21 March 2004
LotR/X-Men

Title courtesy of Grace Slick
For trollprincess's Pairing List That Ate Fandom challenge




Sam sleeps, but Frodo doesn't.  He dozes, sometimes, but the Ring is heavier than his need to sleep.  He waits until Sam is fully asleep to sit up, though.  Smeagol is long gone to wherever it is he goes at night, because Smeagol doesn't sleep either.  Perhaps no Ring bearer ever does.

He wonders, if Isildur hadn't died, would he still be awake?  Three thousand years old and pacing in Gondor, grey and shaking?
 
If the Ring had not been lost, would Aragorn be the one walking sleepless through the White City?

Sam stirs, and Frodo curls back down.  Waits there, cold and aching on the rocks.  And it's not that he doesn't love Sam with everything that's left of him, but when Sam holds him at night, Frodo nearly goes mad trying to keep still.

Click of rocks above him makes Frodo look up.  Smeagol announces himself that way, when he's feeling charitable.  Orcs make more noise.  The Fell Beast, when it's close, rings in Frodo's head too loudly for real thought.

This is none of those things.  Only.  "Hello, meat."

Stiff fear all through him.  He doesn't think it's an orc, but only because he's never seen an orc lass.  But orcs were elves once, and elves have lasses, and wouldn't an orc lass be only an elf lady, mad out of all recognition and torn away from her skin?  "Who's there?"

She drops down.  This, then, must be what orc-lasses look like.  Luminous elf-maiden under the bloody damage of her: bone and blood all over, torn through her skin.  Antlers reach up from both sides of her skull, but not symmetrically.  Some of the bones look very sharp.

She straightens, this thing not quite a lass and somehow very beautiful and terrible.  Scarlet-haired and ugly and half-naked.  While Frodo watches, a bone pushes out from her shoulder-blade, through the wreck of her blouse, and blood trickles through the linen.  His belly turns at it,

(. . . Arwen or Galadriel, tortured for millennia until mad and laughing, hunting in this empty rock country . . .)

then turns again, nearly forcing him to vomit

(vomit up nothing, for when did he last eat properly?)

when she casually reaches down to her hip and rips away a still-growing bone.  The broken ends are sharper even than the parts he saw before.  She crouches above Sam.

"Can I eat him, do you think?"

Frodo could, if he were very quiet and quick, put on the Ring.  It would certainly save Sam's life, but would he be able to take the Ring off, after?  Would all the orcs of Mordor descend on him?

Smeagol.  He needs Smeagol.  He needs time until Smeagol comes back, until the morning comes.

(. . . and be stone to you.  How he wishes he were living Bilbo's fairy-tale life instead of his own . . .)

"I don't think he would taste very good," Frodo says, carefully.

"I could find out anyway."  She's still threatening Sam, but she's watching Frodo, and she's not.  She's not as filthy as the orcs he's seen.  Not as lost.  Brilliant intelligence behind her eyes, more focussed on Frodo than any elf ever has.

"Please.  Please don't."

One red brow quirks.  "Okay, then."

She pulls the bone in close against her.  Its edge catches the edge of the moon, and Frodo can see the blood on it.  Then she catches the edge of the moon too, and Frodo thinks how tired she looks.  As tired as he feels, though perhaps a little less hungry.

He must have his manners still, because: "Would you like to sit down?"

"Thanks."

"I haven't really anything to offer you."

"S'okay."  She nods at her hip, and he sees a flask there, and a knife.  Blood on that, too.  "I was hunting, earlier.  Caught a few mice."  It shouldn't sound so good.  Frodo wonders if the very country here can turn one to hunger for fur and blood.  "Kept hunting and found you."  She cocks her head.  "Bad country for little people.  What're you doing here?"

"That's no business of yours."  A little sharply.  Too bold when the woman before him is sharp on all her edges.

"Somebody's snotty.  I was only asking."

"My business is secret."

"There's no secrets in Ithilien, pretty thing.  The Dark one watches us all the time.  Even the birds are spies.  Secrets."  She spits.  "They're going to eat you."

"You were going to eat me.  You haven't, yet."

And.

And she turns on him.  Smiles differently, not quite madly, but without the clarity of murder she had before.  "I always wanted a doll of my very own.  And look at you, all little and pretty.  Your eyes."  She reaches out a half-gloved, bloody hand, and drags it up his face from jaw to eye.  "Somebody paint those on you?"

"I have my eyes from my mother's family.  Thank you."

"Should go hunting for them, then.  You come from a whole country full of dolls?"

(. . . shire . . . baggins . . .)

"No."

"I think you do.  You've got that one --" nodding at Sam "-- and he's little like you.  Not pretty like you, but if I woke him, would his eyes shine like yours?"

Her hand reaches out again, broad as a big person's, cleaner than an orc's.  This time she tugs his hair.  The pull is careful, though.  It's disturbing how much her touch is that of a child stroking a doll.  Some little half-wild Brandybuck, grown up in the trees and too long between baths, reaching toward the china-dolly of a better-raised cousin.

"You hungry, pretty thing?"

"A little."  He's terribly hungry.  His last good meal was so long ago.  He hasn't been really full since they left Lothlorien.  He hasn't been full and warm and happy since . . . Rivendell, surely.  Perhaps since he walked out of Bag End with Sam.

Bone-flash, too quick for him to scream.  She unfolds herself and vanishes into the scrub-brush, comes back holding something bloody, impaled, and dead.  "You hungry enough to eat this?"  Raw.  Not wriggling anymore.

Frodo's cheeks warm.  "I think so, yes."

"What'll you give me for it?"

He hasn't anything, really.  Nothing but the Ring, and it's singing now, deep in his skull.  ( . . . keep me keep me killherkeepmekillherkillherkillher . . .)  All the Baggins wealth lies back in Hobbiton, half a world away.

Red hair and bloody girl, bones all over her, terrible and elf-like.  Eyes and hands.  Glimmer like a thing immortal.  Lost in dark and empty places.  "You're lovely," he says.

She sparks.  Rises up from her haunches and leaps at him, lands and rolls them both.  Frodo feels weather-worn bones pressing into his skin.  So close to breaking, her fingers all over his throat.  She's not as strong or as frightening as Smeagol.  Only so terribly angry.

( . . . you could kill her knife her knock her down you have me always you have me kill her killherkillher . . .)

Flat on his back, staring up at girl and moon, he says, "I didn't mean to make you angry."  Her hands on his shoulders, knees on his hips.  So huge next to him.  Bloody-sharp.  Nothing of Lothlorien or Morder.  She is, after all, only human, and terrible.  "You are lovely, though."

The dead thing hangs in her teeth.  She spits it, down onto his shoulder, and bends.  Kisses him, very carefully.  He tastes blood on her, but water too.  She might only be as old as one of his tweenage cousins; even close-up, she has no lines in her face.

So very huge around him.

She pulls back.  Looms over him and smirks a little.  "You taste interesting, meat.  Pretty."  She's even more enormous when she stands.  Frodo wonders whether he and Sam together could take her down.  "Watch your step out there.  Worse monsters than most in this country."

She's not silent, but she's deliberately quiet as she goes.  Soft twig-snaps that fade more quickly than he'd like.  This country swallows sound.

Frodo goes back to his blanket and curls into it.  In the dark, he can't see the dead thing properly, but he holds it for a while anyway.  Then he tucks it in his pocket and tries to sleep.  In the round of his skull, the Ring whispers.



jane
x-men
fandom whore