A/N: I'm so sorry this took so long, but Faramir was harder to write than usual.
When I was younger I remember being in awe of my mother's gardens, they were a place where I could spend time away from my studies and with my mother as well. The gardens were where my sisters and I would sleep on summer nights, trying to make out the stars in father's books. And, though I never told another soul, they were to me a sign of my father's love, his promise fulfilled.
Now I wander aimlessly through the same gardens, the new grass yielding beneath my feet, the flowers and plants waking up slowly from their winter sleep and I could not help the revulsion that rose inside. These gardens were payment to my mother on my father's part. Some pretty thing to ease the pair of them, or perhaps to fool the world around them.
I ease myself into a swing that hung from one of the sturdier trees. If felt as though my very history was being burned before my eyes. Lies, betrayal and shame, that was the foundation for my family. I could not understand.
'Friend she called him… and still he took her. Friend.' The word was bitter on my tongue for the first time in my life and I wish I could forget everything. I wish to wake up and find myself a child again so that I might hide behind my mother's skirts and find comfort in her arms. She would tell me it was alright and I would believe her.
Friend
The word echoed in my ears.
'She should not have used him. He should not have asked her to begin with. He should have offered such a thing that she could not reject.' My mind continues to list all the things that could have been done different, all the things my parents should not have done, the list ever growing, my heart heavier then it had been before.
'Elboron?'
I jump at the sound of my father's voice, calm and firm, as it had always been. I look up but do not stand. He makes his way out of the shadow of the wall and walks into the moonlit path before my tree.
He has not changed much, there are more lines around his eyes, his mouth, his brow, he frowns to often my mother said top him once, but the grey in his hair was not so plentiful, lesser than the white in my mother's, the blood of Numenor runs through his veins and the year do not mark his so severely.
His eyes search my face keenly, shining like the stars reflected on the water.
'What troubles you?'
'Nothing.' I lie, wishing he would turn away and go back to the gathering.
Instead he lowers himself on the grass before me, ignoring the fact that he was in his finest tunic, and that as both Steward and Prince, it would not be proper to just sit down in the garden while his guest, which included the kings of Rohan and Gondor, waited inside without host, and I'd imagine, hostess. But there he sat, formalities forgotten, fingers running over the grass.
'Spring has come early this year.' He says, leaning back on his hands.
'Ere Spring was born, now Spring hath died.' The fragmented line of one of the many lays my father had read to me filtered through my mind. It was odd, where moments before my mind raced, now there was naught I could bring myself to say. My tongue was heavy, my mouth dry, my lips clumsy. There was nothing I could readily say to the man who sat before me. And it seemed ridiculous to me, my sudden muteness around my father, who had never been quick to scold. But then this was no shattered vase or ripped page or muddy rug. This was my need to understand his behavior in the past. And for all my father knew and spoke of history, he did not speak of his own past. A mirthless laugh threaten to pass from my mouth at the thought that at the very least both my father and mother were not so different in their ways.
'Why don't we ever go to Rohan?'
And with that my muteness is gone, and all my questions return.
'We go to Dol Amroth once every year, yet I have only gone to Rohan once, and the others know it only through tales.' The words pour from mouth quickly.
My father just stares at me from his seat.
'Twice.' He says after a moment.
'What?'
'You have been in Rohan twice.'
I open my mouth to disagree but my father continues.
'We found out about you while in Rohan for your uncle's wedding.'
He becomes lost in some memory, and I fall silent, swinging to and fro.
'How did you talk mother into going?' He breaks out of his memory and looks at me. 'She always hated Rohan so much didn't she? She always longed to leave, why would she ever willingly return?'
'Elboron—'
'Surely it must have been some great gift you promised in return for going! What was it? The stables? The armory? Th—'
He has risen now, and the anger in his eyes cannot be missed.
'That is how things were, are still, you give her things that she might stay happy?'
He stands before me now, one hand stilling the swing, trapping me where I sit.
'Do not disrespect you mother so.' He breathes.
'How can I disrespect her with the truth? The truth from her own lips no less!'
My father backs away then, and with a deep breath, faces me again.
'She told you then?'
I fall silent. Somehow I didn't think he'd admit to it so easily.
'Yes.'
He heaves a sigh and turns his back to me, shoulders tense.
'Perhaps it is true; she did always wish to leave Rohan. There was no bribery needed to have her return however, Eomer has and always will be, her brother, after all.'
'Did you know the truth when you married her?'
'Yes.'
'Did you not feel guilt in the slightest way?'
'Yes.'
'And still you did it?'
'Yes.'
'Why?'
His shoulders sag with my last question and he kicks a pebble in the grass.
'Because,' He starts slowly 'I loved her. She was my light in those dark days when the Shadow covered all. She was my salvation. I thought, it was only right that I should be hers.'
'She did not ask you to save her.'
'No, no, she begged instead a Man of the North whose heart lingered else where to help her, but he couldn't. After that her pride would not let her speak.'
'Out of pity and love then did you ask for her hand?'
'Pity…it all comes back to pity—' He says quietly to himself as he shakes his head. 'No, not pity. Too grand a maiden was she too pity, though my heart was grieved by the sight of her, a lonely wanderer in a world remade. I knew I could not bear to see her go, I knew she could not bear the thought of having to return to a place where she would ever wait on others in silence.'
'I loved her and when I looked at her, into her heart I saw hope, for there I saw a beginning to something that would, perhaps if tended correctly, grow into something greater than any elven garden. I took the chance, at my own happiness and hers.'
My father spoke of hope as my mother had. He spoke of love, she spoke of freedom. And in the end the two alike had used the other, guided by a tainted hope that all would be well in the end.
'I had a dream the night she returned to Rohan.' My father says suddenly in an almost wistful tone, 'I dreamed of her in a white house in green hills. I saw her smiling, a child in her arms, happiness in her eyes.'
'And even though she did not love you, still you held to that dream?'
'I did.'
'Why? Was there no other Lady, more known to Gondor than her? No other maiden who would delight in a garden and children? No other Lady who had not wished for death or loved another or seen the darkest Shadow only to return incomplete? Why her, Father? You say you loved her, and yet you must have foreseen some bitter future where her regret became scorn for you and any life you offered her. Surely, even with your hope you must have feared a life in which neither you nor her were happy! And still you stand before me here and say you risked both your happiness and hers on a chance that things might not be so terrible.'
'There is no excuse I can make to reason with you,' my father says sadly. 'Perhaps because no excuse can make due of this tangle your mother and I created. But you cannot judge us justly. For you, my son, are here today, and all the choices have been made and all the parts laid out before you. You cannot understand the thoughts that drove us for theydo not make sense to your mind, which has never known true sorrow or lost, or fear so great as that caused by war. They were different times then, andwe, different people. I cannot blame you, though my heart is pained by your pain, I can only pray to the Valar that in time you will understand.'
He walks away and it is I who am left in the dark.
