Chapter Text
“So. What are my marching orders?”
The elf asks this laying on his side with half his armor off, neck exposed, as if the two of you are actually sharing a tent, and that’s the last thorn in the warg’s paw. You start laughing until it’s hard to breathe, wrapping your arms around your head in a futile attempt to muffle your sounds.
You’re not sure if you’re glad your children have left before this could happen, or frustrated you’re breaking in front of an elf. A useful elf, mind you, but still an elf.
A touch on your knee. The only reason you don’t kick the elf across the room is that he’s on the ground, head at your feet like Mairon used to keep you, and you know better than to stomp those wretches rendered lower than you are. But no one should be touching you, truly. Don’t they know who you belong t-
You recognize the alien shape of the thought in your head before you finish it. You bite down on your gauntlet rather than wail, rather than give Mairon the satisfaction of a reaction.
The elf is staring. He can stare. He is not the first. You are too much of an Uruk to be an elf anymore, but too elvish for them to call you an orc. When Morgoth sent you to the dungeons to spy or torment, elves mistook you as one of their own and confided in you, or they saw in you the proof that their kind could be corrupted and could be tormented more easily. Either way, your existence was a blade to their hearts; they could not drag their eyes away from your twisted visage -
Why is he touching your knee again.
You’re so baffled that you drop your hands and stare at him, liquid still dribbling off your face. He’s patting your knee. Does he have a death wish?
“What,” you say.
“What?” he asks back, as if whatever he’s doing is self-evident. It’s not.
You grab him by the scruff with your good hand and drag him as you unfold your legs, dropping him sideways in your lap. You then grab his chin with your gauntlet, make him look up at you. “If you touch me without asking again. I will make you bleed.”
The elf eeps. “Understood!”
“Good.” You drop his chin and dig your fingers into the soft flesh of his neck. Scruffing is the sort of thing that would be more appropriate to do to a disobedient child than a full grown elf, but it seems to have the same calming effect on him as it would an Uruk.
“I still,” the elf says, and the elf puts his palms up, look-I’m-harmless, “really do want to help. The enemy of my enemy is my friend. I don’t understand what’s going on, but I have to stop Sauron.”
You squeeze the back of his neck out of old habit; you’re so used to avoiding his name that you still dance around it, a thousand years after you’d thought you’d killed him for good. Mairon listened for his name in the crackles of the fire; you’d seen enough of your children hurt for saying the wrong thing at the wrong time and place that you still default to Mairon’s name in second voice. He could not overhear a gesture.
“We must kill him,” you agree.
“Can he be killed?”
“I hope so.”
That was not the answer your elf wished for given the way his face shatters, but you are not going to lie to him. It is fortunate for him that you need little from him, and that you are tired, and that he seems to be an ally you can actually work with rather than aiming like a boulder from a ballista.
“I will tell you my tale,” you say, “and you can tell me yours. The worst I intend for you is to ransom you back to your brethren; if they refuse, I imagine we can find a use for you in Mordor.”
You realize a moment too late that that would sound like a threat to an elf’s ear, rather than the normal and pragmatic statement you meant it to be.
Fortunately, the elf perks up at it. “Do you have smithies?”
“We’re building them. The smaller ones have already begun their work.” Little Urshka was an apprentice in fire and metal, had joined the army in part to scavenge elven tools and materials and test them out where he wouldn’t blow up half hte camp - but there were already those working with what was in Mordor. His children were nothing if not stubborn.
“I suppose you’ll have to put me in one,” the elf says.
You wonder if you could pull that off without the elves declaring war on you again. You’re fairly certain they’ll march on you whether you run off with a single hostage or not. You are simply so overwhelmed with worries for your children that you don’t think you can contain any more of them.
“I suppose I will,” you say. Tentatively, you take your gauntlet and start rubbing circles on his scalp with it’s talons; the elf sighs in appreciation. This isn’t new, per se - Mairon and Morgoth both thought it was very amusing to have elves let down their guards to you only to realize you were not one of them - but in general your victims did not know you were Uruk when you came to them. This one did.
You’d played Galadriel like a flute with only 3 holes, but you’d still had to play. The fact that this elf isn’t putting up any defenses makes you uneasy. Perhaps Sauron had already eroded them all? He was very good at that, but usually the sight of an obvious enemy like you in that state should return some of that defensiveness.
Then again, this fearlessness is advantageous to you. You’re going to have to move him, and it’ll be easier if he can move under his own power. And he seems particularly shameless for an elf, having stripped off two layers of armor already. Maybe you won’t have to fight him on it?
“I brought some balm for your injuries. I can help you put it on if you - ” and he’s already pawing at the buttons on his gambeson. You huff a laugh and help him, dragging him up to sit on your lap, using your gauntlet to pick out the most fiddly buttons from their loops. It doesn't take long before you husk him, and he immediately takes to struggling out of the final linen shell of his undershirt.
You pluck it off him, steadying him on your lap.
Elves aren’t peach-soft like Men are, but neither do they have the thickened peel of the Uruk. The handprint bruise just above the elbow is livid and dark; the grip would have snapped a Man’s arm, and an Uruk would take at least a week to heal from it. You’d need maybe three days. His wrists are raw and red from being tied and hung by them for so long. Tiny, dark bruises dapple the livid lines Sauron has marked on his neck and back. It’s almost a relief that the bruising on his front is greening from age, faded.
