than touches do. You value everything there is about him. You cannot think of another you could be with, even with his darker aspects. You wish nothing more than to be beside him always. Make him the best that he can be." He shrugged though now he would not meet her gaze. "It seems quite simple really."

Arathell pondered his words, staring up at Boromir curiously. "If that is what Love is supposed to feel like then I do not feel it with him. Some of those aspects apply, I suppose, but I hate that he falls for the Ring as he does. And when we talk… sometimes it just leaves me hollow. When we kiss, there are explosions of emotions and it feels exhilarating, but if talking should evoke such a thing as well, even in a lesser degree… then I do not feel that with him. It does not mean that I never will," she continued. "But it does only prove that I am not one to fall for another so easily. I am not like my kin who can see their One and know it is them upon first meeting them."

"It does not mean anything other than that you wish to be sure that you really love someone. I think that it is a good thing you think the way that you do. Involving your mind in decisions is just as important as involving your heart, Arathell," he comforted.

Arathell stared at him for a moment. "Only I do not ordinarily use my heart for thinking anyway."

Aragorn frowned. "I disagree. You chose to let Kara go because you wanted her to be free. You wanted her to be able to enjoy the world and all that it offers. It was because you knew that you could not give her those things. It was something that she needed to experience for herself with others like her. You knew that logically it made the best sense to keep her in Rivendell where it was safe and you could still watch over her. But you let her go, even if it caused you great pain, you let her go because you knew that was what you had to do to make her happy. And she is very happy now, as I'm sure you are aware..."

There it is! Let me know what you think and check out the music as always! Are there any thoughts about this chapter? Any questions? More importantly... any guesses? I'm curious!

Also, don't forget to check out (cough cough and review cough cough) "Maybe I'll Stay." It is super cute and super fluffy and I really enjoyed writing it!

Love you all lots!

- LM