Yes, after fourteen years I have finally succumbed and started a "Girl (well, woman) Falls Into Middle Earth" fic. I'm attempting to actually make it realistic, as I have read some utterly fantastic realistic GiME fics. The woman in question, Lorna, is from my own books, the first of which is up on my profile on AO3.
I have noticed that most of the GiME's have prior knowledge of Tolkien canon. Lorna, by and large, does not. She read The Hobbit as a child, but that was twenty-five years and a great many drugs ago, so to begin with, she has absolutely no idea just what the hell is going on.
If this was the afterlife, it bloody sucked.
The first, and definitely most pressing thing that Lorna was aware of was pain. A lot of it. Which made sense, really; her last memory was of flying head-first through the windscreen of her van. That alone suggested that this was not, in fact, the afterlife – she'd done some right nasty things in her thirty-three years on Earth, but she was pretty sure none of it was bad enough to get her sent to hell.
In any event, this didn't feel like any hell she'd ever heard tell of. It smelled like a forest – damp earth, leaf mold, with an undercurrent of dying grass. The ground beneath her was hard, but far too uneven to be asphalt. There couldn't be any people around, either, for her head was mercifully quiet for the first time in months.
Opening her eyes seemed like a terrible idea, but she'd have to do it sooner or later, so it was best to get it over with. Her head hurt so much already that it wasn't like a little more pain would make much difference. Or so she thought.
"Son've a bitch," she muttered, turning her head and shielding her eyes. Though the light was quite dim, it still threatened to blind her, and sent a stab of white-hot agony straight through her brain. There was dampness at her temple, and when she touched it, her fingers came away smeared with red. Blood. Awesome.
Her beleaguered brain piped up long enough to remind her that she had not been alone in the van – her nameless quasi-friend had in all probability gone through the windshield with her, so he ought to be around here somewhere. Wherever the hell 'here' even was. If this was somehow her dying hallucination, her mind could at least have coughed up something worth seeing.
She sat up, and very nearly threw up. Lorna was no stranger to pain, but this was goddamn bloody ridiculous. If she hadn't broken at least one rib, she'd be right surprised, and there was something badly wrong with her left arm – dislocated, she realized. Well, she knew how to fix that, even if it wasn't going to be any fun. Unfortunately, she was left-handed, which was going to leave her at a severe disadvantage against…well, whatever. Everything.
Somehow she made it to her feet, bracing her hand against the nearest tree – the bark felt unpleasantly slimy – and shoved. Predictably, it hurt like a bastard, and she swore as only the Irish could. Dizziness gripped her, and she had to lean against the tree or risk falling over.
"You out there, mate?" she called, trying to blink the blurriness from her eyes. She didn't know if she wanted him to answer her or not – if he did, it would mean she wasn't alone, but it would also confirm the reality of everything around her.
No answer came, from anything or anyone. Brilliant. Did she stay, or did she go? In her not inconsiderable experience with hallucinations, they tended to fall apart if you subjected them to close examination. Moving would hurt, but if she could spot the inconsistencies, she might snap out of it.
Her first few steps were utter agony, and her head swum so badly that she almost fell to her knees. There was nothing for it but to grit her teeth and keep going, swearing all the while – Irish really was a language practically built for creative cursing, and she kept up a steady litany as she tried to find anything that might resemble a path.
Admittedly, Lorna didn't have much experience with forests – it wasn't like Ireland had many anymore – but this one was creepy. For one thing, it had to be very old, going by the size of the trees, most of which appeared to be dying. It was also, save for wind in the high treetops, almost completely silent, without so much as a single bird calling. She half expected a pack of zombies to come lurching out of the undergrowth.
Her head was still bleeding, but she had nothing save her flannel shirt to use as a bandage, and she wasn't about to tear it up. The longer she walked, though, the less aware she became of all her myriad hurts; simple, repetitive, mindless movement was a wonderful way to block out pain (and most everything else). It was still there, but you didn't care about it quite so much.
Come on, self, she thought, wake up. She didn't know how long she'd been walking, but darkness was fast descending, and still her hallucination (if that was even what it was), showed no sign of fracturing. Though she had neither seen nor heard any sign of life since she arrived, she still didn't want to be stuck here after dark. Oh, she had a lighter, but doubted any of this wood would make a very good fire.
A single ray of light pierced the canopy, a red-gold ray of sunset. She looked up, trying to find a hole in the leaves – and damn near screamed.
The biggest fucking spiderweb she'd ever seen in her life stretched overhead. It was hooked between five separate trees, like some kind of massive parody of a trampoline. Some of the strands had to be as big around as her leg, pale and horrifying.
There was not much in the world that really, truly freaked Lorna out. Unfortunately, spiders were at the top of that last – she'd watched a documentary one, while living with her sister, about some spider in Australia that was so big it ate birds. The pictures of their webs had nothing at all on this thing, and she was not too proud to admit that she was two seconds away from pissing herself. She'd had some bad, bad trips over the years, but she did not want to hang around and give this one time to get worse. She didn't care if she had busted ribs and a cracked skull – she was out of here, right bloody now.
