Title & Chapter Number: Brother/Sister 1/11
Author(s): - Author's Index
Website:
Fandom: Tolkien
Rating: NC-17
Disclaimer: I don't own these characters I just make them do rude things.
Warnings: Het, Incest
Betas: Nope
Cast: Éomer/Éowyn
Timeline: TTT/RotK
Spoilers: Maybe TTT & RotK
Summary: As Éowyn's marriage to Faramir approaches Éomer still burns with desire for the one night he spent with her in Edoras.
Notes: It's really longwinded, too much exposition, but I'd rather just get it out there than edit it right now. LotR details a bit wobbly, haven't read the books in a year. Don't care.
Éomer sat at the High Table of Minas Tirith, valorous king of Rohan, welcome guest, comrade-in-arms, brother of the fair bride-to-be - and heavy, sullen, wretched at heart. It was a bare week before the marriage of his sister Éowyn to Faramir, noble steward of Gondor, and he struggled uselessly with that knowledge while he tried to make polite small talk to those dining around him: while he hopelessly watched, and, wrenchingly, twistingly, felt, the happiness of those people he loved best in the world who had also brought him to this bitter pass, as they adorned the table like rare flowers, like so many beauteous works of art and joy.
His sister Éowyn, her cool blonde beauty never more arresting than now it was lit from within by the flame of her true love. It made him almost gasp out loud to look at her, it made him cry inside. And yet he who had loved her longest could not begrudge her new-found happiness, not after the agony of their long struggle in Rohan, not after her first, painful awakening to love. Not after - everything that had happened in its wake. Her trothplighted, Faramir, as dark of hair and eye as she was fair, each plane of his face and body bespeaking the blood of Numenor running in his veins, was her equal in every respect, Éomer willingly granted him that, and more than this was the saviour who had won her from her darkest despair. When in repose, the suffering they had separately known before the miracle of their meeting at the Houses of Healing sat in their eyes and would never fully leave them, yet when one bent their head to the other and murmured a word or two, a smile might break across Faramir’s face like the sweetest of dawns, or a snatch of his sister’s laughter would carry across the table, pealing clear as a bell just as it had when she was a child, mischievous and carefree chasing Éomer across the fields below Edoras.
The two lovers sat, in some slight embarrassment when they thought about it, at the head of the High Table, for Aragorn and Arwen had laughingly decreed that, as love now ruled their kingdom, in this lead-up to Éowyn and Faramir’s marriage new love must for a time give way to the old.
Arwen. Arwen Evenstar. She sat now with Aragorn in their chosen lowlier place to Faramir’s left. Until she had come to Minas Tirith for her marriage Éomer’s heart had raged against Aragorn for not returning the love Éowyn had once borne him. Then he saw Arwen and the scales fell from his eyes. Here was a queen among Elvenkind and a goddess among the world of men. Even now as he took in her beauteous oval face, lit by her eyes of dark blue crystal and ravishing ruby lips, the tumbling tresses of raven hair that fell about the pale shoulders rising from her shimmering gown, he could barely believe she walked among them. A quiet joy radiated from her at all times, and when she was with her lord it seemed to beam even brighter, it was a pulse, a hum, that seemed to reach out to all around her and say that everyone’s sweetest dreams of love were real and possible, even within their very grasp. It reached Éomer and fell like a dead thing before his rage and loss and need. When Arwen caught his eye he knew she saw into his heart and he was ashamed, so when he looked her way he tried instead to concentrate on Aragorn.
Aragorn, newly crowned King of Gondor, chief among all men now living, to whom Éomer owed and willingly gave his allegiance, and through him all that of Rohan. The black dust within Éomer that threatened to choke him, his misery, his despair, it began with Aragorn. Aragorn had set loose, all unwittingly, the beast that reared up inside Éomer, and Éomer knew no means to tame it, nor knew how it could not be the death of him at last.
How had such things come to be? His eyes flickered back to Éowyn, lovely in her repose, lovely in her laughter, childish playmate, brave and loyal shield-maiden of Rohan. A brother and sister close in age and matched in temperament - he, all fire from surface to core, she, all fire beneath her veneer of coolness. Instinctively, and because for much of their life she had willingly confided in him, he had known her childish crushes and teenage infatuations, as she had his, and they had nursed a bruised heart or two between them well before the dark times of the last few years. Then came Saruman’s rise in Isenguard, and the grip of Grima Wormtongue on the will of King Theoden. Wormtongue’s lust for Éowyn had darkened her days, dogged her footsteps, and all but stilled her heart.
