#SEAWARDSTOYOU

[sun-snatcher]

( credits to @winterswake for this phenomenal gifset ! )

3/? | SEAWARDS, TO YOU. ; REPENTANT!AU

summ.  A continuation. Sauron learns what it means to be human— and what it takes to be one. or: Sauron experiences the best & worst of mortality. pairing.  (Repentant!Mairon/Sauron) Halbrand / f!reader , ( established in #SEAWARDSTOYOU ) w.count.  4k a/n.  Important tags in first chapter ! Warnings for implications to PTSD & slight horror , including Non-graphically implied Animal Death.

THE BARNACLES STARE.

They’re overgrown; marrow-white and clinging onto the cracks of the salt-licked rockface, breathing and blinking at him like the thousand, ever-watchful eyes of the Ainur. 

In his dreams, every single one turns to blazing stars that wink out in an instant as he passes them. The shadow of Morgoth is a powerful darkness: it can dim them into lightlessness and nothingness. He tells them he is neither Morgoth nor Melkor nor Sauron nor Mairon, that he is something new; something different— but they can’t hear him under the sheet of waves crashing like a tempest on the shores, pulling him down, down, down, and under.

(He drowns. Rarely does he choose to fight the currents.)

In other vivid dreams, the barnacles don’t listen. They don’t because they can’t listen; because they’re dead and lifeless and the colour of their shells look eerily vertebral and bone-faced. They’re skulls, he later realises. A thousand of them. Endless. Both young and old. Their missing teeth and gaping maws, frozen in terror, roll in masses that wash in from the bloody tides and take up the shore beneath his feet. They fracture and splinter and cry out in pain when he walks on where soft sands ought to be, begging for mercy with every black step he takes.

He wakes up restless. He wakes up mortified. 

A forest fire rips through Eldalondë.

It dies out as quick as it had come, however; by the grace of the Valar and their blessed storms! The Faithful cry.

“Blessed,” Galadriel hears Halbrand scoff underneath his breath. They’d both sailed down the river Nunduinë with the other locals to help with clearing out whatever the blaze had left in its wake, and the very air now is clogged with residual smoke and the stench of death. She doesn’t comment on his muttering. (He had yet to heal completely from the rope burns in his palms from when they’d been stranded at sea, after all.) 

“You think it’s a sign?” asks one of the arborists. 

A grave weight seemed to have sunken into Galadriel when the scent of the Mellyrn had greeted her, and she’d been brought to the heart of the massive grove, where she lay a hand on the now-sundered tree.

“These very trees were brought as seeds from Aman by the Eldar of Tol Erresëa. Elros Tar-Minyatur himself had hand in planting these.” She remembers Elrond, too, had come to sail and plant a tree of his own here. The forest had been so young then, in the early years of the Second Age. Now the woods seem unsettled— even the very winds that blow between its spaces.

“Not idly do the trees of Valinor burn,” she finally warns. “Even when ensnared by lightning.”

Halbrand had seen it from afar, coming downwind from the riverbank: the tree’s colossal trunk— thick as a Dwarven-hewn mountain pillar— torn in its center from the high canopies of branches, snaking all the way down to the spindly stretch of roots. The bolt of light had rent an ugly, gaping wound into its silver bole, hollowing out the wood and carving it out to look like a glaring crack into the Unseen World.

He can still see the gleam of red embers between the bark of the tunnelled tree.

He can still hear it crackling in its seams, even.

Or… no. That isn’t the fire— 

“Galadriel!”

Mallorn branches grow great and wide, so it takes out an entire stable when it crashes down. 

One of the horses get caught underneath. 

They cannot move the branch. (It wouldn’t do any good, even if they did.)

Abârzî, the sea-cadet weeps, stroking the mare before he went to braid the hairs of her tail and cut it off. He chants it like a prayer.

Abârzî. Abârzî. Abârzî.

(No one has the heart to finish the job.

Halbrand does not exactly offer— but they don’t stop him either when he begrudgingly enters the stables for them.)

