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Assistant: Title: Gifts of the Water
        Author: theowlandtheunicorn theowlandtheunicorn 
        Chapter: 12/12 
        Summary: Boromir fell beneath Amon Hen and was given to the River – and the River gave him back. What price will he and those who love him have to pay for his return? And who set it for them?Or: Boromir Lives, with a twist.
        Contents: Chapter 12: Holes
    

    


      
        
          
          (See the end of the chapter for  notes.)
          
      
  

  
  
    
    The world sparkled at the edges.Half-crouched in the grass, clutching at her knee with one hand and holding back her braid with the other, Anna gulped for air and willed herself not to faint. Suddenly her eye was drawn to a flutter to her right.Near Boromir’s feet, grey-brown and fluffy with shiny black eyes, a tiny mouse emerged.Rustling the blades of grass, it approached the edge of wet earth between her and Boromir. It looked up, twitched its whiskers, bowed its little face and began to drink the water that had collected on the soil.Anna observed it, breathing hard. The fresh air slowly replaced the bad taste in her mouth; the ringing in her ears and the pressure of fear in her chest dwindled. The sun of a new day shone upon them: bright green dawn carrying a promise of not too distant spring.Not taking her eyes off the mouse, she reached a trembling hand into the nearby pouch of dried apricots and groped inside. As her fingers found a tiny enough piece, she took it out, crouched further down and very slowly placed it in front of the mouse.It started, but did not run away. She could see the precise moment it switched from timid vigilance to eager, focused attention; the morsel drew the mouse forward like a magnet. It walked up and sniffed it, then pounced on it and scurried away. Back behind Boromir’s feet, away into the rustling green sea of its home.A drink of water and breakfast. Not too shabby for mousie.She looked up to find Boromir gazing at her with heavy eyes.“Are you well,” he said; less a question and more despairing pity.“Splendid,” she breathed. She sounded like she was crying. Maybe she was.There was so much water.The bottom of her skirt was wet. Her riding boots glistened with countless droplets in the sunlight, hopefully merely cold and not soaked through. She could hardly feel her feet; her hands throbbed as if she’d been holding ice cubes…… there had been that one long winter when she was little and they’d run out of firewood, and grandad could never gather enough because most of the village needed it. And grandma made litres of tea and mum knit a lot and dad went to their room in the middle of the night to check if they’d uncovered. And the dog and the cat slept inside until April, and Anna and her brother played red hands to keep their hands warm and fought over who gets to sit next to the furnace…This was how that had felt.Only it was March already in Rohan and not as icy anymore. The worst of the winter was over. The dawn was something young and soft in the air, like the neigh of a new-born foal.She squeezed her eyes shut.(When had she started thinking in Rohirric metaphors? She needed to go home.)She opened them again and the last of the stars twinkled out, and the ringing faded away. She took a deep breath.Her patient was lying on his cloak in the grass, his horse looming over him protectively.Anna straightened unsteadily. She reached for the skin of wine mixed with water and herbs that they used for disinfection and that she’d forgotten to use on Boromir’s wound. She took a swig and swished it around before spitting it out to wash out the taste of vomit.She hadn’t given him the sedative mixture either, she thought dumbly, wiping her mouth. The fatigue squashed all worry before it could rear its head. She was the worst healer in the world. It did not seem to matter.Boromir was still looking at her. Their eyes met, and his face contorted as if in pain. He turned his head back towards the heavens.“I am sorry,” he said, voice strained. “It – it is an abomination, I know—”He could not go on. The horse gave a reproachful neigh, pawing at the ground with a squelch. It seemed to glare at her. Anna stared at them both, trying to remember how her life had unravelled to this moment.“Oh. You mean…” She gestured vaguely at the water. “No, that is not why I…”She took another deep breath. She felt like she was floating. “I am not a healer, not truly. Or I have trained, I did not lie. But ere you my patients had been two. One a ten-year-old lass who fell from a tree…”Boromir turned his head towards her.“And the other?”Anna stared back.“A cow that had lost a fight with a goose.”She blinked. Several moments passed until she realized that the sound had to have been a laugh. Boromir had covered his face in his hands; it was strange, and sounded pained, and did not last. The laugh of a man who had reached his limit.Anna, who’d passed her limit two and a half years ago and was now looking at it from the other side with binoculars, grinned.