Gimli

She was quite proud of her braids. The beads worked into them had been given to her mother by her grandfather as a wedding present, and she was happy to be allowed to wear them now. She was getting married, after all. When she’d been told, so many months ago, that he had fallen she had felt her heart rend in two. She was strong, of course, and had powered through her grief so that no one noticed how it had hurt her.

In her heart she had despaired.

But he was strong as well, and when Gandalf had hinted that he had survived—rather than being carried off and eaten, as she had been forced to accept—she had broken down in joyful tears. She remembered Lady Eowyn’s hands patting at her hair softly, asking what was wrong. She could barely choke it out, that a comrade who had been lost was not so lost after all. 

The two little ones were with him, Gandalf had said. His voice was soft, knowing. He knew of their budding romance, of course—he had to. It was hard to hide. She rode on a stout pony all the way to the White Tower of Saruman, trailing the group but brimming with spirit and happiness. She cared not for however she found him, so long as he was alive when she did. 

The heir to the Stewardship of Gondor was haggard and pale. His dark, curly hair was longer than she remembered, she thought as she knelt down with a little effort at his side. He had his arms around the two little ones, Meriadoc and Peregrin, the three of them deeply asleep. She blushed a little at seeing his torso exposed, bandaged as it was—her father had been rigorous with decorum, and his daughter, his only heir, was not going to be mentally damaged by the sight of naked man-flesh. As though teaching a girl how to wield an axe with intent to kill wasn’t mentally damaging already. 

Boromir’s eyes opened and her breath caught. His eyes were gray, always some sort of gray, but right at this moment they were that light gray of ancient granite. It was her favorite stone, as common as it was she hardly ran into it in the mines. Its crystals grew too close to the surface to be hallowed out into galleries and palaces. She had once carved out a bedroom in granite the color his eyes were now, a secret one high above her regular chambers. 

“You’re here, we thought you’d never arrive, that Gandalf would take you on to Minas Tirith without us,” there was a suspicious sort of pain in his eyes as he spoke of Gandalf, but she passed over it in favor of taking his hand. It was bloodied and scratched, but unbroken. 

“Aye, we thought to travel on to that white city, but Gandalf had unsettled business here it would seem,” she paused taking a calming breath to steady herself, and Boromir’s hand tightened over hers, “I thought we lost you, Laddy.”

“I thought I lost me too, Gimli,” he said softly. His free hand was buried in young master Meriadoc’s hair, ruffling it slightly as the little one slept deeply. Gimli felt her eyes crinkle with a bit of unforeseen joy. She hadn’t lost him, and it seemed they already had children to look after. The two young hobbits would of course protest, but after the not merry at all chase she had been led on she was in no mood to hear it. 

“Gimli?”

“Yes?” her voice was low and gruff, more vulnerable than she’d like it to be around Boromir. He had a way of hearing that vulnerability that made her hopping mad sometimes, while at the same time endearing himself to her. 

“Should we survive the coming evil, I should like to ask your father for your hand,” his eyes were half closed, but she knew his words were not the phantoms of his drowse. His hand was still clutched hard around hers, after all. She smiled, wide enough that it must have shown through her beard properly. 

“And what of that father of yourn?”

“My father can chuck himself into Mordor, I cannot attempt to care about what his opinion will be,” Boromir said. There was a hint of malice and a pinch of regret to his teasing reply. Gimli wished she could lay down next to him and cuddle into his body like the young masters were, but knew she couldn’t. Not yet. 

Later, Gandalf had taken Peregrin to the White City. The rest of them travelled to Edoras, recovering their strength and healing. They decided that Boromir would remain among the Rohirrim to make his recovery, whatever happened. He had survived his ordeal by dumb-luck and little else, and she chose not to think of how close she had truly come to losing him. Meriadoc wanted to talk, and talk, and talk of how Boromir had saved them. But she couldn’t bring herself to hear it. 

When they left to go to their doom, Gimli and Meriadoc themselves had tied the Steward’s son to his bed. Her goodbye had been as tearful as his nearly had been—neither of them wept, but Boromir wanted so badly to go to the Pellenor Field, to ride among the Rohirrim as one of them. He wanted to earn his place, and to aid where and as he could. Gimli had kissed him, she could do little else. Her glove-less fingers stroking slowly through his soft curls. 

“If I am to die in this fight, I will die knowing that you live on to defend this world as I could not. You shall help me best, Laddy, by being alive when I return here. Promise me not to get yourself killed? You would do such harm to all around you if you did.”

That had been the last time she had laid eyes on him for weeks, and when she did again she nearly had a stroke. He had felt the lessening of the evil in the world, had felt it nearly going out of the world, and had known it was time. Boromir seemed to have stolen away from Edoras in the dead of night and ridden alone to Minas Tirith. No one knew who he had encountered on the way, or if he had seen even one face during that long, lonely ride.

Gimli was sitting with Eowyn as the frail woman waited on the second son of the late Steward. She had glanced down briefly—idly lamenting in the back of her mind the ruined stonework, and that should her father see the white city in such a condition he would fall to the ground weeping—and she had seen him. 

He looked stronger now than he had been, but she knew for a fact that his wounds couldn’t have been completely healed. He was threading his way on his horse up the stairs, a determined look on his upturned face. Obviously Boromir had asked someone where the Dwarf Gimli could be found, and he was on a mission to find her. 

Finally he had walked slowly into the courtyard, and Gimli stood up just as slowly. His smile had been many things over the months she had known him—smirking, playful, self-deprecating, shamed, shy—but the one on his face now could only be described as rakish. 

“Gimli, the day you left I left as well. I rode for the mountains your father calls home, and when I found him I asked for your hand. He gave me these,” he said, taking her hand and turning it over. He put twelve beads in her palm, and looked up at her. Gimli felt herself choking on air. These beads had been in her family for thousands of years, taken from the deepest parts of the world. 

One was a blue diamond, for trust. Three were white, for goodness, clarity, and wisdom. Two more were rough basalt, for faithfulness and passion. Another was red, for a fertile marriage, and its counterpart was green, for a long marriage. The last four were yellow obsidian, for happiness and a sharp wit. Boromir’s eyes were dark gray as she closed her hand around the beads and stepped into his arms. He sucked in a gasp as though he had been worried she would reject him. His arms around her shoulders were definitely nice, she thought, letting her face burrow for the first time into his chest.

She would wear the beads in her beard, arranged at her own discretion, until the birth of Boromir’s heir. Dwarven culture decried birth-order systems, calling them unnatural and unfair, and parents were expected to have many children and choose from among them once they were somewhat grown. But she was marrying a man of Gondor—her first male child would be declared heir, regardless of his parents’ wishes. 

 

This, however, could not distract Gimli as she was married to Boromir. The ceremony in Gondor was small, intimate, and simple. A far-cry from Dwarven weddings which could last days, often being interrupted by random outbreaks of song, dance, and ale.