That night, in the warmth beneath the quilt, and dim glow of the bedside lamp, wrapped one another's arms, Éowyn asked Faramir the question she'd been afraid to ask.

"What will happen next?" She did what she'd been wanting to do for days, and brushed the stray locks of dark hair back from his cheek.

"I don't know. My best guess is that there is some sort of treasure, some thing of great magic and power, that I must find and take back. But what it is, I know not."

Éowyn rested her cheek against his chest, and took his hand, interlacing their fingers. Past experience had taught her to be reticent, to make light of her feelings, to keep herself protected. It didn't seem to work with this man. Something about him made her throw caution to the winds. "I don't want to lose you. I don't want you to go back to your world."

"Nor I you. If I could, I would stay. You are the most precious treasure in the world to me. You are the woman I would spend the rest of my life with, whether long or short, were I given that choice." Faramir's voice was low and caressing, filled with need and hurt.

For a moment Éowyn felt as though she'd forgotten how to breathe. She had known Faramir was… Her thoughts ground to a halt for a moment. She didn't have the words for this sort of thing – it felt as though no-one in her world, in this time, had the words for this sort of thing. That Faramir was, what? Keen on her? Besotted? Fond of her? All those silly phrases that she used to hide from the truth. Somewhere, though, she knew this was more. But to have such a clear declaration. From any of the men she had dated, it would have sounded ridiculous. (And if she was honest, she supposed none of them would ever have felt inclined to say it anyway – what was it Éomer said? That she only kissed frogs who stayed frogs?) But from Faramir, it came across as straightforward honesty.

And as for its effect on her… It felt like a stupid way to describe it, but the only way she could account for the effect his voice, his words had on her, was that her heart felt as if it was swelling with a mixture of joy and sadness. The corners of her mouth twitched in the beginnings of a smile. How ridiculous she was being. Then mentally she berated herself for cowardice. She should be able to meet straightforward honesty with equal honesty of her own, tell him what she felt.

And yet, and yet. She knew there was a "but" coming.

"I would stay with you if I possibly could. But my whole world stands on the brink of war, a war which, should we lose, will see my whole nation dead or enslaved, tortured, corrupted beyond all imagining." Faramir's voice cracked. "I have to go back."

Éowyn said nothing, just tightened her grip on his hand. In response, he tightened his grip on her shoulder, pulling her in even closer against him. The silence stretched out. Beneath her cheek, he felt a wetness on his chest.

Eventually she let go of his hand and brushed away the tears with the back of her own. She turned her face towards him, and wriggled up so she could kiss him.

"I suppose we'd better make the most of the time we have got," she said, in a slightly choked voice.

Another stanza of poetry haunted Faramir's mind as he kissed her back. He whispered it to her, between kisses. "Thus, though we cannot make our sun stand still/ Yet we can make her run."

~o~O~o~

They set of the next morning, early, having borrowed Jane's car. Éomer took the first turn at the wheel, Éowyn in the passenger seat, Faramir folded up somewhat uncomfortably in the back. His pain was only increased when Éomer turned on his favourite play list. Although, in an odd sort of way, Éomer's presence, and the dreadful din, made Faramir feel better. He couldn't get maudlin, not with another person there to witness it.

The road wound around uncomfortably as Éomer tackled the corners with enthusiasm. – Éowyn had said something incomprehensible about "heading north to hit the M40". Through the window Faramir could see trees. At one point Éomer had to hit the brakes and swerve to avoid a small roe deer, which hurtled off into the undergrowth.

After what felt like a lifetime but was probably only a couple of hours, they stopped to swap drivers, and Éowyn told Éomer very firmly that it was his turn to be squashed into the back.

"We'll stop and swap again at Bridgenorth – we can grab some fish and chips."

"Christ, we won't need to eat for a week..." Éowyn muttered.

As they stretched their legs, she also seized the opportunity to give Faramir a kiss, which he returned with considerable enthusiasm, while Éomer made vomiting noises, then told them that they should get in the bloody car and behave themselves.

Comfortably ensconced in the front seat, Faramir stretched his legs out with considerable relief, and retuned the radio with even more relief. He found Radio 3 and gave a contented sigh.

