AUTHOR: shoneaugen
EMAIL: cparkerho@hotmail.com
DISTRIBUTION: Ask and recieve.
FEEDBACK: Please! I'll beg?
DISCLAIMER: Grima, Theoden, and Eowyn are Tolkien's. I just bring them out to play.
SUMMARY: Grima still remembers love, among other things.
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Sometimes he delights in the way she prowls the halls of Meduseld.
She is beautiful, cold; she shares in her brother's tempestuously noble nature, and Grima is not entirely sure whose will it is that keeps her trapped within those stone walls: his - his whispers of caution and restraint into Theoden's ears that hear naught else - or another's. It doesn't matter, he supposes, so he simply watches Eowyn speak, rage, plead with an uncle who does not hear and will not answer.
He thinks he loved her once. Once in a long-ago time when Theoden's eyes still saw all that passed in his kingdom, when she still laughed, when his loyalties had still been untried and unchanged. She was once kind to him; there had been a time when she did not spit her lashing words at him, and her eyes had not flashed like shards of sky-grey glass when they lit upon him. Her gaze now is eminent and terrible, as Theoden's used to be in anger, and Grima prefers the King's empty stare to her contempt. She carries no hatred toward him, only her scorn, and he cannot manipulate that to his will.
Sometimes he hates her for that.
Her contempt is only for him, and his hatred, those times when it surfaces, is only for her. He pities all others, prides himself in their weakness that he may twist it to his uses. Her - he desires, and he hates, and he watches, more than anything else. Watches her wilt like a lily plucked from the ground and stored in the shadows. Sometimes it seems like she fears him, and that is when he follows on her heels the most closely. After all - hate is not so very far from love, is it?
So he watches her, tastes the hatred and infatuation of her lingering on his tongue sharp and acrid like blood. He looks to the day when he will corrupt her contempt into something more malignant, more malleable - memories still surface halfway in his mind, though, whirling wisps of remembrance past his vision: a gentle smile here, sun-bright laughter there. He keeps those closeted away in the darkest corners of his heart, and tries not to linger on them.
But sometimes he does.
Only sometimes.