He must have washed his face, because now he’s not dappled with ash and grime but a rainbow of bruises; there are long, thin scabs around his hairline. Mairon is making rings , you know, but he must be wearing normal rings as well to leave marks like this. Your hand shifts from the back of his neck to his cheek; your thumb ghosts under a cut that goes from his forehead to where jawline meets ear.
“This is from - “
You must make a face when you hesitate around the name because the elf says: “He said his name was Annatar.”
“Giver of gifts,” you snort. “Of course he’d call himself that. When he still was lieutenant to the throne, he preferred the title of Most Admirable to all others. Gorthaur the Cruel was tolerable, but you risked your neck saying the epithet the elves gave him.”
“No wonder you’ve been so cagy about naming him,” the elf says softly. “What do you call him, then?”
“Gorthaur is probably the safest out loud - he would not be listening for someone to call him that since it is mostly historical. I imagine it would not go over well for you to refer to him as Mairon in front of the elves,” and you grimace.
“Can I refer to him, ah, not out loud?” He gestures - it takes you a moment to recognize dwarf-sign. His gestures are wider than you’re used to, but you can recognize that he’s asking the same thing with his hands despite the accent. You haven’t used dwarf-sign much recently, but you’d sometimes make yourself up as an elf if there were traders around, and being fluent made it less likely for the dwarves to question your strange appearance. (There are far fewer dwarven traders than there once were. Is it strange to miss the petty dwarves, sometimes allies sometimes foes but always entertaining? They at least were willing to share a cavern with you and your children if need be.)
Oh. “Fire,” and you wiggle the fingers of your bad hand up, “crown,” and you display your thumb and first two fingers at your forehead “fallen,” and you flip your hand down. “If you have to whisper it,” and you show him the truncated version that could be signed with your hand down or behind your back. “It’s safer to talk about him now that we’re away from the city, but old habits die hard. He is spiteful.”
“You think I don’t know that?” the elf says with a rueful grin. “I’m covered in his gifts, freely given.”
“He’s always been like that,” you say. You yank over the bag Lurka left for the two of you - the spoils of your hard earned negotiations for the retreat within - and pull out supplies: soap, as clean a cloth as any of you can manage on a battlefield, and a fist-sized nut filled with healing salve. “This will hurt, but not for long,” you say as you pry your gauntlet off. “Give me your hands.“
He’s already putting them on your shoulders. You wet the cloth, soap it, and start washing his wrists. The elf whimpers, his curls falling into his eyes as he clings, but he does not move away; you do your best to clean the wounds on his arms and face, then dry them with a different cloth. Once you’re satisfied, you scrape two fingers worth of balm out with your bad hand and smear it over his wrists, then the worst of the bruising on his head and neck, rubbing it into his skin.
(You avoid his mouth for reasons of practicality. You’d rather not have him so numbed that he starts slurring his words. He can live with a split lip.)
You know it’s a good batch because your fingertips are going from stinging to numb within a minute. You are proud of your childrens’ efficiency; the balm will burn away any disease and dirt lingering in the wound as well as damp the pain. The elf, too, is obviously feeling it, his body sinking down until his forehead is almost against yours. His breath is cool against your face.
“That works fast,” he says, slowly flexing his wrist. His fingers dig comfortably into a knot in your shoulder. “Why didn’t you give it to me before?”
“I didn’t have it before.”
“Did your people make this?”
“Obviously.”
“I didn’t know you could.”
“There is much the world does not know about us. The lies about us have twisted as deep as roots,” you say, and pat his elbow. “Where else are you injured?”
The elf’s face half-smiles, sheepish. “Can you help me turn around?”
“Yes,” and you do. He’s more muscular than you expected from one of Mairon’s victims; Mairon usually started with starvation and isolation, to sap the will from his victims before the real torment began. Either he’d been rushing or this elf was stronger than he looked.
The latter, you think ruefully once the elf has turned and sat back on your lap. His back is covered in livid bruises; the marks look as gruesome as if they were from a balrog’s whip,but lack the telltale burns. (It is similar enough that you wince.) It’s no wonder he crawled to you on his belly.
His shoulders look miserable, too, from having to hang bound by his hands for so long. A Man would risk dislocation; as it is, there’s going to be muscle strain and muscle pain, and even with the numbing balm, you think it’s unlikely he’ll be lifting anything heavy in the next few days.
You take the soap and cloth again and start cleaning again. There’s a few places where whatever whipped him broke skin, but they’ve already scabbed over; they look painful but not infected, and you don’t feel anything underneath, so you don’t break them to clean them out. His back is muscular; there’s a faded star tattoo on one shoulder - you recognize it as one of the sigils of the elf-kings of who fought Morgoth, the one your singing prisoner fought under; he makes a startled, breathy noise as scrub dirt away from an old scar. You rest your bad hand on his ribcage to keep him steady as you work.
The elf is shaking on your lap, head bowed, nape bared. The pain must be getting to him.
“I doubt there will be permanent damage,” you tell him. “He must have just started with the proper torture.”
“That’s right,” the elf breathes. “He was furious with me, but, but.” He hunches, and that could be the pain or the memory. “I did everything he asked of me. I fought him sometimes, but i did everything he asked eventually. He still was so furious.”
“He does that,” you say, not unkindly.
“He did it to you?”
“Among other things. Yes, even when I obeyed,” you say, answering his unasked question. “Sometimes he did not need a reason.”
“What did he do?”
