A/N: These are in no particular chronological order.

When Aragorn Needed Him

Arnor, summer, Third Age 2981


"I was wondering when you'd decide to wander in here."

"There was a lot to do first."

"Always is."

He sat for a while, thinking about the high ridge, and the bodies they had carried back down it, while Elrohir did what Elrohir did.

"This thing is a mess."

"Yeah… I'd have done it myself and saved you the trouble, but it's in the wrong hand."

"Hmm. Your finger's busted, too."

"Yeah, I figured."

"What'd you do, try to stop it with your bare hand?"

"Sort of."

"That doesn't really work, you know."

"I'll try to remember that."

"Sit tight, I have to run next door for the stuff." His brother added over his shoulder on the way out, "When'd you get a tetanus, last, you remember?"

"Umm…"

Elrohir was back in a few minutes and set his supplies on the table.

"Which is which?"

"That one's the lidocaine."

Aragorn unbuttoned his own shirt one-handed and tugged it down off his shoulder and stuck his deltoid with the tetanus toxoid, craning his neck to see. Elrohir waited until he was finished and then started at his cloven hand with the anesthetic.

When it was numb Aragorn tipped his head back against the chair and when he woke the hand was sutured, back and palm, his forefinger and thumb no longer looking as if you could crack them off like a broken tree branch.

Elrohir dressed it and splinted the fingers and left again and came back with six tablets—four painkiller and two antibiotic—which he set on the table with a canteen and a broke-off piece of waybread and three crabapples wrinkled around the stems.

"Rolling out the banquet, I see."

"I've got a protein bolus, if you'd rather."

"Thanks. This is fine."

Eleven of them. One little Padron who wasn't supposed to be here. He had followed them from the garrison and by the time he slipped up and was discovered they were too far out to ship him back. Said he was eighteen but Aragorn suspected he'd stretched it by two or three years.

They wouldn't even ship him home to his mother. There wasn't a mother in the world he would let look upon a body that ruined.

Elrohir said, back at his journal and not looking up, "Why don't you crash here tonight."

"Yup."