Immortalitui // Faramir 🥀

Chapter Forty-Four - Return to Gondor

Word Count: 2,128 words. 

Warnings: None. 

Gondor stood as the beacon of light against an otherwise decayed world. With Arathiel came the darkness of the world beyond. A concerned look for the starving people on the street was shared by Arathiel and Faramir before calling in those that followed.

"Escort the wounded to any Healer you can find," Arathiel ordered gently.

"And the dead?" a soldier countered, he himself bloodied and bruised. The dead outnumbered the living in their company.

"Find the families and tell them that Gondor will care for them in the absence of their father or brother." Or both.

Arathiel turned away, spotting the stray Faramir. The simple gaze he pinned her with was enough to calm the nerves that gathered.

"Is that the Steward's order?" the soldier called.

"It is mine," she corrected.

Faramir followed as they ascended the fortress. "My father will not be happy with that order," he commented.

"Your –"

"But my father can simply accept or meet your blade?" he suggested with a quirked smile.

Arathiel almost rushed to kiss it away so that the gesture did not grow a contagion. Almost.

"I am glad that we see eye to eye."

Faramir tugged on her hand, pulling them to a stop. "Can we simply be for a moment?" he requested.

"The war does not wait for us," she countered.

Pulling on both hands, he placed her fingers around his neck, gently splaying his own across the small of her back.

"You must learn, nin emel, that if our war will not wait for us, then we must make it," he advised.

Unused to the affection, Arathiel assumed that she would feel uncomfortable embracing Faramir so publicly. The truth was no such thing. She played with the ends of his hair, twirling the strands around her fingers.

"Darkness has no compromise." The she-elf could not admit defeat in any argument.

"And yet, we do," Faramir explained. "We must learn to use it or we shall become the evil that we fight so tirelessly against."

Arathiel pulled him into a hasty kiss, slowing only as he returned the passionate embrace.

Faramir smiled. "What was that for?"

She knew that their time together was limited. "To show every woman who ever paid you fancy that I am here now."

He smiled. "I did not take you for a possessive woman."

Deciding to be playful in selling the lie, Arathiel leaned closer. "I am very defensive of things I own."

His smirk matched her tone. "I am owned by you, am I?"

"In a manner of speaking," Arathiel returned. "The Elven bond insinuates that we are now property of each other. There was an argument regarding the wording several hundred years ago in which an Elf claimed that he would not be referred to as owned, but –"

Faramir silenced her with another kiss and smiled against her lips. "You must stop talking."

"Are you telling me to be quiet?" she countered. "This may be our first argument...."