Meetings 2, back by surprisingly popular demand. Oh, have I got some surprises for you lot.
Disclaimer as before: me no own nuffin 'cept Alex and the Theory of Sappy/Obsessive Fanfic Author –Space (S/OFA-space). Note to Tanglewinde: go look up seventeenth century mechanical physiology and have a look at Christopher Wren's experiments with IV infusion.
Frodo lay in the high white bed, surrounded by the gentle almond-coloured light of Rivendell. He couldn't quite be sure if the light was coming from the walls or from the air itself, and he found he didn't much care. It was pleasant just to lie there and think of nothing, when his fever's mutterings receded enough for him to think at all.
There was another little pop as empty space suddenly became Alex, dressed in a rather nice single-button olive-green wool Oleg Cassini suit. Frodo stared.
"Hi," she said, giving him a little wave. He continued to stare, and she glanced down at herself. "Oh, damn. I came straight from work. Hold on." She snapped her fingers and was suddenly wearing an 1850s nurse's uniform, complete with starched frilly cap, leg o'mutton sleeves, and floor-length apron. "Any better?"
"No...." quavered Frodo. She looked like a small and determined wedding cake.
Alex sighed and snapped her fingers again, and was wearing a long dark-grey dress with trailing sleeves, clasped with a belt of grey-green stones set in silver. Her hair uncoiled itself and fell in a torrent of white down her back. She cursed sheepishly, and the hair cut itself into a neat chin-length bob. "Sorry. It's my Mary-Sue syndrome. I keep thinking it's got itself under control."
"Right," said Frodo weakly. Alex gave him a crooked smile and sat down, the gems on her girdle glowing blue as she moved. "Why're you here?"
"I'm here to check up on you, my dear," she said. "How do you feel?"
He sighed, and her knuckles went white as she clasped her hands demurely in her lap. "All right," he said after a moment. "Look....the others are getting a bit tired of this. I mean....we have to stop every few days so that Aragorn or Sam can support my fragile shuddering frame through fits of coughing, or worse, and mop my fevered brow, and stare wearily into the dying flames of the campfire while I fall into an exhausted slumber. And frankly, I've had just about enough nursing."
Alex nodded slowly. "They've spoken to you?"
"Not in so many words. Boromir was muttering the other day about how he was damned if he'd let a wretched malingering halfling carry the One Ring when he could jolly well do it himself, and not whine all the time either."
"Is that so?" Alex said quietly. There was an edge to her voice Frodo could only just discern. She seemed to.....blur gently for a moment.
In another part of the elf-city of Imladris, a Man rolls over in his luxurious bed and mutters to himself. He is dreaming of a vast Eye of flame, burning brightly and sickly in the East. There is a dim blur by his bed that could just about be the form of a short slender woman in a grey gown, who bends over him and whispers something in another language; then she is gone.
A few moments later, the sleeper wakens, sits up slowly in an effort to still the rush of dreams in his head, and wipes sweat from his face with a sleeve. Gradually, he begins to shiver; in a few moments more he throws back the covers desperately and bolts for the privy.
Alex tilted her head at Frodo. "What's the matter?"
"Nothing," he said, lying back and rubbing at his eyes. "Must be....more tired than I thought."
She sighed and reached out, resting the back of her hand gently against his cheek. "Poor thing," she said quietly. "Hasn't Elrond done anything for you?"
Frodo turned his head against her hand, resting his brow in her cool palm, his great eyes closed. She could see the darkness of the irises beneath through the delicate skin. "He gives me something bitter to drink, and makes me breathe in steam."
Alex nodded and took out her stethoscope again, listening intently to the noises as he breathed. He coughed a little as she moved the tube; she closed her eyes and thought hard about something else until the fit passed. "All right," she said gently. "You'll be fine. I want you to have a full course of..........er......moldy bread extract, I suppose you'd call it." She rummaged through her bag again as he stared.
"A.......full course? What's that mean?"
"Nothing bad," she said, preoccupied. Jars of unlabeled substances and strange and disturbing items of hardware surfaced as she sifted through the contents of the bag. "Sod it. I'll be right back, sweetheart. Try to get some rest."