To her utter horror, something skittered in the trees behind her – something that sounded very, very big. She was not about to turn around to find out what, especially since she could already guess. She didn't care if this was a dying dream or some kind of forced drug trip – she was not going to die by spider bite, thank you so very much. Adrenaline shoved all her pain to the back of her mind, and she knew, dimly, that her body would exact vengeance for it later, but right now she did not remotely care. She was willing to yarf up one of her kidneys, if it meant she could survive this.
"Daro!"
The voice was so unexpected that Lorna tripped, but managed to right herself before she could go crashing to the ground. "Get out've here!" she cried, flailing with her good arm.
"Daro!"
"Oh, daro yourself," she panted, scrambling as best she could over a massive tree-root. She couldn't recognize the language, and she still couldn't see the speaker, but if they wanted to get eaten by a damn giant spider, that was none of her concern. Or at least, she thought it wasn't, until she almost ran eye-first into the tip of an arrow.
"Jesus bloody Christ!" she yelped, staggering backward and finally losing her footing. All the pain she'd held more or less at bay came surging to the forefront again, leaving her unable to do anything but swear as she tried to wipe the mingled sweat and blood from her eyes.
There was in fact a person on the other end of the arrow – tall (but then, everyone was tall compared to Lorna), vaguely androgynous, and rather improbably attractive for a nutter with a bow. He or she looked two seconds away from shooting her in the head and having done with it, which Lorna could not, on the whole, say she would really mind at this point.
The person didn't speak, but evidently they had a lot of friends who were more than willing to start yelling. There was a strange twanging sound, and it took her a minute to work out that it had to be dozens of bow strings. Maybe they wouldn't all get eaten after all.
"Man le carel sí?" the person asked, glaring down at her. What language was that? It sounded Welsh, which was not a language Lorna knew well at all. While it was technically Gaelic, it was very different from Irish or Scots Gaelic. When she'd been in gaol, one of the other prisoners spoke Welsh, but prison had been years ago now. She wracked her brain for anything useful.
"Ble ydw i?" she asked. Where am I?
A blank stare met her question – apparently not Welsh after all. "Do you speak English? Irish?" Apparently a nope on those as well.
He (and she was pretty sure it was a he) was looking somewhat agitated, as well as disapproving. "Pedich i lam edhellen?"
She shrugged, and winced when pain lanced through her shoulder. "I got nothing." It occurred to her briefly that he might just be unable to understand her, which even a lot of Irish people had trouble with, but no – this communication barrier was too complete for that.
Lorna struggled to her feet, wincing. God knew she was no threat to anyone or anything right now, whether she needed to be or not. Her captor must have realized that, for he lowered his bow. Who in bloody hell carried a bow?
Someone who lives in a forest full of giant spiders, she thought.
He pointed at her head, which was still bleeding sluggishly, and she shrugged, having no way at all to explain the injury. The action pulled something in her left shoulder, and she winced again, rubbing it.
"I'm no danger to you," she sighed. "I wish to bloody Christ you spoke any sensible language. Maybe I really did die, and this is some level've hell after all."
Faelon really did not know what to do. He had no idea how an Edain female – unarmed, injured, and apparently completely without supplies – had made it this far into the forest alive. He knew the Edain tended to be shorter than the Eldar, but this one was so small he had thought her a child from a distance – which was the only reason he had not shot her.
It was clear she spoke no Sindarin, but nor did she seem to comprehend any of the other tongues he tried. She was apparently attempting the same with him, but he did not recognize any of her languages, either.
The King had been very definite about what ought to be done with trespassers in his realm, but this woman was no orc, and somehow she had got herself badly wounded. Faelon was no linguistic scholar; perhaps someone within the halls would be capable of speaking with her. They needed to know why she was here, but more importantly, the needed to know if she was as alone as she appeared.
Captain Tauriel, her armor spattered with black spider blood, leapt down from the nearest tree. The Edain woman stared at her, clearly fascinated.
"She is not a child, small though she is," Faelon said. "And she speaks no tongue I can recognize. Do we take her with us?"
Tauriel looked at the woman. Her face was pinched with pain, and ashen from blood loss. If she had been bitten by a spider, she would be dead long before they reached the halls, but they had to try to get her there alive. "Well, we cannot leave her. Was she bitten?"
"At the speed she was running, I doubt it. Whatever injured her so, I do not think it was a spider."
"Come with us," Tauriel said, beckoning her to follow. "Can you walk?" She mimed two legs walking with her fingers.
The woman eyed her with obvious distrust, but after glancing back the way she had come, she nodded.
"If she cannot keep up, someone will have to carry her," Faelon said.
Tauriel appraised the Edain. Tiny and obviously in pain though she was, there was a stubbornness to her expression that suggested she would not take kindly to being picked up by anyone. "Let us hope it does not come to that."
She took the pouch of water from her belt, taking a careful drink before passing it to the woman. The message was clear: there were neither drugs nor poison in it. The woman gulped half its contents at one go, but did not drain it before handing it back.
