Author's notes:
-All this belongs to Tolkien and I will die envious about it
-I decided to write this when I re-read The Two Towers and realized A. "White Lady of Rohan" is not an established name for Éowyn before Faramir coins it, and B. Faramir first uses "White Lady" to refer to Galadriel.
-Please review to let me know if I'm wrong about the above! And anything else on your mind...
"Then she must be lovely indeed," said Faramir. "Perilously fair."
"I don't know about perilous," said Sam. "It strikes me that folk takes their peril with them into Lórien, and finds it there because they've brought it. But perhaps you could call her perilous, because she's so strong in herself. You, you could dash yourself to pieces on her, like a ship on a rock; or drownd yourself, like a hobbit in a river. But neither rock nor river would be to blame."*
In the space between when the news was felt and when it was known, the transmutation was complete: he was utterly and irrevocably hers, though he did not realize it immediately. Then his waking reason returned, and he found their hands clasped and his lips pressed to her forehead, and that moment was not like the piercing of a dart but the falling of a hammer.
The stroke of doom, they had both said. So it was, in more ways than one. He would never again be whole without her; a second life he now claimed, but not for himself.
As he drew back from her, he knew that both wonder and fear showed plainly on his face. For indeed he was both wondering and afraid, confronted with a question that would decide his fate, a question he never imagined would need be asked. Most terrifying of all, what was it that he saw in her eyes? For once, he could not guess: implausibly, they seemed to hold tenderness, challenge, entreaty, and betrayal all together. Did she hate him for overstepping the bounds of what had been, to her, an innocent friendship? Or did she simply reflect what she saw during his moment of shock, unnerved or insulted at how he seemed to recoil from her? He could not bear to know, and so he retreated.
"I… I believe that I must leave you now. Regrettably. I am healed, and the time has come to take up my office, for there is much to be done ere the King returns." He wondered if he would learn more of her mood from her reaction to these last words, but she seemed barely to register them.
"Then I shall be alone again. I have been glad to make your acquaintance, and to have your company through dark days, lord." This answer was also uninformative; though her tone was gentle, her words were chillingly polite, more formal than any she had spoken to him since their first meeting.
"I will see you again," he offered softly, not knowing if he meant this as a question, a promise, or a simple statement of fact.
She nodded, and it seemed that she thought of smiling but did not. "Until then, farewell, my friend."
In the days that followed, he thought almost perpetually about that day, dwelling most on what he had said to her from the crest of the emotional wave: 'White Lady of Rohan, in this hour I do not believe that any darkness will endure!'**
'White Lady.' Why had he addressed her so? Unwittingly, he found his mind cast back to the last time he uttered those words.
'Yet I envy you that you have spoken with the White Lady,'* he had said to the gardener.
Her power was greater than his. He knew this from their first meeting, that such a woman could put a spell on him if he did not take care—and he had not. Such carelessness was inexcusable, he mused; more songs and stories than he could count had warned of the peril men faced when they met powerful women.
He had only seen her once after he left the Houses. Those who remained in the City were celebrating, as they had every night since the news came, and Merry had persuaded her to join for that evening. Faramir knew the hobbit would leave for Cair Andros tomorrow, and he guessed that Éowyn came out of reluctance to disappoint the little esquire of Rohan rather than any real desire. From the moment he perceived her, he felt compelled to be nearer, though his reason cried out against it. With effort, he had stayed where he was, enjoying the company of his cousins authentically but no longer unable to deny how unreal, how intangible, he found the scene around him. It was not only the shock of unhoped-for victory, though that certainly did not improve matters. Rather, with Éowyn in sight, he was reminded that part of him now went with her wherever she was. He was not the same man he used to be, and he could not live his life as he once had. He was alive, and his body was strong, and the world was full of light, and yet the light seemed to shine straight through him, for he was no longer all there.
After a time, he found that his younger kinsmen had left him, presumably to fill their cups again. As they went away, he thought he heard a joke about his fey mood cut short by a hushed reminder of how he had suffered—but he could not be sure of either of these. Then, all at once, his deepest fear and his most profound delight stood before him. There she was, golden hair aflame in the light of the lanterns, proud eyes gazing steadily—questioningly, expectantly?—up into his.
He must say something, but it could not be what he most wished to say. Truly, this may as well be witchcraft: he was struck dumb, and his hands trembled so much that he could not even manage a polite kiss on her knuckles in greeting, as would customarily be expected.
"I am glad to see you looking well, lady." In truth, she did not look well. She looked as he thought he must look: unsure, anxious and, beneath even the absolute relief at darkness unendurable extinguished forever, exhausted. Still, he thought her as beautiful as ever, maybe more, and as he walked away he felt almost weak enough to swoon and fall to the ground. Of course, his strength belonged to her along with so much else, and he wondered what, exactly, he had left.