"Bloody Rupert," muttered Éowyn, but she also put her hand on his leg for a moment, before having to return it to the gear stick.

"Hands on the wheel where I can see them, sister dearest!" came Éomer's voice from the back seat.

Éowyn found herself wondering whether all Radio 3 documentaries had to pass some special test to make sure they were sufficiently earnest and high-brow before they aired. This one was about "musical portraits of political leaders." It started with opera – from Monteverdi's take on Nero, through Donizetti doing a very Italian version of Mary Queen of Scots, to Britten's Elizabeth the first. Éowyn decided it was all a bit screechy and over-blown for her tastes. Then on to symphonies – Beethoven's portrait of Napoleon (Éowyn laughed out loud when, out of the corner of her eye, she saw Faramir jump at a suddenly discordant bit), and Shostakovich's portrait of Stalin, a musical portrait of a monster as the announcer put it.

"Wonder what they'd have made of my father," Faramir observed, which of course prompted the question of who his father was, and why some Russian dude from the last century might have been interested in writing music about him. So Faramir started to explain, and before long was bogged down in a complicated explanation of his country's history and politics.

It gradually became clear to Éowyn that Faramir had, how could she put this? Downplayed his background. He, or at least his family, was a highly important one… his father was pretty much king in a kingdom with an absolute monarchy. It also became clear, as much from the gaps and the things left unsaid as from Faramir's actual words, that his father was a complicated man, and Faramir's relationship with him was similarly complicated, even painful. Driven by duty and principle, but not always by warmth. Faramir seemed simultaneously to admire him, yet have reservations about some of what he did. It was also clear that he yearned for his father's approval yet not get it. The approval apparently went entirely to Faramir's elder brother; despite this, Éowyn could tell that Faramir adored his big brother.

The phrase which came to Éowyn's mind in connection with Faramir's family was "messed up." She decided it was a bloody good thing she was unlikely ever to meet his father – she didn't think she'd like him in the slightest, nor (she was pretty certain) would he like her. Maybe the Russian dude would be the ideal guy to draw a musical portrait of him.

Gondor's history turned out to be even more complicated and messy than Faramir's family. The great wave of Numenor, the kinslaying, Isildur, the ring, Sauron, the disappearance of the line of kings, the line of the stewards… it all began to blur into one long, confusing muddle to Éowyn. It was like listening to an amalgam of ancient history and myth, all blended together, in a story where the mythical was taken as seriously as the historical. It was mad. Mind you, this whole thing was mad – here she and Éomer were, with this strange man from God only knew where, off in pursuit of an ancient chapel holding a magical artefact which would change the course of a war in another world. Utterly mad.

And yet, she thought, as she sat on the stone wall in front of the chippy, eating what Éomer described as "a whale and a bucket of chips", however mad the whole enterprise was, she was certain of one thing. Even though she was probably about to lose him, she loved this man. She shook her head as if in an effort to clear it, and popped another chip into her mouth.

Bloody typical. It summed up her life really. Only she could have the earth-shattering realisation that she'd finally fallen in love with a nice bloke, while sitting out side a chip shop in the middle of nowhere. And only she could have timing quite that lousy, to realise this while on her way to help him back to another world and out of her life forever.

~o~O~o~

The rest of the journey passed uneventfully. Night had fallen before they reached the village near the foot of Cader Idris, and Faramir had begun to doze in the back seat. He was woken by the streetlights – few and far between. The hamlet seemed to consist of a main street with stone houses with slate roofs, and not much else. In the passenger seat Éowyn consulted her phone.

"Third house on the left past the chapel," she said to her brother.

Éomer came to a halt outside the cottage she'd indicated. Again, she checked her phone, then tapped numbers into the keypad by the door, opening the metal box to find the door key to the cottage. With a sigh of relief, they switched the lights on.

The cottage was tiny – one room downstairs with a sofa (which according to the description doubled as a bed), a table and one end turned into a small kitchen, and a bathroom and bedroom upstairs. Once they'd brought the bags in (including a bag of food Jane had set aside for them to take with them), Éomer made a pot of tea. Then he and Éowyn fried up some sausages and served them up in bread rolls. They followed it up with a large slab of Jane's Christmas cake, then did the washing up, Éomer washing, Faramir drying.

