didntrun | (no subject)

For someone who has only just started working at a part time job that barely pays him enough to consider any big purchases, Eddie spends a lot of time window shopping for expensive things.

First was the guitar. She's still there, still waiting for him, sleek and black and perfect, but she's also way too expensive for him right now. Then there was the leather jacket. He'd found a good denim replacement at a thrift shop, which is right in his price range at the moment, but the creaky looking leather jacket on the mannequin in the window of the same store calls to him. The price tag makes him want to cry, but the jacket calls all the same.

Then there are the dice. In game shops across the city are sets of dice Eddie could have only dreamed of back in Hawkins. Dice carved from bone, made of stone, gems, crystals, items suspended inside, painted with gold, painted to look like the centre of the universe, translucent, opaque, pink and glittery, black and angry looking. He had even seen a set with tiny ships suspended inside, complete with sails.

A good set of dice, while still pricy, is reasonable.

He's standing by the game shop he's come to prefer, looking at the sets through the window, and when he senses someone nearby, he asks, "What do you think? Black with gold number or something like those translucent red ones?"

Then he turns and looks up. And up.

"Holy shit, you're tall."

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"So I'm told," Maedhros says lightly, turning to examine the dice displayed in the window, "though I might argue that I am a perfectly reasonable height, and everyone else is just short."

He had, when he was a child, often enough that he could do it with a completely straight face and more than a little persuasiveness. It had been a surefire way to irritate his brothers.

"I would get the black and gold, by the way," he adds. "The craftsmanship is better."

"A fair point, my good sir," Eddie agrees with a bit of a dramatic flourish, because hey, that could very well be the case. They could all just be very, very short, and this dude is a completely normal height.

But really, he's tall.

"Ah, a man after my own heart," he continues, hands pressed to his chest as he turns back to the window. "They're beautiful, aren't they? And just expensive enough that I can consider it a splurge and a useful tool."

"A tool?" Maedhros asks, genuine curiosity in his tone. He has never heard dice described in such a way before. "Do they have a use I am not yet aware of, or are you just a particularly devoted gambler, to call them such?"

"Not a gambler," Eddie answers. "Unless you count gambling with the lives of my party during a campaign."

He grins and says, "No, it's for DnD. Dungeons and Dragons? It's a fantasy roleplay game, you create characters and have different skill sets and go on adventures. The dice are for determining the outcome of situations."

Not for the first time since his arrival in Darrow, Maedhros finds himself in the position of understanding exactly what a person is saying but without having the slightest idea what they mean by it.

"I confess myself unfamiliar with the concept," he admits, when turning the words over in his head for a third time fails to explain anything. "But a dice game does admittedly sound more pleasant than my own experience of dungeons. Or what I hear of dragons, for that matter." No dragons had come to Himring during the Dagor Bragollach, but the survivors they had taken in afterwards had spoken of the beasts with terror.

"So you've been in actual dungeons," Eddie says. "And you come from a place with real dragons."

Back in Hawkins, before the five days he spent running from the cops and Jason Carver, Eddie never would have believed that. But after those five days, followed by Darrow, he believes a hell of a lot. That this very tall man has been in a dungeon and may have heard real stories of dragons doesn't seem all that far out anymore.

"If I get a party going, you want to try?" he asks. Why not? Eddie will already be teaching a bunch of new players, one more can't hurt.

"Correct on both counts," Maedhros says, "though I am given to understand that Arda is somewhat unusual in that respect." Most people in Darrow seem, like this man does, to regard worlds with dragons as being the provenance of fiction.

"If you get a party going... why not?" He shrugs. "It certainly sounds interesting enough."

"Arda," Eddie echoes. "As in... okay, sorry. I'm Eddie. What's your name?"

Because Arda is what Tolkien called his Earth, the world of Middle-Earth and Valinor, and Eddie has dealt with a lot of weird shit in Darrow, but if this very tall man turns out to be a Tolkien elf, he thinks he might have a stroke right here.

It'll be the coolest moment of his entire life.

That the name of his world appears to have caught Eddie off guard is not necessarily a surprise. Eowyn is here, after all, and he knows Artanis was, though she left well before he arrived - perhaps Eddie knows one of them.

“Well met,” he says. “I am called Maedhros, son of Feanor.”

Eddie doesn't mean to react the way he does, with as much drama as he does, but fucking Maedhros. Maedhros! He stumbles back a few steps, hand to his chest, his eyes wide with disbelief.

"No shit," he says. "You're not fucking with me? Maedhros? The same Maedhros who swore an oath to retrieve the Silmarils from Morgoth?"

If so, he's going to have a heart attack.

Maedhros’ name has earned that sort of response before, but not for some time and never in this world. Eddie is most assuredly not from Arda, that much is clear, and he could not have learned of this from Eowyn, who does not know - and yet he knows it all the same. For the second time in as many minutes, Maedhros finds himself faced with something for which he has absolutely no explanation.

“The very same,” he says, curious and a little cautious but not hostile - not yet, at any rate. The city has many tricks; it is entirely possible that this is simply one of those. “Though I might wonder how you know that.”

Oh, shit. Eddie blinks, realizing he's caught, and he has no idea what to say. Spider-Man is here, but Eddie doesn't care as much about comics, and he'd felt sure he'd be able to avoid this very situation with a superhero.

But Lord of the Rings? The Silmarillion? Eddie's been reading those books over and over since he was big enough to hold them.

"I read it," he blurts. "In a book."

"In a book," Maedhros says slowly. It is not outside the realm of possibility - the deeds that we shall do shall be the matter of song until the last days of Arda, his father had said, and since people can, apparently, move between worlds perhaps stories can as well - but it still feels strange.

"Are you referring to the Noldolantë, then?" It's a trick question, as much as he can manage - the Noldolantë is a song and not a book, but, more importantly, it's also Maglor's baby, and writing it down would require his brother to first consider it finished. Maedhros is fairly certain that Arda will be remade before that happens.

"No," Eddie says with a shake of his head. He has no idea how to navigate this while both being mostly honest and not totally fucking up this guy's whole perception of his life.

"It's called The Silmarillion. It's uh... a collection of um, tales. History, I guess," he continues. "There's a lot of stuff in there. The creation of Eä told as like, sort of a myth. And then there's a bunch about the war over the Simarils."

Oh god, he hopes he's not about to get punched.