“What was he saying?” Sauron asks, after, in some poorly attempt to clear his mind.

“Her name,” Galadriel translates, solemn. “Abâr holds several meanings. It stands for strength, might, endurance. ‘One of Valiance’, even. Perhaps: ‘Admirable one’—”

It’s the first time Mairon ever experiences throwing up.

Galadriel sits beside him, and doesn’t say a word more.

He’s glad. 

Or, maybe he isn’t.

He doesn’t understand what he feels these days.

The wine Sauron pours to the raven-haired elf in his dreams is thick.

Too thick to be wine— but just as deceptively sweet.

On other nights, he pours and it keeps going, and going, and going. It gushes down his palms and down the nameless peak he’s standing in, and cascades down the cliff- like a thundering waterfall— no, an open wound. Sometimes the elf pushes him forward from the back, and it stings like a stabbing betrayal. (Other times, Mairon simply chooses to fall.)

When he plummets, it’s into red seas. It feels like wading through molasses; exhausting a pain into his limbs more than the dull ache at his nape and the throb of his suffocating lungs. Then there’s the twinkle of starlight throwing him off every time he swims. He always mistakes them for the night sky, and he blindly reaches towards the surface— until they turn out to be the white-faces of barnacles instead, attached to the maws of a sea-wyrm deep in the ocean.

Tonight, however, he swims in the right direction. 

The raven-haired elf pulls him out with a trusting, helping hand wrapped in a gauntlet; and when Sauron breaches ashore, he’s not kneeling at his feet on sands or bones, but instead on the all-too familiar cracked, black stones of his old fortress up in the bleak frigidness of Forodwaith.

Mairon is garbed in soaking red robes.

This time, Adar coronates Sauron not with Morgoth’s crown, but with a rotting horse skull named Abârz—

“You have a strange shadow, ‘Maril,” Eärien tells you, not long after you’d come down to Nísimaldar to assist in the clean-up effort. “It’s shaped like… a funny-looking man who always seems to look as if he’s rolled around in the dirt for ten hours.”

You blink, puzzled, then turn to where she’s peering over your shoulder.

Halbrand’s eyes dart away just as you meet his gaze. 

“Friend,” you correct, levelling an unimpressed glare back at your table of teasing looks. “Halbrand is a friend.”

Isildur raises his brows once you begin gathering another fresh bowl of seafood. “Don’t forget the oysters. I hear they’re great for men’s libid—”

“Shut your mouth when you eat,” comes your sharp flick at his ear, going to leave as the rest of the cadets break into laughter. “Even Berek has better manners than you, airhead.”

Halbrand, shaded under a temporary forge set up by the treeline near the half-constructed stables, senses you long before he hears your voice. You’re appraising him again. He can feel it. It reminds him of the barnacles staring, and he has to actively remember not to be instinctively beset.

You’ve been kind, after all.

Frustratingly so. 

And Sauron, as uncertain as he has been of everything (and by everything, he means his entire simulacrum of an existence— or, reincarnation? Re-embodiment?) of late, is smart enough to know not to bite the hand that feeds him. You’d made it clear that night in the forge, after all, that you’re a friend. And if not that, then at the very least— an ally.

So it’s no surprise he sets the horseshoes he’s working on aside, and relents to your plate of food. It is a surprise, however, when a few minutes later you go:

“Thank you, by the way.”

He shuts your train of thought down before it can take off.

“Don’t start,” Sauron says, voice a low rasp. He knows where you’re going with this: You’ll thank Halbrand for going out of his way to help, for lending a hand with the rebuilding, for putting down a boy’s dying horse. He wants nothing to do with it. 

“Then I want to—”

“Don’t apologise either,” he interjects, failing to hold back the mild bite. (So much for biting the hand, huh?) 

