This is a slightly edited version of a story originally submitted in response to the April 2016 prompt ("Waiting") at Teitho, where it tied for 1st place.

I own nothing in this story, and desire no profit whatsoever. My only intention is to honour Prof. Tolkien's work and contribute to the community of imagination that he has inspired.
 

Softly, drawing on all his Ranger skill and stealth, Aragorn slipped from the chamber where his wife at last lay sleeping. Her ladies had been reluctant to let him depart with the tiny bundle in his arms, but kingship brought at least this one privilege: they could not forbid him from stealing these few moments alone with his son.

His son!

It was almost too much to take in.

Aragorn slowly eased himself into a cushioned chair, his eyes never leaving the face of the babe snuggled into the crook of his arm. Hesitant still to touch newborn skin with calloused fingertips, he stroked one silky cheek with the back of his finger and traced delicate features with enraptured eyes.

Not since his first sight of the child’s mother had Aragorn been thus awestruck by a sudden glimpse of living beauty. Everything about the infant entranced him. The soft wisps of hair, black as a raven and downy as a chick. The impossibly tiny hands that grasped his smallest finger with a surprisingly hearty grip. The perfect little ears, tapered just enough to reveal a half-Elven heritage.

“Eldarion,” Aragorn whispered reverently. There were still times when he could scarcely believe that his noble Elven lady had deigned to look on him with favor, to sacrifice immortal life and kin to join herself to him. Now, as he cradled this child whose appearance so clearly spoke of both their lines, he wondered afresh.

How many fathers had gazed upon such a child? Beren, Tuor, Eärendil . . . Aragorn was struck by the last, for he imagined Lord Elrond must have looked much like this little one when he was himself new to the world. The thought brought with it a pang of sorrow, and there was little Aragorn would not have given in that moment to share the delight of this new life with the child’s grandsire by both blood and adoption.

Arwen, he knew, felt this desire keenly—indeed, during her pregnancy this longing had at times expressed itself in bursts of uncharacteristic resentment. Sharp words were always soon recanted and replaced with the softer language of simple grief, but Aragorn knew his wife had hoped, if not expected, that her father would tarry long enough in Middle-earth to see his grandchildren. And yet, he also knew that Arwen recognized Elrond’s need to make a swift departure after the destruction of the One Ring and the waning of the Three. The keeper of Vilya had poured too much of himself into the protection of Middle-earth, and in the months following the War’s end it had gradually become clear that he faced the choice to seek healing in the Blessed Land, or fade.

And then there was Celebrían. Aragorn remembered well the Elf-lord’s words when he gave voice to his decision: neither “I will leave Middle-earth” nor “I will depart for Valinor,” but “I will join my wife across the Sea.”

This, more than anything, ensured that no matter how he missed the only father he had ever known, Aragorn could not share his wife’s ambivalence over Elrond’s departure. For many lives of Men, Elrond had waited, ever attentive to the duties that tied him to mortal shores even as his very heart fled West. Faced with the barely hoped-for reality of victory, and at last free from the dreadful burden of the Rings, how could he fail to respond at last to the desperate longing for his beloved? Surely Elrond had waited long enough.

And that, Aragorn believed, was the crux of the matter. He was not so arrogant as to presume he knew Elrond better than Arwen did, but Aragorn privately felt that in this one matter his empathy was the greater. He knew the pain of waiting for one’s love—waiting almost without hope, waiting even as the relentless weight of time, responsibility, and fight after bruising fight seemed determined to crush even the brightest dreams of reunion. Such had his own days been from the hour he first met Elrond’s daughter to the hour they finally wed.

As much as their minds and hearts were in accord in most things, Aragorn knew the anguish of waiting in a way Arwen simply could not. She had waited just as he had through their long betrothal, but tied as she was to an immortal heart and mind and body, she could not truly understand how slowly so many years passed for a mortal Man. She could not comprehend the grating loneliness of watching decades and generations pass and feeling one’s youth slip inexorably away.

Aragorn realized, and accepted, that Arwen only dimly grasped how the long and barren years of his virginity had gnawed at him—how he had been haunted not only by desire so long unfulfilled, but by the ever-present burden of duties neglected and heirs unconceived, the fear of an ancient lineage dying with him and carrying his people’s hope to the grave.

Nothing of the timeless quality of Elven life in Ring-guarded havens could compare to the urgency of life among the northern Dúnedain. Sheltered as she had been among her own people—Elves who thought nothing of centuries-long courtships and sought not to bring children into a world from which they grew estranged—Arwen could little imagine the furtive looks, the whispers and the gossip, that had dogged her beloved’s steps. Nor was Aragorn inclined to enlighten her. The awkward questions, the thinly veiled accusations that turned respite from the perils of his travels into a grueling test of patience and diplomacy, the palpable excitement of his kinfolk when he chanced to exchange pleasant words with a maiden in the village, and their collective frustration when yet another eligible match failed to materialize—these were not the aspects of his former life that he chose to share.

Arwen might have guessed at, but could not truly relate to, the many hours Aragorn had spent arguing against well-intentioned but increasingly exasperated counselors who insisted that he must choose a woman, marry her with alacrity, and do what was necessary to secure the future of Isildur’s line. Their arguments had been all the more difficult to counter because he could not explain that he was pledged to Elrond’s daughter. For even without the ever-present risk of spies and treason, it was not in Aragorn’s nature to expose the most cherished secret of his heart to more than a few best-trusted intimates.

Most of all, Arwen could not have fully understood the burden of temptation that had crept up on Aragorn from time to time as he waited for her. He had long endured the same bodily desires as any Man—compounded, often, by the solitary wanderer’s thirst for any affectionate touch, however chaste, to alleviate the wild’s unrelenting loneliness—but it was not temptation to careless deeds of lust that troubled him. More burdensome by far was the temptation to abandon the hope of being united to the lady of his heart, defy her father’s prophecies and ultimatums, and bind himself to a woman of his own kind. To grasp the joys of home and family where they could so quickly, so easily be found.

Aragorn knew well enough that Elves were capable of envy; beyond their experience, however, was the relentless, crushing pressure that time exerts on those who measure their lives in decades rather than millennia. Perhaps they could have sympathized with his fear of never being a husband, never a father; never could they truly comprehend what he felt each time he saw a wedding, each time he met a newborn babe . . . each time, in later years, he witnessed the marriage of one he remembered as an infant. Aragorn was honest enough with himself to recognize that there were some few women he had encountered in his years of waiting whom he could, perhaps, have come to love. Yet he had resisted the siren call of marriage, children, and the familiar comfort of a family home—resisted, and sacrificed, and waited for a hope he often barely half believed in.

A hope that somehow, to his infinite joy and wonder, now lived and breathed in the form of the tiny, perfect creature cradled in his arms.

“Estelion,” Aragorn murmured, his gaze bright with love. “Son of my hope.”