Whispers by Luxa

Chapter 1

For my next fic for the 10th anniversary of the SWG I went for something entirely original- a post-Thangorodrim torture fic. Super new stuff, right? Warnings for descriptions of torture and violence and the vaguest hints of sexual abuse. Mentions of Russingon. Prompts used are family, cruelty, gravely injured, and Maedhros.

Lies, betrayal, it was all wrong, when he opened his eyes the light was soft and when he took a breath the air was sweet. Tricks, these had to be tricks, like the food that had tasted so sweet and good only to sour on the way down, turning to bile in his stomach and causing those dreams, the ones that flickered behind his eyelids when he blinked.

Betrayal, the Dark One had said, a finger lifting his chin so high his neck throbbed. They betrayed you. Left you here. Maitimo had had another name for the Dark One once, many names, but now when he tried to think of them they came in bits and pieces, the orcish words so much easier on the tongue now. He did not dare to speak of him around the ones who had taken him from the mountain. He could not let those tainted words slip from his worthless mouth. He could not show them how much he’d been changed.

Sometimes he thought these things, as though it really had been his cousin (his love, oh how it ached to remember those nights under the Trees, so enamored with each other their laughter bubbled up like the best champagne) who’d saved him, and not another cruel trick of the Dark One.

But it had to be.

It had to be.

His family had betrayed him. The Dark One had said so.

When he walked every step felt like it was taken on broken glass. His brothers did not understand why the tears streamed down his face. They never did. He cried out, screamed about the glass, his thin legs trembling as he felt the shards pierce him.

Betrayal. He’d been left to die, left in cruel hands, left with the filthy ones who lived in the deep for the amusement of the Dark One. They’d betrayed him, right?

The nightmares weren’t nearly as bad as being awake, because then he had to try and control the thoughts that wormed their way in. His hand shook and he couldn’t walked. His cousin had such sad eyes when he saw Maitimo.

It was the eyes that did him in. The Dark One’s illusion had brought him to the heights of joy only to plunge him into the depths of misery, but the people in them had never looked at him with such sorrow. The touches of his dream cousin would turn to ash, but Findekáno’s never did, not in his room by the lake.

Still, he could not walk. The healers cut open his feet looking for the glass shards he screamed of, but they found nothing. The servants avoided his gaze and even Findekáno’s smiles were tinged with worry now.

The whispers were still in his mind, day and night, worming their way into his skull (he clawed at his face, his hair, but it was enough, they were still there). They spoke of wrong things, things he knew couldn’t be true (or could they, because the Dark One had told him they were, and wasn’t he always right), that he was worthless, that he’d been left to die.

But Findekáno had come for him (if this was real, if he truly wasn’t going to wake in the dungeons with his limbs bound, the laughter coming from above him as the torments were resumed, a hand stroking his cheek in that way that brought sickness to his throat).

He had not been abandoned.

He had not been betrayed.

The Dark One was wrong.

The others would never know of these early days, of the torment that twisted his insides while his body healed. They knew he was troubled and he screamed of glass, but they could never know the way the memory of the Dark One haunted him. He never wanted anyone to know again.

He had not been betrayed, had not been lied to, had not been abandoned, not by those who mattered, and that was what he told himself during the nights (and the days too, when the sky was blotted out with fear). It was what he told himself to drown out the whispers.

It took time before the glass stopped splintering in his feet, but he could walk.