MERCENARY
Whenever a theory appears to you as the only possible one, take this as a sign that you have neither understood the theory nor the problem which it was intended to solve.
Sunlight, bright and golden, threw fragmented shadows in front of her closed eyelids. Shadows shifted and pulsed. She could hear laughter in the periphery of her consciousness. Warmth suffused her entire being.
Home. She was home.
The smell of cigarette smoke and apricots beckoned her to open her eyes. How long had she tried to replicate that particular smell? She'd even taken to smoking, just so she could feel the peace of home once more.
Mum, she called out. Mum, look! I'm home! You're alive again! Mum, I missed you. So much. I don't want to wake up.
She felt warm palms on her cheeks and soft breath that tickled her eyelashes.
Elle, be brave. Elle, be strong. You can't stay here, sweetling. Papa loves you. Mummy loves you.
She felt a gentle kiss on her scrunched up brow. She didn't want to leave. Bad things happened once she left. She knew that. She had to stay.
Take her, Jen. Love her. She's all that's good in the world. She's all that's left. Please. Run. Don't look back. Tell her we love her.
Elle woke to pain. Her head throbbed with the might of a hundred devils and the pain caused waves of nausea to ripple through her cramping belly. Oh God, she thought to herself, what the fuck's happened?
She was wet.
Was it raining?
She could smell metal in the air and knew she was bleeding. She'd smelt it a hundred times before and yet, this time it made her feel faint. The scent was thick. Viscous.
She rolled over retched. Gorge had risen swiftly to her mouth and the cramps had forced her last meal out of her body. She felt sick to bones and completely bewildered.
What had happened last night?
What was happening?
The light itself was dull and hazy and though her eyes adjusted to the sudden illumination, Elle felt a strange dizziness start at the back of her skull. Cranium. Occipital.
She tried to drag her body to safety, crawling on elbows and knees in the mud.
Everything faded to black.
The next time she awoke, she heard voices. Soft whispers and loud cries. An argument? The voices all blurred into the mire of her half-conscious mind. There were people around her. She could feel them moving. She could hear them breathing. Talking. Why were they not helping?
Help, she cried out. Help. Please. I can't move. Help.
Not a word came out of her mouth.
Air. She needed air.
She felt her sternum burn with the effort of inhalation. She couldn't. She couldn't.
The hardness of the naked ground on her back had been replaced by soft bedding. Metal creaked as she thrashed out, arms and legs kicking out in the last attempt at survival. Her bloody fingers tore at her neck to sate the burn.
Help!
Gentle hands held her down and once more darkness took her.
Elle wondered if she was dreaming again.
Or worse, if she was dead.
There was no other explanation. She'd never been this comfortable in her life. Not since, well, not since she'd left her country-side home and her parents with it.
A thick comforter was tucked all around her body and the warmth of its embrace left her wanting to bury herself deeper and hibernate. There was no one waiting for her on the other side, she knew. If this was what death entailed, she'd have taken the plunge a long time ago.
What had happened? Where was she? The last thing she could remember was looking at herself in the mirror at Cornucopia and wondering why Mr. Gee had given strange looking travel clothing to wear.
Worry about her past and future encroached upon her temporary happiness before a startling discovery made the joy permanent.
She could smell bacon!
Her eyes opened to beautiful, golden light. It streamed in through quaint looking wooden windows. They were painted green and were round! Round windows and golden light and bacon.
That confirms it, Elle thought to herself. I really am dead.
She drew herself up on the bed, which on sight seemed very small. She was hardly 5'7 and yet she felt like she dwarfed this tiny cot. Looking around she realised that the cot was just the right size. Not for Elle herself, but for the rest of the room. Small tables and smaller chairs and a tiny, little vase adorned the remarkably circular room.
Death was funny. She liked it.
Elle felt no pain. Instead, she felt as if the warmth from the sunlight had seeped deep into her bones, waking in her a vigour that she could hardly deny. She wanted to run and laugh and shake the hands of all the baristas at her local coffee shop.
Hoping out of bed, she decided to investigate some more. She was a giant in the new world! The ceiling was just high enough for her to stand upright without injuring herself. The view out of the window was gorgeous. Lush green meadows rolled over hills as far as the eye could see, broken only by a small, clear-water stream. So much greenery. She felt a twinge of pain deep in her chest. It had been more than a decade since she'd seen so much green.
Ellie marveled at this, feeling strangely like Alice. Had she eaten any forbidden biscuits? Drank any bubbly potions?
Not to her recollection, which admittedly was rather suspect at the moment.
So caught up in her own musings was Elle, that she almost failed to notice what looked like a miniature person, staring up at her in faint alarm with a tea tray balanced between his hip and the door.
She stopped. Blinked. And stared right back.
'Hello, Mister! Am I dead then?' she asked of the mini-man.
Mini-man stared some more before clearing his throat. He seemed to be choking on something. Elle wondered if she ought to do something about it.
'Dead?' he said, eyes wide, 'Not at all. Well, to be quite honest, you nearly did die but you're not dead. Not any more, at any rate.' He stopped mid-rant before peering closely at her face. '
'Why? Do you feel a bout of death coming on, Miss Young?'
Elle was confused.
'You know my name.' She stated, feeling a bit miffed.
'Why, yes of-course. One does not allow a stranger into their house without enquiring about their name. That would be a wildly stupid idea, wouldn't you agree?' he asked her.
'Yes. I suppose so. Yes. I'm only annoyed because you know my name Mr. Man and I don't know yours!'
'Man?' He seemed shocked. 'I'm no man! I'm a hobbit. Of the shire! Where you are!' The hobbit seemed scandalised. 'Miss Ellen, are you sure you're feeling quite alright?'