Sauron had chosen, anyway, to take it upon himself to toil away in the forge, from sunrise to sundown; Dedicating himself to aiding the reconstruction by crafting everything from bridles, stirrups and bits, to metal brackets, hinges, and nails. He’d toiled because it focused him; because he’s utilitarian at heart and so despises uselessness; because it helps blur the waking haunts of horses and the seas under the hissing and clanging of working metal. 

(Besides, there’s plenty to improve in this part of the island, and Sauron is the type to not count flaws and cracks but to instead step up and fix them.)

So there’s no place for you to apologise. 

“You work quickly,” you redirect instead, avoiding the urge to bicker with him. “Some might say almost tirelessly. Seems you’re getting into our good graces, from what I hear.”

“Well, you ought to listen closer.” Local gossip is difficult to not earwig, especially if the topic is about a low-man from the South; even more so that they don’t expect said low-man to have a passable fluency in Adûnaic. 

You don’t bother to hide the amused look on your face. “Right. Well. They do say eavesdroppers never hear but ill of themselves. What have you gathered, jailbird?”

“That I would be their downfall,” he says, then after a mouthful, goes: “That I would squander their resources and drain their waters and steal their women,” which makes you laugh.

“Númenórean women are not so easily taken.”

He hums at that. “And are you?” 

“…Am I what?”

“Númenorean.”

You blink. Halbrand levels a gaze you suddenly can’t meet. It’s a game he plays, you guess right then, between the crawl of heat up your cheeks. Of sharpening ulterior meanings into both sides of his words like one would a sword’s edge. 

(“The low-man said that?” Isildur titters, much later. “What a smooth advance! I ought to give him a—”

“Beheading,” Eärien overrides, “You do know he also effectively implied your sister may be easy?”

Isildur cheers. “And he’s honest? Outstanding!”)

“I believe I am one, and that’s enough for me,” you lie. The thought has crossed your mind before— that you may very well be an orphan descendant of those who had sided with the Enemy, once upon a time. That it’s likely you’ll die long before your own foster family does. 

“And if you’re wrong?” asks Halbrand. He enjoys making you squirm. “Shall that be enough?”

“Then so be it,” you wrinkle your nose, displeased yet matter-of-fact. “It doesn’t matter what type of life we’ve been chanced to be given, jailbird, so long as we live it doing the right thing.”

Until it becomes part of your nature, Sauron abruptly remembers Diarmid; of his words; the necklace he’d cruelly taken from the old man that stormy night. The advice had been unwelcome then, and now it seems to haunt him still.

“Is that your heraldry?”

Halbrand loosens his grip. His hand has been flying to the pouch out of habit, lately. “No.” Then, after you scrutinise him, cocks his head and says, “Is it so hard to believe we might quite be the same— Lost and found at sea?”

“You have a past,” you point out, the same way Elendil had chivvied you then. (If you had noticed him blink away in a flinch, he’s grateful you don’t mention it.) “But no, not so hard to believe, considering that’s precisely how my father found you too. It’s just hard for me to believe someone would be so willing to sever ties with their history.”

“I found this on a dead man.”

“Then why keep it?”

“Thought it looked fancy,” he dodges.

“A pearl is fancy,” you reflect, unconsciously flexing your fingers. The ring he’d caught the first day you two met lustres now at certain angles of the setting sun, beyond the horses grazing lazily in half-barren pastures.

Your answer is hardly a surprise to him. A bereft orphan would likely covet something as insignificant as a worn-out emblem if it meant a potential link to their true heritage, no matter how thin or nonsensical. Yours just happens to be a pearl.

“Beauty is subjective, seabird,” he comments sagely, before letting curiosity get the better of him to ask, “Is that from the tidepool, too?”

No, you want to say. I like to think my mother gave it to me. “Yes. It was in my grasp when my father found me; so came my name.”

Halbrand finishes his bowl, and doesn’t say a word more.

You’re glad.

“You know, I meant to say earlier, before you interrupted me,” you begin out of the blue, voice possessing that Nienna-esque lilt that makes him unconsciously want to shrink into himself. “…You shouldn’t have had to be the one.” 

