Chapter Text
Or: Does your OFC come from Earth? Are they dropped into Middle Earth by mysterious forces?
***
Do you know this feeling? One is experiencing the darkest hours of their life and thinks it can‘t get any worse now. Ah yes, you know it. This means I don‘t have to explain in great detail what I felt that morning.
What morning, you might ask? Well, it was the morning I entered the practice to find my boss, the esteemed dentist Horace Willbur, lying dead at his desk. That alone would have been bad enough, but it was Monday and, as the nice policemen told me after I‘d finished throwing up in the bathroom, presumed time of death was on Friday afternoon. Horace had been lying around all weekend in this nice little office that was the basis of my life hood.
It was warm, as I had switched off airconditioning when leaving on Friday and by now, Horace bore little resemblance to his usual form any more. To be honest, the body had started to decay and it stunk like the plague.
Yeah, the stench should have given me a pause. On the other hand, though, as a dental assistant, I was used to some of the worst smells that came out of our patients' mouths and I was a little slow in the morning. It always took a while until my brain was able to process environmental stimuli accordingly. Also, who would immediately suspect the death of their boss?
Heart attack, said the coroner, who bore an eerie resemblance to Rumplestiltskin. I didn‘t really know how he‘d come to this conclusion, but at least there was no knife sticking out of Horace's back or anything equally gory.
Anyhow, they sent me home telling me not to worry about some sort of crime and to take the day off. How?, I would have liked to shout at them, This is Long Island, rent is expensive and the jobs are sparse!
So I spent long hours staring at the walls of my tiny apartment and wondering what I would do now. Standing in front of the bathroom mirror, I stared at the figure suddenly robbed of her certain, pleasant future who looked back with my own murky brown eyes.
„Hello, Lucy“, I greeted, smiling mirthlessly. Incidentally, I noticed my most attractive feature to be my teeth. Very even, very white – well, that could be expected of a dental assistant. The rest of me was nothing worth mentioning; I was 24 years old with average height, average weight, and average shoulder-length hair that had the same colour as my eyes. „Time to look for a new job, your money will only last for 2 more months.“ All grief for Horace aside, that was what I would do first thing tomorrow. It was too late for today, anyway. Outside it was already getting dark, but that didn‘t stop me from throwing on my new jogging shorts, pulling the grey top over my head and putting on my trusty sneakers that had seen better and tidier days to run from my sorrows.
Well, not running away from them per se (as some might have claimed), more like running to forget these problems for a little while. That was what happened when I was trotting through this outrageously expensive neighbourhood, panting loudly all the way.
The inhabitants of those expensive mansions were certainly far better off, sitting in front of their custom-designed fireplaces, wearing their custom-designed jumpsuits, and enjoying their custom-designed A/Cs. I am not a jealous person, but on this day I wasn‘t in the greatest mood. Maybe it was due to the thunderstorm gathering over my head. One I had been hoping to miss before it started. Did I mention it was my lucky day? It started raining, no, pouring just as I reached the small pathway leading to a cute little wooden bridge crossing a small stream.
The storm was reaching its peak when I was about 50 ft away from the bridge. One particularly impressive flash of lightning lit up the otherwise pitch-black sky and my heart missed a beat when I saw the tiny person swinging their body over the railing.
„No!“, I screamed, as it was obvious what this creature over there was planning on doing. Nobody would go for a win in this weather when the river swelling and the current downright dangerous.
I could have saved my breath. Naturally, they promptly jumped from the railing and I pushed my legs to work even faster. One death was more than enough for the day! Two deaths would be unbearable and might lead others to believe you meant bad luck.
I really had been ready to jump into the current to save that poor unfortunate soul, but when I finally reached the bridge and took a look at the masses of water barrelling towards the Atlantic Ocean with the speed of a racing car I found I no longer cared for my reputation all that much. I‘m no hero, just a dental assistant for god’s sake. We‘re saving teeth, not human lives.
Standing there, staring into the dark waters below I was starting to wonder if I had stepped on some important toes in a previous life. Maybe bad luck was ingrained in my genetic code or something. My parents, in any case, had chosen to leave me in front of a hospital and disappeared pretty quickly after. So quickly, in fact, that even the surveillance cameras had been able to show more than a dark blur. Oh yes, from the moment I‘d been born I really felt the love!
I stood there for quite a while, overhead the raging storm and under me the foaming river and gallons of rain slowly soaking me through. Maybe I should jump and put myself out of my misery … I dismissed that thought very quickly. There would always be bad teeth, dentists too, and I would find another job somehow. Assuming I didn‘t die of pneumonia first.
