Immortalitui // Faramir 🥀

Chapter Fifty - Distraction

Word Count: 2,308 words. 

Warnings: None. 

"Do you have a home, Arathiel?" Bilbo had asked her that day beneath The Lonely Mountain. 

Thorin had fallen to madness, demanding to only be surrounded by the riches of the within Erebor. She was failing him and Arathiel did not know how to fix it. 

"I never thought to ask," he continued with a small smile and the toss of his hand. In his palm, the Hobbit grasped an acorn tightly.

"Rivendell, I suppose," she returned.

Bilbo faced her, covered in dirt and soot. He was no longer the Hobbit she had met in the Shire. "You suppose?"

"Elves came from the Undying Lands. I was born long after they were forced to flee... but that is where I am told we will return. My brothers made a home here, Elrond in Rivendell and Elros in Numenór. His descendants sat on the throne of Gondor."

"But you didn't?"

Arathiel shook her head. "I am perfectly content with living in the homes of others as long as I am welcome. I fear that if I... stop, then perhaps I shall never move again."

Bilbo nodded, leaning forward. "I used to think that the walls of my home in Bag End were all I needed to be happy," he began, "but those walls, that furniture, those dusty old books and maps... those stupid doylies," – they both laughed – "they mean nothing without her. Without my Rose."

"She is hard to forget."

Bilbo smiled. "My sister will never not be noticed. She is the Took, the Adventurer... but she's also the lover. That stubborn woman will never give up on who or what she cares about."

"That includes you... Bilbo Baggins," Arathiel countered.

He looked up with a smile. "I suppose it does." He took a deep breath, leaning back against the stone walls of Erebor. "I suppose it does."

Arathiel thought of that moment then, as she watched the darkness grow stronger. Gondor had been saved, Rohan coming to the aid of Minas Tirith. The battle had not finished, the war still turning on the wheel of time. Several spokes had been destroyed, shattered... but enough remained to turn it.

"I should have been stronger," Éowyn began, at Arathiel's side. She had been found amidst the rubble of Rohan's fight, half-dead. Despite that, the woman did not give in to the call of death. She rose above it.

"You killed the Witch King of Angmar," the she-elf returned. "A fete that no one has been able to overcome. You were the strongest soldier on that battlefield."

She wrapped her arms around herself. "And yet, I could not save my uncle."

The grief of Théoden's death was still close to the hearts of all who knew him. "He was the greatest King that Rohan has seen," Arathiel explained. "He was a leader who fought amongst his people, and so he fell like one. To die alongside the Riders of Rohan... that is a honour I aspire to have."

Éowyn smiled with tears in her eyes. "You, Lady Arathiel, always know the right words to say."

"I never know the right words," she countered. "I simply say what I want and hope that I am not beheaded." They laughed lightly.

With a quick glance behind, Éowyn noted the approaching Faramir. She bowed with a smile before drifting away.

"How seductive of her," Arathiel commented.