Work Text:
"I have given hope to the Dunedain," she said, on her last day. "I have kept none for myself."
Fear had been her sole companion on the night of Arathorn's death. Fear and desperation, and the image of the black arrow. She would never forget it as long as she lived.
Arathorn had been targeted because he was chieftain. No one said so in her presence, but she knew it as surely as she knew her own name. And Gilraen, knowing this, looked at her son. Aragorn, just two years old, uncomprehending of his father's demise. She looked at him and saw the arrow, looming large against his tiny frame.
She could not bear it.
So even as her husband was prepared for burial, she packed a scant few of her possessions and closed her ears to all protests - "We need our chieftan!" "Have you gone mad?" "He is the only heir."
"Aye he is," she cried at last. "Arathorn's only son, my baby, and he is but two years old! I will not see him cut down in his infancy. I will not."
The sons of Elrond spirited them away as soon as the last crumb of earth obscured the remains of her husband's face. Gilraen wept, loud and long, but she did not turn back. She clutched her baby to her breast and turned her back on all that she knew. He was all the light that remained in her life. To keep him safe, she would do anything.
"He must not know his father's name."
"If that is what you wish." Elrond had had few protests tonight. "If he asks, we can tell him that he died in honor and that it pains you to speak of him."
"Must he be told he is a man at all?"
"He must. He will notice the differences in age, and speed, and stength. Such a thing would be impossible to conceal." Elrond took her hand in his. "Gilraen, he must know something of his own kind."
"You agreed that secrecy is his only safety."
"I do agree; and yet we must choose carefully what we conceal from him now, lest the knowledge unman him when he is grown. Knowing that he is a mortal man, that you and he came from a village in the wilds after his sire was slain - these facts will not endanger him."
He was her all. She had nothing left but him. "He must be safe."
"He will be safe. We will do all that is in our power to make it so."
She looked into his eyes, testing his sincerity, and it seemed that his conviction was her own.
Rivendell - Imladris - was safe. Few other places in the world were safer. Her son, Estel, was happy and loved. At five, in the place of his birth, he might have known to fear the howling of wargs, the bite of hunger, the first frosts of winter. He might have seen the grimness in the men's eyes, worn down by fighting the long defeat, and the calloused hearts of the women who knew at any moment their lives would be ripped apart.
Here he feared nothing. He wanted for nothing.
He knew a little of convalescence, for this was a place of healing - mortal men still found there way at direst need to this great house, and so did elves, and so did the occasional dwarf. But here the sickroom was not a grim place, and he was seven before he understood that some did not recover from their hurts, and ten before he began to understand their causes, and twelve before he began to learn either the healing or the inflicting of wounds.
Gilraen protested this last one, but Elrond stood firm. He must know how to defend himself and others.
"Why? Do you think the protections on this valley will fail?"
Elrond looked at her with sympathy. "Estel will leave its safety one day."
Gilraen recoiled from this, from the image of her son riddled with arrows and the certainty in the elf-lord's voice.
"Leave to what end? To endless toil and death? To spend his years too swiftly and leave a new widow behind?"
"To find love, to protect others from suffering, to become a man as all boys must do."
"No."
"We cannot cage him."
Elrond embraced her then. Ten years ago they'd looked like they were of an age, but Gilraen showed the passage of time and he did not.
"My dearest kinswoman," he said, "my friend. I fear for him as you do; I love him too. But we cannot shelter him forever."
Her whole body shuddered. It seemed impossible that grief could reach into this place of comfort, that any blackness could survive under the warmth of the sun, but when she closed her eyes all she saw was the foul black arrow, lodged in the skull of the man she loved - lodged in the skull of her own son.
"We cannot keep him forever."
For him she had given up every familiar face, her home, her possessions, her past. She had been ready to let him forget all knowledge of Westron, but conceded that it would be easier for him if he did not have to relearn it in manhood. She had let him find a father's love in Elrond and playmates in the lighthearted elves of the valley; encouraged it, even, so that he would seek such affections nowhere else. She had even let him greet a few men in their convalescence - men who knew nothing of her or her people, who thought they were here for healing as well.
Perhaps in her own way she was a convalescent too, meant to be recovering from grief. Perhaps. But each step he took into manhood stole a portion of her strength. The first whiskers sprouting on his chin, his eagerness to hunt and track and fight orcs as the sons of Elrond did. His growing curiosity about the ways of men and the world outside their shelter.
Each effort to leave the nest she'd wrought for him was an agony to her. Must he learn the history of Numenor? Must he see the shards of Narsil? Must he be told, even in passing, that a remnant of Arnor survived though it did not thrive?
Must he look at her with those eyes, no longer quite so large in his face, and clasp her hands and say "I dread to ask, for I know it pains you, but where did we come from? My fath- Lord Elrond will not speak of them; he says I must ask you. What was our village like? What manner of people were we?"
"What does it matter, my dear one? All that was so long ago."
But that wasn't enough for him any more. He was twenty, impatient to be a man in his own right. Impatient to know his past and make a future of his own.
He couldn't see, as she did, the black arrow wedged in his skull. It didn't haunt his days and nights as it did hers.
Her precious child, her baby. He had been too young to remember. A blessing that it did not haunt him, and a curse that it did not hold him here, where he could be spared the same fate.
"My Estel," she cried. "My hope for the future."
She had no hope left, apart from him. She'd buried everything else.