Afterwards, each with a mug of tea, they spread the map out on the table, and Éomer pointed out where Theo thought the chapel was. They would have to leave the village on the road, then after about a mile, take a path up a narrow side valley, first through some woods, then into open moorland. There was a river to be crossed, and from the tight contours, the valley in which it ran was steep and narrow at that point, but fortunately the map showed a bridge. Another couple of miles over a saddle between two hills took them into a second valley, parallel to the first, which was where Theo thought the chapel lay.

Éomer folded the map up, and Éowyn went to get more tea. She came back with the pot, and a pack of cards. The cards didn't look quite like the ones Faramir was used to, but (to no-one's particular surprise) he turned out to be a quick study, and won several hands. Then he amused them by showing them some tricks, and demonstrating an ability to skim cards, not merely from the top or bottom of the deck, but from the middle as well.

"Remind me never to play against you for money," said Éomer, with a laugh.

Faramir answered very solemnly that he would never dream of cheating friends (which left Éowyn wondering who he would cheat, and in what circumstances – it seemed rather out-of-character). Then Éomer claimed first dibs on the bathroom, saying that since he was sleeping on the couch he might as well get everything he needed to do upstairs out of the way (by which Éowyn guessed he meant And get safely back downstairs out of earshot before you two go off to bed).

In fact, Éomer needn't have worried. Éowyn crawled into bed feeling unbelievably tired from the drive, and emotionally strung out by the events of the past few days. She had had every intention of making love to Faramir, but as soon as she felt the warm comfort of his body next to hers, and the softness of the pillow, she fell asleep.

Faramir, on the other hand, couldn't sleep. He was long familiar with this sort of night. They were, thank Nienna, a mercifully rare occurrence, but when they did happen, he knew there was no fighting them. Sometimes they stemmed from waking up, having dreamt of the great wave again. Other times they arose from troubling events in the day – a near miss with his troops and a band of marauding orcs, having to discipline a soldier for dereliction of duty (a ghastly task, given the draconian punishment that awaited the worst cases), meetings with his father. Yet other times they arose from anxiety about the morrow. Tonight, he was wound far too tight to sleep, both by the uncertainty of what tomorrow would bring, and the horrible realisation that he was about to be parted from Éowyn.

He alternated between staring out of the window at the sky – currently cloudless, with a three-quarter moon shedding a cold, ethereal light into the room (was the moon a man in this world, or a woman, to cast such soft light over his beloved?) - and looking at Éowyn as she slept, her face turned towards him, her arm cast across his chest. Even in the moonlight, her hair glistened.

After a couple of hours, she stirred in his arms, and her eyes opened a crack.

"Shh, go back to sleep," he murmured.

"I didn't mean to go to sleep in the first place," she whispered back, then reached up and kissed him, lightly. She looked at him expectantly, a look of yearning and desire on her beautiful features. In answer, he threaded his fingers through her hair and gently pulled her in for another kiss, then another. Gentleness turned to slow heat, then to a burning fire.

And then, in the midst of the burning fire, Éowyn wrapped her long legs around Faramir's hips and held him there, stilled for a moment.

"I need to feel all of this, to remember all of this. I have the weirdest feeling that in the future I will need to know what it is I have to remember." Her voice came as a whisper in the near darkness. She reached a hand up and stroked his cheek, and held him for a moment longer, looking up at his face, the way the moonlight cast shadows. Then she loosened her grasp and moved with him once more.

~o~O~o~

AN: My goodness, this quick parody has grown into quite an epic. Another three or four more chapters to go, I think (two of them already written in first draft).

Thank you to everyone for reviews. Earthdragon: yes, Wales is magical (I always think of it in connection with Alan Garner's wonderful novels, and of course, parts of Susan Cooper's The Dark is Rising sequence). Though I must confess Sindarin is either French or Italian in my mind (according to mood – both beautiful languages), and Quenya I think of as Latin. Your mention of Ladybower takes me back to my twenties, driving over the Snake Pass between Manchester and Sheffield (by that stage, I and my friends were dotted around Lancashire and South/West Yorkshire). The Peak District is a part of the world I love dearly – it's where I learned to climb, and I have spent many, many happy days on the gritstone edges there.