#eowynn

Where was the face he longed for?

It took too long to walk through the survivor people until he located someone who was bound to know. An elderly woman with crooked fingers and a boy near thirteen in age. The boy’s clothing dragged on the floor behind as he walked.

Eomer placed a hand on his shoulder. “Maynard. Where is your sister? Her face is lost to me.”

The woman and boy exchanged looks. Their faces told of a restrained guilt. He was not let in on their silent exchange. Tensions in his gut quivered. The battle fear was not yet over for him. There was relief still to be awash his body in victory. Their hesitation did not ease him.

            “Speak,” he barked.

Maynard gathered the billowy fabric up to move. “We don’t know.”

Eomer stood straight. His eyes squinted as he took in the boy’s slumped shoulders. The woman’s deepening frown.

            “I’m sorry, my lord.” The boy trembled.

He staggered a step, startled by his own thought he’d come to.

She wouldn’t.

Now he saw it. The clothing was sizes too big for the young boy. A young boy who – if by recollection – should have been out on the battlefield alongside his countrymen.

The elderly woman held a stiff face as he turned to her in anger.

            “Do not ask to send our young ones,” her voice said, “when there were perfectly fit soldiers ready to fight.”

Eomer flew to the battlegrounds. He searched the dead before they made safe the castle. There were wounded to tend to, provisions to secure, men to regroup, efforts and rebuilding all to be concerned with yet his solider heart could not rest until he found her.

The frantic wavy grip of his throat struggled to keep breathing as he looked through bodies. Their helmets pulled from their heads. Blood, mud, disgust smeared around. A singular stench of death on the wind. It cloaked the stronghold with its inescapable melancholy.

He moved through the bodies on the wall – what was left of it. There were men with crushed ribcages. Their insides leaked out onto the stone.

His stomach flipped. Eyes turned to sadness at the innocent round eyes of children that gazed up from their limp corpse.

All he pictured was instead her: light colored eyes of sky blue with perfect golden hair, more flat than wavy. The coloring of her cheeks perfectly pink turned white, ghost-like in death. Broken bits of her body torn from her flesh like an animal consumed the life straight from her living tissue.

He fought every want to succumb to his emotion. They were bottled so tight, ready to release. He did not know if he would weep or scream. Perhaps, it was the brewing of both: his sorrow at losing the woman he loved so deeply and the anger at himself for not keeping her safe.

A foot solder approached behind his back. The clinking of the chainmail against the armor chest plate echoed in the silence of the dead.

The loud clank of a helmet dropped to the stone.

            “Keep that helmet on, solider,” he said through his gritted teeth. “There is still reason to fend for your head.”

            “Is your head forfeit then, my Lord?”

It was a voice he convinced himself would never sound in his ears again. He turned around.

There she stood, much like a man, in her armor. An empty sheath hung from her belt. The chill of morning left her breaths clouds sourced from her chapped lips.

She panted heavily. The effort to remain standing dwindled as she swayed.

            “Brona,” escaped his lips in disbelief.

Eomer rushed to hold her in his arms. His hands trembled against her body. It was real. No figment of his imagination. It was her. Alive.

He pulled her against his chest. Her weight impacted him fully. She was exhausted.

            “Yes, my Lord. I am here.”

            “Why did you not come find me?” He murmured. It was a selfish yearning in his heart. To have known she was there would have had him fight harder. Harder to protect her. Harder, to keep them all alive.

She winced as slid his hand between the plates of her shoulder and pulled them down her arms. “You’d have sent me back to the caves.”

Glimpses of her flesh below her tunic showed deep purple and black bruises. Red rashes at her neckline were from the metal chainmail too close to her neck below the armor. He pulled the last heavy pieces off her body showing what woman laid inside. She was not small, nor slender, but woman all the same. A woman who loved flowers and song and enjoyed riding in the yellow light of dawn.

He collected her body into his arms. It relaxed, limply hung by a thread of her energy.

The cots were assembled for the wounded. Eowyn tied a knot at the back of her head to keep it out of the way as she wound a linen wrapping around a bleeding arm. She directed the others tending to the injured around the room.

She rose, wiped the blood from her hands to the white apron tired around her waist, when her eyes caught at Eomer. Her face went pallid.

Not a breath exited her chest as she rushed across the room. A finger ran along her friend’s face. “Is she?”

            “No.” He shook his head. “She’s passed out from exhaustion. Dehydrated.”

            “Bring her here.”

There was an open space on the floor. A wooden crate was covered with spare comforts that were available. A flat pillow and course blanket.

He frowned. He pulled the cloak from his uniform. It was a luxurious cloth. He slid the fabric over top her body.

His sister handed him a bladder of water. “Drip some into her mouth. I’ll massage her muscles. It will ease the pain.”

He tried to hold the bladder steady. His hands trembled too much. It flicked water over her cheeks down her neck.

Eowyn frowned. “I’ll do this.” She took the water. “You massage her.”

The room was thick with energy. The battle left many wounded, some beyond repair, and many young men dead on the fields that surrounded the grand hall. There were cries of loss, cries of reunion, cries of pain around them.

Neither sibling said a word as they worked on their friend.

Eomer gave a long glance at his sister. Her hands worked at the joints of Brona’s shoulders, rolling them and stretching the muscles with her long fingers. She discovered a split in the skin of Brona’s underarm like the slice of a sword come from behind.

A cold sweat formed at his spine.

War was no place for those with tender hearts. It was horror and gore. It was for the field of monsters and those who became monsters in their fight against monsters.

His innocence was lost on those death fields. The slain bodies full of blood and hate and anger and other worldly tissue filled his mind with no impact anymore. It was like a tapestry woven of a scene. He saw what was before him, but it did not illicit emotion. Just a barren stare.

There was no hope for him. But his love. The beautiful pieces of her soul were light and delicate and glee. They were the bits that he adored. She felt emotions that he could not bring his heart to feel.

What had she endured that night? What savage action had killed that spirit, he wondered. Would she even be the same?

            “Did you know?” He bumped his sisters arm with his shoulder. His fingers worked at massaging the left hand. It was the one that held the sword. The grip on a sword for extended periods of time cramped the hand woefully.

Eowyn swallowed but said nothing.

            “Eowyn,” he said sternly.

            “I only suspected,” she replied with no give in emotion. There was fear for her friend, but no guilt in what had befallen her. “There were too many around. I-I could not see what happened until it was too late.”

            “She could have been killed.”

His sister put a palm against Brona’s cheek. She leaned into the touch. “You don’t know what its like. That feeling. Left behind, to wait for everything you love to be stolen from you bit by bit.” His sister placed a gentle kiss atop her forehead. “There is ache in surviving. Being the only one to not be killed in bloody battle. To carry on with the weight of the dead as a reminder of why they perished. It would have killed her, Eomer. Killed her. To have Maynard slain in battle while she lived. She would have not been the same woman we love. I could not ask that of her. Could you?”

Eomer sat there for a few long hours while his duty called at him to rejoin his uncle and regroup his men, he remained by Brona’s side.

His sister’s words echoed within his head.

The shrill heartbreak of cries that came from the caves when the boys were pulled from their mothers. Old men pulled from grandchildren. The women of his country asked to give more than they were willing to survive.

He’d not allowed himself to consider what was done to Brona when they came for her brother.

The fact she changed her clothes with him, made herself a man, just to save his fate from being skewered by an Uruk-hai lance.

Tears were in his eyes when her eyes started to slide open. Her brow flexed in confusion as she looked around her. They stilled when she caught sight of him on side of her cot.

                    “Eomer,” she breathed.

Her hands touched his cheek. A slip of water fell from his eye. Her thumbs wiped it away.

                    “Am I dead?”

He shook his head. “No. You should be, but you are not.” His hand trembled as it cupped her cheek. It held her close. The coloring of her face returned. Peachy pink hue touched the tops of her cheek as she stared up at him with those loving eyes. The fear of losing her had near come to fruition. “Forgive me, my love. Forgive me for what I asked of you. Our land was in need. Our people nearly extinct.”

She held the hand against her face. “Forgive me for doing what I must.”

Eomer pulled her into his lap. Her body slowly wrapped around his. Lips pressed against his cheeks. They both forgave what awful betrayal they had done to one another without fulling realizing the devastation it could have caused.

The land was safe. Their loved ones survived the long battle.

The world was far from perfect. It had more trials to endure, but they did not doubt the strength of one another as they faced the terror that grew in the east. For a dark cloud hung over their life, but it did not shade their love.

For more stories on Eomer Eadig and Rohan, please check out my Eomer collection on fanfiction.net!

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