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Boromir had never really thought about death. He had thought about supplies, messages, alliances. About tactics and strategies; about horses, friends and weapons. Sometimes he had thought, in a worried, distracted way, about Faramir, his brother, and all the ways that Faramir made his own life more complicated than it needed to be.
Lately, he had found he had to think about Elves and their difficult, uneasy ways, and also about a face and sword that had appeared from shadows of history so deep he had never expected them to have any relevance to his own life as he walked under the Sun on the green grass of Day.
Death had not concerned him, until, suddenly, riding on the black arrows of the orcs, it had found him.
It was too soon! Too soon! The hobbits had been taken, and he could not leave them in the hands of the orcs! What would Father do without Boromir’s strength to be his right hand? What would Faramir do, left to face the storm without his brother?
What would Aragorn do?
What would come to Minas Tirith, now that Boromir was no more?
He came back from a reflecting maze filled with such concerns with a start, when he realised that he could hear singing. It was the clear voice of Legolas. How very strange to have died so far from home, and be lamented by an elf.
"So many have passed down Anduin to find the flowing Sea.
Ask of the North Wind news of them the North Wind sends to me!
O Boromir! Beyond the gate the seaward road runs south,
But you came not with the wailing gulls from the grey sea’s mouth"
Boromir could not look at the crumpled wounded thing that was his own body, surrounded by broken orc-weapons in the bottom of the elf-boat.
Now Aragorn was singing. Gimli was standing beside him, his broad face marked with grief, and the grey river running past them seemed to call to Boromir. And yet he lingered, listening.
"Beneath Amon Hen I heard his cry. There many foes he fought,
His cloven shield, his broken sword, they to the water brought.
His head so proud, his face so fair, his limbs they laid to rest,
And Rauros, golden Rauros-falls, bore him upon its breast."
Aragorn seemed, so far as Boromir could tell, overcome with a real sorrow. But Legolas was looking up, directly at Boromir, his fair face untroubled and curious.
Strange how different they appeared, from the other side of death. Aragorn seemed taller, stronger, and there was a light in his eyes. By his side, his long sword Andúril seemed brighter than it ever had in life.
Boromir had looked over Andúril before, when it was re-made with such fanfare in Rivendell. He had thought it an oddly simple blade for one who claimed the very kingship of Gondor itself. But now the hilt shone bright as day, the most solid, real thing in all this vague and misty riverland. It was marked in delicate chains with letters that Boromir could not recognise: both the Elf-runes, and other sharp, straight-edged marks that made him think of marks that he had seen on the walls of Moria.
The song was over. They were leaving.
Boromir was dead, and the world would go on without him.
It could not be borne that Minas Tirith and Rohan and all the southlands of Gondor would fall, and Boromir could do nothing to stop it. Aragorn would try to save them... but would Aragorn be enough?
Boromir’s spirit, so full of life and determination and duty that it barely knew that it had died, reached out. He took hold of Andúril’s hilt, and felt it flare — in recognition, perhaps. As the Three Hunters began to run, Boromir’s shade went with them.
If Legolas saw him, he said nothing of the matter to his mortal friends.
******
Boromir stood, unseen, beside Aragorn as he met with Éomer, and heard the terrible news that Théodred, the heir and hope of Rohan, had fallen. That Merry and Pippin were lost, burned with the orcs that Éomer and his men had slain. Two savage blows: Boromir could scarce decide which one bit deeper.
Boromir had ridden with Théodred in peace and war. He was a dear friend. He looked, now for Théodred's shade, perhaps with hobbit-shades following. They were so young, so joyful, Merry, and Pippin. Visitors from a land where even the words to describe war were half-forgotten, legends from the past. Though orc-losses were far from new to him, it galled Boromir to think that they had lived their last hours among the orcs.
Perhaps Théodred had accepted fate and gone into the Sunset as a Man rightly should. They would sing the lament for him in Rohan, and drink, and he would not be forgotten.
But Boromir could not choose to vanish into death, not while the fate of all the free lands still lay in the balance. And after all, Éomer had not seen the bodies of the hobbits himself...
Boromir, filled with desperate hope, followed the Sword that was Broken and its bearer onward.