He follows your gaze to one of the Bay horses being herded away. Its body gleams; a vibrant, rich red-brown in the dusk that needles a strange grief into him. The colour reminds Mairon of his old form. 

“You’re right, I didn’t,” he agrees distastefully. Needless suffering also falls under the realm of uselessness, however. Perhaps, in a twisted, roundabout way, Sauron had chosen to put down Abârzî. “…But I’ve done far worse things.” 

You watch him tuck the necklace away beneath his collar, and he wonders, briefly, if you’d caught his shudder; his waver. 

“To survive,” you emphasise. Surely.

He laughs under his breath. It’s neither sad nor sordid, just empty. 

“Not all of it.”

Sauron opens his eyes to a crowned shadow and a blade.

Do not fear, it says. And when its hand had come away with a fistful of his long, braided hair, cut from his blazing red head— it repeats itself to him again, though this time in the commanding tongue of Black Speech.

Do not fret.

(He frets, and begs. He disobeys because he’s terrified— but it’s all happening under his skin. Black Speech cannot completely overpower the mind, you see, but it can command and seed an intent in it; a sliver of power over the flesh, if willed so. He can fret and beg all he likes; it will never translate to his body. 

Now he’s just a vessel, still as a Bay horse caught neath a great tree, watching and waiting; helpless and paralysed.)

He catches the glint of the dagger but he cannot scream.

Do not fret, Morgoth commands, in that divinely, beautiful way only a Valar can make all guttural words sound. Do not fret, Abârzî.

Mairon startles awake.

When the candlelight flickers with the moon, he mistakes them for blood on his hands and a stable floo—

“Y’alright, brother?” Someone claps him on the back.

It’s noon, now. It feels like he’s woken up for the third time today. 

The stables are coming up nicely (Quickly, because Halbrand works when everyone else is asleep). The clouds are thick, so the day isn’t beating down on the horses as they feed on bran and alfalfa, and there aren’t any damning signs of coming rain to hinder what little is left of the reconstruction today.

“Never better,” Halbrand says, after steadying his heavy breathing. The perfectly delivered lie is somehow miraculously seen through, however, and promptly called out, via: an insistent pint of ale into his calloused hands that’s supposedly the ‘cure to all ailments’. 

He learns the old drunkard’s name is Seamus.

He learns a bit of everything to nothing, really; until the sun had sunken too far beneath the canopies of the Mellyrn, and the dappled light faded into drifting spots, and all that was left of their drinks was a final sip. Sauron had found himself both inexplicably refreshed and exhausted between the overload that managed to distract him from the cavernous feeling in his chest.

“It’s a swallow bird. We sailors tattoo it as belief it’ll lead us back home when we get out at sea,” says the old man, between a tangent on island customs and traditions beyond the primly ‘Nobody kneels in Númenor’ ones. “Why? Lookin’ to get inked yourself?”

Halbrand blinks.

He had composed as Mairon among the other Ainur in the Timeless Halls for the Ainulindalë, once upon a time; and then served, much, much later, as Sauron alongside Morgoth in the Iron mountains of Thangorodrim. Neither exactly had been something anybody would call a home— One was simply a state of Being far beyond Eä, and the other had been both a fortress and a prison. 

“Don’t have a home to return to,” is all he decides.

It sounds a lot like a realisation.

“Aye, well…” The drunkard flails his hand to the chilly winds. “Swallows mate for life.”

Halbrand frowns in confusion. Seamus just laughs, mad.

He doesn’t understand what the crazy old shrimp had meant, until two days later (of which Sauron still had only understood half of what was told to him, if he’s being honest) when the stables had at last been completed and the locals put together a small feast for everyone who had come together to help.

Crab legs had been the catalyst, oddly enough. 

Or, rather, how you seemed to move amongst the people-who-may-not-be-your-people, and spoke to your family-who-isn’t-actually-your-family.

