#male elves usually have long hair but the show keeps pushing fort short

[diwyllian]

gotta love how theres so many articles about how this new lotr show has female orcs!!! equality!! but still forces gendered looks on dwarfs and elves urdgjhgfdfgh

[reality-warp]

Point That Thing Somewhere Else: Part 1

Part 1 | Part 2 | Bonus

A/N: In answer to the very popular AU question in my inbox: what would it have been like if Eleanor had woken 65-ish years earlier in The Hobbit timeline, and joined the Company of Thorin Oakenshield instead of the Fellowship? Well...

“Point that thing somewhere else!”

Those had been my first words to the elven man who’d just saved my life. I’d meant them to come out with at least some dignity, maybe even a glimmer of polite gratitude. He had, after all, just rescued me from an economy sized arachnid trying to sink toxic fangs the size of kitchen knives into my neck.

But no.

Instead, they’d sprung from me in a full blown, slightly hysterical shout right into his startlingly handsome face. Not the best response to being saved by a tall, handsome blond stranger armed with a bow and a small battalion of lethal looking wood elves. But considering that he was now pointing a nocked arrow directly at my face, I felt just a little bit justified in my rudeness.

The impossibly good looking elf just stared at me as if I’d just slapped him across his pronounced cheekbones.

“What?” he whispered, a dangerous look leaking into his eyes.

Adrenaline wasn’t my friend in this situation. I was still weak at the knees, my hunting knife clenched so tight in my hand I could feel my arms shaking like leaves. I had to take a deep steadying breath before I was sure my voice would shake to.

“I said, point that thing somewhere else, please,” I repeated, adding the belated touch of politeness, but still refusing to break eye contact with him. He had the iciest pair of grey-blue eyes I’d ever seen, sharper even than Aragorn’s. Though I guessed—at barely sixteen—Aragorn hadn’t yet seen enough of life’s cruel beauty outside Imladris to develop that frozen expression.

This elf—whoever he was—had.

Mildly stunned as he was by my verbal slap in the face, there was still a cold intensity to those eyes that left me with the feeling that I’d just poked an angry wolf with a stick.

“Lass!” Balin’s panicked voice suddenly boomed through the trees, breaking my unsettlingly intense staring contest with the blond man. I barely resisted a sigh of relief.

“I’m fine! I’m not hurt,” I called back over my shoulder, not taking my eyes off my saviour-come-captor and the arrow still only a hand span from my nose. “Not yet anyway,” I added in a whisper.

The blond elf obviously heard me, because I saw his shoulders tense. I flinched on instinct, my eyes instantly going to the arrow, but the second he saw my alarm he quickly lowered his bow. I was about to let out a breath of relief, but that reflex was immediately arrested in favour of alarm when he reached out to me with a gloved hand.

I froze.

From the dark expression on his face (and maybe the residual adrenaline) I honestly thought he was going to wrap his long fingers about my neck. But instead, he reached past my face, and brusquely pushed back my tangled brown hair in a gesture that—while not exactly gentlemanly—was surprisingly gentle.

His hard expression went slack. I wasn’t sure anyone else, Elves or Dwarves would have noticed the minute change in expression, even if they were in eyeshot. But I was close enough to see my captor’s intense blue eyes widen slightly, and his lips part in surprise.

It took me an embarrassingly long moment to realise what he was looking at.

My ears. My pointed ears.

Ears that marked me very clearly as a she-elf. An unusually short she-elf who was apparently allied with a troupe of dwarves, and had also just openly insulted a member of her own race who had saved her life from giant spiders.

Oh, boy. Thorin and this guy were going to get along like a goblin nest on fire.

“She’s one of us?” One of the dark-haired male archers blurted in Sindarin, sounding just as startled as my blond captor still looked.

The sound of his subordinate seemed to shake him out of his daze though, and a second later he’d fixed his hardened expression back into place. His gloved hand dropped from the side of my head to my shoulder, and pushed me rather roughly towards the trees.

“Put her with the others,” he ordered, still looking at me as if I’d just insulted his mother. Suppressing the urge to glare back, I reluctantly complied, and a couple of the elven archers began nudging me back through the trees towards the clearing where I’d been chased from my allies.