Elle pursed her lips. A hobbit? What was a hobbit? Which shire was he talking about? The 'Hobbit' seemed to be oblivious to her bewilderment for he hustled her back to the bedroom before pushing a glass of water into her hand.
'Who told you my name, Mister Hobbit?'
'You may called me Bilbo, my dear, or Mister Baggins. None of that Mister Hobbit rot, if you please. Why, if I weren't the only one in the room apart from you, I'd be quite perplexed as to which Hobbit you're talking to.'
Elle, who was growing more annoyed by the minute made an unhappy grumbly noise that drew a sigh from the Hobbit.
'Gandalf brought you here. Said you were a dear old friend of his. Said he found you passed out amongst Farmer Maggot's turnips. He didn't want to risk the good farmer's wrath and so here he brought you. To my Smial'
'Smial, Miss Young. My Hobbit Hole.' he said in response to the blank look on her face. 'Now, my dear. Gandalf didn't tell me anything about how you came to be there, so I was hoping that you would'
An awkward silence followed his question.
'What's a Gandalf?'
'Oh, dear'
Two pots of tea later, they'd decided that Elle was an unfortunate victim of memory loss.
She'd obviously been conked on the head a few times, Bilbo mused. Poor girl. She didn't seem very smart, he thought, though he could only barely tell, what with severe memory loss and all.
However, Elle was sure in her speech and courteous in behavior. Her dialect was strange to Bilbo but that didn't worry him unduly- he had hardly stirred past Bagshot Row in his fifty years of living and couldn't claim to know all of Middle Earth's tongues.
She had a big smile, he noticed, one that spanned her entire face and lit up her countenance like merry hearth-fire. She smiled a lot and somehow that made him want to smile back.
Bilbo wasn't what one would call a joyful sort. He was respectable and held his upper lip firmly in place. Smiling too much gave folk the impression that he wanted to start up a friendly conversation, which he rarely did, and worse, it made people feel the need to bring pies into his Hobbit Hole.
Mr. Bilbo Baggins liked his privacy and no amount of pie would convince him otherwise.
No. Only suspiciously persistent old men seemed to be able to drag him out of his bubble of comfort. Well, up until that very day.
Miss Elle Young was a happy stranger and Bilbo couldn't help but like her. Impeccable manners and a sunny disposition? He found it hard to dislike the girl. And worse? Miss Young was unconcerned. She sat there, all bent over, in his cushy wing chair with a small teacup cradled between her hands, utterly unconcerned.
Sure, she gave him the impression that her head was filled with cloud-fluff but there was no reason one had to be as sharp as a Hobbit. No, no reason at all.
Bilbo was swiftly reconsidering his previous plans to pack her a hearty supper and send her on her merry way once she was healthy again.
He'd cared for her while she was unconscious. Her finely made clothing was wet and muddy and her hair fell to mid-back in a tangled mess. He'd tried to clean her up as best he could but he had been incredibly uncomfortable combing through a woman's hair, conscious or otherwise. He'd given it up as a bad job, half done. He had tried to pluck out the odd leaf and bramble and that, he deemed, had been enough.
Yes, he decided. No reason why he couldn't allow her to intrude for a few more days. Gandalf had promised to come back soon and promised to take the tiny woman-child back with him. A few days wouldn't hurt anyone, Bilbo thought to himself.
No, a few days with company wasn't the end of the world at all!
Elle knew Bilbo was watching her. She'd felt it enough number of times to know when someone was watching you, judging you. She wondered if she'd pass his test.
She'd learnt early on in life that every single person had a test. A test they'd employ to find if you were worth their time. Most would pass judgment based on appearances while some would actually bother to ask questions. However, a small percentage of people, a very small percentage, would observe, would listen to the answers and then pass judgment.
It pleased her, for some unknown reason, that Bilbo was one amongst the latter group.
He'd held up a lively conversation all whilst quietly making mental notes. She could see it in the way his gaze moved, oscillating between her eyes.
He spoke about books and the tales within them- tales that had fuelled his childhood love for adventure, tales that had made him weep like a besotted maiden, tales that made him close his windows and hide amid his blankets under the bed. He regaled Elle and Elle soaked it all up. She dissected his words and tried to build a more complete picture of Middle Earth or Arda as it was called. She'd learned about their God and their angels and filed away the knowledge for future use. She's learned about Hobbitish customs and Elvish lore. Dwarrow warriors and Dúnedain riders.
She was still reeling but hard won training had given her a legendary poker face.
She had to pull together all threads of her mind and hold it within her tight grasp.
For there were moments, odd moments, where Elle had the distinct feeling Bilbo was speaking a foreign language. The way his lips moved just didn't sit right with her. He wasn't speaking English and to her discomfort, neither was she.
Elle didn't know what to make of this discovery. She knew a handful of foreign languages - German, French, Spanish and she knew she wasn't speaking in any of them.
"Sprichst du Deutsch?" she had asked him, mid conversation. "Sprechen Sie Deutsch?"
Bilbo had blinked at her in surprise before continuing to talk about gardening. He clearly thought she had experienced a momentary lapse in mental acuity and had kindly overlooked it.
Bilbo was harmless, she had realised. A bit slow, perhaps, but harmless. He hadn't questioned her strange accent nor had he questioned the circumstance of her appearance in this Middle Earth. He was perceptive but not too perceptive. Harmless.
She needed friends in this strange world and she was determined to have Bilbo.
After all, one didn't always have to be simple to befriend a simple person.
She sipped her cooling tea and smiled happily at her new friend.
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