A/N: Popping in with a little Eowyn & Faramir sweetness before school starts. Maybe I'll be able to fit something else in during this summer break, but we'll see. In the meantime, Enjoyyy :D

Disclaimer: Do not own do not own do not own.

-Sanded Silk-

Bending his knee to Aragorn. Offering the crown of Gondor to Aragorn. Receiving his princedom over Ithilien from Aragorn.

Eowyn rides hard across the field, the wind throwing her hair in graceful arcs of disarray about her shoulders and back, the gleaming walls of Minas Tirith passing by in the distance. She spares that glittering city barely a glance, for it houses the title she once wanted to marry, and brings her only a memory of immaturity, a stirring taste of shame. Although she had spent her younger years caged by the confines of the Rohirrim court and, later, shadowed by the horror of Wormtongue's influence over Theoden, and that such an upbringing would to anyone justify her perverted view of love and her desire for title, she feels she will never make peace with the emptiness of her past desire for Aragorn. Handsome and stern as he was, it was never his person she loved—it was the vision of herself by his side, as the Queen of Gondor, that she had desired, desired with a passion.

Ignoring the distant shouts of the Rohan riders behind her who guide the wain-horses and are ever entreating her to slow her pace for her own protection, Eowyn frowns in private thought. Odd. Why is it that as she rides closer and closer to the man who first introduced her to love, she can only imagine him supplicating himself before Aragorn?

Throwing her hair from her brow, Eowyn immediately derides the implications of the question. In fact, she decides that if Faramir was any less tender and any less humble than he is now, she would not ride toward him with such speed, nor miss his presence with such ache—for he would not have been the one to reveal to her the workings of her own heart, and then where would she be today?

-.-.-

"My Lord Faramir?"

Faramir looks up from the depths of his papers, his mind retreating from his business slower than his eyes. He blinks, then responds. "Yes, Beregond?"

"There appears to be someone riding toward us with great urgency."

"A visitor at this hour? Is the rider alone?"

"It appears so."

Faramir looks at his papers with unfocused eyes for a moment, before putting them down with a sigh and standing up to follow Beregond to the door.

"There is the rider," Beregond says, pointing at a distant speck flying toward them across the hills from the direction of the Anduin. Faramir narrows his eyes against the setting sun and glimpses long, golden hair, flying wild in the wind. Beregond, upon Faramir's silence, turns to look questioningly at his lord, and finds Faramir smiling.

"My Lord?"

"Our visitor appears to have long golden hair, Beregond."

Beregond's eyes widen with realization, and he races inside, calling maids and man-servants to prepare a meal and bath and chambers for the Lady Eowyn.

-.-.-

"Well," Faramir says as Eowyn's horse draws to a halt before him, its flanks steaming. Eowyn's hair drapes about her, tangled and twining rebelliously, set aflame by the setting sun. She leaps down from the horse and approaches her husband-to-be, her expression inscrutable.

"Well," she echoes Faramir when they stand face to face.

"Shall we enter?" Faramir says, overlooking her unexpected arrival for now. Questions can be answered later. He assumes that affairs to be settled in Rohan have finally dwindled down to a manageable size for Eomer to handle without the aid of his sister. But as he steps for the stairs leading to the door, about to summon a stable boy to take Eowyn's horse, she cleaves to his sleeve and plants her feet. When he looks back at her, surprised, he finds himself facing that inscrutable expression still.

"Well," she repeats, "here I am. Your tamed shieldmaiden from the plains of Rohan." Her words are surly, but he perceives a wavering in her voice, as her brows draw together—not in anger, but in—something else.

"Do you still want me?" Eowyn asks. "If you verily do, then all your life you will be obliged to suffer this," Eowyn says, gesturing at her muddied gown and boots and her wild hair. "Do you not feel that you deserve better?" These are words that sap the strength from her knees and the clarity from her mind, but she perceives the necessity of uttering them—because she is sure of it now—sure that he deserves infinitely more than what she can offer.

For this was the turn her thoughts took as she neared Ithilien. When she thinks of Faramir and his gifts and lineage, her afterthoughts almost always pertain to her sheltered childhood, and the ways in which she still behaves like a child, and how Faramir would surely cease loving her should he become more familiar with her.

Faramir breaks her grip on his sleeve gently, and Eowyn tries to steel herself for a moment of rejection, or some such fulfillment of his Numenorean superiority. But instead, he turns to face her bodily, and places his hands on either side of her face, bringing their gazes close together.

"Eowyn" he says. And he holds her tightly to his breast, his hand cupping softly the back of her tangled hair.

"Perhaps you find your upbringing in the court of Rohan inadequate," Faramir says into her hair after a stretch of silence. "Perhaps you see yourself right now only as muddied dress and windblown hair. But I see you as one newly victorious over a life-long hardship. You have shaken whatever haunted you from your shoulders, or at least you have faced it and know it for what it is."

"I have only begun to name it, and even that I only achieved with your help," Eowyn murmurs.

"And see what it has done for you," Faramir says, pushing back her hair to see her face. "You were beautiful even as a shade of sorrow, as I first beheld you—and you are even more beautiful now, standing before me, straight and free—and imagine the radiance of your beauty as you continue to heal."

"I do not care for my beauty," Eowyn says brusquely, instantly regretting her tone but not her words. Beauty is a tool, an asset, a fortunate accident—but in the end, even something as radiant as beauty may not be enough to stay the heart. "Say something about me that is worthwhile, something that lasts," she says, in a more amenable tone.

"Just that," Faramir replies, smiling, a warmth in his eyes that she cannot explain. "While beauty may have been gifted to you beyond your control, your heart and your will you cultivated throughout your life. You are not self-pitying and shallow, but perceptive and resilient; you refused to let your spirit die in times of trial. And now here you are—not damaged by life, but made stronger by it."

"Perhaps stronger," Eowyn corrects, falteringly.

"Yet stronger," Faramir assures her, leaning down slightly to kiss her cheek with a tender chasteness. "You may ask me to disregard your beauty. That I might, with time and effort, be able to do. But you cannot ask me to disregard the light of life that grows in you. And so, if you will have me, Eowyn, I will have you, and keep your light by my side for as long as I live. No more of this uncertainty do I wish to hear from your mouth."

Eowyn does not trust her voice, but perhaps her limbs can convey her answer. So she wraps her arms around this strange specimen of Numenor, and the servants glimpse her content smile before they recover their senses and scurry away quietly. Though in all honesty, Eowyn does not believe she could have resented their presence for a moment.

The trees about them stir and sigh in the wind, throwing the last rays of the setting sun in haphazard dance across the leafed and grassy hillside. So unlike the plains of Rohan, where everything is laid bare to a steel-blue sky and an unblinking, unfiltered sun. She is used to the feeling of being constantly scrutinized, and this half-covering of the scented trees of Ithilien is a foreign feeling. But here, standing in the crook of his arm, feeling his lips ghost along her cheek, ever nearing her lips, she feels utterly at home.

A/N: Goodness I love these two together :D

Review pleasepleaseplease! Wheeeee

-Sanded Silk-