The weeks that followed were tedious, and tiring, since there was always more to be done than time allowed. Secretly, though, he was glad he had unlimited work to absorb his attention, for the White Lady haunted him less overwhelmingly during that time. When thoughts of her did, inevitably, surface, he declined to interrogate why these were increasingly suffused less with longing and more with awe and dread at what she had done to him. Thus she became more and more remote, until she was no longer the living, laughing, grieving woman he had grown to love so unbelievably in those brief hours of waiting.
Then came the day that he answered the Warden's call. He went to seek her again, and he realized he had been wrong about everything.
She stood upon the walls, looking east, as if she had not moved since he left her there. Just as he expected, she was lovelier than any flower and stronger than any sword but, curiously, he found that to look upon her in that moment was to gaze clear into the past. And so it was that he remembered: none of this had been her doing.
Grief denied, need suppressed, despair swallowed—all these had a way of crystallizing, becoming tangible things that lodged in the flesh and grew, almost imperceptibly, over years. They were hard as gemstones, with corners and edges as sharp, and they could rip and tear like broken glass. Because they were intrinsic to him, however, he had learned to abide; so much of his memory and present being was bound up in these things that their loss or destruction would surely leave him hollow. Still, there was a day not long ago when he realized that it was life-blood that spilled out where they cut him, and he wondered if he might die of it. Not unfounded, he decided now. After all, it was not the dart of Harad that brought him down.
From their first meeting, he wanted to open to her. He knew not whence the feeling came, but he thought she might have something to say about these barbed bits inside him, some wisdom that had heretofore eluded him. And so, to this beautiful, formidable lady, he had given all the sharp pieces of himself that sliced and cut.
There was the need to understand, and to be understood, to depths that could only be reached through precious time never spared in war. There was loss unfathomable, not only of Boromir but of so many men he loved, whose glass eyes and paper skin flickered ever on the insides of his eyelids. Most of all, there was crushing doubt, about whether such loss could ever be justified, whether he could make himself worthy of living (did he still wish to be?), whether anything in his power could have saved his family, his City, his people. Perhaps these all originated from his inborn imperative to serve, to give his whole self to the preservation of something, and moreover to feel there was a chance it would not be for nothing. This was the same imperative, it so happened, that brought him back to her today.
All these fragments of himself he had given her freely—enthusiastically, if he was honest. And why not? He wanted them not, so sure was he that his life and all he held dear was soon to end, and he did not wish to die as unhappily as he had lived.
He thought she would let these fall, and shatter, and that he would fade to nothing anyway in due time, and that it would be just as well. He never expected she might hold onto them, would never have dared ask such a woman for such a thing. Yet she did, gathering them one at a time and turning them skillfully in her fingers, and not once did they cut her, so practiced was she. In her hands, it seemed that these pieces were almost pleasing to the eye, and he marveled, morbidly, at how they glistened red in the pale light that seemed to emanate from her.
See, my friend? Not so sharp after all. All this can be endured, she seemed to say with every sad smile, every proud, defiant peal of laughter, and he could have wept with relief as the omnipresent sting of pain melted into new warmth and strength, a thousand cuts beginning to mend themselves at last.
And he had the audacity to call it witchcraft.
Gazing at the White Lady upon the walls, aghast at his own foolishness, he considered that there had never been any hope for him until he met her. He had not been whole for many years. The dart drawn forth, the shadow lifted by the King's hand, he awoke—but still his flesh tore a little with every step he took, and he bled, and one day he would bleed to death. Until that day, he would have given all that was his to Gondor and its King, and there would have been joy in that, but what he had to give would never be as much as he wished, and so he would never be at peace. Knowing not what she did, she had brought such joy and peace to him in five short days that he felt her absence thereafter more acutely than any wound before. So yes, he was in her power, but he understood this now as a blessing and not a curse. The woman before him, whether she loved him or not, filled his heart with such hope that he thought it might burst, and it was everything he could do to not drop to his knees in reverence.
She turned at his call. The desolation in her face knocked the breath from him, and for a moment he could not speak. Then he recovered, and he found that the world around him was solid and substantial again, and his resolve was steeled. It must be spoken. He must ask her, and then he would know if he was to be dashed to pieces, or drowned, or…
He did not finish the thought.
"Éowyn, why do you tarry here?"**
*The Lord of the Rings Book IV, Chapter 5, "The Window on the West"
**The Lord of the Rings Book VI, Chapter 5, "The Steward and the King"