“I am sorry,” she said softly. “You would not have asked for me had you known.”“Had I known, it would have changed nothing,” Boromir said. He lowered his hands. “It was not your healing skill that I sought.”“What did you seek?”He grimaced as he contemplated.“It was not my intention to have you come into my confidence,” he said finally. “I wish it had not happened. Yet it has, and like so many things cannot be undone. You should know: it was your knowledge of me that bade me ask, yet I know not even now if it was in vain, and you have already told of what you saw.”“I have not. I did not think that you would wish me to.” It was hardly the whole truth. She was already known for strange stories; this one would have cemented her status as a lunatic more quickly than trying to explain public transport. But Boromir didn’t need to know that.“Then I am grateful,” he said. “More than you can know—”“I need to place a poultice over the wound,” she remembered suddenly.Boromir blinked at her.“Leave it,” he said.Anna stared at him. She looked at her bag. The floaty feeling was swiftly being replaced by a dull heaviness in her limbs. The last two nights she’d barely slept at all.“It may become infected—”“It will not,” he said, with bitter certainty.Anna sighed. She rubbed her eyes. Exhaustion weighed her down, calling her very bones to rest.But there was nowhere to sit. Everywhere was water, pooling in little puddles on the hard cold ground.How much of it was dew, and how much…?Yawning, she stretched, and stamped her numb feet with a squelch. She took the wine skin again and offered it to Boromir; he raised himself up, accepted it with clumsy hands and took a few sips. She then strolled over to the place she’d discarded Boromir’s clothes and picked up his tunic.It had been lovely once – thick and warm, and dark blue, with little white trees embroidered around the collar. But now, a large tear gaped in the fabric where the blade had struck, and there were nine other smaller holes in various concerning places.They looked like arrow damage – men sometimes brought her clothes with similar holes to mend, yet they could not be. No corresponding wounds marred Boromir’s body, which showed only scars faded long ago – some earlier wounds that someone had healed much better than her. No arrow wounds that she could see – nothing, indeed, in places that matched those on the tunic.“Big moths?” she joked weakly, then winced with a pang of guilt at the stricken look in his eyes. Maybe they were poor in Gondor, and he couldn’t afford a new tunic. But he had that golden belt…Or, she thought, as a greater wave of guilt washed over her, perhaps it had belonged to someone who had been pierced by arrows. Someone who’d died…She sighed. With single-mindedness born from exhaustion, still holding the tunic, Anna trudged back to her stitching kit and rummaged inside until she found a suitable needle.“Do not waste the thread,” Boromir rasped. “Someone else will need it.”She stared at him. Surely he didn’t want to walk around in clothes full of holes?“The cloak hides them,” he explained, as if reading her thoughts. “And no chill can find me where I am.” He gazed at the sky as if willing it to crash down upon him.Mad, mad, all of this, and him, and her.“It is no waste,” she said. “They rather close their wounds with horsehair. Of which there is plenty in Rohan, if you can believe it.”“Nonetheless. Not only the Horse-lords battle here—”“There is enough,” she insisted gently, and Boromir shut his eyes as if the effort of arguing with her was too great for him.“As you wish,” he managed.Anna rummaged in her bag again until she found some fabric: an old faded tunic of hers that she must have packed by mistake. It was a different colour, thinner than his, and much worse-looking, but long enough that she could cut a bit away for patches and still hem it for later use.She located the sword Éowyn had given her nearby in the grass, took it out of the scabbard and with the help of the pointy end started tearing bits from the tunic. Boromir observed with an unreadable expression. The horse looked unimpressed.When she had gathered enough pieces, she crouched, smoothed his tunic over her knees, placed the first patch over the hole and began to sew.Her mind slowed and stilled. The cold seeped away in thin trickles from her hands as she focused on the needle, as it soared into the sun-soaked air and dove back into the fabric – on the black thread that followed in its wake, on the holes that filled with the mismatched colour of a Rohirric linen tunic.It would look ridiculous when she finished, of course. But at least there’d be no more holes. At least he’d be a little less cold.Perhaps.At least she could do that.