starters from PROMETHEUS BOUND by aeschylus ||| Accepting
@shieldarm sent: “you can be softhearted.” (is théodred just out of earshot ?? probably)
Theodred was five and a half paces behind him, just a little to the left, just close enough to hear his dark laughter but not enough to hear why, just one turn and five and a half strides away.
Which was fine. The blazing fire pits at Meduselde’s centre chased away every single chill Boromir had acquired on the road. The sensation of the heat beating against his cheek was almost reminiscent of midsummer in Anorien, when those plains would truly earn their name as sage filled the air. No sage here in this Rohir winter but the seasoned applewood logs were fragrant enough and making him even drowsier than when he’d first arrived not two hours ago. Too drowsy by half. He would have to wait until tomorrow night to tell Theodred about that song he’d heard the last time he passed through Arnach, and Forlong’s revised version too. A shame, he would have laughed better.
But that was still, fine. Grimbold was getting steadily drunker in front of him and the lady Eowyn. As he usually did! Before they rode abroad. It was a humorous diversion in particular because Grimbold had a pleasant voice but a foul tongue. Very funny, even if Boromir often had to quench the urge to steer Eowyn away as Grimbold’s recitals became ever more blue the more mead he drank. Theodred would know it too and no doubt take great delight in Boromir’s silent inner moral and cultural dilemma… if he just wasn’t five and a half paces away.
The annoyed tension in his chest was stalwartly ignored. It had been ten years already, they weren’t melodramatic young men anymore! Moping over- what? Lack of attention? Affection? Absolutely not. He was just tired, he reasoned, and the usual routine for his arrival in Edoras had been broken this time. Lead up to the halls and presented to the King, instead of Theodred meeting him at the gate so they could meander that way themselves. They were creatures of habit, that was all it was.
The disgruntled sigh he gave was not very loud or large, but obviously still too exaggerated for the Lady Eowyn to not notice. Her glance up was enough for Boromir to meet her gaze. What a gaze, just eighteen and yet already bearing such a stare. He opened his mouth to answer her silent query with a usual easy half truth,
“I am only road weary, Eow-”
His focus was snatched away mid-sentence, there was that laugh again! Sardonic and repressing and grim. He saw Theodred standing in a circle of Thanes with his father and that new advisor of his opposite him. It all set a concerned and frustrated tension to Boromir’s jaw, but he flicked back to Eowyn as soon as he recalled himself. Not soon enough.
Something complex passed over Eowyn’s features, something Boromir could not decipher. She looked Theodred’s way too, calculating. Grimbold’s chattering continued over them but he seemed to know that he’d lost his audience. And so no others saw the White Lady touch the cuff of Boromir’s tunic, nor heard her pensive but decisive advice, words that brought him up short, his brow arching just a little, squinting.
“You can be softhearted.”
There is a pregnant pause. She holds his gaze admirably as he frowns at her, trying to judge what is transpiring in this moment between them. In the end he can find no answer other than the obvious.
There were… many questions that passed through his mind, along with the little wearied and boring panic that he tried to stifle. How long she had known; had Theodred told her; what would she do; had she told anyone else? And he could not deny the doomful weight to his stomach at all of them. But once his catastrophizing was done and he had visibly forced his muscles to untense, the more pertinent question came to the fore; what did she mean?
“... And why do you say that, My Lady?” He asks in an attempt at casual inquiry.
And, even if there is no malice to it, she looks at him like he’s a fool.
Perhaps he is, he concedes. What had they said to each other, so long ago? I want to take heart in you, we can bend for this. Just this. He felt at times he’d spent all the softness his heart could give on that one concession to his austere drive. What would he do, if he had it all back now?
Detach from Eowyn at this moment, most likely, give Theodred a clap to his shoulder as he passed.
And when he eventually followed him to his room, Theodred would find him asleep, sat up on that cushioned seat but turned for him to drop against his side. And he’d awaken and Theodred would grouse over his late arrival and he would reply that ‘if you only kept the roads better...’ which would allow them to replay that argument for what might be the fortieth time but pretending to care as if it was the first just so that he could hear Theodred’s taunts in answer to his own jabs. Until he was just too tired and Theodred would call him an old man as they both staggered to stand and he would tell him he had a song for him and Theodred would say, ‘Tell me tomorrow’ in that edging tender tone he had and then- stars- to sleep! Thank all fates for the winter when his own body heat was a blessing not a curse and they could settle into their proper practiced tangle. Theodred wouldn’t remember to tie his hair, Boromir would find it in his beard before morning.
The sudden sense memory hit him so hard he had to blink it away. The unruly yawning yearning that came with it was not dismissed so easily. He tried to return Eowyn’s somewhat exasperated expression but something demanded he look Theodred’s way once more, perhaps they could do that.
But a single eyeful of the new black-haired, black-minded and suspiciously shadowed man at Theoden’s side reminded Boromir of why they definitely could not.
Why was it that, even as the world and his priorities demanded his feelings mellow, they only grew all the more poignant? That Theodred’s absence in his mundane everyday had only grown more painful with time? The nature of love, he supposed, in defeat.
And so he finally broke that dreadful silence he’d left Eowyn in with another strangled sigh, dragging a hand over his beard as he spoke a very poor reply. “Not today, not this time.”