Frodo stared at her as if she was insane, which he had fair reasons for believing, and then shut his eyes again in sudden nausea as she blurred.
"Where's your glassblower?"
Lord Elrond looked up slowly. "I beg your pardon?"
"Don't mess me about, your lordship. Where is your resident glassblower? I'm sure you have one."
"Yes of course we do......who are you, miss, and what are you doing in my private library? If I may be so bold as to inquire, that is."
"Y'know," she said slowly, "you really are nothing like the Patrician. That's odd. I'd always thought you'd have at least some similarities. My card."
She held out a rectangle of slightly dog-eared white cardboard to the elflord. He took it between thumb and forefinger and looked down his not inconsiderable nose at it.
"What is all this about epidemiology?" he asked mildly. "And 'obscure medical trivia?' And 'strange but harmless fetish for beautiful sick men?'"
"My qualifications, lord. Look, can I see your damn glassblower or not?"
"This is about the Ringbearer, isn't it," said Elrond quietly. Alex went pink.
"Nnnoooo."
"Well, at least you aren't like the hordes I get in here every day squealing for Legolas. The Prince of Mirkwood, I might remind you."
"Yes, I hear he has quite a following."
"Despite the fact that his eyebrows are quite un-elven," said Elrond. "I've had to post a guard outside his room armed with the strongest soporifics I know. Then I've got the duty of sending them all back to their own world with nothing wrong except a headache. Really, if I'd known this sort of thing would happen, I'd have refused to open the city to anyone except very unattractive, very unromantic individuals. Like gnolls." He paused, savoring the thought. "Imladris overrun by gnolls. Imagine the blessed silence. No fangirls squeaking."
"Sounds very nice, but can I please see your glassblower?"
Elrond sighed and got up. "Very well. I must say, Frodo is greatly improved. Did you do something to him?"
Alex shrugged. "Nothing the people of my world wouldn't do in a heartbeat. Er, my lord, do you have any bread that's gone moldy? I need...a certain kind of mold."
Elrond paused and stared at her. "Come with me."
"But the glassblower—"
"Come with me," he said, and there was mithril in his tone. Alex gave up and followed his regally sweeping robes down a wide white corridor she hadn't seen before.
He led her into a light and airy workshop, crowded with complicated glass flasks and tubing that looked as if it might have been produced by a small and chemistry-oriented tornado. Alex grinned like a shark and lit several burners before Elrond had even finished locking the door behind them.
"This is perfect, my lord!"she grinned, crumbling herbs into a beaker. "Do I dare hope you've had the same train of thought as me?
Elrond sighed. "I dread to think what train of thought that might have been."
She grinned. "Well, there are a few. Have you been playing with chemical dyes yet?"
"No," said Elrond. "Should I be?"
"Well,"she said, "you'll find that several of the more brilliant dyes have bacteriostatic effects...................oh. Are you familiar with bacteria, my lord?"
Some time later, she rubbed at the growing knots of tension in her shoulders, watching Elrond peer through a hastily-cobbled-together sequence of crystal lenses at the things on the glass slide. "Fascinating," he muttered. "Tiny animalcules—too small to see—are behind all the diseases of our world?"
"Not all of them, my lord. In this case, those little dots we stained dark red are what's causing Frodo's illness. Looks like a streptococcus to me, but I'm really not sure. Nevertheless—this is a perfect example of an antibiotic-naive population, and I think I can help."
Elrond straightened up and stared at her. "Who are you, anyway?"
She fought the urge to say, in a bad German accent, "Just a traveler searching for purity." Instead, she gave him a weary smile and said "Just someone who wants to help. Now...have you got any thin glass tubes I could borrow? And a blowtorch?"
When Frodo opened his eyes again, she was sitting by his bed demure as ever, hands folded in her lap. "What the hell was that?"
"What was what?"
"You blurred," he said crossly. "Stop doing that."
"Sorry. Just a function of warping time and space."