You do not say something like, is it not obvious when you look at me? Or, do you not know the rumors about how orcs were made? His mind is muddled with Mairon’s arts, and having even one elf remain sympathetic to your cause will make the rest of this week significantly less likely to go wrong. Better to not go too deep into the horrors and risk breaking him.
So instead, you lean forward, your breastplate casting a shadow on his back, so he can see you roll down the sleeve of your good hand. It remains a mess of scars - Mairon has knit you back together more times than you can count, but he was never so good as to do it flawlessly - but one stands out to you. Order in the chaos, a mark of artifice among the scars of war.
You take his hand and run his thumb down the shiny line that runs from the butt of your palm to the inside of your elbow. Then you press his hand on your arm and gently flip it, the way that Mairon had opened your skin down the line and peeled it back to look at your veins and muscles.
“What,” breathes the elf.
“He wanted to see what it looked like underneath,” you explain.
The elf looks at you horrified over his shoulder.
“He put it back,” you clarify, taking his hand and pressing it onto your bare arm again. “If he had been truly angry, he’d have removed it.” There had been a few instances of this that your mind has mercifully refused to cling to the details of. It is a blessing to no longer be an elf, that Mairon’s left your mind full of holes, in that your memories can muddle enough to erase the worst stings of the past. “But what I mean is that he does not need a reason to hurt people. He would have done it no matter if you obeyed or not. Obedience could buy you temporary succor, but it would not have stopped him.”
The elf twists his head away from you. You do not tell him that you have seen this a thousand times before; you know he is trying to hide his tears, overwhelmed in helplessness. You have felt that twinned relief and despair, knowing that you had been doomed the moment you were chosen, and that no amount of fighting could have saved you.
“My hands,” he croaks, and his grip on your wrist tightens. “I know you are cleaning my injuries, but - can you wash my hands too.”
“Yes,” you say, and you damp the cloth once more, then take his hand in yours. You make a circle of your fingers and clean his one at a time, swiping under his fingernails to get the worst of the dirt out. You press his palms between both of yours. He clings to you in return.
“What’s your name?” you ask. You had refused to ask before, in case Sauron had tried to peek into either of your minds - but you are both away from the city now, and you doubt Sauron’s influence is great enough to stir anyone directly in your camp against you. You can drop your paranoia for now.
“Tyelpe,” he says quietly.
It’s a diminutive, you’re pretty sure. (Most elves have at least four separate names, five if they were important, last you checked. You’ve spent enough decades in the mountains and Southlands with only your children for company that you’ve forgotten the nuances of mothername-fathername-sindarin-quenya-epithet, and have little to warn you of if yet another naming system has emerged.) On the one hand, that meant that you’d gotten him relaxed enough to trust you; on the other hand, if he was important enough to be worth ransoming to the elves after you kill Sauron, you’d need the name he went by in public. But if nothing else, this gave you a good structure to build on with him.
“Tyelpe,” you repeat. “Tyelpe, the bruising goes past your hips. Is that something I can touch, or do you want to treat it?”
He shudders in your arms again. “Let me try,” and he twists his arm behind him, then bites back a cry. “I don’t think I have much of a choice but to trust you.”
“If it were not an emergency, I’d tell you to refuse,” you say. “But it is. I will be as gentle as I can.”
“Thank you.”
You take the fabric of the stockings and his smallclothes at his hips and carefully peel them off Tyelpe. He shifts uncomfortably as you pull them down around his knees, then off, then pile them on your lap so that he does not have to place bare skin against your chainmail.
Mairon was more systematic in his attacks below the waist. There are even, painful lines of bruises across his buttocks and the soles of his feet. You’d recognized the punishment back in the city, but it seemed that Mairon’s ire was truly inflamed, to have struck Tyelpe so harshly with some rod. (Or perhaps you are still too used to seeing these wounds on your children, who do not bruise or break so easily as elves.)
(The only bruises that are out of order are the handprints at the sides of his hips, crescent scabs at the indents of his hips and the jut of his pelvis. You do not comment on it. Elves are sensitive about this sort of thing, and you do not need him sinking into despair when the two of you are on a live battlefield. )
You keep cleaning, letting him use your scarred arm to balance on his knees as you work. He tries not to make a sound as you work, and you do not comment when he fails. As you finish getting the last scraps of dried blood off his feet, he falls back onto the pile of padding in your lap, kneeling around your two legs, hugging himself. “Please, a moment.”
“Rest,” you say, hands falling to his sides to steady him. “The salve will be here when you are ready.”
He takes your hands and wraps your arms around himself; you quickly drape the washcloth over his back before it hits your breastplate so that you don’t have to clean him again.
“What do I call you?” Tyelpe asks.
“Whatever you wish, so long as it is not ‘slavering orc,’” you say. “My children will take well to you calling me Lord Adar in public.”
“You are the lord of the orcs - of the Uruks,” he says, catching himself fast enough that you can tell it is a genuine correction, not Galadriel’s calculated shift in terms. “I am speaking to you as that lord. As such, I cannot simply call you ‘Father,’ can I? Do you not have a name?”
The question gives you pause; is the answer not obvious? “That person who was born and named no longer exists. There is only the title.”
“What do your friends call you?”
“My children call me Adar.”
“I have a father. I can’t call you that.”
“Elves call their fathers Ada, or Atar, or Atto, or Atya, or sometimes even Atir. I am Adar,” and you emphasize the soft consonant, the rolling r. Your children have made the title their own; you wear it with pride. “That is what I will be called. Or give me a new name, if this one displeases you so.”
