#yes apparently

Many thanks to @sallysavestheday and @nycterisg for the tags and the lovely excerpts of their Silm fics! ♥️

I write in LOTR land, so below is a small clip of my WIP/Not WIP about the household staff of Meduseld secretly resisting the influence of Gríma. Here Helswith, an apprentice cook who is new to Edoras, is having her first encounter with Mr Wormtongue himself. CW for creepy dude behavior.

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His [Gríma’s] mere presence, to say nothing of his handling of the plates, was a violation of one of Luftmeda’s only firm directives. Allow no one else near the king’s food. But Helswith had no authority to order around the man everyone knew to be the king’s own favorite. And surely such a constraint wouldn’t apply to someone in his position anyway? She looked over her shoulder, wishing for reinforcement of some kind, but the kitchen remained empty. When she turned back, he’d moved again, coming to the end of the bench as though he might round it to her side. She took an instinctive step backward.

“Everything is nearly ready, as you see.”

“Yes, I certainly do.”

One corner of his mouth curled up into a smile followed by a little huff of laughter at a joke that meant something only to him. He took another step toward her, almost a challenge to see if she’d move again, and she hesitated.

She’d come across men like this before in her life. An uncle of a childhood friend, the man in Eabíge who made and sold cookware, the boatman who operated the small ferry to the Dunlendish village on the opposite side of the river. Men whose eyes crawled all over her body like so many roving hands and whose every utterance carried some hint of covetous menace no matter how pleasant their actual words. Their ominous attentions somehow always left her feeling that she’d failed the encounter. Laughing it off, edging away, gritting her teeth and ignoring it until circumstances intervened — none of these responses ever gave her what she wanted except in the most immediate sense of reprieve. But to do anything more felt charged with danger, requiring her to shoulder risk of a different kind that she wanted as little as she did the leering looks and casual touches.

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