Work Text:
When she is well enough to walk outside again, the war is ended.
The ash still falls on Minas Tirith. The dark clouds dissolved into the sky when the Dark Lord fell, drawn up as though in a whirlpool, burned away like fog on a summer morning under the blinding sunlight of a new Age. Their deposits still linger. When this slowly pinkening dusk sky turns to dawn, the people will wake to wash the dark stains off the white stones.
Eowyn thinks Minas Tirith's design choices are fairly impractical.
Perhaps that will be her problem someday soon. Perhaps she should be with Faramir as he organises the city, covering a thousand smaller tasks that the King has no time for at this moment.
The King. Aragorn. Still a strange thought, still a pang, and she pushes it away for later.
The benefit of the white stone is that she blends in perfectly with the rest of the city. Her dress is pale as a ghost. Her skin is as dark as the earth.
She is pulled through the early morning twilight as one risen from the grave. Her feet carry her to the gates, and for the first time since she fell, Eowyn sees what became of the battlefield where she gave herself up for dead.
The land is ravaged. The ground is scorched and cracked. The ashen remains of bonfires mark where orcish bodies have been burned, but the blood still stains the earth.
There are black fissures gouged deep through the land.
~
The first time Aragorn introduces her to his bride, Eowyn bends to kiss the hand in front of her and raises her head to look her Queen in the eye –
And understands in an instant why Aragorn's heart could never have turned to her.
For the first time, the thought carries no sting.
~
In the early hours of every morning she walks through the city like a ghost. Now, a change; somewhere, the loveliest voice she has ever heard is singing. The ground seems to listen.
~
It is almost a year before Eowyn goes home.
A year without the scent of the wildgrasses and the sound of her peoples’ tongue as they raise their voices in evening song. It’s not until she makes the choice to return that she realises how desperately she has missed it.
For all the path home, through every field and village, the black fissures in the earth follow her.
~
Aragorn healed her. There are no visible marks on her skin from the Witch King’s blow.
Still, sometimes she thinks she can feel the black fissures itching under her skin.
~
She did not expect Arwen to befriend her. She did not expect to have anything in common with one two thousand years her elder and in every way greater, wiser, beyond her.
These things she finds they have in common:
A love of the city; a love of the people; a love for Arda; a desire to heal.
And mirrored where she did not expect it; a fierceness.
Eowyn takes Arwen's hand and teaches her the songs of the Rohirrim. Arwen takes Eowyn's hand and teaches her the songs of healing.
Her hand is not quite human, but it is warm nonetheless.
~
It would never have been a choice for Eowyn.
Eowyn is bound to the land, to the blackened earth and flashes of green regrowth crawling out of the cracks. She has been bound since birth to the feel of the dust in her breath and the thud of the dirt beneath her feet. Her lungs move with the wind on the plains; her heart beats under the white midday sun; her flesh is made of the earth.
She is bound to Rohan in her very blood. And yet - she is leaving it behind for love of Faramir and the life they have dreamed of together.
Perhaps she and Arwen are not so different after all.
There is a grief she sees in Arwen sometimes, an aching loss that flickers behind her eyes and makes her hands still. It comes when she watches twin boys play in the streets. It comes in the Houses of Healing. It comes in the dead of night.
Eowyn knows it too.
~
She rides out into the morning sun of Gondor. The light shines in her eyes, but she pays it no heed. A fresh sweet wind is blowing over the hills today, bringing great breaths of fresh air.
She urges her horse on faster. Green shoots are breaking through the earth where elven arts and stubborn nature have brought the cracks together again. The villagers are toiling in preparation for new growth.
Eowyn finds herself galloping, rushing as fast as she can, the world bright and free and crisp. She laughs as joy rises in her as sharp as the spring.
Together, hooves on the earth and her heart in her chest; they beat, they beat, they beat.