*******
To see Merry and Pippin again, taking their ease upon the broken gates of Isengard, was a joy that he had not looked for. And yet, all now marched on to a war that he could see no good end to. Boromir could have no confidence in the mad chance that the hope of Gandalf and Aragorn would be fulfilled and the Ring destroyed. The best hope left was that the victory of Mordor might not be complete.
Boromir thought of Mordor, of all he had heard of it and seen of it as it grew in terror and potency.
He thought of Frodo and Sam, and came perilously close to despair.
*******
The Paths of the Dead were a horror beyond Boromir’s imagining. He had never thought much on death: now the Dead were all around him, and he was one of them, the youngest and most vulnerable of all among these: ancient spirits held imprisoned by their own words for long years in empty holes in the darkened rock, that snatched with ghostly hands at Andúril, whispering greedily in languages Boromir did not know.
In his agony, he thought that he would lose himself.
He might have done, if it had not been for the fierce will of Aragorn, leading him on, and for the thoughtful eyes of Legolas, that rested on him as a companion and a friend, no oath-chained spectre, but a member of the Fellowship still, one who would not allow mere death to come before the calling of his heart.
*******
Aragorn came in time for Gondor. He defeated the Corsairs of Umbar, and led the ruin of the host of Mordor upon the field, and Boromir felt the sick, fearful grief dissolve as he saw the walls of his city once again, and knew that Gondor still stood.
They did not come in time for Denethor. It was near-impossible to understand, that Father had broken before the city fell. When he heard Gandalf say it, he flatly did not believe it.
It was only when he saw his brother, marked with ash and burning in a dark fever, and heard Imrahil — Imrahil of all people — offer his loyalty to Aragorn, that he began to think that it could possibly be true.
He could barely bring himself to look at Aragorn, whose coming had saved the city, but had brought Father to despair. Aragorn had lived, and Boromir had died, and would it truly have been so different if it had been the other way around?
But then, Aragorn had brought his healing hands to Faramir, and Éowyn, and so many many familiar faces now suffering under the Black Breath.
Boromir had no talent nor patience for healing. He had thought it the province of old men and women, not something that a hero would concern himself with overmuch.
When Faramir stirred, and the colour came back into his face, Boromir thought that he would gladly die for Aragorn all over again, if he had a second life to give.
******
Boromir had never really believed that Frodo and Sam could possibly destroy the Ring.
He still felt a weight of guilt that he had tried to take the Ring himself, but clearly, Frodo and Sam were destined to die in Mordor. It was hard to see any other reasonable outcome. His only comfort, when Aragorn marched out against Mordor, like a fool, was that Faramir at least had stayed in Minas Tirith, and might escape the inevitable end.
And yet. And yet.
All his life and all his death had been spent with the dark threat of Mordor to the East, as much a fixture as the sky or the sea.
And now. Now the Black Tower was fallen, and the Enemy was gone at last. Boromir felt light as he had never felt before, as if the rays of the sun were slanting through him and calling joyful sparks from whatever it was that still held on to this not-quite-life, the person that was, still, somehow, Boromir.
Coming back to Minas Tirith and knowing that Father would not be there was hard. And it was hard to see Faramir come forth to surrender the rod of stewardship to the new King.
Boromir had expected that rod and that duty to be his, and now it was Faramir’s and he was giving it away...
And then, he remembered that the world was now a different place. A place where Mordor was ruined, and Minas Morgul, that place of childhood nightmare and cool, reasonable adult terror, would be pulled down, and Faramir, Faramir would be the one to see it done.
Aragorn had given Faramir the Princedom of Ithilien, and if being Steward of Gondor was a very fine thing, for Faramir to be the victorious prince of Ithilien renewed and at peace was beyond all Boromir had dared to dream of.
He had taken Éowyn to wife, and that, too was a great joy. Théoden was fallen, but neither he nor Théodred his son would be forgotten, not in Minas Tirith, that they had saved, nor in Rohan where horses would roam over the long grass on their graves.
Boromir had always had a great love for Rohan: the people and the land were to his taste, and he had delighted in the feats of horsemanship that they had taught him. Quiet, scholarly Faramir had never seemed so taken with the place: indeed, one of their rare brotherly quarrels had been over whether the Men of Rohan should rightly be counted Men of the Twilight, and less than the Men of Minas Tirith.
But now Faramir was alight with purpose. His new fierce little golden-haired bride had kindled in him something new. He rode more wildly, sang more freely, and laughed, as Boromir did not remember his brother laughing for years and years.