"A function of who?" said Frodo, looking at her with wide, sky-colored, helpless eyes. She shivered.
"Suffice it to say that I, and my fellow obsessives, have found a way to move around in space and time. It's because of the theory of S-OFA-space."
"Sofa space?" inquired Frodo, pulling the covers tighter around him. This one was mental.
"Sappy Obsessive Fanfic Author." She gave him a wry smile. "We transcend the laws of physics. That's how so many of your devoted fans make their way to Middle-Earth, develop long flowing hair of interesting colours, and show up in convenient points in your narrative. I bet you were wondering how Legolas managed to get so many of his women here without anyone letting them through the gates."
"I was curious," said Frodo weakly, and found himself shaken with another fit of coughing. The slightly deranged light in Alex's yellow eyes died away, and she sighed.
"Poor thing. You'll be happy to know Elrond and I are working together on your case," she said, brushing his hair gently out of his face. "And I've improved my injection technique."
Frodo swallowed painfully. "Do I want to know?"
"Probably not." Alex extracted a slim wooden case from her bag. Inside, on a bed of grey velvet, lay a glass tube elongated and stretched at one end to form a long, delicate crystal point. It glittered.
"You're not going to......."
"I'm afraid so. But this one won't hurt nearly so much," she said, lifting the thing out of its box. Inside the crystal cylinder was set a thin metal rod with a disc at one end, which seemed to slide in and out of the tube. She fished out another of the little bottles sealed with wax, and washed the top of it with dwarf spirits before passing the tip of the needlepoint through a flame and piercing the wax seal. Frodo, despite himself, watched in fascinated horror as she drew up the clear fluid from the bottle into the crystal tube. She squinted at the tip. "Roll over."
Despite the indignity, Frodo couldn't help noticing that she was right; the crystal needle hardly hurt at all compared to the hollow thorn she had used before. She let him lie back and pulled the covers up over him gently, setting the needle back into its case. "There......I'm sorry, sweetheart, but it's necessary."
Frodo sighed, shivering a little in the warm air of the room. "Alex?"
"Yes?" She was mixing up herbs in a little bowl—something that smelled sharp and sweet.
"Alex....if it's not you who's making me ill......who is it?"
"That I aim to find out, Frodo." She poured hot water over the herbs, stirring, eyes downcast. "I expect it's terribly dramatic."
"It always is," he said petulantly. "I wish the Ring had never come to me."
She set a small steaming cup on the table by his bed. "Oh, Frodo......."
"Well.....it's true. I wish I'd stayed in the Shire and been nice and boring and........and respectable." His voice shook a little; he was weakened enough to cry easily, although he didn't want to cry in front of her.
She sighed and bent over and took him in her arms. "I know, Frodo. I know.....it isn't fair, any of it. You've carried a burden far too heavy for far too long."
He lay against her, coughing a little. "I just want to go home."
"You will. In time." She held him gently, rubbing his back. "Everything will be all right."
He muttered something into her shoulder as the coughing increased, and she hissed in sympathy and held him tight as the spasm shook him. Eventually it eased, and she let him lie back against the pillows, gasping, face greyish-white.
"Can you try to drink a little of this?" she asked softly. He took the cup in shaking fingers, and she steadied his hands with hers. The mixture tasted sweet and sharp at once, with a hint of smoke in it, but it dulled some of the pain in his throat and chest. Slowly, he finished the cup, and she gave him a sweet, tired smile. "Try and sleep," she told him.
"Don't go," he croaked, clinging to her hand.
"I wouldn't dream of it," she assured him softly. "You'll be safe with me."
Elrond peered in some little time later, and smiled a little at the sight of the stranger curled in a chair designed for someone six inches taller than her, clasping the Ringbearer's narrow hand in hers. He had meant to ask her if she knew anything about Boromir's sudden and acute attack of gastrointestinal unhappiness, but decided it could wait. He sauntered off back to his workroom, and the interesting theories she had hinted at. Something about chemical dyes?
Peace fell over Imladris with the dusk, except for in one room, where a certain Man was trying very hard not to cry for his mommy.