A/N: Guys! I'm doing an experiment! My good friend Levade and I have been working on a great big huge REALLY WEIRD sprawling AU project for several years now. We've started posting it on AO3 under a different pseudonym, but I'm curious to see if readers over here might be interested, too. So here's a little teaser... please let me know if you think you'd like to read more!
What Elrohir Does on Duty
Arnor, spring, Third Age 2981
Aragorn makes them drill at the butts until they can put twenty arrows a minute into a circle the size of an Uruk's face.
Elrohir makes them drill with the tourniquets until they can cut the circulation out of one another's legs in the dark.
"Well, kiddo. You ready?"
"Yup. Let's go clean that spellcasting bastard's spawn out of my country."
He is sixteen, not eighteen; Aragorn knows his mother, and would have beat him like a schoolboy and shipped him back with the supply train, except they don't have the time. He wants to be a Ranger that bad, they'll make one out of him. Or a damn good dishwasher, in any case.
"Get 'em off, pal."
"Sir?"
"Your boots, Talvard, quit lookin' at me like I'm speaking high-Elvish. I can smell your nasty wet feet all the way across the clearing. We're going to dry them out before you rot the skin off of them."
"Oh! Yes, sir."
It takes them six hours to beat down the gate and six minutes to kill every one of the Hai inside. Halbarad is hanging by his wrists in the cellar and grins at them through bloody teeth.
"Hey, fellas, we were just fixing to start some dinner, glad you could join us."
Nights later he wakes up trembling. He even knows how to have stealthy nightmares. Only Elrohir hears him.
"You alright?"
"Yeah."
"You need to talk about it?"
"Nope."
"Kay."
They don't come again, after that, whenever Elrohir sits the watch.
"Feridir, look at me, now. Hey! Follow this, okay? Just your eyes."
"No. Dammit."0
"Bud, your pupil's gone."
"Then tell someone to go find it."
"…why don't you sit tight for a minute."
He can feel them moving around and he spits and spits again and tries to rinse the grit out with a swig from his canteen and only manages to wash out a broken shard. His cheek still numb from the blow. Elrohir suddenly there says, "Sergeant, may I have a look?" and has him move his jaw in all directions and pokes around in the back of his mouth and then says, "I can yank it out for you, or you can chew on the other side for a while and see if it hardens back up."
"I ain't got too many left, doc, to be yanking them out."
"Alright. You want to take something?"
"I'll let you know."
"Let me know."
"I need… dammit. You got any tape?"
"Hang on. Elrohir!"
The ankle is a ruined pulp ground in with filth and black debris and all they have is a musty blanket spread out on a dirt floor and three measly hours head start and together with Aragorn he makes the sorriest call he's had to in a month and takes the kid's foot off above the malleolus and ligates the living hell out of what's left. They pack him in a cart and send him back to Elladan who waits seventy miles east along the Road at the base near the Bridge to clean up whatever wreckage they dispatch back to him.
"You can… speak with her? Beggin' yer pardon, Captain, I don't mean to…"
"You're not, bud, don't worry. Yeah, I can… I mean, not like this, like us sitting here looking at each other. Not from this far away, at least. More like… I know if she's sleeping, or safe, or joyful."
"…is she?"
"Joyful? All the way down to her bones."
The stars march.
"I don't envy you Elves your curse, my lord. I wouldn't want to watch my mates get old and die without me. But my Ceridwen is… lady of light, I might envy you that."
His guts are squirting around in his own hands and he wants his mother. She does not come, but Elrohir does, the next best thing, and takes them from him gently, and lowers him down into the quiet dark.
Another quick note: if you happened to have stumbled across this already on AO3 I promise I am the original author and didn't plagiarize it and I can prove it if you ask me how Nine Days at Brandywine ends :D