She was a curious sort of little creature. Despite the abundant grey in her black hair, she was nowhere near old for an Edain, though she was well past childhood. She seemed near as weathered as a Ranger; perhaps she was some descendant of the Dúnedain, though her complexion, even after having lost what looked to be a great amount of blood, was rather darker than most of that people, and her eyes were not grey, but a startlingly vivid green.
"Come along," Tauriel said, as her company formed a line behind her. "Our walk will be long." They had little in the way of food, but they would have to try to feed her, when it was safe to rest. That, unfortunately, would not be for some while. At least they were less than a day's march from the halls – neither Tauriel nor anyone in her company had ever tried to heal an Edain, and might well do more harm than good if they attempted it now.
The little woman gamely limped along beside her, her face grim and set. She greatly favored her right side, which suggested injury to her ribs – that needed binding, but Tauriel had no idea how tightly one could wrap a wound on an Edain without making it worse. Athelas was of no use for broken bones unless they were properly set first, though when they paused to rest, she could at least attend to the woman's head. Provided she remained conscious that long.
Lorna had long passed the point of mere pain, and entered a sort of grey half-consciousness that allowed her feet to move without any effort from her brain. She did not want to pass out around these people, no matter how temporarily benign they seemed. For all she knew, they were cannibals.
I think you can give up on the hallucination hypothesis now, she thought. This was too vivid, and had remained coherent for too long. Which meant she actually had, somehow, traveled somewhere when she went flying through the windshield, but that was not a thing she could examine in her current state. That could come later, assuming she didn't bleed to death first.
There was something weird about her…companions. She hesitated to call them captors, since they hadn't actually tied her up, or forced her to go with them (though she had little doubt they could have, if they'd felt the need). It wasn't just that they were all so very tall; there was something absolutely inhuman in the way that they moved. Surely that couldn't all be in her abused head. Their clothing was damned peculiar, but having taken a meandering, aimless tour of the States in the last two months, that didn't necessarily mean much. And she'd thought Dublin could be weird.
She was so out of it that she didn't stop walking until the woman beside her caught her arm – her right arm, fortunately. The fog in her mind lifted a little, which was not a good thing; it was all she could do to bite back a yelp of pain.
The woman gave her a look of compassion that might have made her hackles rise, under any other circumstances. As it was, Lorna knew how pathetic she must look right now – though it couldn't be any more pathetic than she felt.
She sat when bidden (through pantomime), watching warily as the woman produced bandages and a jar of some salve from another of the bags at her belt. No translation was needed here – she clearly wanted a look at Lorna's head. By this point, Lorna was in no condition to protest.
She hissed when the woman pressed a damp cloth to her forehead, fighting an immediate instinct to kick her away. Somehow she held still while all the blood was washed off, a process which took a good five minutes. The salve, which smelled pungently of yarrow and something else she couldn't name, stung at first, but swiftly numbed the wound and everything around it. Lorna couldn't help but breathe a sigh of relief.
"I know you can't understand a damn word I say," she said, "but thank you. Seriously. Whatever you've got in that jar, you could make a fortune off it."
The woman's expression, of course, was one of incomprehension, but she must have grasped the sentiment behind Lorna's words, because she smiled. She wrapped the length of bandage so expertly around Lorna's head that she must have had quite a bit of practice at it. When she was through, she handed Lorna her water-skin and a hunk of what looked like beef jerky.
Lorna was too damn hungry for anything like actual manners. The half of a sandwich she'd eaten before the wreck hadn't been enough even then, and for the last few hours, her stomach had been threatening to eat itself. She tore into the jerky like a dog, and gulped down the rest of the water.
It was weird, but even surrounded by so many people, her head remained quiet. Maybe her curse hadn't followed her here…if that was the case, she hoped she wouldn't be kicked out. That alone would be worth any manner of other inconvenience, like not being able to understand a damn word anyone said to her.
She was so tired she almost fell asleep sitting up, and swore when the woman helped her to her feet again. Stubborn she might be, but if this trek went on much longer, she didn't know if she'd be able to make it.
That the Edain was still conscious, let alone walking on her own, was rather surprising. Perhaps she really was some scion of the Dúnedain, for all she did not look it. True, she looked ready to collapse with every step, but somehow she still had not actually done it. Tauriel could not understand her speech, but cursing was recognizable no matter what the language, and she had kept up a running litany for the last five miles. Whatever her native tongue, it was quite beautiful, a sonorous rise and fall that was almost like music.
The King would want to see her before she was sent to the healing wards, provided she did not pass out before they reached the gates. Tauriel was uncertain just how wise that was, but it was not an argument worth having (and losing). The Edain would be incomprehensible no matter what her state of health, but with her current concussion, it would only be worse. Her eyes were glassy, her pupils of uneven size – quite honestly, Tauriel wasn't certain how she was even alive.
Those dazed eyes widened when they saw the gates, and she said two words: "Holy shit." Tauriel did not know what they meant, but there was wonder in her tone.
"Home," Tauriel said, giving her an encouraging smile. "Come. You must meet our King, and then you can rest."
Up next: Lorna meets Thranduil. It does not go well.
"Man le carel sí?" = "What are you doing here?"
"Pedich i lam edhellen?" = "Do you speak Elvish?"