*All of his thoughts had been shadows within shadows. There was no road to turn to that did not lead to despair; cool water flowed that cared not of battles or of living Men, only bodies——and then, hands before him at their tasks like pale candles in the dark: mother’s gentle hand upon his cheek. Faramir’s hand in his, so small. He had been so small that night.Boromir’s own hands that had passed the white rod into father’s larger, stronger; hands that would later summon him to musters, sending him to battles with a squeeze of his shoulders. Ioreth’s rough hands mending his wounds in the dead of night, giving him salves for his bruises, rubbing his back where the orc-blade had struck.Anna’s hands that had closed the hole, stopping the endless flow.She worked so skilfully with the thread. The needle rose and fell in a loop to pierce the fabric anew, the way it had his skin. Filling the holes he could not bear to part with; yet who cared. His life had ended. It mattered not if his clothes showed the wounds that had killed him. It had been his own curse, his own evil that had done it——he gasped, grabbing at his chest. The yearning for home tore at his insides. It reached where the blade could not, to the frozen heart of the River.Gondor, an open wound that would not close so easily. That would not ever close.And Boromir son of Denethor, who would bring it naught but darkness and evil.“How has it happened?”He started. She was looking at him; her hands, rosy with cold, seemed to do the work on their own.“You were not born like this, I deem,” she mused quietly. “How, then, have you come to be so?”Boromir rubbed his brow. Truly it was a wonder that she had not asked sooner.He met her eyes, and she smiled.“A story for a story,” she said.“Yet you refused to tell me the story of your coming to Rohan. So I would rather give you refusal for refusal.”“I did not refuse for my own sake. I thought the account of it would distress you, which in your state would not have been wise.”“Have no such qualms,” he said bitterly. “Not much remains that would distress me as I am.”She gazed at him for a long time, as if pondering the truth of his words. Beside him, the Horse gave a low snort, walked a few steps away and bowed his head to graze.Dawn was slowly turning into morning.And then:“I have come through the River.”*The nameless terror in his face made her look down.“I had been travelling with my friends over the summer.” She ignored the voice that screamed she’d been right not to tell him, that she was right to be telling him now because he did know something about it, it meant something to him, it meant something so big that he really would take her home, the dream was true, all of it was true, it was all real—Pretending that her heart hadn’t started pounding at the way he’d gone still at her words, she continued.“On the last day ere autumn I returned to the house of my grandparents where my family lives, which is near a river. The next day I went out to swim in it. Suddenly I came upon a great whirlpool. I could not escape, the current was too strong. I woke on the shore of Anduin, in Middle-earth that was not my world.”Seeing the plains of Eastemnet, and that never-ending sky…She sighed.“The river at home is a great river, and can be perilous. But where we live whirlpools are not common. I did not stray far from the shore. And my family… We have swum in it all our lives. I know not what happened.”Again and again the needle pierced the fabric. One could now claim that the tunic consisted of more material than holes. Even if said material was not very uniform.“I keep thinking…”She must have hit her head on something, there was no other explanation. Her heart tightened as she imagined her body washed up on the shore for her family or neighbours to find. Lying, perhaps, in a hospital in a coma, surrounded by her loved ones.Or truly here?She hardly knew which option filled her with more dread.She yanked herself back to the present, to Boromir’s eyes that were frozen upon her.“You do not believe me, of course,” she said, though she wasn’t sure about it at all. “Few do, or none maybe. They think something terrible has happened to me and confused me.” She sighed again. “Maybe it has. I do not know.”She lowered her eyes to the tunic and continued to work in silence. She couldn’t bear to look at him. Millions of questions rushed through her mind, but something stayed her tongue.Time passed. In the distance men milled about, carrying the fallen. A few dozen horses had wandered away to graze. All the while that strange wood stood behind them like a sentinel.“You waste your time on my tunic,” Boromir spoke finally. His voice rippled through the air, filling it with something broken. “There are wounded men that you might help, now that you have tended a battle wound.”It seemed she would not get her answers today.No matter. She could wait.“I dare not,” she said. “I would fear hurting someone who is—”—natural, she meant to say, and stopped herself at the last moment. Judging by his expression, he’d heard the unspoken.