Softly, she leans up to her toes, her fingers gently tipping his head forward so she might press a tender kiss to his noble brow, already crowned with stars in her mind's eye. "Go in grace and hope, Estel." - vanimclda I hear u like forehead kisses
A piece of him is cleaved away. It rests upon her bare toes, wet with earth and perfect, and will there remain. It is not his heart but some DEEPER part. He has no word for it. He, who knows a thousand thousand words in a dozen languages, has no name for the part of him that will stay with her forever. Perhaps it has no name because it is new, STIRRED into being by her. She is no more or less beautiful beneath the blue and yellow light of the winter dusk, the death-light of the day, but never before has he been so BROKEN by this beauty. Never before has she looked on him with a love so open ; a brook-water love, soft and cool and endless.
He has found his roots at last but they turn from the earth. He is sown in her, now. There is no going. There is no sun nor starlight that will not have her name. All stones are her spine. All rivers are her waters. Terrifying a thing as is true love, weighty with predestination, Aragorn now feels newer and stranger things than fear. Freedom. CERTAINTY – absolute certainty. Here is his future. She kisses his brow. Here is his hope.
He has no answer for her kindly wishes. It is a lesson long-learned that quiet things are too often the TRUEST and so he says nothing to her but takes her hand and turns it, looking into her palm, to kiss the ageless, slender pillar of her wrist. Unable to prevent it, he smiles. She smiles. The light in her eyes RENEWS him even as the sorrow of parting threatens to send its creeping fingers through his heart. He thinks of her mouth, of stooping to kiss her, but he can bear no other thing but to see her smile. It is the memory of this smile that will feed him in the starving times to come.