Well, it wasn‘t pneumonia in the end. It happened faster, much faster, and was mainly due to the huge lightning blast hitting the bridge about 5 ft next to me. Then I only remember being thrown over the railing. That was it, was my last thought, you‘re dead.
***
I was falling.
Not for very long, I grant you, but long enough to worry about it. I‘d been sort of expecting to see this long tunnel with a light on the other side. Of course, it was also possible I‘d go to hell, and they did not care for such embellishments on the way down. In the details, the two might be quite different, after all. Anyway, as I was plummeting down, there was a slight rushing — might have been the river — and I wondered if I would catch up with the guy who had jumped before me. Before I‘d come to a satisfying conclusion, the fall came to an abrupt end.
The impact, which clearly did not come from a water surface, was so violent I remained to lie dazed. Eyelids screwed tightly shut, I tried delaying the inevitable initial contact with Lucifer’s secretary. It wasn‘t particularly warm down here, I noticed, even a little cool but dry, at least. Although my sub-surface was rocking gently and felt strangely squishy.
And it smelt!
I don‘t want to say it smelt bad or anything, just strange. Very unusual. With my eyes still firmly shut, I started feeling around me.
The softness seemed to come from some sort of mattress I had landed on. And the smell … hm, seemed to be made of leather or something similar, though there was something hard underneath. Very funny, THAT was not what I was hinting at.
I decided to finally open my eyes.
Sometimes, you make wrong decisions, but you don‘t know about it till it’s already too late.
Opening my eyes was one of those wrong decisions. I looked up and straight into the face of a man.
A very DEAD man.
He was lying under me, or I was lying on top of him; doesn‘t matter. There was a corpse and I was in close contact with it. The third body this day, so it might be understandable that I reacted as I did. It was simply too much!
With a shrill shriek, I scrambled to the side, noticed incidentally I was in a small boat, went fully into hysterics, jumped up, and … well, we capsized. Headfirst, was thrown into the fairly cold water, followed closely by the corpse that pushed me underwater. I kicked and flailed, dislodged the heavy thing, broke the surface, and screamed again. The boat had drifted off by now, directly towards the waterfall …
Time to faint, I thought, still screaming when I realized the thing with the waterfall. I was well on the way of doing exactly that when a long blade came to the surface next to me.
Did you ever see one of the movies about the knights of the round table? Nearly always there’s a scene where Excalibur emerges from the depths of the water. You could imagine the scene just like that, minus the screaming woman, of course. Because that was me and the sword was in fact not Excalibur, but the dead man was attached to it. Eyes wide open and gasping for breath, his head broke the water surface. He seemed a little confused, not very strong and the sight of me did not seem to bring him any joy, if the pure terror in his remarkably beautiful grey eyes was anything to go by. The zombie disliked both me and the current and, after a short cry that sounded somehow pained, he slowly sank out of sight again.
My hesitation lasted only for a few seconds, then I took the chance of crossing the third death in the last 24 hours off of my list. Valiantly diving below the surface where funny little waves and bubbles marked his path I grasped his long hair and pulled ruthlessly until my ex-dead companion came up next to me.
There really was no time for worrying about his eyes that had rolled back into his head. Getting away from the nearing waterfall had become very urgent and a brief look around us told me that we would have to paddle back to one of the riverbanks as soon as possible. A long time ago I had attended a lesson by the lifeguard service. Only it was much easier pulling a friend of the same age back to the edge of a swimming pool than maneuvering a fairly large man in heavy clothing through the current of a river.
I don‘t suppose I was handling him very gently, and he definitely got a few mouthfuls of water along our way to the left riverbank. It was a small miracle in itself that I even managed to steer us both in the right direction at all. My arms grew heavier and heavier, my legs too, but with the determination of a survivor, I swam for the nearest bank.
You can‘t imagine just how relieved I felt when I finally felt the steady ground beneath my feet again. Instead of swimming I now waded through the water that only reached my hips by now.
I supported my alarmingly lifeless companion‘s back, so he floated on his back next to me and headed for a point about 100 ft away where the gentle slope seemed steep enough to manage. Furthermore, there was a huge bollard — a sign of life, of civilization! Hurrah, safe at last! The crowd of worried helpers was nowhere in sight, though. I had to pull my hanger-on onto the beach by myself. Not an easy task when the saved was making no move to help whatsoever. I tugged him over the rocky ground by his massive shoulders and didn‘t even feel bad when his head made contact with one of the big stones lying around. Finally, I buckled down with a heavy grunt.
Saved!
Still out of breath, I sat on the stones and absent-mindedly took in my surroundings. The lightning strike had to have caused some kind of weird natural-scientific phenomenon that had transported me from the small wooden bridge to another place. An unfamiliar place, clearly.
The river in front of me was very broad, nearly a lake, and disappeared about 500 ft to the right in a misty cloud. In its middle, there sat an enormous rock.
The rush of the water thankfully was no longer as loud as it had been before and suggested that the waterfall behind the mist was a pretty big one. The boat I had landed on was nowhere in sight. It probably lay somewhere down there, in splinters.
What I could see of the shore was not exactly reassuring for a city person, no matter how small the town. Here it was pure nature, really. Only Trees, bushes, and the riverbank I was sitting on. Besides, the air was strangely clean which could only be the result of lacking smog. I‘d landed in the wildness!
Suspiciously, I turned around and examined the slope at my back. In the wildness, there were wild animals. Considering my luck so far,there would be a wild bear stumbling over our temporary camp soon.
Much to my relief, everything stayed silent and with a sigh, I turned to face the problem lying next to me on the ground. Even while swimming he‘d appeared huge, but here, stretched out on land, he seemed even bigger and substantially unfriendlier, to be completely honest. Also, he appeared to have a screw loose, considering his clothing and the sword he still held onto with his right hand.
I moved a little to the other side. A lunatic with an obsession with knights! And I was stranded here, with him. I should probably be glad he was still unconscious. I knew guys like him — my last boyfriend, good ole Kevin, suffered from the same mental disorder. During the six months of our relationship, he‘d dragged me to no less than 2 medieval festivals and one „Lord of the Rings“-con. There I had seen tons of guys wearing such clothing and waving around with their plastic swords.
My special friend though, I realised with slight panic, clutched a real sword in his hands and his costume was by far the most elaborate I‘d ever seen. His long leather vest alone, decorated with rivets and the boots must have cost a fortune! Kevin would have paled with envy!
I felt myself paling out of fear. This man really was authentic, down to the cuts on his arms and face.
It might be understandable that I suddenly felt dizzy. He really had cuts and holes in his clothing. The whole thing was becoming creepier by the second. Those freaks might have met out there to practice their sword fights and this one had been collateral damage.
I scanned the area once more. It was entirely possible that instead of a bear there would be a mob of madmen turning up and being angry about me rescuing the supposedly dead victim. I seemed to be in luck, apparently they weren‘t here anymore. Had hopped into their Range Rovers and driven back to their families who had no idea that the knight– freaks had just massacred one of their buddies.
I chewed on my lower lip anxiously. What the hell was I supposed to do now? He didn‘t seem particularly stable and there was no sign of an emergency rescue helicopter. What if he died here on my watch and in the end, the park rangers thought I had stabbed him? Besides, it would give me something to do.
I crawled closer and started removing my knight‘s expensive armour. Undressing handsome men supposedly is a fairly enjoyable activity. It probably would have been, had he been livelier and his clothing not soaked through. Like this, it was difficult. At least I had a little bit of experience with this ancient type of clothing, courtesy of my time with Kevin, so the various swaths and buckles were no great issue. Nonetheless, it was no fun, peeling him, unresponsive like a sack of flour, out of leather clothing. From time to time, he moaned. I‘ll admit I‘m lacking the practised efficiency of a nurse, so a few times, I pulled at his arms quite roughly.
I should have let him be, honestly!
He might have been a handsome bugger, with muscles over muscles, but below his left shoulder, there was a really ugly hole in his upper body. That one had definitely not been caused by a sword, looked more like a lance of something of the kind. I didn‘t really care, it was there and it was causing problems.
Did I mention I‘m usually wearing a waist bag when going for a run? Always prepared, words to live by. In there I found a few plasters, a small bottle of disinfectant, a roll of adhesive tape for sprained joints, some salve for minor scrapes, a few tissues in case of sudden digestive problems, and a comb for the unexpected sighting of my dream man.
I wouldn‘t need the comb for now, but the plasters were more like it. One had to be optimistic now and try treating a stab wound with some plasters and salve. Who knew, it might have unprecedented wondrous effects? At least he had survived so far. A plaster was practically hight-tech medicine. Nonetheless, there seemed to be something seriously wrong with my knight; his condition seemed too serious for just one stab wound that wasn‘t even bleeding anymore.
I hesitated for a moment, then moved behind him and, after much struggling, managed to raise him up by the shoulder into an upright position.
„Jesus Christ!“, I groaned when I saw the equally disgusting stab wound in his back. Apart from the light dizzyness came the realisation that I wouldn‘t come very far with just a plaster.
As long as a hand! The wound was as long as a hand and looked pretty nasty, its margins gaping wide. This guy would die faster than I would like.
„Think, Lucy, think!“,I murmured and swallowed down the bile creeping up my throat. „Patch him back together.“
This would indeed have been a good idea, had I had needle and thread. With slight desperation, I reviewed my options and came to the conclusion that plasters would have to do. I‘d have to press the margins of the wound together and tape them to each other with my plasters.
It took a while until I could actually bring myself to take the gaping flesh between thumb and pointer finger and to start pulling. Almost immediately, I flinched back. My fingertips tingled – no idea what the guy had on him, but it felt like touching an electric wire. I frowned. Did this have to do with me being struck by lightning? Whatever it was, it didn‘t stop when I started pulling at the edges of the wound with renewed determination and then placed the plasters with my free hand after having removed the protective foil with my teeth. It might not have been particularly sterile, but my knight was in no position to complain about that, anyway!
After that, my energy was spent. My bare-chested knight was laying in the sun on the riverbank and was slowly drying. I was sitting next to him, staring at the water surface and doing the same.
What the hell was I even doing here?
Where was I?
And how did I actually get here?
I couldn't find an answer to any of these questions. On the other hand, those were the questions that have been preoccupying mankind since the Stone Age, so it was highly unlikely that I of all people would answer them now.
When it started getting dark around me my clothes were mostly dry, except for my shoes which I had placed on a flat rock, and there had been no further progress. The rescue helicopter was still nowhere in sight. The only sounds came from the forest and I didn‘t particularly care for those. Nature was quite a loud affair, I noted, and it didn‘t help that my knight moaned occasionally. It was a pained, tormented sound from the depths of his throat that made me shiver.
„Stop it!“, I hissed at some point. „This is your own fault, mister! Serves you right for toying around with sharp blades. What can I say? A few hours ago, I was standing on a bridge and then struck by lightning – And I'm not crying about it, am I?“
I did, sometime later. Lonely and abandoned, in the middle of nowhere, with only a thin shirt and some shorts to provide warmth, with a half-dead person lying next to me and jobless, on top of it all. In this situation, I was definitely allowed to.
For a while, at least. Before it could get too dark, I picked myself up to go have a look at the surrounding area. After all, there was a chance that, somewhere behind the nearest bushes, there was a parking lot where the knight's car was waiting.
No, it did not.
Surprised?
No, I didn‘t think so. Instead, I found something else. A boat, a canoe, or whatever. So the hobby knights had also fought naval battles. Very pretty, the boat was – made out of wood with intricated carvings and probably very, very expensive. Maybe it even belonged to my knight. And, if this assumption proved to be correct, he was also the owner of the pile of luggage that was hidden underneath a woolen cover which I decide to inspect further.
Great, I was in Sweden, if the crispbread wrapped in various sorts of leaves was any indication. So I wouldn‘t starve until tomorrow morning. Or freeze, because there was a blanket which might have been a little thin but dry, at least. And some sort of leathern drinker for medieval heroes, filled with clean water.
I gathered up the crispbread and blanket, then thoughtfully considered the bow and quiver surrounded with a few arrows lying at the bottom of the boat. Maybe I could use the quiver to kill a senile, half-dead rabbit to spice up my meager crispbread meals. Or I could impale some fish on one of my new arrows. I didn‘t pin my hopes on fried fish – there was no lighter and rubbing two sticks together hoping they would just give up and burst in flames seemed like a futile endeavor.
With the luggage in tow, I felt my way back across the stony riverbank, where the half-naked knight still slept the sleep of the convalescent. His chest rose and fell with his deep and even breaths, so he wasn‘t dead yet.
I really had earned that blanket, but his skin was icy, and seeing a fellow like him trembling with cold was just a pitiful sight. Overcome by my own generosity, I covered him with the woolen cloth and pushed his crumpled, now completely dry, shirt under his head. This way, I had the opportunity of studying him more closely.
He was very handsome, actually. His face was narrow and even, albeit polluted with by a three-day stubble that was perhaps one of the requirements for knighthood. Dark blond hair, reaching down to the shoulders, framed his sharp features, which probably held a healthy tan unless blood loss and nearly drowning caused a lack of blood circulation. And his eyes were grey, I remembered.
In everyday life, he might be an architect, or a banker, or something else that brought a lot of money every month. Enough, at least, to cultivate this strange hobby and be stabbed by like-minded people.