“And see, I am finished.”She straightened and held up the tunic. It was a bit lopsided, and the material scrunched up in weird places, but it was wearable.Boromir hardly seemed appreciative, but he got up, gathered the undergarments he wore below the tunic – all full of holes, she noted with dismay – and dressed, then put on the tunic.It wasn’t as bad as she’d expected. Only the bloodied hair did nothing for the look.Anna took a clean cloth from her bag, splashed some of the water and wine onto it and approached. Boromir flinched as if she’d lunged at him with a burning torch. Even as he did she felt the freezing air coil around her hand.“You need not—”“It will be strange,” she said softly, “if I do not return with at least some blood on the cloth.”He squeezed his eyes shut.Anna bit her tongue so she wouldn’t say anything else that sounded insane, such as you’re lucky someone bled this much in your vicinity, which was what she was thinking, and which probably would not have gone down well.She tried to be very gentle as she removed the crusted blood from his hair. The wound in his ribs did not seem to pain him. Yet something did, all the same.He had a pleasant face that seemed to be stuck in some permanent grief. It had probably been fair once, before it had acquired this pale grey-green of a not too fresh corpse. There was nothing of the momentary laugh around his eyes, not even the bitterness – they seemed lifeless. The laugh had probably been hysteria anyway.The cloth passed over his neck where a bit of blood had dripped, the same place where she’d grasped for a heartbeat that was not there. She wiped away the blood, uncovering the cold, ashen skin below.Anna’s mind jumped over the inexplicable with an elegant, practiced leap. It was how she’d managed to make a life for herself in Rohan, and why change what worked? Her thoughts condensed into one simple point: this man was dead in a way, probably, which was unfortunate for him, but neither here nor there for her. He was her ticket home, and she would not let him out of her sight until he helped her return.*Boromir kept his eyes closed.Her face, so near his face. So painfully fair in the life that danced upon its features. Wisps of dark hair that had escaped her braid coiled around her temples in the damp; they burned against the pale line of her skin. And then, more colour: her cheeks, flushed from the cold.Warm living blood flowing within.She would scorch him in his numbness with the life she had in her.Yet he forced himself to open his eyes and look at her.“When we met,” he began, “I was unkind to you.”“Aye,” she said. Then she smiled. “But worry not – I know how you can make amends.”Who was this woman?He gazed into the distance.“You have done me a great kindness, Anna,” he said. “I wish I could offer you aid – I wish, indeed, that I could lead you to your home. It is hope you seek, and I understand, but you will not find it with me. There is nothing, nothing – of hope in me.”“You are wrong,” she said. She moved onto his brow: tiny frozen needles seared the places she touched. “I do not seek what I already have.”“But is it not lost from the world of Men?” he asked bitterly. “Even your story says so. What good has the gift of fire brought them? All the evil to rule over them, and hope trapped in its jar?”*Anna’s hand halted. Some despairing darkness had settled in Boromir’s eyes.Well. She’d hardly thought he’d been listening that intently.“Is that how you heard it?”“That is how you told it.”“It remains in the jar because it is there for them. To have and take comfort.”His gaze turned to stone. It seemed as if he wanted to say something, but no words came.“It is still there with them,” she said quietly. Suddenly it seemed very important to convince him. “The hope has not left them. They still have it.”Most of the blood was now on the cloth. Still she brought it to his forehead and made a slow, feather-light stroke down the side of his face.“Do you?” he asked.“Do I what?”“Hope. You have been torn from your world, you say; from your life and all you hold dear. Can you still hope?”“Yes,” she said. “And if I can, you can.”
  
  

    
      
        
        
          I know Movie Boromir was shot with three arrows, but in the book it just says he was pierced with many arrows. Since three is not many and I enjoy symbolism, in this story it's going to be nine.I feel like this was a strange one. Then again, it's a strange situation they are in, and they're both kind of teetering at the edge of sanity, so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯Thoughts? I'd love to hear from you <3'
User: Summarize the chapter based on the content provided, ensuring to follow the set format and emphasize key aspects within the specified length.
User: Summarize the chapter based on the content provided, ensuring to follow the set format and emphasize key aspects within the specified length.
Assistant: