“Run!” Boromir commanded, the terrified screams of the Halflings battering his ears.
The orcs that fell upon them were not ordinary orcs. Faster and more vicious than their brethren, they came in an endless flood, large as a man and without fear of the sun, each bearing the mark of the White Hand. Yet, Boromir thought, if he could save Merry and Pippin, he might atone for his attempt to waylay the Ringbearer. He brought the Horn of Gondor to his lips, its bellow rising over the din of the oncoming horde.
But even the Horn of Gondor could not save him, though the others came to his aid as soon as its plaintive wail cracked the sky over Amon Hen. The first shaft pierced his shoulder, the second, his gut. The last black arrow sank deep into his breast. As the tang of blood rose on his tongue, he wondered idly if he had been forgiven, or if his mortal weakness had doomed his soul. In his final moments, as his eyes closed and his spirit fled, he heard Aragorn whispering his requiem: “Be at peace, son of Gondor.”
The souls of elves, when they depart their bodies, travel to the Halls of Mandos on the veiled isle of Valinor. But the souls of men, when they die, travel beyond the circles of the world, and no mortal can say what awaits them there. Some imagine it is a great city like Minas Tirith… Others believe it looks like verdant fields or a towering forest.
Actually, the place where the souls of men go when they die looks remarkably like the M6.
Which is to say that it is dark, empty, and spotted with orange traffic cones.
And so it was that Boromir, Son of Denethor, Steward of Gondor, found himself quite dead and standing on the gravely shoulder of the southbound carriageway on a dark and stormy night, breathing in damp and vaguely salmon-scented air. In the distance, red and blue lights flashed.
“Sauron’s balls!” he muttered angrily, inadvertently stepping on an orange cone. It bent in the middle under his boot, and when he stepped off, it sprang back to its original shape. He felt a pang of nostalgia; the cone made him think of Gandalf. He had heard about the wizard’s “pointy hat trick,” and had desperately wanted to see it for himself, but it wasn’t the sort of thing one brought up in casual conversation, was it? By the time he had mustered up the courage to ask, they had entered Moria and had that unfortunate incident with the Balrog. Boromir sighed and nudged the cone with his toe. He didn’t suppose anyone around here knew anything about pointy hat tricks.
Not that there was anyone around to ask.
Aside from the strange flashing lights, there was no living thing in sight. Boromir had hoped being dead would mean simply ceasing to exist, but this empty, open roadway was infinitely more confounding than life had been. Even life when the Uruk-hai were shooting long, pointy arrows into his soft, fleshy body.
“Is there no one to greet me?” he shouted down the empty lane. “Am I cursed for my weakness to wander alone till the end of time?”
Apparently he was, although the end of time, as it were, came much sooner than anticipated. And more loudly. His ears picked up a growling in the distance, a noise like the rumbling thunder of impending doom. He unsheathed his sword and assumed a combative stance.
With unearthly speed, four grinding, screeching creatures roared past him. Moments later, four more of the foul beasts crossed his path. He swiped at them with his blade, but to no avail. They moved too fast.
“Nazgul!” He roared. “Even after death, the evil has followed! The Black Riders are upon us!” He cursed the loss of the Horn of Gondor. Damn Aragorn for tossing it with his corpse in that pansified elvish canoe! Little good it was going to do anyone crashing down the Falls of Rauros! No doubt the smug ranger had done it on purpose, just to get one last dig in.
One of the Black Riders stopped on the road beyond. Boromir could see one glowing red eye (oddly situated on its rear end) peering at him malevolently through the murk. Slowly, the beast turned and crept steadily toward him, making a sound he usually associated with Gimli after too much venison.
As the creature approached, he saw the fearsome face of the Witch-King staring at him, hard, hairy, filthy and huge. It opened its great maw, fetid breath rolling out like the smoke that belched from the peak of Mount Doom itself, and the voice of Hell emerged:*
“So, er... you wif us, then?”
Boromir blinked.
“Well? Where’s yer bike?”
The erstwhile son of Gondor squeaked out a sound like creaking wood, much like the one his voice had made after Faramir had kneed him in his wobbly bits during a brotherly squabble.
“N...Nazgul..."
“Naza-wot?” asked the Witch-King, puzzling at Boromir and poking a beefy finger under his great domed helm to scratch his greasy head. Beneath his black leather coat, he wore some sort of shirt with words painted on: “The Man,” with an upward pointing arrow, and “The Legend,” with an arrow that appeared, inexplicably, to be pointing towards his crotch. Boromir assumed whatever “The Legend” was, it was probably not in the Lays of Beleriand.
“Are you not the Witch-King? Are you not one of the Nazgul?”
The Rider snorted. “I’m Grievous Bodily Harm.” He leaned in and gave Boromir a conspiratorial smirk. “Used to be Big Ted. But you can call me GBH. S’like we’re brothers or something, after all.”
“Brothers?”
Wistfully, he thought of Faramir, and the time they decided to paint clever slogans on the back of their riding cloaks. Faramir painted If ye can reade this, the wenche fell offe. Boromir painted If this horse doth rock, forbear to knock. He had been quite proud of that one.
“Why would anyone knock on a horse?” Faramir had asked.
“It is a reference to...er... you know!” He illustrated with his hands.
Faramir had looked perplexed. “You can’t very well do that on a horse!”
Disappointed that no one seemed to find it as amusing as he did, he had finally painted over it with My other ride is your mother
To which Faramir had scolded, “Now, that’s just plain rude.”
He had felt the same disappointing sense of being misunderstood later, when he suggested (only suggested, mind you, and very casually at that) that maybe the Fellowship could, oh, you know, possibly swing by Gondor with the Ring and sort of fix things up a bit, rout out the Forces of Evil and whatnot. Just a little side trip, really. A holiday, if you please. Aragorn had given him the same nasty look and shouted “I will not lead the Ring within a hundred leagues of your city!”
Boromir’s brow frowned in recollection, followed by the rest of his face. Certain rangers were awfully testy about certain Rings. He wagered that if the poncy blond elf had asked him to take the Ring to poncy blond elf-land, Aragorn wouldn’t have been quite so snappish about it.
He looked up again, realizing the Rider in black was talking at him.
“Sorry... what?”
“I asked wot’s yer name?”
Boromir paused, momentarily weighing the benefit of giving his real name versus offering an alias. The name “Aragorn” sprang to mind.
“Boromir.”
Grievous Bodily Harm wrinkled up his nose as if he smelled something mildly unpleasant, which was interesting, really, because it suggested that he was utterly oblivious to his own smell, which was rather more than mildly unpleasant. In fact, the aroma of GBH was downright vile. Not that anyone had ever wanted to tell him.**
“S'not very...you know...Evil. But I like the cloak,” he added to soften the blow. “S’nice touch.”
Boromir looked hurt even as he fluffed out his cloak. “Well, in full, it is Boromir, son of Denethor, Steward of Gondor.” He punctuated this with a nod, as if the name carried such weight that it pushed down on his head.
The biker shook his own head slowly, as if there were a Really Big Thought inside that needed to be gently coddled like an egg, so it didn’t crack and cover his otherwise empty cranium with runny yellow goo.
“Gotta have something better than that to ride with them. Think of something you hate. Like Really Cool People or Cruelty to Animals.”
Boromir thought of things he hated: giant Uruk-Hai with long, pointy arrows... He hated those. But he also hated smug rangers who suddenly appeared out of nowhere to claim the throne his family had been courteously stewarding for the last, oh, 2477 years or so, without even so much as a “Thanks for keeping an eye on the kingdom for me! The privets look splendid!” And he really hated poncy blond elves who played sheathe-the-sword with smug rangers and managed to still look pretty and not smell bad even after a protracted stay in the Mines of Moria.
He looked up at Grievous Bodily Harm with renewed determination.
“You may call me...” he paused for dramatic effect. “Poncy Blond Elves.”
He could tell by the way his new friend looked at him in the same way that one might look at someone who has put his loincloth on over his breeches that he was going to have to try again. An image popped into his brain of Frodo, clutching the Ring to his puny chest while looking around with his pathetically huge eyes as if to say “Oh, woe is me! The future of all the free peoples of Middle-Earth rests on my short little ring-bearing shoulders, blah blah blah.”
His eyes narrowed. His lip curled.
“Stupid Halflings Who Hoard Magic Rings.”
A broad smile, or what passed for a broad smile on the face of a large, ugly biker spread across GBH’s equally large, ugly face.
“Right, then! Stupid Halflings Who Hoard Magic Rings it is!”
There was an awkward moment of silence. Boromir kicked at the dirt with his toe, as if there were something really interesting on the ground, and Grievous Bodily Harm put on a very serious face and looked around, as if there were something really interesting anywhere except where Stupid Halflings Who Hoard Magic Rings, formerly Boromir, was standing. Finally, he spoke.***
“Since you ain’t got a bike... I dunno..."
GBH had a very shy look on his face, a look he used to wear before he was GBH. A look he wore when he was just Big Ted, trying to muster up the nerve to ask for a date with the girl who operated the deep fryer in the Happy Porker Café.
“...I s’pose you could ride wif me.”
Stupid Halflings Who Hoard Magic Rings stood up very straight, feeling bashful in a way that he hadn’t since the days when he was just Boromir, trying to woo the young maid who dunked baskets of sliced potatoes into boiling oil in the palace kitchen.
“I would... that is, I...er... I think I would like that.”
Just before he swung his leg over the side of the strange metal beast, he noticed that there was some sort of slogan painted on its shiny tail end, and his heart skipped a beat.
It read: My other ride is your mum.
As an otherworldly wind whipped up behind them, Stupid Halflings Who Hoard Magic Rings, formerly Poncy Blond Elves, formerly Boromir, son of Denethor, Steward of Gondor, and Grievous Bodily Harm, formerly Big Ted, sped off down the M6 toward Lower Tadfield and disappeared into the dark, slightly-fishy-smelling gloom of night.
*The voice Hell, as it turned out, was a bit less frightening than one might have imagined. More like the voice of Heck, with a bit of Brummie thrown in for good measure. It was a bit of a letdown, really.
**Skuzz had subtly (well, subtly for Skuzz) hinted at it when he briefly changed his name to Embarrassing Personal Problems, but GBH hadn’t really caught on, and Skuzz wisely decided not to press the issue.
*** Strictly speaking, he belched twice, and then he spoke.
A/N: This piece was written in August 2005 for the "It Hurts My Brain" multifandom bizarre pairings challenge in the LiveJournal community of the same name.
The orcs that fell upon them were not ordinary orcs. Faster and more vicious than their brethren, they came in an endless flood, large as a man and without fear of the sun, each bearing the mark of the White Hand. Yet, Boromir thought, if he could save Merry and Pippin, he might atone for his attempt to waylay the Ringbearer. He brought the Horn of Gondor to his lips, its bellow rising over the din of the oncoming horde.
But even the Horn of Gondor could not save him, though the others came to his aid as soon as its plaintive wail cracked the sky over Amon Hen. The first shaft pierced his shoulder, the second, his gut. The last black arrow sank deep into his breast. As the tang of blood rose on his tongue, he wondered idly if he had been forgiven, or if his mortal weakness had doomed his soul. In his final moments, as his eyes closed and his spirit fled, he heard Aragorn whispering his requiem: “Be at peace, son of Gondor.”
The souls of elves, when they depart their bodies, travel to the Halls of Mandos on the veiled isle of Valinor. But the souls of men, when they die, travel beyond the circles of the world, and no mortal can say what awaits them there. Some imagine it is a great city like Minas Tirith… Others believe it looks like verdant fields or a towering forest.
Actually, the place where the souls of men go when they die looks remarkably like the M6.
Which is to say that it is dark, empty, and spotted with orange traffic cones.
And so it was that Boromir, Son of Denethor, Steward of Gondor, found himself quite dead and standing on the gravely shoulder of the southbound carriageway on a dark and stormy night, breathing in damp and vaguely salmon-scented air. In the distance, red and blue lights flashed.
“Sauron’s balls!” he muttered angrily, inadvertently stepping on an orange cone. It bent in the middle under his boot, and when he stepped off, it sprang back to its original shape. He felt a pang of nostalgia; the cone made him think of Gandalf. He had heard about the wizard’s “pointy hat trick,” and had desperately wanted to see it for himself, but it wasn’t the sort of thing one brought up in casual conversation, was it? By the time he had mustered up the courage to ask, they had entered Moria and had that unfortunate incident with the Balrog. Boromir sighed and nudged the cone with his toe. He didn’t suppose anyone around here knew anything about pointy hat tricks.
