by Ashura
disclaimer: Middle-earth and all its residents belong to the estate of J.R.R. Tolkien, and I would never dream of claiming them. Maybe one shouldn't fanfic LotR, someting's got to be sacred but on the other hand, this is almost like going back to my roots...how many notebooks full of middle-earth scribblings did I fill up as a kid...?
dedication: to everyone who, like me, grew up battling orcs in their backyard and building Lothlorien in a treehouse.
Prologue:
"See, Aragorn is kind of like Jesus," a young brunette woman was explaining, her voice warm with passion for her subject. "He's the heir of the Great King, and he's supposed to be a healer, prophesied to save the world from dark days."
"Ha. If anybody's like Jesus in this story it's Frodo," came a low male voice from the back corner of the classroom. "He's the one who ends up sacrificing everything to save the world—he doesn't get killed, but he does give his life, if you think about it. He was never the same after."
"But he's not...well, /great/," the first responded, stammering. "I mean, he does great things, but he's really just a hobbit thrust into a bad situation."
"Sounds like he fits the bill even more, to me," the young man said, a note in his voice of satisfied finality.
"Professor Walden!" the girl called, starting to sound desperate. "What do you think?"
"I think that's as far as we need to take that topic today." Walden was small, slender, dignified in the way that only literature professors can ever really pull off, and even then only after they reach middle-age, with wise green eyes and short red hair that was beginning at last to show streaks of silver. "But you're both welcome to explore it as much as you like in the freewrites that are due on Thursday. Four pages—and that's at the beginning of class, not slipped under my door at sunset with an apology and a cookie," she added, with a pointed look to the boy in the back corner.
She slipped out the door while her students were still gathering their things—they were used to it, every class she'd had for years had been used to it. Walden's Disappearing Act, they called it, and especially during the Tolkien unit, made a good many jokes about her possible possession of a golden ring of invisibility.
It had taken a long time for her to really become comfortable with the jokes, but then, she knew things that they didn't, and some of it was not necessarily about the metaphysical poets or the adventures of Beowulf.
Up the stairs—the elevator was slow, when it bothered to work at all—and down the hall, past the writing centre and the administrators' offices, into the Catacombs she went. They weren't really catacombs, especially as they were on the third floor, but a university English department can warp one's brain as well as one's sense of humour, and it had been so named for as long as she could remember. The walls were a chaotic mix of utility and whimsy—playbills for shows from London that nobody in the department was old enough to have actually seen, clippings from newspapers and scatterings of poetry or old cartoons hung between advisor sign-up sheets and class schedules.
Her office was 12-B, and she had lived there now for a very long time. Not /lived/ there in the sense that she slept or ate there, but rather than she poured her heart into it until it became her home. Her interest in all things Tolkien was obvious even before entering: the word "coarya" in Elvish script as one went in the door, and "lerya" on the other side as one came out. [1] A large map of Middle-Earth dominated one wall, though the edges were curling with age. She was an artist as well, and her work was everywhere—members of the Fellowship, singly or together, and not infrequently her own self, though much younger, was shown with them. She had been, apparently, a pretty girl, fresh-faced but sad-eyed, long red hair either hanging loose or knotted into a haphazard tail at the nape of her neck.
"Amber?" The voice was accompanied by a quick, polite knock on the open door, and she turned. "I know you just got out of class, so you probably haven't gotten the message yet. The meeting's been cancelled, Roger slipped on the stairs. Looks like he broke an ankle."
"That's too bad. About his leg, I mean, not the meeting." She smiled. Charles Norland, whose specialty was Shakespeare, was a stout old man who still wore his hair long and waving wildly about his head. They had been friends for a long time.
There were still points of contention between them, and they seemed most prominent whenever he was in her office. She watched his gaze flicker around the room, resting on each of her paintings, as he always did. "Amber...when are you going to take those down?"
Her lips thinned, frowned. "I'm not going to take them down, Charles, we've been over this. I don't tell you how to decourate your office."
He pushed his dark-rimmed wire glasses further up on his nose. "No, and there's nothing wrong with a bit of artistic license, but students see this stuff. You'll have them thinking it's perfectly all right to wander around in fantasyland for their whole lives."
She raised her eyebrows, not quite able to suppress the chuckle that seemed determined to escape. "They're /English/ majors, Charles. They've already got that much figured out."
He didn't seem to think it was all that funny. "It's all fantasy," he said again.
Amber Walden let out a long, slow breath. "Of course it is," she replied. "And they are /my/ fantasies. Why shouldn't I indulge them? I'm fifty years old, and by this point I think if I want to spend my life in a fairy tale that I've earned it. Don't you?"
He shook his head, grumbling, but the good-natured grumbling of an old friend who knows he's already lost the argument. "Suit yourself. I'm off home. Don't run afoul of any goblins on your way out."
He closed the door behind him, and Amber sank wearily into her chair. Her head fell back—her posture would have earned a severe lecture from her mother, had she been younger—and stared up at the map, and the paintings, for a long and quiet while. She was tired. Absently she twisted a ring on her hand, an elabourate twist of tarnished white gold that she wore like a wedding band, though it wasn't.
"Is it time yet?" she asked the painted faces softly. "I'm getting old, and so tired. I know twenty-five years is barely a heartbeat in the lives of Elves and Dúnadain, but it is half my life gone by now."
The flat canvas faces made no answer, though her mind provided her with one. //Not yet, not yet// echoed in her head, whether it was a voice from the air or only a product of her mind.
"Soon, though," she said with a sigh. "For my heart followed you long ago, and soon, whatever the time, I will have no choice but to go after it."
She stood and gathered her things, and shrugged into her coat, and turned off the lights as she slipped out the door.
"I only hope," she whispered as she closed it behind her, "that I can still find the way."
***
[1] "coarya" = Quenya (Elvish), 'her house.' "Lerya" = Quenya, 'to be set free'