Aragorn’s arrival in their lives had seen those damped-down embers burst back in to life, and inwardly Éomer rejoiced that Wormtongue had not destroyed Éowyn’s natural lovingness. And surely here was a fitting match for the sister he treasured - Éomer stood in awe of Aragorn’s courage, and skill with a blade, his innate kingliness and wisdom, and came to love him as friend and comrade. But as the days passed and it was clear Aragorn stood against Éowyn’s passion, Éomer’s love of this exiled heir to Gondor’s throne became wracked with doubt. For if Aragorn could not return the love of his sister then surely he was fatally flawed, bereft of true humanity, with a stone for a heart and ashes for manhood.
Éowyn tried to say nothing. Her long resistance of Wormtongue’s defilement had made her proud beyond reckoning. She had long stopped speaking of it to Éomer and even when Wormtongue was banished and her long ordeal was over she shrugged off his tender enquiries as if the daily degradation of the twisted creature’s desire for her had been of no consequence. Now when he saw her burn for Aragorn still she was silent. Éomer started to wake in the depths of the night, thinking of his sister in her chamber nearby, rigid with both longing for Aragorn and the lash of his unspoken rejection. He did not seek to find ways to calm his troubled mind, and yet would at last fall into sleep with the sense that he had gone in to Éowyn’s room and curled himself around her aching form, soothing her with the warmth of his body as he had when they were children roaming the plains near Edoras and got caught in a sudden rainstorm.
Éowyn endured letting all her men-folk set forth for the grim battle at Helm’s Deep, those she loved and the one she wanted most to love her, when all she wanted to do was fight beside them, but when she had to let Aragorn go to what they all considered naught but his doom through the Paths of the Dead, her will broke.
That night Éomer had heard her, at long last, crying helplessly, heartrendingly, in her room, and was just at his door about to go to her when a small bundle of long blonde hair and soft flesh careened into him, almost knocking him over in its headlong flight to refuge. Éowyn, in her thin white nightgown. Éowyn, in his arms.
“Éomer,” she sobbed brokenly, clutching handfuls of his thick mane of hair, blond as hers, as she clung about his neck, “Éomer, brother, I cannot bear it.”
“Éowyn, sister, child,” he murmured, pressing her tightly into the safe haven he wanted his arms to be, fervently willing himself to become whatever it was she needed to get her through this awful night, “praise the love of our ancestors you have come to me at last. Your heart has been breaking, I’ve prayed so that you would share your pain with me, why would you not?”
He pressed his face into her hair, smelling the sweetness there he had known since her birth. She whispered, her words coming in between gasps for air through her tears, “Proud… I’ve been so proud… pride has been all I’ve had left, I’ve had to shut out everything else…even you… Éomer… not anymore… oh god it hurts so much… hold me, help me…”
He felt so helpless before her agony and loss, yet somehow so beloved, that when her will could not withstand her pain she had turned to his strength. “Little one, little sister, brave Éowyn,” he crooned to her, rocking her gently, willing her to let the pain flow away from her and into him.
She lifted her tearstained face to his. “I cannot stand.”
He scooped her up then, light as a feather and soft as gossamer in his arms, and bore her to his bed. He laid her down softly amongst the sleeping furs and sat with her head in his lap, stroking her hair, her shoulders, her tear-stained face, as if he could be both brother and their long-dead mother to her this night. He didn’t know how to say the words that could heal no current hurts yet which where truth and must be spoken.
“This will be a small comfort now I know,” he ventured, “but there will be love for you Éowyn. I don’t understand why he” - he couldn’t say Aragorn’s name, and he balked at the words, feeling her frail body heave as he said them - “cannot love you. It’s a crime against all that’s holy to me, but life is cruel, you and I know that only too well. But another will come in time and recognize your worth…”
As I do, he did not say, but felt with all his being.
He felt fresh tears slide from her face onto his thighs, naked beneath his sleeping tunic.
“I do not think so,” she said, as though she had been weighing this up for some time. “I think Wormtongue broke something inside me. I think he stole something from me that I can’t get back.”
Éomer stiffened. “God forbid he ever touched you, Éowyn say not.”
She gave a soft bitter laugh. “Not with his hands, or his mouth, or his manhood - but his mind was all those things and I felt them every day upon me and inside me.”
She pulled Éomer’s hands gently to her and laid her face between his palms.
“When I felt love for Aragorn I felt that black mark upon me lift, but I was mistaken. He sees it and he cannot love me.”
“Éowyn, no. There is no mark, no stain. You are as strong and beautiful as you ever were. We just cannot choose whom we love, that is all.”
As the pain of Éomer’s truth hit her like a blow and she cried afresh, it hit him too.
We cannot choose whom we love.
With her face in his hands, tears streaming over his fingers, her blonde hair spread like a cornfield across her shoulders and his legs, Éomer realised he loved his sister Éowyn, as a man loves a woman, wanted her as a man wants a woman, and tried desperately to push the crushing weight of that realisation away so he could be the brother she needed, to whom she had come in trust.