Not that there was anyone around to ask.
Aside from the strange flashing lights, there was no living thing in sight. Boromir had hoped being dead would mean simply ceasing to exist, but this empty, open roadway was infinitely more confounding than life had been. Even life when the Uruk-hai were shooting long, pointy arrows into his soft, fleshy body.
“Is there no one to greet me?” he shouted down the empty lane. “Am I cursed for my weakness to wander alone till the end of time?”
Apparently he was, although the end of time, as it were, came much sooner than anticipated. And more loudly. His ears picked up a growling in the distance, a noise like the rumbling thunder of impending doom. He unsheathed his sword and assumed a combative stance.
With unearthly speed, four grinding, screeching creatures roared past him. Moments later, four more of the foul beasts crossed his path. He swiped at them with his blade, but to no avail. They moved too fast.
“Nazgul!” He roared. “Even after death, the evil has followed! The Black Riders are upon us!” He cursed the loss of the Horn of Gondor. Damn Aragorn for tossing it with his corpse in that pansified elvish canoe! Little good it was going to do anyone crashing down the Falls of Rauros! No doubt the smug ranger had done it on purpose, just to get one last dig in.
One of the Black Riders stopped on the road beyond. Boromir could see one glowing red eye (oddly situated on its rear end) peering at him malevolently through the murk. Slowly, the beast turned and crept steadily toward him, making a sound he usually associated with Gimli after too much venison.
As the creature approached, he saw the fearsome face of the Witch-King staring at him, hard, hairy, filthy and huge. It opened its great maw, fetid breath rolling out like the smoke that belched from the peak of Mount Doom itself, and the voice of Hell emerged:*
“So, er... you wif us, then?”
Boromir blinked.
“Well? Where’s yer bike?”
The erstwhile son of Gondor squeaked out a sound like creaking wood, much like the one his voice had made after Faramir had kneed him in his wobbly bits during a brotherly squabble.
“N...Nazgul..."
“Naza-wot?” asked the Witch-King, puzzling at Boromir and poking a beefy finger under his great domed helm to scratch his greasy head. Beneath his black leather coat, he wore some sort of shirt with words painted on: “The Man,” with an upward pointing arrow, and “The Legend,” with an arrow that appeared, inexplicably, to be pointing towards his crotch. Boromir assumed whatever “The Legend” was, it was probably not in the Lays of Beleriand.
“Are you not the Witch-King? Are you not one of the Nazgul?”
The Rider snorted. “I’m Grievous Bodily Harm.” He leaned in and gave Boromir a conspiratorial smirk. “Used to be Big Ted. But you can call me GBH. S’like we’re brothers or something, after all.”
“Brothers?”
Wistfully, he thought of Faramir, and the time they decided to paint clever slogans on the back of their riding cloaks. Faramir painted If ye can reade this, the wenche fell offe. Boromir painted If this horse doth rock, forbear to knock. He had been quite proud of that one.
“Why would anyone knock on a horse?” Faramir had asked.
“It is a reference to...er... you know!” He illustrated with his hands.
Faramir had looked perplexed. “You can’t very well do that on a horse!”
Disappointed that no one seemed to find it as amusing as he did, he had finally painted over it with My other ride is your mother
To which Faramir had scolded, “Now, that’s just plain rude.”
He had felt the same disappointing sense of being misunderstood later, when he suggested (only suggested, mind you, and very casually at that) that maybe the Fellowship could, oh, you know, possibly swing by Gondor with the Ring and sort of fix things up a bit, rout out the Forces of Evil and whatnot. Just a little side trip, really. A holiday, if you please. Aragorn had given him the same nasty look and shouted “I will not lead the Ring within a hundred leagues of your city!”
Boromir’s brow frowned in recollection, followed by the rest of his face. Certain rangers were awfully testy about certain Rings. He wagered that if the poncy blond elf had asked him to take the Ring to poncy blond elf-land, Aragorn wouldn’t have been quite so snappish about it.
He looked up again, realizing the Rider in black was talking at him.
“Sorry... what?”
“I asked wot’s yer name?”
Boromir paused, momentarily weighing the benefit of giving his real name versus offering an alias. The name “Aragorn” sprang to mind.
“Boromir.”
