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But Aragorn answered: “Alas! I cannot foresee it, and how it may come to pass is hidden from me. Yet with your hope I will hope. And the Shadow I utterly reject. But neither, lady, is the Twilight for me; for I am mortal, and if you will cleave to me, Evenstar, then the Twilight you must also renounce.”
And she stood then as still as a white tree, looking into the West, and at last she said: “I will cleave to you, Dúnadan, and turn from the Twilight. Yet there lies the land of my people and the long home of all my kin.” She loved her father dearly.
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He walks most nights. Late, in the silent pre-dawn hours before the birds, before the first tendrils of sunlight curl through the branches of trees.
Most nights, he gets up carefully, pressing the bedclothes back into place so she won't notice he is gone, though she always does.
Through half-shut eyes she watches him go to the terrace. He stands there for hours sometimes, fingers turning white from the cold, from clutching the balustrade as though he would tumble down the great cliff without it. Beyond him the moon sets, and in that violet hour between the setting of the moon and the rising of its brother he slides back into bed as though he was never gone.
Once, she followed him. Only once. She had come up behind him and placed a gentle hand on his shoulder, and he had flinched. Turned away.
Later he had tried to explain. "It is only part of me that walks," he'd said. "Most of me makes it through the nights. But the part that cannot unsee all the things I've seen, the part that cannot scrub out the bloodstains - that part must walk."
He had looked at her then as if to say, do you understand, and she thought she did. Well enough. Well enough to leave well enough alone.
Still she wants to explain to him that she loves all of his parts: those that are whole and those that were shattered by the battles and the Ring and the sleepless nights. The parts that came back missing.
In the mornings they wake up together in the cocoon of their curtained bed, but she smells the world all over him. Breathes him in cool and dark, the scent of moss on trees, peat and damp, and somewhere below it decay, though it doesn't do to think on that. She wonders sometimes what he found out there, all those long years in the wild. He’s never told her.
"It's over now," he would say, and she would lean into him and exhale. "Let's speak of brighter things.”
Exhale.
Every breath counts now. She has to remind herself constantly, for it is easy to forget. To while away centuries as though they were hours, the way she had done for millennia. She once thought nothing of spending a year embroidering a gown, a month lying stretched out in the sun, three days locked in a bedroom making love. Time is new for her, and she wears it uncomfortably.
And yet she cannot say so to him, who has always been mortal. Who has lived each day of his eighty-nine years with the knowledge of death.
Other things she cannot say: that she saw with him many of the things that make him walk. That just as he had dreamed her she had dreamed him, too, and woken from the horror of war only to discover the horror of facing down the daylight alone.
She had given up eternal life for him with no guarantee of his survival. It had made the months very long.
She is not, by her nature, practical; few of her kind are, in truth. Even so, she had given thought, over the course of those months, to what her future might look like without him. Of course, if the mission failed entirely, it would hardly matter, for all of their futures would be terribly short. But if he alone failed where the mission succeeded: what then? Would she marry another mortal man, or die alone - would her father stay with her and see her through death? Her kind so rarely encountered true death, the death of men, and she was not sure that even her father, brave and world-trodden, could stomach it.
Throughout the ages she, like so many of her kind, has been fascinated by men. Their bright spark, so quickly extinguished, and burning all the brighter for it. For millennia she observed from afar their desperate passion, these creatures who loved and hated so deeply, who drank too much and considered too little, who made love and killed and died as though all were born from the same impulse.
So how could she have done any different when a man walked through her forest home, calling Tinúviel, Tinúviel like a song from a dream?
She thinks sometimes on the things she sacrificed - the years, the songs, the multitudes of stories untold - and she wonders at what hour she will begin to feel regret for those unchosen paths, for she does not question whether it will happen. Only when.
And yet.
He does wake up next to her. Every morning. And every morning, she thinks that all by itself, it would be enough: to wake to his warm breath against her ear, his lips on her neck, for the next five or ten or hundred years. His hands, broad and riven with scars; his body, still lithe and strong; his hair just beginning to gray. After all this time, he is still a thing of exceptional beauty to her.
Her kind have an infinite store of legends, but those stories she most loved concerned the deeds of men. As a child, she heard the tale of Beren and Lúthien countless times. Her quick mind spun new endings for them, better and brighter ones, but her mother always insisted on telling it true. Perhaps she had known all along what fate had in store for her daughter.
When she looks at him, she sees not only him - her beloved, her king, her greatest and final choice in a very long life - but all of the old kings as well. All of his ancestors, all of the great men who fought and fell. In the twilight hours when her vision blurs she sees Beren, and understands at last why it was that Lúthien sang, and how it was that her song broke the heart of the most powerful being in Arda.
For the first and last time, the story says. There will be no reprieve for her. For him. This is the only life they will have together, and though she cannot yet regret it: she wonders what awaits.
In the past few days she has begun to feel the stirrings of new life inside her, which has only increased her awareness of her mortal body. Their child, too, will come into the world and then leave it some years later. Their son will have a long life for a mortal, but even now, faced with the same fate, she cannot imagine that it will be long enough for all of the living there is to be had.
And yet, the voice whispers again. In all those other visions of the future, the child does not exist at all. In the retellings of her story where she goes over the sea, where she chooses her people over her king, there is no child. He is never born to love and suffer and laugh and conquer and die, as he must. As must all mortal men and women of such a lineage.
As must she, now. Such is the road she has chosen. And while he walks in the world, so must she. Day or night, dawn and twilight, through any trial.
For love. For the sound of his breathing, low and even, after he returns to their bed each night and falls into sleep at last. For his straight-backed bravery, and for the joy she will see in his eyes when he hears the news of their long-awaited child. For the lines that will deepen with age, for his hands and his lips and his beloved voice, calling her,
Tinúviel, Tinúviel,
calling her home.