“Éomer,” she whispered. He bent his head to her, trembling in his new knowledge.
“Sister.”
“Lift me up, hold me, let me feel your strength, I’m weak… lost.”
Weak and lost she was indeed, a newborn filly strayed from its mother’s side in the night. He lifted her tenderly and laid her to his heart.
“I love you Éomer. You are my rock, like the rock of Helm’s Deep that protects our people. Even when I would not, could not come to you, I knew you were there and that you’ve tried to bear my pain for me. I love you dearest.”
She pressed soft kisses on his cheek, wetting him with her tears. He kissed her softly back, wiping the tears away with the silk of his sleeping-tunic. That much he could do and still be her brother.
She looked at him in the glimmer of moonlight that played across his chamber, and the ghost of a tear-stained smile lit her face as she wound her hands in his long hair. A sister’s smile surely, a smile that would keep them both safe.
“So like me, yet not like me,” she murmured, with so much love Éomer’s breath caught. “Blond hair, like mine, long too, but thicker, coarser - a stallion’s mane”.
He smiled, trying to indulge her, but longing rather to… he couldn’t shape the words, admit them to himself.
Now she stroked his close-shaved beard. “Funny it’s red-brown, not blond. But so soft. Like the fuzz on a spring colt. You have a few years to go yet, Éomer heir to Rohan, before your full manhood settles upon you.”
Leave my manhood out of this, he wanted to groan. If this soft jesting meant the worst of her crisis had passed, he was grateful for her sake, but she was going to drive him out of his mind.
She continued to trace the contours of his face.
“The planes of our cheek and brow is the same, the set of our chin the same - ”
“Proud,” he couldn’t help clarifying.
“Yes, far too proud,” she agreed, with a little gulp, as though she might start crying again.
“But strong, little one,” he whispered quickly.
“Yes, strong. She nodded firmly, then was soft again, touching him again, and he was lost again.
“Our noses now - ” He heard the smile in her voice. “Well, there our parents begged to differ. Mine small and straight, yours with a little upturned tilt. When you are Éomer King we will still see an echo of that mischievous boy who used to steal birds nests and put spiders in my braids.”
Éomer relaxed, feeling on safer ground. She spoke like a sibling, and her touch was soothing, not arousing. He let her go on with her game without fear, tracing his brow and eyelids.
“Eyes now, the window of the soul they say. My eyes grey-blue like a mountain lake in winter. Yours brown, deep deep honest brown, like the deepest brown of the noblest Mearas, trustworthy.”
She leaned in and kissed him below one of his ears, not bothering to say whether it resembled hers or not.
“You would never hurt me. I trust you, my brother.” She kissed his cheek again softly, and snuggled in to him more tightly. Gods Éowyn, not too tightly, for there can be no trust here tonight, Éomer thought wretchedly, no trust ever again now I know what I desire most.
As she continued her sweet ministrations, he was so busy trying to muster his strength, fight through his guilt, hold her slender form vital inches away from his turncoat body, that for a moment he didn’t realise her kisses had changed. But suddenly he registered that she was holding the back of his head with both hands and her mouth was moving restlessly, desperately over his face, everywhere but his lips, tongue touching his skin, teeth nipping at him mercilessly, her breath coming in short, hot gasps.
“Éowyn,” he said with the last vestige of self-control he possessed, “Éowyn, no.”
He tried to pull away, speak sense to her, and saw her beautiful eyes had become hazy like one drugged.
“Say nothing,” she whispered. “Kiss me.”
When she pressed her rosebud mouth against his, that was all he could do.
When their lips met he let out a groan like one being released from the cruellest of bonds, and she sighed into his mouth like a - gods, he didn’t know what, but no other woman’s sigh of satisfaction, even when he was buried to the hilt in her wetness, had ever aroused him so. He wrapped her to him, pliable as a willow wand, so their tongues could meet at last, tasting the warm sweetness inside, tracing lips and wetting them for the gentle frenzy of sucking and nipping to follow. Their mutual need escaped them both in ragged moans that made them wrap their bodies to each other tightly so he could feel her small swelling breasts against him, her nipples hard through her shift rubbing unbearably on the bare chest revealed as her trembling hands pulled his sleeping tunic away. Tighter still, and he raised her shift to feel the soft tender globes of her buttocks beneath his trembling hands, then slipped one hand around to dip past the golden curls between her thighs, her entrance honeyed and aching for his touch. His fingers slid inside her as she moaned against his mouth, so ready and wanting it seemed but a few moments before she cried her release.
“Éomer, Éomer,” she whispered helplessly. He couldn’t bear to hear her say his name. It reminded him that she was Éowyn, Éowyn his sister. He covered her mouth with his and kissed her until his head span. When she came up for air, licking his ears and nuzzling at his neck, panting, she reached down for his hard buttocks and pressed him forward into herself.