The Dwarven company of Thorin Oakenshield looked surprisingly well, considering they’d just been assaulted by a horde of giant arachnid, and then subsequently a horde of  elven supermodels wielding bows. Dwalin looked pissed off, or at least more so than usual. Balin was attempting to look placating, and poor Ori still looked a little shaken and white around the eyes, but he and a few of the others graced me with smiles of relief at the sight of me in one piece. All of them were in the same position I’d just been in; an array of arrows aimed carefully at them by the surrounding Elves.

“Ellie!” Fili gave me a wicked grin around the sneering elf who was guarding him. “We thought you’d got done in for a minute there.”

“So did I. Next time I’ll run faster,” I tried to grin, but it felt brittle on my face. I was uncomfortably aware of the fact that a lot of eyes, both Dwarven and elven had locked onto me in particular. The archer behind me gave me a non-too gentle shove into the group, just as a slightly dazed looking Kili was being pushed towards the others by a female elf with gorgeous hip length red hair.

He looked a bit like he’d been hit over the head with a mallet and dropped off a cliff, and even after he’d been pushed into the midst next to a stone-faced Thorin, he couldn’t seem to tear his eyes away from the retreating form of the fire-haired she elf.

Double damn.

Thorin was really going to love this now.

He’d been pissed enough about being coerced (read: blackmailed) by a wizard into taking on an elven healers apprentice as the company’s resident surgeon (read: myself). He hadn’t noticed yet, being too busy exchanging death glared with our captors. But if he cottoned on to the fact that his Dwarven company’s integrity had been further corrupted by his nephew apparently developing an insta-crush on a tall, pretty elf woman; I think his head might actually explode.

Which was when another sinking realisation struck me: a Dwarven companions only.

Thirteen Dwarves, and no Hobbits in sight…

Where in hell was Bilbo?

I glanced around as subtly as I could manage but couldn't see any trace of our burglar anywhere. I didn’t dare ask any of the others if they’d seen him in the fight. There was no guarantee if I let slip we had a missing party member aloud, our captors wouldn’t immediately send a very attractive lynch mob into the woods after him.

“Search them,” my blond Disney assailant commanded as he strode back into the clearing, handing his bow off to another archer. The same one who had spoken when he’d displayed my ears looked uneasily between us.

“But, my prince, she is—” He said quietly, and was met with a hard look.

“I know what she is, Orelion. Search her as well.”

My eyes widened at him.

Prince? Prince?! This was the prince of the Woodland Realm? King Thranduil’s son?

I almost sputtered, but just about managed to hold in my shock and indignation when said prince strode straight over to me, stopping barely half a step from our toes touching. I had to tilt my head up to meet his stony glare with my own.

“Your weapons, now.”

I felt my hand tighten unconsciously around the hilt of my hunting knife that I was still gripping, and his gaze sharped as he noticed. Forcing myself to relax, I stubbornly told myself that it was only temporary, and one way or another, I’d get it back.

“Fine,” I hissed finally, making a show of sheathing it and removing it from my belt. “But only since you asked so politely.”

Illogical as it was, the more I was exposed to this guy, the more he seemed to rile me up. I may or may not have slapped the hilt a little harder than necessary into his palm when he held a hand out to take it; and wavered a little as his eyes flickered over the names engraved on the hilt then up to me again.

My eight most important words.

I looked deliberately away as he took my throwing knives, and the needles from my medical satchel; some of which were so huge they could have easily doubles as weapons, or even lock picks. Instead I tried to focus on what was going on around us, trying to pick up as much information on who our apparent captors were, and how in hell we were going to get away.

Just looking round at them I couldn’t really tell much beyond the fact that they must be members of King Thranduil’s guard, and that none of them seemed particularly fond of Dwarves.

Another thing I noted was that none of them seemed to be making any particular effort to keep their voices down as they divested Thorin’s crew of their weapons too. Most of them were conversing in rapid but clearly insulting Sindarin with little to no concern for the fact that they might be understood, and it took me a long moment to realise why. It was obvious none of the dwarves were versed in the language, but so far the only words I’d spoken had been in the Common Tongue too. It seemed that they had taken that as evidence that—along with my apparently un-elf like appearance—I could neither speak nor understand their particular dialect either.

