Heroes and Monsters (Season One Now Streaming) by AdmirableMonster  

Say—you forgot—

It sounded like Miranda’s own voice speaking into a dark room.  She reached for the bedside table and switched on the lamp.  Light flooded the room.  She was alone, awake, covered in sweat.  She’d dreamed that she was dreaming.  Then she’d dreamed that she was awake, telling a figure in the shadows about her dream.

“Ugh.” She sat up and looked around.  The clock on the bedside table said 5:37 a.m.  Twenty minutes till her alarm went off anyway.  The books she’d been working through the night before lay scattered all across her floor.  Kings and Queens of the Distant Past, Finding the History Behind the Myth-story, Eówyn: Reckless Shieldmaiden or Reluctant Heroine?  No surprise she’d had weird dreams with all of that buzzing around in her head.  Not that it was helping.  The season two opener of Heroes and Monsters remained nothing more than a blank page in her crisp, new notebook, and the deadline for her first draft was looming in a little under two weeks.

This shouldn’t be so hard, Miranda lamented as she stumbled out of bed, waded through books to her little bathroom, and began to brush her teeth.  She loved Eówyn.  As a kid, her favorite book had been an old Rosemary Sutcliff novel called Hidden Protector, a dramatization of Eówyn’s life and confrontation with the Dark King.  And it wasn’t like she didn’t know how to write a screenplay.  She never would have been front-running this Netflix docudrama if she didn’t how to put together a script.

She applied her teeth whitening strips and started in on her makeup.  As always, she went a little bolder than everyone suggested.  She was a performer, for god’s sake.  That was the point.  She had it down to an art, but there was no point rushing it, since the tooth whiteners needed to stay in for half an hour, and the application of powders and paints was pretty meditative.  She meditated, too—it always gave her something to talk about, feminine but not too silly.  Not this morning, though.  This morning she was going straight to her favorite coffee shop, because she was getting desperate.  She filled in the wings on her eyeliner, said, “fuck it,” and grabbed her favorite bright pink lipstick, and her whiteners timer went off.

Right.  Time to go.

Miranda’s favorite coffee shop was just three blocks down, but she hadn’t made it there in several weeks, being mostly occupied with going to the library and trying to get inspiration that way.  Since that hadn’t worked, it was time to try something different.  Besides, she knew all the basic material by heart anyway, and the more scholarly papers were available on her laptop.

It wasn’t a particularly notable coffee shop.  It was a chain that was only marginally less obnoxious than Starbucks, and it did the usual overpriced oversugared drinks that barely tasted of coffee, which was for the best, since the coffee wasn’t very good.  But Miranda was used to it, the baristas knew her, and she always got the same thing and holed up in the same little corner underneath a hanging plant and a peeling poster for some battle of the bands that had happened a decade or so ago.  She liked the plant.  Sometimes it made her forget about the honking and yelling and rushing and movement through the concrete hellscape of downtown outside.

It was like being part of a piece of music, the rhythm of routine, she thought. Her body knew what it was doing: it carried her over to the counter, asked for her usual (raspberry mocha with an extra shot), swiped her phone to pay, strode purposefully over to the counter to wait, grabbed the finished drink, trotted over towards her usual spot—

—and then nearly spilled her drink all down her front.

There was someone sitting in her spot.

Pause, disrupt autopilot, engage brain.  “Excuse me.”

The person—dark hair starting to thin and silver in streaks, narrow, unmade-up face with a hooked nose, medium-dark and quite impressive skin—looked up, frowning slightly.  “C-Can I help you?”

Miranda put on her sweetest smile.  “Would you mind terribly if I asked you to move?  That’s my favorite spot.”

“Yes,” said the person, and turned back to the pile of papers spread out in front of them, covering—Miranda now noticed—the entire top of the small and rather rickety coffee table.  After she’d stood there for a frankly embarrassing amount of time, it began to dawn on Miranda that the person who had taken her spot had also quite literally answered a would-you-mind question with yes, I would mind.

Fuck.  It wasn’t like she could physically wrest the spot away from them, and it wasn’t like she truly had any claim over it—maybe a moral claim, but given how long it had been since she’d last come, maybe not even that.  But she’d stood here for so long now that it had moved out of awkward and into mortifying.  She ought to just give up and head out, but any movement was not only a concession of defeat, it would also draw more attention to her.

Caught like a deer in the headlights, she stood there, eyes skittering over the scattered papers spread across the table.  It slowly percolated that, while most of these were obscure publications—far more academic than anything Miranda had bothered with—that at least one of them was entitled, Did the crown know the mouth? Evidence for shared origins of the Mouth of Sauron and the Witch King of Angmar.  Skimming rapidly down the page, she caught sight of the words, “well-known confrontation between Eówyn, the White Lady of Rohan, and the Witch King, the details of which are disputed.”

“Are you a historian?” Miranda blurted.

The person froze, looked up, and looked back down.  “Yes,” they said, after a moment.

You are being so rude right now, Miranda’s brain told her.  Her body decided to ignore this and sat down across from her new nemesis.  “What do you know about Eówyn?” she asked brightly.

Leave a Comment