Disclaimer-I still don't own LotR A/N: Okay, I find myself in a fictional rut and so I decided to expand on an idea in another one of my stories "A Road Not Traveled."(Please read that one first). Hopefully this will bring about the end of my writer's block.

She smiled as she threw another rock into the lake and watched it skip across the water's surface causing the little boy besides her to shriek with laughter. He looked on from the comfortable shade of a nearby tree, bouncing a giggling girl in his lap. "Papa look! I'm a queen." Clumsy hands settled a wreath of flowers onto her golden head and she beamed up at him. He smiled down at the small child. "I suppose you are." He bowed his head. "My Lady Queen."

"Why, my silver tongued prince! Was it not just this morning you declared me your Queen?" He looked up at his wife and smiled brightly. "Worry not, Eowyn, no one threatens your place. Not in Ithilien or my heart."

She made her way over to him as the young girl clambered off him to go get more flowers. She dropped down besides him.

"Never?"

"Never." She laid her head on his shoulder and sighed.

He looked up at the cloudless blue sky and blinked into the bright sun. The dawn was still many hours off...

He dreamed of her. Her face haunted his dreams every night. He dreamed of her in a bright and brilliant world full of color and life. What he woke to, however, was to him a dreary gray world where she no longer lingered, and even the wonderful gardens the Lord Legolas had made for him paled in comparison to those in his dreams.

Perhaps it was because the gardens in his dreams had her.

She was always there, caring for the plants she's come to love, humming some song or another to herself. She was bathed in a golden light, her pale skin glowed with a rosy blush and her gray eyes shone with joy. In his dreams she smiled, a smile of full of gladness, not the strained smile he'd often seen in the Houses of Healing.

In his dreams he went to her on the walls of the White City and declared his love for her.

In his dreams she accepted his love and returned her own.

In his dreams Ithilien was their home and they had a garden.

In his dreams he had her.

In his dreams his trip to Edoras marked the beginning of their lives together. In his dreams she was his wife. She was his companion on long nights when neither could sleep do to some terrible whisper of the past, so that he would not have to face the unbearable night alone, haunted by thoughts of things that could not be changed.

In his dreams she was a mother.

A bubbling boy with soft tuffs of raven hair, Elboron, they called him. Even breathing coming from crib by the bed, a shrill cry in the dead of night, the cooing laughter of a happy babe, all rang in his ears when he woke in the morning.

And they saw their son grow, become a young man, well learned in the history and lore of Men.

And there were more sons, and daughters with long golden hair like their mother, and the same brilliant gray eyes. And the halls of their home in Ithilien were full of screams and laughter and the sound of running feet that were off to make more mischief than they should. And sometimes late at night, as he sat in his room alone, he thought he could faintly hear the sound of children laughing outside the door, but he can shake his head, because he knew it was impossible.

In his dreams their children grew up and they grew old too. And one day they were left alone.

In his dreams they spent nights out in the garden-her garden-and talk about things that had passed, the things they lived, and they things that were yet to come. And some nights she asked to stay out late into the night and he'd bring out her mantle to keep her warm. In his dreams he watched over her, watched as lines appeared around her eyes and mouth and on her brow. He watched as silver strands appeared among the golden tresses that graced her head, and he watched as her eyes slowly dulled as she lost her sight. He watch her sit in her garden on cold winter mornings, cloak gathered about her, taking special care to make sure her plants returned in the spring.

In his dreams he was at peace.

Fin