‘ sometimes the unseen is not to be feared and those that are meant to love us most are not always the ones that do. ’ - from Glorfindel/@glcrfindel ( because i thought it would be interesting to have them have a lil interaction and i owe you several replies on Rían )
There was about Faramir that peculiar composure he had learned in youth. A stillness often mistaken for peace, though it was in truth a discipline wrought in the long shadow of a father’s regard withheld. His gaze, which had been resting somewhere beyond Glorfindel – pinned to no fixed object, but rather hung on the suggestion of distance itself – shifted not at all. Not even as those words sank with a slow and dreadful certainty, catching on some hidden seam within him.
“Not always,” he echoed at last.
A mirthless breath left him. His hand flexed once at his side, as if remembering the ghost of some older restraint – some childhood instinct to stand straighter, to speak less.
It had been a curious thing, to grow beneath a gaze that did not warm. Boromir had known the sun of it, had flourished beneath that fierce and terrible light. Faramir, by contrast, had learned the cold geometry of absence – the careful measure of words, the censorship of self, the endless petition for something that never came. Even now, some small and unextinguished part of him recoiled at the naming of it.
His mouth softened, though his eyes did not. When he turned them at last upon Glorfindel, there was only that grave, searching clarity that had ever been his burden and his gift alike.
“We make myths of our fathers, do we not? Of those set above us. We carve them into something noble, something unassailable.” His grey gaze flickered, just once, as though some inward vision had caught him unawares. “When they fail, we are left not only with the wound, but with the story we told ourselves.”
Silence gathered between them then, but it was not empty. It pressed close, intimate and airless.
“And yet,” he continued, his expression gentling, though sorrow lingered there. “You are right in this also: the unseen need not always be feared. There are mercies we do not perceive until long after they have shaped us.”
