puissance (stay my hand now) by queerofthedagger

In the end, Sauron does not kill him.

This is of little relief, of course. There are stretches of time, endless and without mercy, where Celebrimbor wishes—fiercely, desperately, so wrecked with pain that it has no beginning and no end—where he wishes that he had. That he would.

But Sauron looks at him with gold-cold eyes in the desecrated workshop that used to be theirs and says, “I tire of this, Tyelpë. You shall yield eventually.”

In a way, he had always underestimated Celebrimbor’s stubbornness, the tenacity of the Firstborn.

Celebrimbor does not beg for death, does not goad him. He could, he knows; Sauron’s patience had run out days ago, and it would be easy—so easy—to push him that final step.

And perhaps, Celebrimbor should. Perhaps it would be safer, would ensure that he gets to take his secrets to his grave. Perhaps it would be the more merciful ending. For him. For them. For whatever worth that once held.

Above everything, though, Celebrimbor wants to live. He may not see the blue-struck sky as a free elf again, may never again in this mutilated body hold a hammer, his tools. May never again create something and not see it crimson and twisted.

Still, still, he wants to live. If only to gather whatever power he can to himself; if only to enact whatever retribution he can twist his fingers into.

His family has always been fond of revenge, and Celebrimbor may have sworn off their legacy for years, decades, centuries. May have done so for good reasons.

Some things, though—some things, his grandfather, his father, his uncles had doubtlessly been right about.

There is no worth in giving up. If you decide on something, commit.

And Celebrimbor vowed, once the betrayal sliced through him, to bring Sauron down, one way or another. If not with his own hands then with his legacy.

It is the only oath he ever uttered. He meant it all the more for it.

Mordor is a wasteland. Is a tangible, terrible testament to how far Annatar—Sauron—has fallen.

Once, they had dreamed of Middle-earth restored. Of something splendid and grand enough to rival Valinor, to bring peace to all races.

Celebrimbor knows it is foolish to assume that he ever knew anything about Sauron at all, and yet he does not think that that part was a lie.

It is a little sentimentality and a lot of practicality. Every great deception builds on kernels of truths; it is how Sauron had been able to ensnare him in the first place.

There is no comfort in the thought, which is why Celebrimbor hopes for it to be true. The fact that he is riding behind Sauron—guarded, ridiculously, by an entire host of Orcs, but in Sauron’s sight and on horseback all the same—strengthens the belief.

As does the fact that he is still alive. That he is brought here, instead of dead and rotting in Eregion’s wreckage.

Ahead of him, the ring gleams on Sauron’s hand. It whispers.

Celebrimbor knows that there is no hope left for Sauron. That perhaps there had been, years ago, when a golden Ainu stepped into his workshop, but that somewhere along the way—somewhere between late nights and shared work, between ambitions and glistening dreams—the window of opportunity had slipped.

There is no use in shedding tears over the past; Celebrimbor knows it better than anyone.

There is no use mourning the cold, hard present. The Lieutenant ahead of him—the one who had tortured him so that even mended, Celebrimbor can still feel each cut, each flayed stretch of skin imprinted on his soul—is no longer someone he recognises. No longer anyone he could bear to love.

This, beneath brushed aside what-could-have-beens, makes everything from here on out easier.

He is kept in the dungeons, at first.

Escorted personally, Sauron looks at him through the closed bars. “Perhaps, Tyelpë, this will teach you the meaning of gratitude,” he says, and then he is gone.

Celebrimbor sits back against the cold, dank wall, and waits. He eats the food provided to him. He ignores the taunts and cheers of the leering Orcs. He sleeps when he can.

Celebrimbor knows patience, the weight and sharp edges of it. He knows of the enemy’s cruelty, what it means to be at his mercy.

The Orcs never enter his cell; no one ever lays a hand on him.

He smiles into the dark, and wonders if this is what Nelyafinwë meant when he spoke of the satisfaction of resistance, no matter its price.

“The rings, Tyelpë.”

Celebrimbor stares back, steady. It is lucky, he thinks, in the detached corner of his brain that he can still call his own, that the betrayal barely stings any longer.

Annatar was Sauron, and he had carved everything that might have ever meant to Celebrimbor out of him, muscle after tendon after rattling, bone-shaking scream.

Anything this may have ever meant is iced over, buried. He holds Sauron’s gaze and does not speak.

It is impossible to tell how much time has passed when Celebrimbor is moved to chambers.

The order comes from a human guard, one who looks at Celebrimbor with a strange mixture of bitter resentment and awed terror.

“Has he said why I am being moved?” Celebrimbor asks, his voice rough from lack of use.

He is met with silence.

“So, he forbade you to speak to me.”

A tightening in the jaw, a twitch of the fingers. Celebrimbor smiles. “It is quite all right; I shall cease causing you problems.”

He still gets no answer, but by the time the guard locks the door behind Celebrimbor, his resentment and fear have simmered down to something that allows a flicker of curiosity.

