[ point + knife ] (from @morghulis)
VIOLENT REACTION PROMPTS / ACCEPTING
THE CAT HAS CIRCLED HIM FOR THREE DAYS, gradually coming closer, but always a hand's breadth out of reach. Warier even than most the strays that populate the city. Estel remains against the wall with the others, travelers and shipless-sailors and vagrants waiting on whatever ship will bring them out of the harbor and towards another world—none of them going home, but all going somewhere. The city is dangerous and few are willing to leave the docks to venture deeper in. When Strider goes, he comes back out with nearly enough food and fresh water to distribute. Nearly. Enough for the children, at least. Their parents, to the last person, claim they are not hungry, and so Estel loves every one of them, and finds that he is not hungry in his turn.
It is a scrap of stale dried fish, laid down beside his boot, that finally brings the cat close enough to touch. She does not arch or hiss when he places a slow and tentative hand on her back but only watches him with unblinking eyes; luminous and grey as winter, neither human nor animal in feeling. She has been watching him thus for days, three days, and Estel offers her a small smile. She hisses, and he laughs. Seemingly displeased, she stalks away.
None of the ships that come in will have him. The next day, when all the others have caught their boats and he is the last remaining on the wharf, legs tucked against his chest and his salt-stained cloak drawn around them to shield some of his body from the cool rain, pressed into the wall, the cat is the only creature which seems to pay him any mind. He lays the last of the fish out for her, far enough away from him that he will not be able to reach her, and watches as she takes it in her teeth and retreats to a near distance to devour it.
She does not clean herself after she feasts—only sits, and stares, and then slinks away.
Somewhere between the din of the cold day and the thick, wet dark of the long night, Estel sleeps. It is no more than a broken moment here and there, but it is enough. He wakes and a girl is before him. Her knife is at his throat. She is staring with unblinking eyes; luminous and grey as winter, neither human nor animal in feeling. He sees his own reflection in them. He looks tired and weak. A lost man who no one will remember, and certainly no one will miss. She has observed him thoroughly. Perhaps she has decided these truths for herself.
"For three nights, you might have killed me—yet for three nights you have not."
The docks are empty and silent but for the sound of the water and the boats. The only lights are from the city behind them and the low-glowing ghost lights of the sailors aboard their ships, smothered in the mist. The fog stinks of the canals.
"I think you did not want the children to see my blood in the morning. That was kind of you."
The rest is plain: the children are gone now, and no one will see. No one but she. Estel is still as glass, unblinking as she is unblinking, but his body is not tense even as her knifeblade is warm where it is tucked beneath his tipped-back chin. She must have been holding it in her palm before she approached. Estel's neck is slender, tough with sinew, and bears some scars already. She will not be the first to try to cut it. She may be the first to succeed.
He has been hunted all his life, even when he did not know it. When the reality of the danger he was in lived only in the tired vigilance of his mother's eyes, in the way she would tense at the slightest unexpected sound. They killed his father with an arrow through the eye. As with the hero Huor in the old tales, who he would often pretend to be when he played alone on the walls of the gorge in the heat of the day. Leaping onto an Eagle's back, utterly unaware. Sometimes, Gilraen would put her left hand over her small son's left eye and look long at him just to see—and then disguise the gesture by petting back his wild hair. As with so many things, it makes sense to Estel now only in the distance of his memory. The way she craved reminder and any certainty that it was not so. That it would not be so. The way they lived outside the world and his mother's sacrifice—his own confused happiness, to know only they two existed. The whole world of men, Gilraen and her son Estel: that one, he thinks now with a small sting, he might have lived in well. That one, he might have ruled, when his mother grew weary of the work. Outside of it was only the inevitability of others' births and deaths so that he, too, could eventually be born and die.
The heavy-laden branches on the tree of life and death. A dead tree, too, a world away that is awaiting him. A life unlived that he cannot map in his mind with clarity enough to fear for it now, even with death herself crouched over his legs which he has stretched out before him in sleep, poised to snuff out whatever meager light.
The girl is waiting for him as well. Waiting for him to speak, or to fight back, a dark frustration brewing under the cool facelessness of her previous expression. Dark and childish, like the dark and childish meanness that lives in his own heart, too. She has inherited some of it. Some of it, like his, was taught to her. She is hesitating, or considering, or hovering on the edge of a familiar decision. Every time is like new. He knows. Strider knows, Estel knows. Somewhere underneath, Aragorn knows, too. She should not have watched him so long. It is always easier to close one's eyes.
Wherever she has come from to arrive here, surely she understands. She has watched him as he slept. Kept him safe from all but her. Strider looks at the girl and smiles a small, paradoxical smile, "It is a hard world, and my life or death will little change it—but I would be sorry to leave it now."
Estel’s hand rests loose on his thigh and he thinks of the knife concealed there. His brows furrow. His assassin hovers over him, and they are looking at one another.
“I am trying to come back to it. Do you understand?”