Tyelpe tries to look back at you, then winces as he wrenches something in his shoulder. Instead, he lies back against you, a comfortable weight. “I should feel offended that the one burning my city down is so reasonable.”
“I cannot apologize for that. Sauron,” fire-crown-fall, “must die. If your Lord thought he was in Mordor, gathering an army, would he not march his own troops to burn it down in turn?”
“He would,” Tyelpe says quietly. “My King would.”
And he will, you know, which is why you have acted now. You cannot defeat both the Deciever and the elves at once; you cannot allow them to work together.
“I hid Annatar - I hid Sauron from him, thinking my king would forbid me my forges if he knew. He’d never let me make anything again.” He squeezes his hand over yours after he flicks Mairon’s name out of his fingers. “He probably won’t let me after this foolishness.”
You should come to Mordor, you think again, but you do not say it. He is likely more valuable as a ransom than as a smith; you need copper and iron and pewter, pots and pipes and tubs, not fine jewelry made from silver and stars.
(Or, recalling that Lady Galadriel said that Sauron was here to forge certain weapons, and knowing this elf was valuable to Sauron - you definitely do not need any rings .)
“I was so focused on my work that I did not know we were under attack,”Tyelpe continues as you think. “I heard the siege alarms sound and I went out and it was daylight and everything was fine. Everything was fine . How did I not notice?”
Siege alarms. You think back through the days you’ve been attacking this city. “I heard a great noise of bells from the city around dusk seven days ago, when our armies finally began our siege proper.”
“That’s the siege alarm. Seven days - it’s been seven entire days?”
“It has been. But they may have felt shorter or longer - Sauron’s manipulations alter the flow of time to a mind, prevent sleep, muddle the traces of time.”
“It was barely an hour,” he breathes. “It was months. I couldn’t tell. I’d go outside and everything was normal and the sun was shining. I could feel blood on my face but I couldn’t see it in the mirror. Everyone was screaming - I thought it was the wind - I thought it was the focus of creation distracting me but it was him .“
“He isn’t called the Deceiver because of his veracity,” you remind him. “He can weave illusions with those he knows dearly; and his words wind webs around even those he’s seen only in passing.”
“I am a fool,” Tyelpe says miserably. “How could I have not seen - ow, ow, stop that!”
You pinch the lobe of his ear harder, as you’d scold a child. “Stop me.”
“You - !“ Your remaining arm is an iron band around his upper arms, and he’s still bare and sitting your lap. He snarls and twists weakly, but he’s not going anywhere.
“If you can’t escape me,” you tell him, “you were not going to escape Sauron on your own. Do you understand me?”
“Ow, ow, yes, I understand! Stop that!”
You twist his earlobe to make your point before loosening your grip, instead petting his ear to help with the pain. He groans; his head sags into your palm.
“See? You couldn’t have done anything to stop me. You couldn’t have done anything to stop him,” you say. “You are not a fool. A snowflake cannot stop a fire.”
“How can you say that? You came here to kill him.” This time, he twists himself around slowly enough that he can look at you over his shoulder without flinching. You can see the whites of his eyes straining, like a Warg fearing thunder.
“Because a single snowflake cannot put out a fire, but an avalanche can,” you say. “Even if elves or men or dwarves heeded our warnings, they would never bind themselves together in time. So we will kill him as we did once before.”
“You what - “ and he hisses in pain as he twists his neck too far. “I think - I think, the salve, please. I’m ready.”
Shhhh whistles past your lips as you take the shell full of balm and slather the first two fingerfulls over his back. Your hand drags past the star tattoo, his shoulder blade, his spine. You can feel muscles untensing as you go. He cannot seem to make up his mind on if he is more comfortable hunched over or back arched, and twists between both until you scruff him by the nape again, holding him still.
“You are worse than a child,” you mutter. “You twist so much we have not even discussed why the two of us are here.”
“You were the one who was distracted first - must you grip me so hard?”
“I would not have to if you would hold still.” You make up your mind and push him forward on your lap, holding his head down, letting him balance his elbows against his bent knees as you anoint his back. “I was distracted by how he has turned your back into a blackberry bush.”
“Is it that bad?”
“You’ll be sleeping on your belly for at least a week. Whatever you did, he was truly furious.”
You feel Tyelpe swallow with the hand at his neck. He is likely weighing how much to say as much as you have been. You have every reason not to hurt him, given his value, but he has no material reassurance of it. And since you have proclaimed yourself an enemy of Sauron, if he was theoretically a smith helping Sauron make his rings, he might feel admitting it was a potential danger.
Which is why you have not asked him directly. You knew on marching here that Mairon was making a weapon; he’d baited the trap with that information himself, and you’d had no choice but to follow. Lady Galadriel had confirmed the weapons were magic rings, though she’d failed to understand why you’d had to strike quickly if Mairon was working to turn elves to his side.
Morgoth crushed his victims with pure might. Mairon’s every torture was calculated unless he was rattled. But when you were sent to torment the victims of Angband, it was with your comely face, your silver tongue. You could pass as an elf especially well back then; you were the soft touch, the bait on the hook, and Morgoth especially loved the look on an elf’s face upon realizing that you were an orc , and had betrayed them utterly.