It was a strange thing, to be a ghost in Minas Tirith, now the days of peace had come.
Boromir knew almost every face, every road and byway. He stood before the White Tree renewed with Aragorn beside him, looking wonderingly at the new sapling, as Legolas sang joyfully to the new leaves, and no Man in the whole city knew that he was there, watching over them, taking joy in the city coming back to life in a way that he had never dreamed was possible.
He began to realise, as he saw the fallen stone removed or repaired, the twisted broken gates put to one side, leaving a gap though which the children of the city ran in and out at leisure, that he had only ever known Minas Tirith at war, and that Minas Tirith at peace was a place more filled with life, with colour, languages, and peoples, than he had dreamed of.
War had been natural to him. A part of him that he could not imagine setting aside. What would a man even do, if there was no war? It was a question he had never needed to ask.
But Faramir had asked it. He had been asking it all his life, and perhaps that meant he would be a better Prince of Ithilien that Boromir could have been.
Boromir watched the Queen come into the City, and Faramir greet her, swordless, in a language that Boromir had never learned to speak. He saw Elves come flooding through the broken gates, laughing, carrying gifts and flowers for the people of the city.
Many of them looked at him with knowing eyes. Some bowed to him in wonder, or tried to give him flowers he could not touch. Legolas brought a young tree and planted it in a corner of the street, against half the city ordinances. And when the sombre guard came to him to protest, he spoke gravely, and said the tree was in memory of Boromir, and the guard, a Man that Boromir had known from childhood, wept, and helped Legolas dig the hole.
It was all very strange. Boromir had thought Elves strange and dangerous, and hopelessly impractical too... and now, here he was a ghost himself, and the Elves greeted him with delight, as if he were their kinsman.
********
In Minas Tirith, the years passed, mostly in joy, though there were troubles and grief and disagreements, and Boromir watched it all. Faramir was not often in the City, being often away in Ithilien with his wife, and Boromir was not entirely confident that Aragorn, this northerner transplanted into Boromir’s city, would do things right, the way the Stewards would do them.
The broken stone and ruined walls were repaired, or rebuilt. Dwarves came out of the North, led by Gimli, to set up new and stronger gates, and once they were set in place, Legolas and a great party of Elves who had come with trees as gifts, surrounded the new gates with an avenue of blossom.
Boromir watched.
Until one day, on the first of May, when the sky was pale blue and the blossom was starting to shine on the trees that the Elves had planted, Faramir and Éowyn came riding to the city, with their son on a small white pony riding between them. With them, also on a pony, was a small figure, rather stouter than he had been, and oddly clad in bright clothing under his black surcoat, marked with the White Tree, but otherwise, utterly familiar.
It was Pippin Took, and it was clear from the way that he was conversing merrily with Faramir that they were now dear old friends.
“What do you think Boromir would think of all this?” Pippin asked, as they came in through the gates, which stood wide open.
Faramir looked around at the signs of a city at peace. Children were playing in the great marketplace that had grown up by the gate, with stalls overflowing with roses from Imloth Melui, great bowls of dried fruit, olives and colourful spices. There were stalls full of cakes made with the grain grown on old battlefields, and the new lemon-crops from Ithilien. Fine dwarf-made knives and axes from the new dwarf-settlement in Aglarond, fresh-landed fish from the river, and shells and lengths of finely-dyed cloth from the coastlands. There were even a few books of Elvish poetry, marked with the emblem of a gold leaf, among the inks and pens on the writing-stall.
“I think he would be happy,” Faramir told Pippin and a long slow smile grew on his face. “I hope, I believe, that even my father would be happy, if only he could see his city now, in the flower of peace.”
Boromir had not thought of his father happy. It was not something that you associated with the last Ruling Steward of Gondor, not since Mother had faded and gone from their lives, and there had been only Father, and Boromir, and Faramir, and the war.
It struck him all at once, that perhaps, there might be a place where Father could be happy now, and perhaps, indeed, more than likely, Mother might be there too.
He looked once more at the bright banners of Minas Tirith, and at Faramir smiling, and at the cheerful face of Pippin Took grinning up at his brother.
And then he turned to the path he had been ignoring out of duty and hope and fear all this time, and went to look for Mother and Father, to see how things were going with them.