“Here,” you say, and idly lay skillfully de-shelled crab legs and a lobster tail on your bright-eyed sister’s plate. Then onto your even-more-bright-eyed brother’s plate, before doing the same to those within your reach at the table, including Halbrand— sitting adjacent and at a length, because nobody quite fancied sitting next to a brooding stranger.

“I can de-shell my crabs on my own,” he had wanted to huff, put out by the way he suddenly felt impeccably small by your limitless grace and social-butterfly-ness, but one of the cadets had beaten him to it.

Your answer is a smile that’d made Mairon think of Nienna again, followed by a winsome, “I know you can.”

He lingers on what you’d told him ere a week ago, at the forge when you’d come to him saying he looked most at home with a hammer and tongs in hand, and drafts in his head something he tells you much later, which is:

“You looked different around your not-people.”

You’re wrapped in a pelerine cloak that seems to do little with the cold Mallorn-fragrant winds, here at the Bay of Eldanna, where you’ve somehow convinced him to follow you down to at the crack of dawn. (It’s not like he could sleep through the night, anyway, now that the stables are complete and there’s nothing left to busy himself with for the time being.)

It’s early enough that the carpet of stars in the sky shines the rocky shoreline a blinding silver, and only the lantern-lit trawlers far out at sea are awake to fish for teeming shoals of shrimps in season beyond the reef. 

“My not-people?” you yawn, gathering up your cloak and shift dress to toe between the rocks. “Ah. I get it. Because I’m an outsider.”

He raises a tolerant eyebrow. “I’m the outsider, seabird.” To which you answer, breezily, as if it’s a simple equation: 

“Not to me. If it helps though, we can both be outsiders together.”

He barely has time to wrap his head around together when you begin skipping across the tidepools.

“I meant,” he trails after you, ungainly and tender-footed to the shallows compared to your well-versed steps. He had not been raised by the sea like you. “That you looked at home; with your people. And tha— Eärmaril, why did you bring me out here with a bucket?”

You peer at the crevices of the outcrops, turning over black slabs with a trained eye. “Have you ever had soft-shell crabs? They’re active around this time of night, so watch your step. If you’re not getting pinched by their claws, you’ll get stabbed by an urchin.”

“You loon!” he exclaims. “You brought me here for a hunting trip?”

“Hush, now! Or you’ll scare the fur seals further down the coast,” you hiss over your shoulder. “And no. I brought you here because I know you won’t be sleeping, anyway.”

The blatant accusation has him slipping from a jutting rock face.

You catch his hand to steady him.

(He’s warm. Some part of you wants to pull him close.)

“I overheard the farriers. They say the only reason the stables got put up that quickly is because you worked through the night.” You inform him as delicately as you can, because there’s a recognisable, vestigial haunt in his eyes you’ve seen in your father’s, under the shimmer of Eärendil’s starlight. “Is it nightmares, Halbrand?”

“See, Amm— Mother saved Isildur when he was a child.” Nobody in the family prefers to say drowned except your father, because the word is bitter to the taste. “I was there when it happened. Couldn’t sleep for weeks after. Do you dream of the waters too?”

The defensive frown he’d put up melts away, but you can see Halbrand steel himself, still, in order to answer.

“I dream of barnacles,” Sauron allows, brusque so as to cut the conversation short as he regains his footing.

You let go and narrow your eyes at him. 

After a long moment, you conclude, resolutely: “Valar, you’re a terrible liar, jailbird.”

And Mairon couldn’t help it— 

He laughed.

(It sends your heart stumbling.)

“Believe me when I say, seabird, that if I were to deceive you, you would never know.”

“…Right,” you scoff, quick to turn away to hide the budding smile on your face as you carve his laugh and awfully handsome grin into memory. “Now, come and be useful, will you? Before the tide runs in with daybreak.”

He can do that. He likes to be useful.

So he does.

Sauron, however, gathers alarmingly quickly that he’s as helpful as an infant grappling the ways of the water for the first time. Some distant part of him enjoys it, though— learning. It reminds him of his long gone time with Aulë.

