Disclaimer: Same old.

Exposure

The fires burned high in the Citadel that night, but the cold came regardless.

It crept like a bloodless assassin through the ancient stone walls, stealing into Denethor's chamber first, poised with frigid daggers of guilt and grief.

The Steward of Gondor slept uneasily, shivering and twisting beneath his thick covers. Evil dreams beset him, rife with memories and premonitions he could not escape. The face of Finduilas, his late wife rose up before him, her pale mouth working violently with words of warning he could not hear. Denethor felt her icy, pallid fists pounding his chest and twisting frantically into the cloth of his nightclothes, heard the whispers of her dead breath as she strained to make him understand. It was doom she spoke of, he knew, a doom that he and only he could dispel… milky tears leaked from his pale eyes, and his lips cracked and bled with his desperation; but he could not hear her.

Boromir was not asleep; nor in his rooms. The Steward's eldest son was in a dark, musty practice cube deep beneath the castle proper. It was a small area he had uncovered once as a boy, and though he suspected the older servants must surely know of it, he himself had never revealed its presence to anyone. Boromir escaped there when his emotions became too strong to dispel through force of mind. There, he would run through his most grueling sword patterns with weighted weapons, working himself until he was utterly spent and could rest without torment. This place was his haven, a personal citadel where the world was simpler, and the shedding of sweat seemed to rid him of his need for tears.

Tonight, his short, violent breaths escaped in steaming clouds, and his muscles ached as they grew warm in the shuddering chill. Boromir tumbled and twisted and spun, pushing himself again and again as he strained to banish the memory of the night's events from his mind. He turned sharply, striking viciously at one imagined opponent, then reversing and stabbing upwards into empty air-

But in his concentration, Boromir had not registered how near to the wall he fought. He slammed against the damp wood, blind momentum driving all the wind from his lungs. He sagged backwards and his knees folded beneath him; lying on his back, Boromir sucked ragged gasps into his parched throat, heaving and hacking for what seemed like an eternity before his breathing eased and he could muster the strength to drag himself to a sitting position.

His fresh sweat seemed to freeze as it leaked from his pores. He shuddered, both from the cold and some other inexplicable cause. Slowly, he collected himself and left the dank room.

For on this night, there was no sanctuary.

Faramir was sitting on the sill of his window when the unnatural chill reached him. It whistled around him, swooping and stabbing, taunting him with a freedom that would never be.

He closed his eyes; to the night, to the cold… to the world. He shrank down, pulled every sense inside, away from foreign touch.

The cold seemed to take offence; it came at him harder, sharper, faster. Anyone else sitting on that sill would have retreated in swift alarm, or at the least paused in alarm at the anomaly of that wintry ferocity on the early nights of spring.

But Faramir, cloaked in silence, hooded in guilt and anger, did not feel it. He did not move from his stone-like vigil until the eyelashes of the sun began to whisper of the horizon. Then, quietly, he stole back into his chamber and lay on his bed.

He yet had time for a few moments of rest.

All that night, Asëa lay still in her bed. She slept deeply but uneasily, and several times Barais rose to quiet the dreaming murmurs of her charge. Each time, she tucked the covers around the sleeping form, assuring herself that she was perfectly warm, so many firs and blankets, surely she would not feel this strange chill that seemed to have permeated the room…

But the cold was undeterred.

Towards the morning, Asëa began to shiver.