Grievous Bodily Harm wrinkled up his nose as if he smelled something mildly unpleasant, which was interesting, really, because it suggested that he was utterly oblivious to his own smell, which was rather more than mildly unpleasant. In fact, the aroma of GBH was downright vile. Not that anyone had ever wanted to tell him.**
“S'not very...you know...Evil. But I like the cloak,” he added to soften the blow. “S’nice touch.”
Boromir looked hurt even as he fluffed out his cloak. “Well, in full, it is Boromir, son of Denethor, Steward of Gondor.” He punctuated this with a nod, as if the name carried such weight that it pushed down on his head.
The biker shook his own head slowly, as if there were a Really Big Thought inside that needed to be gently coddled like an egg, so it didn’t crack and cover his otherwise empty cranium with runny yellow goo.
“Gotta have something better than that to ride with them. Think of something you hate. Like Really Cool People or Cruelty to Animals.”
Boromir thought of things he hated: giant Uruk-Hai with long, pointy arrows... He hated those. But he also hated smug rangers who suddenly appeared out of nowhere to claim the throne his family had been courteously stewarding for the last, oh, 2477 years or so, without even so much as a “Thanks for keeping an eye on the kingdom for me! The privets look splendid!” And he really hated poncy blond elves who played sheathe-the-sword with smug rangers and managed to still look pretty and not smell bad even after a protracted stay in the Mines of Moria.
He looked up at Grievous Bodily Harm with renewed determination.
“You may call me...” he paused for dramatic effect. “Poncy Blond Elves.”
He could tell by the way his new friend looked at him in the same way that one might look at someone who has put his loincloth on over his breeches that he was going to have to try again. An image popped into his brain of Frodo, clutching the Ring to his puny chest while looking around with his pathetically huge eyes as if to say “Oh, woe is me! The future of all the free peoples of Middle-Earth rests on my short little ring-bearing shoulders, blah blah blah.”
His eyes narrowed. His lip curled.
“Stupid Halflings Who Hoard Magic Rings.”
A broad smile, or what passed for a broad smile on the face of a large, ugly biker spread across GBH’s equally large, ugly face.
“Right, then! Stupid Halflings Who Hoard Magic Rings it is!”
There was an awkward moment of silence. Boromir kicked at the dirt with his toe, as if there were something really interesting on the ground, and Grievous Bodily Harm put on a very serious face and looked around, as if there were something really interesting anywhere except where Stupid Halflings Who Hoard Magic Rings, formerly Boromir, was standing. Finally, he spoke.***
“Since you ain’t got a bike... I dunno..."
GBH had a very shy look on his face, a look he used to wear before he was GBH. A look he wore when he was just Big Ted, trying to muster up the nerve to ask for a date with the girl who operated the deep fryer in the Happy Porker Café.
“...I s’pose you could ride wif me.”
Stupid Halflings Who Hoard Magic Rings stood up very straight, feeling bashful in a way that he hadn’t since the days when he was just Boromir, trying to woo the young maid who dunked baskets of sliced potatoes into boiling oil in the palace kitchen.
“I would... that is, I...er... I think I would like that.”
Just before he swung his leg over the side of the strange metal beast, he noticed that there was some sort of slogan painted on its shiny tail end, and his heart skipped a beat.
It read: My other ride is your mum.
As an otherworldly wind whipped up behind them, Stupid Halflings Who Hoard Magic Rings, formerly Poncy Blond Elves, formerly Boromir, son of Denethor, Steward of Gondor, and Grievous Bodily Harm, formerly Big Ted, sped off down the M6 toward Lower Tadfield and disappeared into the dark, slightly-fishy-smelling gloom of night.
*The voice Hell, as it turned out, was a bit less frightening than one might have imagined. More like the voice of Heck, with a bit of Brummie thrown in for good measure. It was a bit of a letdown, really.
**Skuzz had subtly (well, subtly for Skuzz) hinted at it when he briefly changed his name to Embarrassing Personal Problems, but GBH hadn’t really caught on, and Skuzz wisely decided not to press the issue.
*** Strictly speaking, he belched twice, and then he spoke.
A/N: This piece was written in August 2005 for the "It Hurts My Brain" multifandom bizarre pairings challenge in the LiveJournal community of the same name.
Re: Black Riders