Chapter Text
A month into his first year at medical school, Elrond finds a man in a dumpster.
Of course, that’s not the conclusion he draws immediately. He’s already had six cups of coffee that day, the seventh held securely in his grip but sloshing against the lid all the same, and he cannot remember the last time he’d slept properly. It was probably sometime last August, which means, like, a century ago. He looks at the lower legs hanging off the side of the dumpster, and then at his disposable cup, and then again at those legs. They’re wearing a pair of scuffed combat boots.
A drunk teenager?
Elrond sighs.
It’s not like he swore the Hippocratic oath or anything, but medical schools have their own codes of honor, and besides, he’s always had a deep-set urge to just help people. Whether this kid’s high or drunk, Elrond can’t just leave him here to the elements. So he throws the cup in the dumpster—well away from the legs because he’s not an idiot—and grabs the edge with both hands, groaning at the slimy feeling. It doesn’t occur to him until then that this dark-alleyway-with-suspicious-dumpster thing in fact sounds a lot like the beginning of a horror movie. Shit. The legs were probably like those luminous bulbs that anglerfish have, a bait for stupid passers-by and whatnot.
Elrond hoists himself up anyways. He’s sacrificed his coffee already. He is committed to this.
So there he is, one leg over the dumpster and ready to give the kid a helping hand, when he realizes this probably isn’t a kid at all. And not even in the anglerfish way. It’s more that the body lying in what is nearly textbook-perfect anatomical position—staring straight above, palms up, upper arms close to the body, although obviously, the feet aren’t together—is a good deal larger and more muscular than a teenager could be. Elrond stares at those broad shoulders for a moment, until the caffeinated haze breaks and he’s suddenly jolted into action.
“Hey!” he calls, poking and then shaking the man’s knee. He thinks he’s supposed to tap the shoulders, but well, one of them’s gotta stay out of the dumpster proper. No way in hell is Elrond getting out of there with that extra weight in tow. “Hey, uh, you all right? Are you conscious?”
The man grunts and moans. This is when Elrond realizes that beneath the pile of rotten take-out leftovers, the man is actually wearing a sort of motorcycle helmet. It’s very shiny. Huh, hadn’t there been some rumors about a madman running around in that sort of get-up?
Well, that’s hardly the problem here. Elrond raises his hands to rub at his face, considers the slime, and grips the dumpster edge again.
“Is anything broken?” he asks. “Should I call emergency services?”
“Eer-hnn-huh-hur-hee?” comes the answer.
“Nine-one-one! You want me to call you an ambulance? Police? Do you need to go to a hospital?”
The man moves at the last word, swiping away some . . . are those wontons? Anyways, the man struggles to sit up, which is not an easy feat with both his legs hanging off the side of the dumpster and therefore put higher than his upper body. The man does succeed in raising his head. Either the alleyway’s darker than Elrond had thought or the helmet’s got a reflective visor because, for all that Elrond can tell, the man has a mirror-ball for a head. At least, hopefully the helmet means he doesn’t have a concussion.
And then the man speaks.
“No hospitals,” he says, and Elrond—well. Elrond may be a nerd, but he’s the right kind of nerd; he knows this stuff. This man’s probably an escaped science experiment, an alien, a masked crimefighter, or all of the above. If Elrond takes him home and gives him some Tender Loving Care, the next thing he knows it’ll be episode 5 of season 1 and Elrond will have been kidnapped by either a discontent gang or a group of mad scientists or a pseudo-nazi organization and used as a hostage. No. Nope. He was raised better than this.
“Hospitals,” he blurts. “Absolutely fucking resounding yes to the hospitals.”
“No hospitals,” repeats the man. The helmet makes it impossible to discern some of the subtler tones, but Elrond thinks the man does sound a bit taken aback.
“Hospitals!”
“No!”
“Hos—Jesus Christ, this is the worst show ever!”
“No hospitals,” the man says. “Please.”