Truth be told, Celebrimbor can take a good guess.

The dungeons have been filling with people. Men, mostly; pained and tortured creatures who would be easy to turn with a few well-placed words, a little compassion.

Sauron may have underestimated Celebrimbor’s stubbornness, and in some ways, his measure. He never once did the same to his intelligence though, and so of course, he does not want Celebrimbor among them.

Besides, all the torture, the captivity, the gloom have clearly not brought him closer to his goal. Besides, the goal—the ceaseless, unending questions after the Three—seems to have become more of an old and tired dance.

Sauron would never give them up entirely, of course; surrender is no more in his nature than it is in Celebrimbor’s.

But Sauron does not need the Three to wage his war. The state of his fortress, his dungeons, the news that Celebrimbor catches from outside every once in a while, prove it well enough.

Celebrimbor tries not to think of it. There are things he can control, and those he cannot. He keeps the Three a secret and thinks not about the rest.

So, regardless; intimidation has failed, and Sauron’s rage about it seems to have exhausted itself the moment he decided that death would be too easy a fate for Celebrimbor.

The dungeons were an interim. Celebrimbor could have told him that the moment they failed to manifest as punishment.

So, now, here he is. The chambers are nothing grand, but they have a bed, a table, a basin to wash in. The single window is high and bared, and beyond the sky is red, but there is a window.

It is no relief, of course. It is a step forward on the map of retribution that Celebrimbor has sketched out, an inch closer to the conclusion he had drawn the moment Sauron stitched his skin back together and called it clemency.

“Tyelpë, my Tyelpë,” Sauron sighs, standing in the doorway to the dim room. “I tire of this; do you not?”

It is the same thing he had said before trailing his fingers through Celebrimbor’s open chest, refusing to release him from his misery.

Celebrimbor tilts his head. Swallows the words burning on his tongue—the scorn, the pleading, the moralising that makes him want to laugh—and hums instead, simple and inquisitive.

This is Sauron’s theatre, and he is a mere prop. Or perhaps, that makes it too simple, understates his own role in this—

This is Sauron’s tragedy, and Celebrimbor will be his fatal flaw.

The same is true in reverse, of course, but that particular play has long since seen its curtain fall.

“Eat with me, then,” he says, and does not flinch when Sauron’s hand brushes his shoulder as he walks past to sit down across from him.

Time still passes strangely, and Celebrimbor lets it.

Measures it in milestones instead—conversations that last, that crash not into memories of simpler days, of gleaming tools plucking the bird-fine bones from his fingers, one by one.

Measures it in the periods during which Sauron does not ask after the rings, the way he looks almost exasperated, now, when Celebrimbor merely smiles and sighs. When Celebrimbor tells him again—again, again, again—that he cannot say.

It is almost laughably easy. It is the most terrible thing Celebrimbor has ever had to do.

Each time Sauron leaves his chambers, Celebrimbor breathes—long, endless moments, until his stomach stops turning, until his lungs function again. Each night he wakes drenched and shaking, the sounds and smells of Mordor invading his chambers.

This is his penance; his penance and his revenge.

Weeks pass; months; a year, perhaps.

Progress is slow, hindered by other things taking up Sauron’s time. Celebrimbor hears of the advances of Sauron’s army, the fall of his friends, his people. Hears of their victories, too, of Númenor’s might.

He swallows his grief, his relief, his fear. Listens as Sauron talks, watches the bright violence of the ring on his hand.

It still whispers; it is clearer with each passing day that it does so to none more than to Sauron himself.

A strange thing, Celebrimbor thinks, as Sauron’s glittering eyes stay fixed on him—to be thankful for something that is the root of all your worst dreams.

The first time Sauron dares to kiss him again, Celebrimbor almost punches him; almost ruins everything.

It is a brief thing, a brush of cold lips to the corner of his mouth.

Sauron smiles, a little too knowing, and sweeps out of the room.

There is a ringing in Celebrimbor’s ears, a sensation in his stomach that feels terribly close to falling.

No use in spilling tears over the past. He knows this. He knows this. And yet.

He retches over his chamber pot until the sky turns light again. Then he drags the back of his hand across his mouth, gets to his feet, and shoves it all back down—the grief, the revulsion. The longing.

One objective, and one objective only; he can worry about peace for himself in the aftermath.

Of course, he is not allowed to have any kind of weapon—nothing so much as a knife to cut his food.

The wine glass he is given each night is heavy though, thickly carved glass that reflects the light of the torches tenfold and crimson.

He makes sure to wait until Sauron visits him the next time. Until they sit across each other and Sauron talks of his conquests, his victories, his dreams.

It is a mimicry of conversations they used to have, words sinking like sizzling poison beneath Celebrimbor’s skin. He listens, though, takes note. The attention does not need to be faked, merely his revulsion carefully folded away.

When Sauron expects him to laugh, he laughs. The sound of shattering glass almost sounds like a logical consequence, like the next note as the recapitulation nears its inevitable end.