Mairon had taught you how to calculate and pry secrets out of mouths; you are not so good at it as him, but it is useful enough now. Give your victim mastery over something they feared and they would be clay in your hands. You are giving Tyelpe a loophole to hide his guilt in so that he will cooperate with you.
“I,” Tyelpe says, “Denied him,” and he sounds surprised. You understand. Over a thousand years, and you still weren’t able to admit you killed Mairon without a frission of shock that it had actually worked. (Until it hadn’t.)
“Denied him what he wanted?”
“Yes.”
“No wonder he punished you so. It is a difficult thing, to resist him.”
He puts his hand on your wrist again, flipping it back and forth slowly. You decide to give him a little nudge as you rub balm along the bottom of his rib cage.
“We ran into the Lady Galadriel on the way here. She claimed Sauron was here in order to steal some great elven treasure, some rings, and that he would not leave until he had claimed them all. I do not know if they are star-plucked glass shards or weapons,” you lie, “but I do know that he dislikes having what he lusts for denied him. Was it those rings you denied him?”
You can feel him relax under your hands; the loophole you’d so carefully knit has worked to noose him. He denied the rings, but he was not blamed for them; it would be easier to admit knowing you would not hold it against him.
(How could you blame him? As you told him - once Mairon chose you as his prey, there was nothing that could be done. Tyelpe’s fate had been decided as surely as yours had when Morgoth chose you. You intend to sever Mairon’s influence from this Seen world permanently, but that will not change the fact that he changed you, and that you will never be what you once were.)
“I denied him the rings,” Tyelpe says. “In Ost-in-Edhil, the lord is a great smith, and his tower holds a great forge. We worked there with Annatar - with Sauron - to make rings that would heal and protect and strengthen. They were supposed to help people.”
“This is also what he does,” you tell him, and your fingers drag salve over the small of his back. “He genuinely wishes to help and to heal. He simply thinks that the best way for for the world to heal is under his boot. We mortals are too stupid and simple to understand what he knows best, so we must submit.”
“It is submission he intends. He did something to the rings, I know not what. The dwarves who gained them grew erratic and bad tempered; the elven rings had something so wrong with them that none sent word of them to me; I fear what the rings for men would do.”
“Nothing good,” you say. “It is the rings for men that you deprived him of?”
“Yes. He demanded them, begged for them, screamed for them, and I. Rather than give them to him, I threw them off the balcony.”
Laughter takes you so swiftly you cannot entirely choke back the noise of it. “Off the balcony and into the streets - oh, he’d hate that! If you’d hidden them, he could ask another to find them or to convince you - but he cannot convince the earth to part for him, nor for metal to roll out from crevices at his call. And if you were near the water, he would have to dredge it!”
“It was an impulse. It seems it served me well,” Tyelpe says, voice weak with relief.
“Well enough. I doubt he has enough control to sweep the streets as he should to regain the rings yet, especially with the battle raging,” and you trail off as realizations light up like stars behind your eyes. “Oh.”
“What is it? Don’t just freeze!” Tyelpe protests. “Especially not there!”
You shake your sudden stupor off. Your hand froze curled on his hip, impressed over where Mairon had left his marks; you quickly make to finish applying the balm as your mind races. “Sauron bores a hole in mortal’s minds and worms his way inside to influence them; it sounds as though the rings ease that process. Imagine, then, one who already had an opening in their mind picked up a ring; what would happen then?”
“The hole would - get bigger?” He muffles a noise as you finish adding rubbing the salve on his buttocks; you’re barely able to yank his smallclothes off your lap before he sinks down, leaving the stockings between his skin and your mail.
“It would. Which would mean?”
“More of Sauron would get in?” Tyelpe’s breath catches. “More of Sauron would get in.”
“More of Sauron would get in, and without direction from him. He wouldn’t notice at first, especially if he was venting his wrath on you, and it would spread. Especially if my children got their hands on more than one. They’d finally gotten into the city - one of them must have found a ring and put it on, not realizing it was more than a glass trinket.”
“Your children - the orcs. The Uruk,” Tyelpe says, and - “Wait. Why do they have a hole in their heads?”
“He made us that way,” you say. “Would you make a knife with no handle?”
“There is so much wrong with that statement,” he says under his breath before he shifts, tentatively putting pressure on his heels to turn halfway in your lap so he can look at you properly. “He left holes in your heads?”
“Yes. Do you want these?” and you offer him his smallclothes.
He scrambles into them; the balm’s taking effect, so Tyelpe has an easier time getting back into his undergarments than getting out of them, though the fact that the bottoms of his feet are numb makes the mechanics of putting the lower half of them on awkward. You end up helping him pull them up over his feet and to his hips.
Tyelpe collapses back on your lap when you finish, facing you this time. His arms curl over your shoulders. He looks a good 200 years younger with the pain numbed, his eyelashes near translucent, and his blood-filthy hair curls like elvish filigree; it’s a look more suited to Angband than to elven lands. The prisoner who sang had let you shear him before someone else took his long copper hair, curls clinging to his scalp when you visited him. It is almost nostalgic. Even the dirt clings to the lines on his face the same.
You realize belatedly that this is a rather intimate position to be in. You doubt your children would barge in on this, but it is a possibility; you have not allowed yourself such closeness since the night before you slew Mairon, his lips on yours, his hands maneuvering you for his pleasure.
Better to wrap this up, you think, and pretend that having a warm weight on you is not easing the tension in you. For many thousands of years, your body was a forge, your children the raw material, and it is not yet a one-uruk job to create a child.
