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In the darkness, Adar is alone.
It seeps into him, insidious and endless, creeps into the marrow of his bones, into all the places inside of him that yearn for light. Light, he remembers only distantly, a brush of glimmering brightness that sang in the sky lurking at the edges of his mind. He had loved that light; the idle thought occurs to him, stirring something that is difficult to hold onto. He tries to wrap his fingers around it, stars, elen, the word hovers before him, holding a memory in it that’s too far away to see with any clarity. He strains for it, to look at it more closely, but like every moment of true awareness, it slips away, vanishes back into the nothing.
Darkness, he knows intimately.
There are no stars here.
Perhaps there is a passage of time.
The concept of time, Adar does not fully comprehend, even less than that of light. On the peak, in the void, in between one frozen sluggish beat of his heart and another, one rattling breath is much like the other. But there are things that alter, change inside of him, and so, time, Adar considers must remain by his side.
There are things that alter, some things, painful things.
Deep ripples of hunger inside of him sunder his cells, bend his body, contort it, on the ground, he must be on the ground although he has no memory of finding it, although his last memory, he couldn’t say, on the ground he writhes, bends with the waves of it. Deep ripples that were once aches that began as pangs, and perhaps, at some time, what is time, some time, Adar had not hungered, and there were stars.
He must have a form, because the heaviness of the manacles rests on something, because the pain lives in a vessel of some kind, the thirst parches a throat which must exist. But if he does, he cannot recall it.
But he welcomes them, when they come, these alterations into the fabric of his singular existence. It is far worse when the changes cease to rattle his thoughts and become instead a part of the silent mundanity, as the numbness in his limbs, the blindness in his eyes have. When the mark of change stops, and everything freezes anew.
When he wonders why it is he remains living at all. Except that he is not sure how to die.
The darkness never changes, but slowly, it eats its way into Adar’s heart, more and more of him lost in the stretches. He is becoming the darkness. And soon, perhaps, he will be lost.
In time that is not time that does not exist, he will be gone.
He does not know in truth if he craves or dreads that end. But an end, any end, he considers, he will accept.
—
In the darkness, the sudden presence of light is searing. Painful. It raises a sound from his throat which has long gone mute with disuse, with anguish, with the lack of drink of any kind.
The sudden presence of the light is agony, but something in Adar’s very being leaps to sense it.
He closes his eyes to it, or perhaps his eyes were already closed, and the presence of the light was so furious in the dark that it hadn’t mattered at all. In the dark, it was impossible to say if his eyes were shut, but now, if he opened them, he would know, he thinks.
The thought terrifies him.
Please. He imagines saying, wants to say, although there is no strength in him, Please. But he does not know what he pleads for. Only aware, with sudden blade-sharp sear of clarity, clearer than he can recall a thought existing, that if the light were to leave again, the ache in his chest would be enough to bring this torment to an end.
Soft fingers graze along his face, and beneath them, form returns from the dark. The shape of his cheeks, the line of his jaw, the beginning of his hair. They had faded away, but they come now slowly back into relief in his mind. He can almost make them out. Can find the edges of him. Adar. Him. And the dark separate.
There’s something else in the touch. Something cloying and sweet, something that burns at the edges. But Adar is much too consumed with the rollicking confusion, with the maelstrom of his own reshaping, rebirth, that he can’t quite make it out in the backdrop of everything else. Its poison is lost in the swell.
“My poor precious pet.” A voice murmurs. Perhaps it does not make sound in the air. Murmurs closer, along the edges of his mind, an unbearable intimacy. It seeps along the tangles and snarls of his thoughts, slips between them, and settles there, alien but comforting, bores roots into the soft places. “What has been done to you?”
The voice, tender in his mind, and the touch, the gentle touch, the voice of another, the touch of another, another, and Adar has been alone. Oh, he has been alone. And the presence of another seeps into him, an unbearable intimacy, an exquisite torment.
And the light.
He longs to weep, though no moisture exists inside of him. But the phantom tracks, the welling of it, they dance along his skin. The surfaces of his skin emerge again, too. And he cracks his eyes open, only a hair, but flinches at even the first hint of the rays. A star, the breathless word echoes in the caverns of his skull. A star come to him in the darkness, like fire.
He’s on the ground, he knows again, curled in on himself. And long fingers curve through his tangled hair draped everywhere. He can feel the strands of it now, across his bare shoulders, matted and ugly. An idea of shame strikes him, but it’s very far away.