Elrond looks down at the man. He still hasn’t sat up properly, and if Elrond had to guess—not from any medical knowledge, but from his experience growing up in foster care—the man has at least some severe bruises running down his side. On the other hand, though, he’s lucid and talking, doesn’t seem to be in extreme pain, and a good doctor is after all supposed to respect his patient’s autonomy. Not that this man’s his patient. Or that Elrond’s a doctor. In fact, a month of medical school means he can look at the man’s knee and recite all the skeletal elements of the patella, but not that he has any idea how to fix it should it happen to be broken.
“Fine,” says Elrond, because he is so, so weak for broad-shouldered men saying please. “Fine. But is there at least a number I can call for you? A friend or something?”
And surprises of surprises, there actually is a friend. He rattles off a phone number, Elrond calls it, has a brief conversation on the phone that consists of their location, their mutual friend’s physical state, and Elrond’s profound desire to just go home and cram for the osteology exam. Elrond actually has to bite his tongue in order not to ask if this guy really is a superhero. The voice on the other end is calm and collected, at least, like his friend being found in a dumpster is an everyday occurrence for him, and that reassures Elrond for some weird reason.
After the call ends, Elrond offers to sit with the man for a while, or at the very least, pull him out. The man tries to shake his head. When that doesn’t work, he waves.
“I’m all right,” he says. “Thanks for your help. You’re studying medicine?” And wow, this guy’s getting more coherent by the second.
“Uh, yeah,” Elrond says, unsure what he’s supposed to do.
“Huh,” the man says. “That’s cool. Good luck with the exams. You should probably go, though, you know. To study and all.”
It is either the most considerate thing Elrond’s heard this month, or a blatantly transparent effort to get Elrond away from whatever supernatural or extraterrestrial thing that’s going to happen now that a friend’s been called to help. One of those options is more likely than the other.
Elrond walks away, anyways, because he really is too busy for this shit.
*
But he does check the news on the next morning, if only to find out why exactly the man had been lying in a dumpster.
GIL-GALAD TAKES DOWN MAJOR TRAFFICKING RING, blares the headline, with a shot of a man wearing a silver helmet leaping down from a shipping container. Whoever took the picture caught him perfectly in the moment, making it look almost as if he’s weightless; the hand holding on to the container looks more like it’s keeping the man from flying away. The helmet’s extremely familiar. So are those combat boots the man’s wearing.
Aw, hell, thinks Elrond. That was a narrow miss.
*
Two and a half months later, Elrond walks into his flat only to find the man—Gil-galad—bleeding out on his couch. There’s a sharp tang of copper in the air.
“What the fuck,” he says.
Gil-galad waves. “Hey, doc.”
“I’m not a doctor!”
“But close enough, right?” The grin in his voice is practically audible. “Close enough to help me out a bit, I hope?”
“I’m not—absolutely not! I—this—how the hell are you ruining my Christmas?”
“Am I?” Gil-galad shrugs. “Sorry.”
The thing is, ever since Elrond had met the guy in the dumpster, he’s spared some minutes for research. Because you never know when you’ll run into a vigilante again. And a vigilante Gil-galad is; as far as Elrond can tell, Gil-galad’s been operating in Lindon for little less than six months, beating up remnants of Morgoth’s crew, stopping muggers and leaving tied-up criminals on precinct doorsteps, and if accounts are to be believed, rescuing cute little cats from trees. A stellar (hah) record of non-lethality. Witnesses all claim that this Shining Star guy really does seem to be someone nice.
Also: med school may not be teaching him anything useful yet, but Elrond’s bought a hospital-level first aid kit and learned how to stitch from Youtube. What can he say? He’s a daydreamer, a dreamer of the day. Like T. E. Lawrence said, the dreamers of the day are dangerous men, for they may act their dream with open eyes to make it possible. Elrond sighs and gestures vaguely at Gil-galad.
“Show me where you’re bleeding, then.”