“He put a hole in your head,” Tyelpe repeats, and his hand lifts.
You grab it before it can touch Morgoth’s brand on your temples. “Not physically.”
“No, I knew that - I mean, explain it to me in more detail.”
You firmly put his hand back on your shoulder so it stays put. “If Sauron wanted to influence someone’s mind, he’d normally need to create a way for him to get inside.” You grimace. “ Giver of gifts is apt. The best I can describe it is that you must accept a gift from him with trust to allow him to hook you.”
Tyelpe nods; you know he’s thinking of that first gift he received by the look on his face.
“But for the Uruk - the gift he gave my children is to exist . His gift has been passed parent to child for generations. The hole is already in their heads. Just him existing nearby can affect them. It is...” You try to work out if you can translate it to Sindarin or Quenya adequately as you sign Mairon’s influence, pulling a spiderweb from your head before transforming it into Mairon’s fallen crown. “Like a compass and a lodestone.”
“So he can already influence them,” Tyelpe reasons, “which means that a ring would increase that influence. And if he can make me see things and lose track of time with his influence - if that’s what he can do without help - “ He shakes his head fitfully. “We passed so many bodies on the way out of Ost-in-Edhil. I haven’t seen that since...”
“Gondolin,” you say. Tyelpe hisses through his teeth at the mention of it. “And all of Belerian d, in the last years of that final war, but it was more effective in a contained area. Morgoth wanted the city not just conquered but broken.”
“I remember,” he says grimly.
“Then you must remember the Uruk there being so distracted with rage that we let half the city slip out from under their noses,” you say wryly. “Hence why we two can speak today.”
“Let us escape only to walk right into a balrog,” and Tyelpe giggles hysterically, then crumples. “Oh, that’s not funny.”
It really wasn’t. Gothmog had always treated you as another soldier serving Morgoth, with all the mutual respect for each other’s duties as that entailed. He was almost a friend. You had grieved his death. You had grieved even more the loss of another body to keep Morgoth’s eyes away from you.
“I’d have thought you’d like to know we were bad at killing elves. Even elves are better at killing elves than we were that night.”
“Shut up,” but there’s no teeth behind it. “I fought in Beleriand,” has at least a little fang.
You do not give him a reaction. There is nothing to be done about it. He has killed your children, but so have many others. That does not change that you need him now.
“I told you before I will not apologize for what I am doing here,” you say. “Nor will I apologize for what I have done. But I came here assuming the elves here were working in tandem with him. Since it seems that’s not the case, most of the army will be pulling out.”
Tyelpe does not look up at you but tugs himself to your chest, pulling himself into an embrace with his head tucked against your neck. “Thank you.”
You uneasily steady him with your hands on his back. If he wasn’t exhausted, if you were telling him the whole truth, he wouldn’t be thanking you. But you’re tired too, and it has been so long since you were touched by a warm body that was not one of your children.
You’d spent the last few hours with the leaders of those clans who had marched with you to discuss the night’s battle. It had gone poorly.
Lord Adar, our people have been doubting that Sauron exists -
Lord Adar, only half those I sent with you came back and they’re all talking about how something took control of them during the night -
Lord Adar, where is that sun-haired elf warrior you brought with you -
You’ve spent the centuries since Mairon fell building your reputation and bonds among the clans of your children. This has not spent all the trust they put in you, or they’d have put you to the blade as surely as those Mairon maddened had tried to last night, but is enough that they are abandoning this battlefield for Mordor or their enclaves in the mountains. Perhaps it was a lapse on your part, that your children have become soft enough for this to rattle them; perhaps it was a lapse on your part to bring them with you instead of going alone on a quest you would surely not come back from.
You should have killed Mairon when he was in Mordor. You could not afford to. When you had slain him last time, his final attack had left the land where he had fallen uninhabitable. You could not risk him doing that in the heart of Mordor, not when there were already thousands settled and more coming, not when there were children running free who would not survive a blast of terrible ice.
(You wanted to kill him. You wanted him to grab your hair and push you onto your knees like the animal you are. You wanted his windpipe between your teeth. You wanted a cup to your lips, bitter wine spilling down your throat. You had managed a single strike last time, made deadly only by the weapon; you hid your shaking hands under your cloak when you spoke to him even though he was in chains, trying to make a yoke of an oath to defang him because you did not trust your body to move against his.)
Most of your children are leaving. A few clans are staying to loot the city before elven defenders can appear; a few are staying for you. Mairon’s rage in your head made you want to scream and beat those disobedient brats into the dirt, listen to me, listen he will kill us all you don’t understand, you don’t know the way you will beg for death by the end of it - but you are used to swallowing down your feelings. It was how you survived Utumno and Angband.
If you had a choice, you’d keep them here and rend this city stone from stone to find him. You’d let Mairon ruin this kingdom instead of your home. You’d use your body as a weapon to beat Mairon until you were chipped and dull and broken.
But your children are as strong together as threads in a cord, and it would destroy everything you have fought for to slice through the impossible knot they have presented you. You wanted them to have a choice enough to risk your death at Mairon’s hands, once; you are not fool enough to steal their choices away from them, even when the stakes are greater than life and death.
So here you are. Barely any army and the weapons you needed gone. You need Mairon dead, and you need your children safe, and your body has inverted its senses, demanding touch instead of rejecting it. Breath on your neck and weight at your hips.
