grundyscribbling

Title*: Fortress Anariel
Rating: FR13
Crossover: LotR/Silmarillion
Summary: Anariel's not used to fighting at this level for this long.
Word Count: 1475

Buffy frowned.

She was doing ok for the moment.

But ‘for the moment’ was finite, and so was her stamina. She’s never had to fight at this level for so long at a stretch before. She had no idea how much longer she needed to hold out. Worse, she didn’t know how much longer she could hold out, especially since it’s not like she hasn’t taken injuries.

Of course, given the alternative, she didn’t really have a lot of choices.

Hold until your family can reach you.

Or until she could reach them. She had to believe her brothers weren’t just standing around twiddling their thumbs. They were smart enough to reach the obvious conclusion. Right?

She ducked down the stairs into what was left of someone’s basement, trying to keep off her injured leg as she did. So far, Slayer healing was keeping her afloat. But she’s got a sinking feeling it’s starting to slow down, and if it slows down too much, she’s royally screwed.

Morgoth’s hammer whistled overhead, and she could hear/feel his frustration. Unlike her several times great-grandfather, she hadn’t been operating on pure concentrated rage when the fight started. She wasn’t just going at him hopelessly, and had even done something as un-Finwion as run away when the occasion called for it. (Contrary to what a lot of Middle Earth seemed to think, she’s actually pretty good at that. After all, she who fights and runs away, lives to Slay another day. She just hasn’t needed to do it very often until now.)

It was a very good thing this Sunnydale wasn’t real. What was left of it by now – ‘now’, because she had no real gauge of how long they’ve been going at each other – looked like pictures she’s seen of the aftermath of WWII bombing raids. Not that either of them have been playing with explosives. Turned out you could wreck things pretty thoroughly the old-fashioned way if you had enough muscle and enough time.

For all she knew they’ve been locked in mortal combat while she Rip Van Winkled away a decade or two. She’d like to think it hasn’t been that long – she’s hoping it’s more in the range of hours to days – but she had no good way to tell, and she’s pretty sure time worked differently here.

She dared a glance at her mangled leg, and swore in Khuzdul and Scooby.

There were several drawbacks to the current fight. One of them was that it was actually really difficult fighting something four or five times your height. Oh, it could be done, and she was doing it. But it wasn’t nearly as easy as mowing down orcs. It wasn’t even as easy as balrogs. (Not that balrogs had been easy.)

The other drawback was that you needed a whole nother level of situational awareness when you and your opponent were wrecking pretty much everything around you in addition to each other. She’s not used to having to watch out for this level of debris. That’s what got her leg this time, not Morgoth.

Thus the hiding out. She’d love to be out there fighting. But she needed an hour or two without weight on her leg. For that, she needed to find a better defended hideout than this.

If she was lucky, this basement was one of the ones with a hookup to the tunnels…

Wait.

It burst on her like a shooting star. She really needed to re-align her thinking.

This was her ground – because she’s as close as she can be to sure that all this is happening in her own mind. Or possibly fëa. Her extended family were welcome to argue the metaphysics of it later. (Actually, maybe not so much, since for them to be able to do that would entail her admitting to stuff that would freak a lot of them out. General point: potayto, potahto. Call it whatever you want, she’s the home team here, and she had to start using home field advantage better.)
Focus, she told herself sternly.

What she really needed was a defensible place to hole up and recuperate for a bit.

She wasn’t going to get that anywhere in Sunnydale. All the places she knew in Arda came with the disadvantage that he probably knew enough about them to make quick work of the defenses. (Even the purely Third Age places weren’t a safe bet, thanks to Sauron the snitch. She’s keeping a list of reasons to hit him really hard the next time the opportunity presents itself, even if that’s not until the end of the world.)

A castle would do nicely, though, and non-Middle-Earth had so many to pick from.

No, scratch that – if she was going to borrow from ‘California’, there was nothing saying she had to stick to the historic. She could do better.

She grinned, and called to mind everything she’d ever heard about NORAD’s mountain headquarters. Really hard to assault, check. Blast doors meant to withstand a nuclear explosion as near to right outside as makes no never mind, check. Fully stocked bunker with its own water and power, check.

She snickered to herself as she crawled through the tunnel that now connected a basement in Sunnydale to a mountain road in Colorado. There was more than one way to fight. Let him try to figure this out!

She surveyed her handiwork. Not bad. Ok, so the entrance and the big-ass blast doors beyond it weren’t exactly stealthy…Wait, she can fix that. Her mountain can have a concealed entrance and big-ass blast doors made by dwarves. Good luck making these babies open from the outside, assuming he even figured out where they were!

There was noise coming down the tunnel. Sounded like poor unfortunate Morgoth was still having trouble with scale.

He’d decided to go for ‘huge and impressive’ in their initial encounter, making himself not just superhuman tall, but superelven tall. She hadn’t broken out a tape measure or anything, but twenty feet seemed like a good estimate. Unfortunately for him, he was kind of…stuck. He’d tried to adjust his size at least twice that she’d noticed. (Turned out that mismatch in height wasn’t just making things difficult for her.) It hadn’t worked as intended. He was pretty put out about it, too.

She’d taunted him about it several times. It’s been the most fun she’s had since her little sister left.

She strode confidently into her newly finished fortress and pulled the outer blast door firmly shut behind her. (She really hoped she’d get to talk to Kili or at least Gimli again someday. She had a feeling they’d love hearing about this.)

It was only once the inner blast door closed behind her that she let herself relax even a little.

Sure, being this securely holed up means her family can’t get to her easily either, but seeing how the first one to show up was Tindomiel, she really wasn’t in a hurry for a repeat. It worried her that her sister had somehow been drawn in – and that she hadn’t been able to move freely, not even to run. Better to keep her out, even if that meant keeping everyone else out too.

Her goal wasn’t to win. She wasn’t even sure if she could, given that Morgoth wasn’t really here. She might not have Will’s grasp of dimensions and quantum physics, but she did have a basic understanding, instinct even, for what would and wouldn’t work in a fight. And everything in her experience was telling her that whatever small sliver of Morgoth’s power or consciousness had managed to worm its way in to make her life difficult, it wasn’t enough of him to put him down for the count. At least, not in a once and for all way, which was the real goal.

No, the name of the game right now was ‘hunker down and hold out’. She had to stick to the plan – at least, as much as she could. None of them had foreseen this wrinkle, not even Anya, who had otherwise been a veritable fountain of contingencies.

She wondered what the stakes were on her end. No matter how satisfying it was to beat on him, she had to accept that Morgoth would survive this round regardless. She wasn’t so sure the same held true for her. If he killed her here, it just might be permanently fatal. Best not to find out, really.

She sighed, and decided she should find food and then patch herself up. Whenever her leg was back to non-gimpy, she could explore the interior of her mountain. Sooner or later she would need to know her way around. And it couldn’t hurt to get some rest. She didn’t know how long this breather would last, so she’d better take advantage of the quiet while she could.

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