Hurricane Jane: Plain Jane Two
In which our heroine (well let's be honest, anti-heroine) is thrown back to her favourite imaginary place.
PROLOGUE
Ah pain. There's the sweet torturous pain of being in love with someone and then there's the torturous pain that comes from being stabbed in the stomach. She had forgotten just quite how sore it was, just quite how lightheaded it made her. She tried to concentrate and sit up, but someone pushed her down.
"Calm yourself," said a voice, from very far away.
There was something she was supposed to remember. Was she in France? It was a foreign language but it wasn't French. Maybe Danish. You don't know Danish, Jane Thomas, she told herself.
Westron! Her eyes flew open. It had worked! It had worked! She looked down, and saw a lot of blood.
Jane fainted.
She drifted in and out of sleep, drowsy and uncomfortable, always trying to sleep on her side but the pain in her stomach stopping her. Sometimes it felt as if a sharp blade was trapped underneath her skin and was poking her. She felt hot, very hot; feverish. But it felt, slowly, like it was lessening.
She thought of Boromir. Was any man worth this? I mean, really? Was he even alive, she wondered? Was it possible to divert the course of history even if that history was a fiction?
She was thirsty. Hugely thirsty. Whatever elves were looking after her, they could have given her a drink, she thought. Her hands grasped the edge of her bed and the solidness gave her strength and she pushed herself up. Her head swam and her eyesight was patchy, great blobs of black floated in front of her and she sank her head between her knees. Willing herself not to throw up, she pushed herself to stand and on her shaking legs flopped towards the window.
The leafy surroundings she expected to see weren't there. Where were the tall trees of Lothlorien? She wasn't in a talan. Perhaps she was in Rivendell, that was a mixture of trees and stone – that would explain the stone. It was misty outside, but she could see she was high up, perhaps in the clouds, in a strange city she had never seen before. It was grey, almost white, and entirely made of stone, like granite, and it didn't look like anywhere she had seen in Middle Earth before.
It reminded her of somewhere, though. She squinted and looked through the clouds, and saw the flat plain stretch towards a black and dark mountain. It didn't look like a mountain though, there was fire coming out of it…
She looked down. Her stomach was bandaged, tender but seemed to be healing. The door opened and a woman dressed very similar to a nun stepped through, carrying some glass vials.
Jane suddenly realized she wasn't with the elves, at all. She was in Gondor.
"Oh for fuck's sake, Fan Fiction!" she cursed.
"Ahem," said the healer. Jane looked into her face; cold blue eyes were staring back at her. "Now that you're lucid and moving about, Lord Denethor would like to see you."
Jane gulped; the thought of coming face to face with Boromir's terrifying father was horrific. He was known to be paranoid, xenophobic, slightly mad and entirely unreasonable. Her hand went to her throat.
Her necklace was gone.
This was not good.
NB Clearly Fanfiction does not like the story of how it has been tricked and made my story go all goopy and techno jargon. I'm coming to Caster Sugar Land to beat you up! Should be fixed now.
If that made no sense to you, never mind. Perhaps you should read Plain Jane in Thirteen Chapters. Or just accept that life is weird.
Anyway, short and sweet, let me know what you think!