Learning to follow your effortless sea-nymph dance across the jagged shallows, memorising how to identify which rocks to flip and the right ways to harvest mollusks or crabs without risking a fingertip, all while unconsciously committing to mind the shanties you hum under your breath.

You tell Halbrand stories and Mairon listens despite the general inanity of it; because he’s a quiet sort, and because he likes the diluting distraction of it all. 

Little things, like how your mother had bequeathed the craft of pottery to you, or that your father had preferred to teach you to fight instead of fish (“I can hardly imagine that,” Sauron muses, which earns him a sharp look and a: “Well, you don’t seem the imaginative type, anyway.”); that Eärien’s artistic strength is adapted from her uncanny skill of observation, and that Isildur is often wayward because he’s as free-spirited as the sun.

The conversation whiles and goes until the sky slowly pales awake, and the fur seals begin to bark and bay at the shorebirds and skimmers diving close to the rolling surfs. When the stretch of Eldanna’s shoreline finally raises, peaks and tidepools drowning back below the cresting of blue seas, the both of you make headway back inland.

“I was telling the truth,” he says, abruptly, which made you stop in your tracks at the beach. Your cloak is billowing from the salt gusts, edges sticking to the wet of your ankles.

“You don’t have to tell me,” comes your honest answer. 

But he wants to. It feels right to. Here Mairon stands bearing witness to the intimacies of your life, while he had nothing to offer you in return beneath the veneer of Halbrand. It’s only fair to do the same. An exchange, if you will. It’s all he’s ever known.

He sets the bucket of skittering crabs on to the wet sand, and dips his feet at the lap of the tide. “I dream of the Dark,” Sauron admits. “Of a light I cannot reach. The ocean is always red— red as my hands— and the rock-faces are always white and blinking.”

Barnacles. You understand now.

“When I wake up, I feel like I’m bracing for something, but I don’t know what,” he says, which he’s quick to realise had been an instinctive lie, and so he amends it with an explanation. “Like I’m charging headfirst into the abyss, and I’m bracing myself for the impact. For a fight or a— punishment.”

Halbrand kicks at a bubbling bump in the water and out pops a shell. (It’s a whelk. Lightning whelk, if Sauron is being precise. He’d listened to you listing the different kinds an hour ago.) 

“Anybody home?” you peer.

“Mh.” Sauron assents and tosses the hermit back to the waves.

He looks at where the open sky meets the sea, thinks of the knee-high swathes of sea oats growing at the coastlines of Valinor if he’d set sail Westwards from Eldanna and choose not to look back. He entertains idly on the idea of home for a beast such as himself— if it’s even possible to tame savagery into such domestications. 

Then he resists on asking you if there’s a difference between making a home and inventing one (those are questions for another sleepless night, he supposes), and instead glances down to where you’ve stepped into one of the remaining tidepools and back out.

A smooth pebble with a perfectly circular hole in its centre, still damp from its discovery, sits in your palm.

“What in Eru’s name is that?” he furrows, watching you wink at him through the gap.

“A hagstone,” you say, unoffended. “My other brother Anárion has one, though he prefers calling it an adder stone. Ammê told us they were naturally-occurring talismans. They ward off anything evil and protects its keeper. Catch.”

He does so with attractive ease.

(…You commit that to memory, too.)

“You don’t actually believe this little thing, do you, seabird?” he asks, tossing the piece up in his hands.

His snort makes you roll your eyes. “See! You are the unimaginative type. Halbrand, it’s the nature of a thing that matters, not its form.”

Right. He’d forgotten you are You; who built a home in the people; whose wound is your geography and history— or lack thereof— and who’s chosen to anchor to Númenor, because your foster family is where you found your true port of call. 

“You Númenóreans are an odd lot,” he settles candidly, and curls his fingers around the hagstone.

“Odd?”

“Superstitious,” he clarifies.

“I prefer traditional,” you volley.

“Try paranoid.”

Your warm laugh breaks with the surf of the shore, makes him tarry on the sight and sound of you.