Predictably, Sauron huffs. “You have never held your wine well, Tyelpë.”

Celebrimbor smiles, bashful, while his teeth clench so harshly that his jaw cracks.

The first time he had kissed Annatar, it had been after a feast in the middle of winter, the air freezing, the stars glittering. Everything between them so warm and languid, Celebrimbor had forgotten all those reasons and arguments that should have stood between them. Instead, he had slipped a hand into Annatar’s hair, easy; had pulled him close, a question; had brushed their mouths together, and thought it a marvellous thing, the way he tasted of wildfires and home.

Slipping from his chair, he picks up the pieces, laying them carefully on the table for Sauron to take with him.

When he settles back down, his smile is anything but faked, the cold of the large shard pressing against the inside of his wrist singing with pleasure.

He takes to singing to it in return.

Songs of Power have never been a talent of his, but he learnt enough of them—from Makalaurë first, of course, and later from Findaráto. Learnt, even later, how to let his voice sink into metal and gemstones, how to wrap notes into the fabric of them, to sway them to yield to his hands.

Glass is a thankless recipient, but Celebrimbor is desperate and has time in spades. He makes it work.

Songs of resilience and resistance, songs of true aim and warm blood. He sings until his throat is raw and his fingers tremble, and then he slips the thing away, careful, always careful, whenever steps echo down the corridor.

It is all coming to an end. Celebrimbor awaits it, wide-awake.

When the opportunity finally presents itself, it is everything and nothing like Celebrimbor expected.

It is a late night, and Sauron seems drawn, face haggard, hands restless. They talk, words without substance, nothing between them real.

It is when Sauron means to leave that he pulls Celebrimbor close; one unyielding, desperate hand in the front of Celebrimbor’s robes, one pleading, acrimonious mouth to Celebrimbor’s ear.

“The Three, Tyelpë; have I not waited long enough? When will you finally yield? It is inevitable, we know it both. And yet, you continue to—“

Celebrimbor kisses him, then. It is not needed, and no one will ever know it, but he does. He presses his open mouth to Sauron’s—Annatar’s—warm and familiar, as treacherously false as everything between them has ever been.

For a single moment, he lets it all slip away; pretends that they are still in Ost-in-Edhil, stars spinning above the highest balconies. That it is Annatar’s mouth opening beneath his, the future stretching ahead of them.

Sauron kisses him back like a starved beast, for once so surprised by Celebrimbor that he forgets to be careful, to have a plan, to think three steps ahead.

It is satisfying, to still be able to cause this. That this, at least, had not been all lie and calculated deceit. It is agonising, too; it tears open everything Celebrimbor long since thought dead and withered.

His eyes burn. Time spools on. There is a fraction of a moment, a split-thing that slices through him, where he wonders. Where he thinks—what if I am wrong? What if there is hope?

Then Sauron moves, changing the angle, teeth scraping against Celebrimbor’s bottom lip, and Celebrimbor—

Celebrimbor remembers.

It is a simple thing, then, to slip the shard of broken glass into his waiting palm. A simple thing to deepen the kiss, to raise a hand to Sauron’s finely chiselled face.

It is the hardest thing Celebrimbor has ever done to slice the glass across Sauron’s throat—to hold him close, press the weapon into his jugular, a wretched imitation of intimacy. To not let go.

Sauron’s eyes are wide and shocked. His blood runs hot across Celebrimbor’s hand, bright red and accusing.

“Tyelpë,” he chokes, reaching for his throat.

Celebrimbor pushes the shard deeper, then pushes away. He watches as Sauron crumbles, and he expects—

He expects satisfaction. Relief. The pleasure of a task well done.

Instead, everything within him remains iced over. Hollow. It is all mechanical as he grabs the knife from Sauron’s hip, as he slices off the ring from its host, already gleaming, waiting, preparing to undo all of Celebrimbor’s hard and thankless work.

It should even the score. Sauron stares at him with wide, panicked, betrayed eyes, and Celebrimbor almost wishes that he had been allowed to die back in Eregion.

The moment stretches, the room silent except for the gurgling, dying sounds of Annatar at his feet.

“Perhaps one day, you will thank me,” Celebrimbor says, and there—there, at that flicker of incandescent hatred—the satisfaction he so desperately craved flares inside him.

It dies just as quickly. I loved you, Celebrimbor thinks, wants to shout and snarl and plead it. One day, long ago, I truly loved you; now look at what you made of us.

There is no longer any use in it, of course; finally, irrevocably, Celebrimbor turns away.

He has no illusions about getting to leave this fortress alive. Still, he grips the knife a little tighter, ignores the cooling, sticky blood on it. Clenches his fist until the ring digs into his palm like a brand. Faces the door, raises his chin, and thinks—

Resistance, no matter the price. There may be little satisfaction in it, at the end of everything here, but perhaps this, at last, can finally mean something.

The ring sings of mourning within his palm, and Celebrimbor steps forward.

Chapter End Notes

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