And there’s a plus side too. Elrond now knows exactly how some muscles look when they’re alive, not drained of blood like the cadavers at school.
While Elrond’s wrapping gauze on Gil-galad’s stitches and hoping like hell this is the right thing to do, and trying to remember which of the professors had seemed nice enough to answer suspicious questions about human anatomy at three in the morning on Christmas day, Gil-galad takes out a phone and starts texting. The ID on top of his screen says HOLLY WHATEVER, BATMAN. The misspelling is perhaps an inside joke.
“That friend of yours?” he asks, because he’s an idiot that never knows when to keep his mouth shut. Gil-galad tries to shrug, and then realizes that’s painful to do with a laceration on his shoulder.
“Yeah. He’s coming.”
“Should I leave?”
“No,” says Gil-galad. “It’s your house.”
That is, amazingly, the most sensible thing Gil-galad has ever said in Elrond’s proximity.
It doesn’t even take ten minutes for there to come a knock on his door. Elrond’s washing his hands in the kitchen when it happens, and so it’s Gil-galad who valiantly trudges to the door and opens it. Elrond can hear low voices in a whispered argument, one muffled by the helmet and the other with a familiar cadence of a pissed-off elder brother. Elrond knows what it’s like. He’s employed it himself on Elros more than once, before . . . before. Anyways. He should probably stay in the kitchen, but curiosity gets the best of him.
When he reaches the door the first thing he sees is Gil-galad’s shoulders blocking the narrow view, but while Gil-galad’s much (much) broader, Elrond has an inch or two on him, and he can easily look over him to the other man standing in the doorway. Baseball cap, earmuffs just the slightest bit on the too-large side, mask. A black scarf pulled up over the mask, and an olive-green coat with its collars turned up. Not that Elrond had expected any less. But Christmas is not a good time for sunglasses, and the man’s eyes—those are hauntingly familiar.
Elrond blinks.
The man blinks, too.
“Elrond Peredhel?” comes the disbelieving question, the gray eyes almost amber-yellow under the overhead lighting. “You’re this idiot’s ‘medical expert’? Aren’t you twelve?”
“I’m old enough to drink!” Elrond protests. Twenty-one is not an age that inspires much confidence. He’s been starting to regret skipping grades.
“You two know each other?” says Gil-galad, the silver helmet swiveling comically back and forth. “How?”
“Uncle Mags’s foster baby,” Celebrimbor says at the same time Elrond says;
“Foster daddy’s runaway nephew.”
“Huh,” says Gil-galad. “Huh. Small world.”
“So you’re a vigilante,” says Elrond, pointing accusingly at Gil-galad and shaking that finger a little bit. Then he turns to Celebrimbor. “And you’re his . . .”
“Supplier,” suggests Celebrimbor.
“Enabler,” says Gil-galad, his pained tone betraying that he knows just how much this all sounds like a drug problem. Well, a case could be made that violence is in fact Gil-galad’s addiction.
“I’m the Q to his Bond,” Celebrimbor adds. It does not help matters at all.
Although, come to think of it . . . Foster daddy’s runaway nephew had been some kind of science whiz, the kind that won 11th-grade olympiads while they were in elementary school. And Gil-galad’s helmet does look very shiny, and rumor has it that the staff thing that he uses, aptly nicknamed Aeglos (or icicle), is nearly unbreakable. It doesn’t make as little sense as one might expect.
That’s not to say that this makes any sense at all, but Elrond’s willing to take it.
“This is the weirdest Christmas of my life,” Elrond says, “and I haven’t even opened my presents yet.”
“Aren’t you living alone?” Gil-galad asks. Ouch.
And maybe it’s the Christmas spirit, or maybe it’s because of the loneliness that’s got him daydreaming about superhero friends and dangerous lives, but whatever the reason Elrond shrugs a little, steps back to make room, and says, “Well. Wanna come in?”
Besides, he thinks this could be the start of a beautiful friendship. Episode 3, Season 1 kind of thing, you know.