“Red sky in the morning; sailor’s warning…”

“Red sky at night; sailor’s delight,” Halbrand recites Seamus, scoffing humorously. “I mean… Boarding a ship right foot first? Nailing a horseshoe under the mast, laying a silver coin for Uinen or tattooing swallows to lead the way home? And no whistling on board, lest it’ll challenge the winds; Or so Isildur claims of Manwë.”

“Ah, but don’t forget—”

“—Never rename a ship,” he says in unison.

Halbrand shakes his head, but the fond look on his face is undeniable as you break out into another merry smile. Your plan to chase away his night-terrors seem to have worked perfectly. If you’d thought him handsome before, then he looks utterly divine now. 

“Well, I suppose you’re right. There’s another one, though,” you hum, eyes fixated at the gulls taking wing to and fro their nests, the trawlers sailing home with their morning catch. “Never ever bring harm to a seabird.”

He cocks his head. “If I didn't know any better, seabird, I’d say you were making a threat.”

“And?” you smile. “Do you, jailbird?”

“Do I what?”

“Know better.”

Halbrand laughs again. A charming peal of a sound, canine-wide and punched out. It makes your heart sing— makes you wonder when was the last time he laughed this freely.

“You!” he exclaims once more, but there’s a thunderdrum in his ribs to reckon with all of a sudden, from the way the first break of light begins to dawn on your face and the charming, affectionate grin flowering across it, and so he couldn’t finish his insult after all.

You offer him wine in his dreams. 

Soot blackens your fingers as he takes it, but the stains don’t seem to bother you.

Weighty is a hagstone in his palm.

The sea is blue and quiet—

And barnacles are just barnacles, now.

Footnotes in AO3!

[sun-snatcher]

( credits to @perryabbott for this phenomenal gifset ! )

2/? | SEAWARDS, TO YOU. ; REPENTANT!AU

summ.  A continuation. You & Halbrand find common ground. Philosophies are debated. A bond is formed. or: A Smith and a Sculptor begin their friendship. pairing.  (Repentant!Mairon/Sauron) Halbrand / f!reader , ( established in #SEAWARDSTOYOU ) w.count.  4k a/n.  Important tags in first chapter ! Two artisans share their craft and debate their disciplines. Grumpy x sunshine trope coded in this one !

       WEARINESS IS NOT the word, he learns very quickly, when the hammer and tongs had been placed in his calloused hands at Númenor, and he’d been put to the test to earn his Guild crest and prove himself useful to the master blacksmith. 

(They’d tasked him to create the best blade he could, and the finest steel sword is what he’d forged for them. When they’d asked if he knew how to shape a sturdy anchor, he laughed and said, “How many would you like?”)

It is, for all intents and purposes, still a hammer and tongs; still a weighty familiarity where the memory of Aulë rests in one hand and the blackness of Morgoth in the other. But now all attributions coalesce and measure to some… distant nostalgia. 

Homesickness.

He wonders if a Maia could even be capable of such trivial things like a sickness. Wonders if maybe it’s borne from this mortal flesh he’d awoken in; if perhaps Melian had fretted too over this fatigued, adrift state of sense when she bound herself to her corporeality and the menial necessities that came with living in such a body.

Is this what it’s like to fall from grace?

He’d found himself in an endless loop of madness in trying to decipher his Judgement the day he first awoke: Why the Valar had allowed him— Sauron, the Abhorred, Gorthaur the Cruel, Shadow of Morgoth— a second chance; a rebirth. It doesn’t feel like mercy. Is this punishment? A test? Is he truly as free as they're making him believe?

Why, if anything, these hammer and tongs— his age-old solace— just feel like another shackle binding his wrists. 

It’s both too good to be true and not at all.

Perhaps this is the play. To have his uncertainty drive him into insanity. To be the architect of his own demise. Or maybe this is just another part of a grand design amongst the Ainur he isn’t privy to anymore— but surely not; Who would want to give a role of any significance to him? He is Sauron. The Great Deceiver. He cannot be trusted. 