Her shift had fallen back around her thighs, and maybe that was all that saved them. His erection, hard as a rock, the final betrayal to their siblinghood, pressed unerringly and perfectly between her thighs as she moaned and rubbed against him, and had he met her nakedness nothing would have stopped him laying her down upon his furs and making love to her as if his life had depended on it. As it was, it was as if the soft cotton, the flimsy barrier that merely had to be lifted away before he could enter her, was a spell laid down in desperation by a wizard who must prevail against an evil enemy, like the tales of Gandalf’s struggle to protect his companions in Moria that Legolas and Gimli had told them around the fire not so very long ago.
You shall not pass.
Both pairs of eyes, the grey-blue and the brown, sprung open in an awakening where the dawn they looked to was not coloured warmly with their love but was cold and grey and grim with truth.
“Éowyn, Éowyn!” It was not the cry of a disappointed lover but of a horrified brother that caught at her as they whirled apart. He expected her to run, but she stood before him taking great gulps of clean air. Images passed before her eyes. Grima Wormtongue lurking at her heels with his foul breath and his whispering, insinuating ways, disrobing her and crawling inside her with a few deceptively innocent syllables. Aragorn, haunted, powerful, beautiful, unreachable, gone. Her nights of useless, agonized aching, weeping into her pillow until she was driven to touch herself to bring just a little of the pleasure, and a distant echo of the love, that was denied her.
Her vision cleared, and yet it was as though another vision knelt stock-still on the bed beside her. Her brother, his finely-muscled beauty, mane of blond, face of a king’s imperiousness mixed with a boy’s impudence, his manhood still standing proud as a Rohan stallion even while huge tears slid down face. All the priceless bounty he brought to this world limned by the silver moonlight. Warm, alive, wanting, his love as great as hers, his need as great as hers.
She had suffered too much to take his comfort and come out sane. It could not be.
She stepped towards him, and laid her body against him, her head against his chest as she let her arms slide up his warm back, still slick with the sheen of their passion.
“Éomer, love,” she sighed against him. “Brother, king…”
She place the lightest of butterfly touches upon his erection. She wished she could take him in her hand, or slide her mouth around him to give him release. She could do neither. She had to survive.
She moved her head up, caught his eyes with her own. She kissed his mouth gently.
“I love you Éomer. At this moment I love no one in the world so much as you, not even he who is gone. But we must bear our pain, or bury it in another’s love, if we should ever be so lucky This is not for us.”
“Éowyn, love…” He didn’t think he could ever call her sister again. He dipped his head down to her slowly for the kiss he knew she would not deny him, knew instinctively like a last flame of hope she didn’t want to deny him, and when their mouths met they kissed like longtime lovers who must part, who wish never to part, taking time, making each second precious.
When at last their reluctant lips left each other, she drew him down and kissed his forehead, resting there for brief seconds before she began the battle of the rest of her life. For his part he lifted her small hand, kissed it, then pressed her palm to his face, as thought to impress her essence inside him for all time. Quietly she laid that same hand to his chest.
“We are strong and proud, Éomer.”
“We are strong and proud, Éowyn. I love you.”
She nodded, once, her eyes brimming. Then she was gone, like a stray wisp of moonlight returned to heaven.
Éomer slumped into his sleeping furs and cried until his lungs ached. Then he licked both his hands and grasped the firm curve of his manhood, whose rigid call for release had refused to go away even in the grim realisation of his betrayal of his sister in her hour of need, even at the darkest moment of his defeat and loss as she walked away from him. He pumped himself mercilessly, desperately trying to believe he was not Éomer and that it was not Éowyn’s sweet wetness he imagined himself sinking into.
But as he came at last in his hand and on his belly he howled her name into his furs, and knew who he was, and that he could never escape. He rubbed his semen over his body and face and arms and through his hair, whether to stain himself with the memory of those sweet moments with her or to mark himself as some kind of pariah he wasn’t sure, and wept again, though dry of more tears to cry, until the mercy of sleep claimed him.
When he woke with swollen eyes and a heavy heart he had no idea how he was ever going to look her in the face again.
He didn’t have to. He cleaned himself, dressed, and went out to the news that his sister the Lady Éowyn had disappeared. He went back to his room and sat with his dagger and tried to think of reasons not to kill himself with it. In the end he decided he should take as many orcs with him as he could to help his doomed countrymen, before he died in agony and sweet release, and went out to join his uncle at the head of the Muster of Rohan.
His flat, dead eyes did not see the young Rider who named himself Dernhelm watching his passing, who felt a breaking heart within leap with fear and love, and who said a fervent prayer to their shared ancestors that no matter what transpired on Gondor’s fields they would keep Éomer safe.
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