“Sauron,” fire-crown-fall, “must die. For your people as much as mine. If I cannot slay him myself, I will keep from him every treasure which he desires. You have subverted his will, and he will come for you - and since you are in little shape to fight, you must decide whether to flee or to stand your ground.”
Tyelpe will never be safe. One who catches the eye of Mairon shall never escape his gaze. You know that through centuries of experience. But there are ways to hide.
“My life is likely forfeit, but I will spend it with care,” Tyelpe says. “You have saved me, and I may bring word of the rings and what remains of Lord Celebrimbor and how Annatar influenced him. Even if he cannot be saved, knowledge of what happened may protect others in the future.”
“Elves grieve their rulers deeply, even when they have been cruel or foolish.” Especially so, in your opinion, but you’re not going to say that to his face. “Knowledge can be a weapon, or it can be medicine to clean the wound.”
“You’ve half-cured me already, telling me that I am not mad but addled by the Deceiver,” Tyelpe says. “That enough of my right mind is left to fix things. I will tell my brethren what has happened in Ost-in-Edhil as best I can, and I will tell them that you came to fight Sauron and pulled back when you realized the city was not up in arms.” He pulls away from the hug to look at you and your shocked face. “Is that not what you hoped for?”
“It is,’ you say. “I just -”
“Had not expected it willingly?”
“I tried to negotiate something similar from Lady Galadriel. She said she would fight to defeat Sauron, but would not stop her king from attacking Mordor.”
“She would not,” Tyelpe says ruefully. “I don’t know if I can stop Gil-Galad either with what power I have left, but I can try. As a member of Lord Celebrimbor’s guild and one who worked on the rings, I imagine you would find me useful as a bargaining chip, but I would be more useful to you at your side than as a hostage.”
He makes. An incredibly good point. You still have to work your jaw a few times before you can manage your reply: “I will take your help. Just know that if this is treachery, I shall make you regret it.”
“I have no doubt. If nothing else, you can trust in my desire to spite Annatar.”
You can. Once Mairon has burnt his bridges, they stayed burnt.
(He had just. Thought your bridge unburnt when it had been destroyed long ago. You obeyed because it was a habit worn into your soul, because there was a hole in your head he could reach into even when he didn’t mean to. You had had no choice but to obey, when the bridge first burned; you endured century after century until, finally, you had a chance to cut away what was left of the wreckage.)
(Mairon had stared up at you with as much shock as betrayal when you had struck him down with his own crown. Part of you had quailed; part of you had screamed, how did you not expect this? You turned me into this. You killed my children. You made me kill my children. I have outlived so many that I cannot remember all their names.)
(Of course I stayed by your side; I had nowhere else to go. Of course I comforted you when Morgoth hurt you; he hurt me too. Why did you keep on treating me like he treated you? Why won’t you stop hurting me?)
“ - dar? Lord Adar?”
You blink out of your reverie as a warm hand cups your face. You’d drifted again. (It happens.) (It’s happening more often.) (Your body never did fit you right.) Tyelpe looks concerned; it’s his hand on you.
“I’m here,” you say. “This day is catching up to me.”
“And no wonder. You’ve fought so hard.”
It’s open, obvious flattery. A blatant compliment. Untrustworthy. You still shiver, a rumble of pleasure in your throat.
“We will move at sundown. We should both rest while we can,” you say.
Tyelpe’s eyes flit around your tent. “Where should I go?”
There is only one place, truly. You would not have him sully the balm by rolling in the dirt, and there’s few patients who would not benefit from a source of warmth as they heal. And you are already sitting on your bedroll.
“Stay here,” you murmur, and lower your body so that you are lying on your bedroll and he is on top of you. He’s heavier than he looks, for an elf. His body is hard with old tension and muscle. His weight is familiar and comfortable, though you have not done this for over a thousand years. Ancient strains are being crushed out of you.
(It was your job for thousands of years to exist like this, flesh to flesh, entwined. This is a much chaster version of it, but this is still an intimacy you have not allowed yourself since the last of your Moriandor brethren fell. Your body is fully yours and no one else’s now; you still crave for someone who is not your child to hold you.)
Tyelpe lets himself go limp on top of you. He mostly smells like herbal balm and sweat now. You curl an arm up so you can scruff the nape of his neck again,your other hand at his side. “Like this. You won’t hurt your back or disturb your wounds, and you can wake me if pain returns.”
“With you?” His voice squeaks at the end.
“There is only one bedroll. You’re injured. I am trusting that your desire to spite Sauron is greater than your desire to strangle me in my sleep. Or would you rather be cold in the dirt?” you ask.
After a moment, he shakes his head. It is natural. You are returning the tentative trust he has offered you, and you both must take advantage of any advantage you can gain before you go on the battlefield. Warmth and softness promote healing in elves. The heat is already helping - his cheeks are gaining a healthy flush.
It takes a little maneuvering to pull your blanket up over the two of you, and by then Tyelpe’s eyes are fluttering shut. You do not think he is in good enough shape to run, and he has nowhere to go here. Nor do you fear that he will harm you.
Perhaps you are not thinking clearly. You are tired down to your bones. But the idea of pushing him off you feels like driving a knife into your gut. He is yours, for now, and you will take advantage of a docile hostage for as long as you can.
He sinks against your body, cheek against your chest, and then knocks on your breastplate. “Are you going to sleep with your armor on?”