“Morgoth.” The voice says, a real sound this time, which fills the hollows of Adar’s ears, eases the strain that has besieged them in the great gout of time that has drenched him. Straining for the sound in the distance that never came save for the howling of atmosphere. “His ways can be ugly, indeed.” A low tut of tongue. “But we’ll leave that all behind us now, won’t we?”
The touch leaves his face, hovers instead feather-light over his shoulders, wraps around the, and urges them out of their coil. Presses him back, opens him up. The muscles in his body tremble at being so moved, and a soundless whimper falls from his lips. But he could not fight even if he wished to, and the touch he does not wish to stop. So he allows it as the nausea rises inside of him, succumbs to it, a sweep of dizzy confusion.
Rhythmless breaths heave through his chest, too deep and then too shallow, unable to stop them from drifting too fast, exhales tripping into inhales.
His heart pounds without pause.
The touch comes soft again, a play at grounding, but it digs, despite itself, draws tiny pinpricks of new pain into everything else. Adar can scarcely sense it in the muddle.
“Open your eyes.” The voice purrs now, velvety, dropping into the cadence of command. And then a promise with the edifices of sincerity. “I won’t hurt you.”
Adar wants to shake his head, wants to protest, that he can’t. That he’s tired. But he does not wish for the light and the voice and the touch to leave. So in the fray of everything, he slits his eyes, pushes them open, a shuddering breath shivering through him.
For a breath, everything ceases.
All of it too much, too much at once.
And the roar of it explodes so loudly that it turns again into nothing. A whirling of streaking images assails him, blurring together, sensations that have long lain still shocking back into existence. His mind struggles to perceive---to understand. It thinks to return to blackness. It thinks to simply cease. But in the end, from the pandemonium, a face takes shape. And the rest falls away to quiet around it.
A hand comes to cup his cheek, and he leans into the gesture.
He could see his body, frail and flayed, if he tried now, he knows. He could see the manacle that so long held him, invisible in the dark. He could see the tremble of his fingers.
But all he sees is Sauron.
The figure above him is drenched in a crackling light, dark and firey. Not like the stars, Adar’s memories, a little fuller now, tell him, silver and pure. But the stars, where are they, gone.
And in the absence of stars, Sauron is before him, beside him, around him. His eyes, golden and hungry, see Adar. Perceive him. Make him real.
And Sauron is beautiful.
The darkness surrounds him, but he is light. Adar has long longed for light.
He reaches out, a slow, shaking hand, remembering what it is to move, to control his limbs at all, and Sauron doesn’t stop him, only watches, amused. He offers Adar his hand, pale smooth skin, to run a finger over in wonder.
Clean, untouched, unscarred.
Whole. Beneath Adar’s fingers, whole. Wholeness, that had not existed in the void.
Adar is a constellation of shards. Acutely, he knows he will never fully heal.
But Sauron smiles down at him, and some treacherous part of Adar gleams again.
“You must be thirsty.” Sauron hums, his touch drifting back to the sweaty strands of hair that cling to Adar’s forehead. For a breath, his gaze drifts down, and across, along all of him, and that brings the embers of distant shame to a stoke again. But then their eyes have tangled once more.
Silver, Adar thinks, his eyes were silver.
Silver like the stars.
“Let us toast.”
Sauron’s voice is half in Adar’s thoughts, half in his ears, envelopes him
From nowhere, the other procures a bottle of wine in a clear glass bottle, scarlet and gleaming. It radiates color in a way Adar has not perceived since the darkness, and it enchants his gaze, the richness of it, the lush ripples, the darker sediment that settles like blood.
“To your health.”
Adar’s blood has gone sluggish in the dark, full of shadow. It dries dusty and black on his skin.
But the bottle, the bottle is full of wonder.
Sauron’s laugh fills the space between them, and Adar is grateful for it. Aches for it, in a way he could not recall that ache felt.
And when the other raises a glass of wine, blood red, glorious, to his lips.
He drinks it.
And it tastes of honey. It fills his mouth, sits heavy on his tongue, floats heady and exhilarating down his throat and into him.
In the void, he thought often of death.
In Sauron’s presence, as the heat of the wine warms through his veins, deliriously delights his tongue, softens the sharp edges of pain in his limbs, in between his cells, in his mind, he thinks, for the first time, of life.
Sauron holds the cup to his lips, and his fingers gently tilt Adar’s chin up.
He drinks.
He drinks it all.