They were in fact wrong in that assumption.

“Goodness! She’s so tiny!” One of the lovelier female archers with rich brown curls tittered.

“Are you sure she is one of the Eldar?”

“More like an oversized halfling than a true elleth,” another added with a pitying, almost mocking little smile at me.

I sighed. Languages had never really been my forte, but Lord Elrond had found my early efforts at Sindarin so offensive he’d made damned sure that I learned to speak it to within an inch of perfection in the past two years. It probably would have been the smarter thing to keep pretending I couldn’t understand every word they were saying in the hopes that they’d let something slip, but I’d already used up patients quota for the day.

And life is too short to put up with simpering, aesthetically perfect immortals with more pompous pride than manners.

I gave the three twittering archers a withering look.

“You do know I can hear everything you’re saying, right? I’m small, not deaf,” I said in a deliberately loud voice so everyone heard.

To my satisfaction, the she-elves each had the grace to look embarrassed as well as shocked, and I actually saw a couple of the male archers—and surprisingly, Kili’s red haired saviour—fighting to hold back grins.

But out of the corner of my eye, I could see the blond elf who’d taken my weapons away continuing to stare hard at me. If I was honest, frustratingly handsome as he was, the surly expression and death staring was starting to really border on irritating now. It was like being stared at by a pissed off Disney prince who’s been spurned one too many times by his would-be princess.

I stared back, not bothering to hide my disdain, and I was mildly surprised when his expression shifted very slightly from annoyed to… curious?

But I blinked, and it was gone, and less than a minute later we were being frogmarched through the forest towards the gates of the Halls of the Woodland realm.

We weren’t exactly told to stay silent during the walk, but every time one of us opened our mouthes to speak we were glared down until we stopped whispering. I didn’t even bother trying to whisper. I was too busy focusing on what was going on around me, and inside me.

Tink had gone unnervingly silent since we’d entered the wood, and whenever she had spoken, it had been in a voice that had sounded strained, almost painful; like someone trying to force down memories. I knew all too well what that was like, so I hadn’t pushed her for answers or advice. She deserved a break from saving my ass.

And anyway, what was the worst a gaggle of prissy wood elves could do to us anyway?

Turns out the answer to that question was: lock us all up in a dungeon.

The second we passed through the massive gates to the (ironically) underground Hall of the Woodland realm, Thorin was ushered up towards the king’s hall for questioning, and we were marched down a series of coiling, winding stairs to a series of ledges lined with elaborate jail doors that overlooked an underground stream.

Rather pretty for a jail house.

“You would truly lock up one of your own?” Balin asked my tall, blond, Prince Charming with a raised eyebrow as I was pushed past him towards a separate cell at the end of the row. Legolas turned his cold stare to me and came perilously close to scowling.

“She is not one of my own,” he answered flatly in common speech, so they could all understand. I smiled angelically up at him, and made point of stepping on his foot as I passed.

“Whoops! So sorry, your highness,” I said sweetly. His scowl turned dark, and my smirk turned vulpine as I was shoved inside.

Petty? Maybe a little. But I’d be damned if I was going to let this arrogant, simpering ass of a prince get the last word in before he locked me in a cage like a damned hunting dog.

The cell door slammed behind me, and the sound of the retreating wood elves boots and chatter was met with catcalls and jeers from almost all my Dwarves friends.

I didn’t join them, fun as it might have been.

The second I was sure Mr. Blond & Broody was out of sight I let my shoulders slump, the exhaustion and adrenaline I’d been holding in for hours finally catching up with me. I stalked over to the oddly smooth prison wall and slid down onto my butt on the cool stone floor, sighing.

“Hells bells, Eleanor,” I muttered, just quiet enough so no one outside my cell could hear, especially over the sound of Fili, Bofur and Nori swearing up a storm in fluent Khuzdul. “What kind of mess have you landed yourself in now?”

Part 1 | Part 2 | Bonus