Violations
Title: Violations
Summary: What happens on the Road, stays on the Road - except when it doesn't. A short sequel to Aliana's Triage about vows for New Year's Day.
Characters: OCs, Aragorn, Halbarad gets a mention
Warnings: A rather internal story; you need to know that Thorondis is Eledhril's wife in Semper Fidelis, but you need Triage to make sense of how they interact with each other here. Bechdel test failure. Also, it's likely depressing.
Violations
18 March 3019
On the Pelennor, as the Host of the West departs:
“Aragorn,” he says, again. The other man has already half turned away from him now, but he pauses, looks back. Eledhril lifts his chin slightly. “Deal them some hurt, will you?”
If Aragorn’s smile is mirthless, his eyes are yet alive. “As best I can.”
- from Triage
The day the king returned, the people of the City met him at the ruins of the gates. The hinges still clung to the stonework, hanging twisted in their frames; men had cleared the salvaged timber from the gap, leaving the way into the City barred only by their bodies.
But there would be no blood on the flagstones today. The cheer raised as the army approached told of decision ere ever the Steward spoke. Eledhril stood among those gathered to greet Isildur’s Heir, and did not smile, not even when Aragorn, Elessar at last, came to him and clasped his arms, and said, “As much as I could.”
He will remember that day before the gates later, when he returns home to a grey, autumn world; when the tale of their war deeds - all of them - is told; and when afterward Thorondis, wearing naught but shadows, kisses his lips, and tells him fiercely, “You did your duty.”
Warm and smooth she lies in his arms, and hard as steel, and he aches - Valar, he aches! - as he tells her, “As much as I could!”
As much as he could.
That, she thinks, has always been the measure of the man in all his unmeasured life. Thorondis had known that when she married, for mothers in the Angle warned their daughters: Wed a Ranger, bed a stranger - you lie down with the whole Road.
She had thought she could do it; youthful, groundless confidence, that, but it had got her through her vows and got her a husband and a home, duties, a woman’s place and right respect. It was just that she hadn’t understood that day, why, as soon as he had kissed her, Eledhril had looked to Halbarad.
She understands now - has known for years, and learned how wise were her mothers.
She took the wash and went to the river that first time she saw and understood, and she screamed into her dirty sheets, and wept herself sick, there by the river. Then she’d done the laundry and gone to her mother and said, “We have children! We have our household! I swore an oath! What shall I do?”
Her mother, all practicality, had answered her: “You become the Road.”
Men say that the Road is not home, that the Road is a shadow you drag behind you, but catch in the gates. It is many things, but of them all, it is not safe, nor is it forgiving, and men do not love it.
He told her as much that night, as she lay cool to him in their bed.
“There are things that I do beyond these borders that I should never tell you,” he had said; “Hateful things.”
It was a kind of apology, that admission - so she had thought. It was also, perhaps, a plea. But though she longed, she would not be bribed, not by him, not even by her own longing. He had been with another, and she had to be the Road, and so she had told him:
“Do not, then, expect me to love them. Or forgive you.”
Then she had turned to him. He learned that night that there is a price to pay if he will still wear her ring, love her children, if he will lie in her bed.
For she’ll make him remember how much he wants it, all of it, including the honor - she will make him dream of it, ache for it, beg for it. But she will be honest with him: when she had said ‘yes’ to him, she had sworn to lie down with the whole Road, and so she will take him as he is, with his secrets and all the dirt that clings to them, and never ask the question. She will take him so hard, she’ll leave him breathless and with blood on the sheets sometimes, but she will keep her marriage bargain: she will hear no confessions.
Because then she never has to forgive.
There’s cracked flint in his eyes this evening, of a piece with the broken bones he’d suffered, and Thorondis thinks he must prefer the grating of cracked bones to irreconcilable griefs. Her ring on his hand gleams in the firelight, bright burnished gold - ever it shines, even when he breaks his vows. Perhaps especially when he breaks them, because in the end, despite such weakness, he hasn’t ever wanted to unmake them: though he does not do them honor, still, he loves their bondage as she does.
As a measure of the man, that is enough - just enough - for her.
So she lays him down, digs in her nails, makes him gasp, for hurt and for heaven, and lies down with him and with all that Road he’s walked. Somewhere down in that darkness, there is another, maybe others - she can’t be certain. And it’s neither well nor right, but that has never been the final measure of what matters. For they had sworn to make their way together: let the seas rise, and the earth change, and the stars extinguish themselves, I shall not forsake thee.
“As much as we can,” she whispers, breathless, to him. “As much as we can!”
Notes: 1. I felt bad that I never really wrote Thorondis very much, since the silence of female characters in slash is a pretty noticeable trope. I'm not sure I feel better now that I've written her perspective, but she does have one now, which has to count as some kind of improvement.
2. "let the seas rise, and the earth change, and the stars extinguish themselves, I shall not forsake thee." - the Angle's marriage vow.