Title: Five Women Boromir Married (And One He Didn't)
Fandom: Lord of the Rings/Highlander/RPF
Rating: Teen
Length: 960 words
Content Notes: Choose Not to Warn
Author Notes: Set in my Immortals of Arda AU, where Boromir is an Immortal. Also, part of my "Five Things - Boromir" set of stories.

Summary: What it says in the title.

Iron Age Celt

He stood still and silent as she painted symbols on his skin in the blue dye of her people. From his face down across his chest, and along his arms, down his back and around his legs, while he wore naught but a brief cloth wrapped around his loins. The physical armor would be donned after, when she had invested all the magic she knew into his skin.

"Now you are ready to face the invaders, husband." She stood with a faint grimace for the pain of aging joints, though she would have ignored an offer to help her if it had been made. Her hair was already touched with gray, though his was still as dark as the day they met. She said that he was honored by the gods, preserved for some other fate, and had forbade him to leave when it became clear to her he would not age. "Return to me with your shield, or not at all."

---

13th Century Mongol

She fought with the skill and strength of a shield-maiden of long-lost Rohan, and had all the look of a woman of Khand. He could not give her children, but it never worried her - and she died before the winter came the year he married her, fighting to expand the empire her people were creating across the breadth of Asia.

---

15th Century Burgundian

He is a man-at-arms in service to a warrior-king with ambitions that encompass all of France. She is a laughing-eyed lady in waiting for the Duchess of Burgundy, who watches him as he follows in the wake of his knight at the court. For her, to marry him will be a loss of status, and he almost is tempted to discourage her flirtation on that alone.

He cannot, in the end, resist the stirrings of his own heart, as well as her quiet words of Burgundian French. When her father refuses to give his permission or blessing, Boromir would have left it aside, save she came to him with nothing but the clothes on her back, soft pleas on her lips.

They live a quiet life in England after, married without the blessing of her family, but happy enough. She never mourns the lack of children, telling him instead, laughter in her eyes, that it means she can have more of him, and never mind the preaching that would call it lust and gluttony and perhaps some other things.

---

18th Century African (tribe unknown)

They have not a word in common when he first meets her, and stands between her and those who chase her. Paying the man who calls himself her master no little price, and then more again to ensure she will have papers that declare her free of all such horrors. He wants nothing from her for it, though it takes some effort to make her aware of that.

Boromir meets her again nearly fourty years later, living a different man's life, and far enough away from the one he'd met her in that he'd not expected to meet her. She is a widow and a mother, and they share a language now, though her accent is rich with the tones of a homeland she will never see again.

"You are still the same man, no matter that you have a different name." She doesn't seem to be bothered that his face has not changed. "A god-king, without a place to be either."

"I'm neither a god nor a king, and have never wished to be either." Boromir had once, before the Ring, before Amon Hen, before waking in Harad, thought he would be Steward of Gondor, but there is no place since that has made him wish for that sort of rule.

She courts him for nearly three years before they are married, and he finds a family that he hadn't expected to want.

---

21st Century, location uncertain

He's left behind a lifetime of fame, and found himself a quiet corner of an every-shrinking world to call home, and a woman who thinks his willingness to stay home - to take on a role that still is seen more of a woman's than it is a man's - is part of the appeal. They still hire someone to take care of aspects of housework he cannot (laundry machines still make him wary, but he doesn't have the time to do it by hand with two small children to chase and a horse to keep up with).

It's enough for him to live in the peace of a rural home while his wife supports them, after a life that had made disguising his secrets more difficult than anything in his past. And if their love is a quiet sort more than a grand passion or romance, it's just as well. It's enough.

---

And One He Didn't

"If I had said I would wed you, would you have been able to do what needed done?" She stood at the window of a tower that no longer existed, looking out over a city she'd never visited. The room they were in had ever been bare to his knowledge, meant to hold the palantir, though now it was furnished as a bower.

He pushed up on one elbow, watching the familiar-unfamiliar line of her back, half-hidden by a robe pulled around her. Something light and nearly translucent that never would have been warm enough where they were.

"I don't know." He was dressed in naught but the sheet that tangled about his legs, as he always was in this dream.

"You would have fought him, and lost, and I would have followed. We'd have been lost, memories stripped away until we were but a shadow in the back of his mind, easily ignored." She looked over her shoulder, gray eyes ever disconcerting against dusky skin and black hair. "It is better this way."