“Yes?” you say. Is it not self evident?
“You said you had no fear of me strangling you, but are you so worried I’ll stab you?”
Tyelpe’s curiosity is edged with held-back laughter; you playfully respond in kind: “If I thought you would try and hurt me, I’d have you bound. You’re going to be good, aren’t you?”
Tyelp giggles tinnily, his cheeks flushing further. Whatever game this is, you’re winning it.
“But isn’t it uncomfortable to sleep like that?”
“No?” You sleep like this every night. Sometimes you’ll remove your breastplate if you’re feeling particularly sore, but it’s back on the moment you wake.
“You sleep in your chainmail?”
“Yes.”
Tyelpe’s eyes roam over your breastplate, your mail. Despite his exhaustion, he pushes himself back up so that he’s straddling you, his hands steadying himself on your shoulders. “If you’re letting me share your bedroll so that I don’t injure myself further, wearing your mail is, it’s...” He raises one hand; the meat of his palm has red chainmarks livid on it. “I can’t sleep like this.”
“Berry-bruised,” you mutter, and shove yourself back up to sitting. You have spent so long digging trenches and making war that you forgot how delicate a standard elf was. Making them dig for hours on end would hurt them, but so would something normal like sleeping in armor. Because they bruised as easily as berries.
Was that why he’d pried off the layers you’d hunted down for him? Discomfort? Not a thought about who would take his armor if he discarded it? He was lucky he was in your tent, where you held a claim, or everything would have already been taken. Good armor was in short supply, and to remove it in a public space was to announce that you no longer wanted it, that any taker could have it.
(Your children are too young to remember what life was like before, to know how those habits were carved into your culture. When all you owned was the clothing on your back, punishment came from removal - theft and humiliation both, to have your status so worn down to be reduced to wearing scraps. It was all the more reason to wear your clothing layer over layer over layer, so that Morgoth’s punishment was less likely to render you bare.
And Mairon had noticed how you and your children had grown a taste for layers and pouches and pockets, a thousand tiny ways to keep that which you held dear on you at all times. When he summoned you to his rooms for company, he would eke out a little extra entertainment to leave you with one less garment than you came in with, or to find some leather strap replaced or the contents of your pouches changed.
Armor is armor, naturally, but clothing is armor, and layers are armor, and caution is armor, and Tyelpe has no idea what it means to disrobe willingly in the middle of a war camp. Much less in your tent! You could do anything to him. Implicitly, he would have permitted it.
But he is an elf. He doesn’t understand any of this. And you are not going to alienate a perfectly useful and cooperative hostage because he’s too ignorant to know what he’s offering you.)
“No, I'm not in very good shape,” Tyelpe says ruefully. “And I don’t think we have to worry about a battle happening that quickly. Won’t you rest better without your mail off?”
He does not know what he’s asking you, suggesting you disrobe with him in your own tent. He does not. And you wish your body would remember that, because the idea of shoving him off you and making him sleep in the dirt for daring to suggest it makes your skin itch with the need for contact.
This is a terrible idea.
Mairon is going to try and kill you and all of your children very soon. You should not be sleeping unprotected, unarmored, vulnerable. And yet if you’re going negotiate with the elves - or if he is lying (your chest aches at the thought) and you must ransom Tyelpe, you want him in decent shape. You remind yourself; it is pragmatic, it will help him heal, you had decided so, it is an essential need and there is no point to denying it. So you say, “Very well. Know that if you try and take advantage, I will be tying you and hauling you around camp instead of letting you walk.”
For some reason, that makes him laugh again. For some reason, your lungs squeeze and noise bubbles up in your chest and throat and it takes you a moment to realize you are laughing too. You let the noise work it’s way out of your body; only then do you begin prying your body out of it’s shell.
Your breastplate only requires you to fumble with a couple straps to get it off. You are so used to wearing it that your chest feels oddly exposed; you know the feeling is about to get worse. The chainmail is more obnoxious to remove. Between maneuvering around Tyelpe, making sure the mail didn’t get caught on your tunic, your chest or your hair, and the way your skin itches for touch even harder with all the metal off your body, you feel like a freshly molted spider. All of you is far too soft.
It’s almost a relief for the two of you to fall back on your bedroll once you’re down to your tunic and pants. To get crushed under Tyelpe. Elves run cool compared to Uruk, but his skin is almost clammy; you think he could be very useful to cool off in the summer. Your other senses feel heightened now that the weight of your armor is gone. The sharp herbal smell of the balm mingles with his sweat, as it had before, but now it is joined with the scent of ashes on his smallclothes. His breath, too, has a faint whiff of the bitter medicinal tea you’d ordered him be given upon arrival.
“Comfortable?” you ask.
Tyelpe shifts himself so that he can rest his head on your chest, his arms bracketing your sides, and sighs sweetly. “Comfortable.”
You drag your blanket back over the two of you again; your hand rests itself on the back of his neck as if they were made to fit together. Your body is going boneless already.
You usually don’t sleep until your body makes you. You can’t otherwise. Why lie on your bedroll for hours with your eyes closed when you could be doing things. Instead you drift away watching the wargs play in their pens or when you’re plying your hand spindle. Sometimes your children nudge you awake, and sometimes you wake draped on someone’s back as you’re carried to your bedroll, and sometimes you end up in the nursery to be watched with the children.
You fall asleep fast enough with Tyelpe’s comfortable weight that you don’t have time to be surprised by it.