And he had a beautiful sword. I would know, thanks to Kevin. The good man had turned half of my apartment into an armoury. Only none of his stabby tools could compete with the piece of weaponry lying next to my knight here. If his buddies had similar weapons, it was no surprise he was in such a state. I just couldn‘t resist. Cautiously I reached over him and fished for the sword. It laid comfortably in my hand, even though it wasn‘t custom-made for me. Critically, I swung it back and forth; The sword was heavy and I had to take it in both hands to really hold it. But it was sharp and pointed, so shortly thereafter, I stood up to my thighs in crystal clear water, held the sword with the tip pointing down, and waited for a pack of fishburgers to swim by. Honestly, it‘s not like I had anything else to do ...
Time passed and only a midget that would not even have been suitable for an appetizer swam by my feet. I was trying to drive it away by stirring the water with the sword when there was a noise behind me. I froze n my tracks. It had sounded like a disgruntled bear, or an angry aurochs, or a monster. I wouldn‘t know, I hadn‘t met any of those before.
The noise repeated itself and I suddenly remembered the knight lying at the beach, completely defenseless. With the courage of the hysteric, I grabbed the sword a little tighter and whirled around to show the unknown assailant you didn‘t just grunt about here on my watch.
„Wah!“, I squeaked with surprise before promptly dropping the sword.
My knight wasn‘t lying down any longer, but sitting upright and looking at me with great irritation.
„Don‘t move!“, I warned him next while fingering in the water to find the sword again. „I‘m armed.“
He lifted one eyebrow and watched me pulling his sword from the floods to swing it in his direction.
„Ha, with a sword!“, I triumphed.
„That is my sword.“, he said after a short pause with a hoarse voice and cocked his head.
„So what?“, I hissed nervously.
„Steady, my lady, or you will hurt yourself“, he sighed after another break.
Jesus Christ, what a complete weirdo. One with a nice voice, but clearly in need of some serious therapy. My Lady, indeed! That one didn‘ even find back to reality when having his guts sliced open.
He felt around his shoulder, then touched his back with the other hand and pulled a strange face. Then, he started to rise, though he was clearly in pain. „I would not do that if I were you“, I advised, channeling my inner Florence Nightingale. „These were not caused by a fairy with a toothpick, you know?“
„It was Uruk‘hai“, he corrected, shaking his head and casting a suspicious glance around us. „Are you alone? Where is Aragorn?“
Having spent half a year with Kevin, certain words triggered warning bells that simply were impossible to ignore. Besides, I had seen the movies, read the books a few years ago with little interest but with a sense of duty and spent whole evenings with Kevin and his stupid friends who had taken every detail of the movies apart. Yeah, my knight was a fan of the Lord of the Rings, one of the truly dedicated ones who re-enacted the scenes.
„Aragorn is gone“, I tried jogging his memory. „And the whole gang is, too. They overdid it a little, buddy, and just about left you for dead here.“
„I was dead.“, he said mostly to himself. „And I remember being on the way to my forefathers. Then I was pulled back and I saw your face.“
I nodded nicely. If he went on like this, he would remember where he had parked his car by tomorrow morning. And where he‘d left the keys...
He stalked up and down the shore. For an almost dead man, he‘d recovered very quickly. Maybe his wound hadn‘t been as bad as I had assumed initially. I was fine with both, as it spared me having to witness another death.
Suddenly he came to a halt in front of me and stared at me with a searching look. „Were you sent here by the Lady of the Golden Wood?“
„Huh?“, I asked, not very intelligently.
„Tell me your name“, he demanded, still quite deep in his role.
„Lucy“, I stuttered, by now feeling truly disturbed.
„Lucy“, he repeated. „That is a very unusual name for an Elleth.“
Ah yes, an Elleth. My Boromir-double – nothing else would have made sense, at this point – clearly had to be very short-sighted in real life. His stint with the river had probably cost him his contact lenses. I might pass for a lot of things, most likely for an oversized Hobbit, but definitely not for an Elleth. On the other hand …
I swear, I didn‘t mean to do it. Honestly! But some sort of compulsion took over and I lifted my left hand up to my ears. Boromir flinched when I gave a loud wail as soon as my hand had touched the pointy ends of my previously round ears. Next, I stared at the water surface at my feet and this time, I didn‘t pay attention to the fish at the bottom, but to my reflection.
Waves or not, it was enough to give me the rest. It was me, yet it wasn‘t. Staring back at me was an Elleth with wide-open eyes of violet-blue, long, dark lashes, and truly gorgeous facial features. My dark hair held a shine and was twisted into delicate braids that disappeared behind my pointy ears.
Suddenly, my throat went dry. I had heard of this before! I had read of this before. One of Kevin‘s acquaintances – the tart with whom he had cheated on me – had been crazy about this and constantly talked about it.
I was a goddamn Mary-Sue, trapped in Middle Earth!
***
TBC.