By his very own hands, he had ensured that.

…Except you. Eärmaril. The one who’d offered him wine and proverbial bread and a new beginning. 

Foolish, he thinks, pursing his lips. But with whatever few days of time he chanced to spend with you sitting in that cell, there’d been a graceful naïveté to you he found (charming) himself envying. A mortal innocence. An excitable youth he’d long since grown out of. This seemingly bright wonder and an ever-light in your eyes he deemed frustratingly blinding— like the blaze of a sun, or the glare of a moonglade— that he surprisingly couldn’t help but be drawn into out of pure fascination.

Even moreso, now, since he’s discovered:

“You’re a craftsman?” says Halbrand, stunned. “You didn’t tell me.”

In the clear midday afternoon, you pause to look up from your potter’s wheel. 

He’s fascinated. It shows in the curious dart of his eyes. 

Earthenware line the front of your atelier, all in odd colours, shapes and sizes, still dewy from catching the remains of the late morning shower. They trail into your workshop; great pots and elaborate vases dotting the floor while the flatware stack neatly on shelves lining limestone walls. The ceramics are all set aside in a way one could see a careful path to your throwing wheel, where you’re nestled behind and idly washing the slip off your fingernails in a bucket of water.

“You don’t tell me a lot of things, either,” you snort, drying your hands on your apron. Your tousled hair is tied neatly away, and there’s a spot of clay marking the edge of your jaw. “Besides, is it so surprising I am?”

Halbrand had seen you at the docks, just this salty morning when he stood at the forge (that you’d spent hours cajoling the Master blacksmith into accepting him into the day prior); barefooted on the docks among the local sailors, casually dirtying your pretty alabaster skirts with wet sand and seawater to help tug the ropes of a wayward skiff, dainty sleeves rolled and rumpled up to your elbows as you moored it with the unwomanly ease of a seasoned sailor.

“How unladylike!” he’d overheard the chinwag of the traditional Númenorean mothers when she came upshore. “What a mess!”

(What a mess, indeed. But it explains plenty, and as a Smith, Mairon can understand it. An esoteric signature between all artisans is to be a mess; to rebel against the orthodox. It had been what set him apart from the other Maiar— And it had been precisely what led him into Morgoth’s hands.)

“No, I suppose not,” says Halbrand, sounding somewhat breathless. You stamp down the prickle of alarm when he picks up a piece to study it; the instinctual urge to warn him to be careful.

There is a thread of… something, after all, no matter how unconsciously thin it may be, between you two. You cannot call it trust— not yet, but you’re determined to get there— so perhaps understanding would do; And if it starts with something as small a step as trusting him not to mishandle your works, then you’ll chance it.

Craftsmanship appears to be the only bridge to a version of Halbrand you’ve not yet seen since you’ve met him, after all. You want to hold on to it. No, you want him to hold on to it, more like. To this lifeline; this rare flicker of radiant light in him.

“Have you ever tried pottery?” you ask, noticing the acuity of his appraising gaze.

For a moment, his gaze had fallen inwards, and he was not in the room with you when he spoke with a longing look. Sauron is far away, in the place where Aulë first taught Mairon all there is to know of the joys of creation. 

“I’ve tried my hand in plenty a craft before metalwork, believe it or not,” Halbrand says, and sets the plate back down with a clink. “Admittedly, clay is my weakest medium.”

“Oh?” you smile, suddenly curious, and Halbrand meets your inquisitive look once you’ve set your finished piece— a jug it looks to be— alongside the rest of the unfired clay prepared for the kilns.

“Clay is ever elusive,” says Halbrand, mildly as he can to avoid offense. “It is the inferior material to work with. The most fragile after being tempered.”

It had sounded almost recited, the way he said it, and so you frown, “Right. And who told you that?”

Morgoth. “…My old master.”

“Valar, then your old master must��ve been as good as…” you wave, face twisting in incredulity to find the words. “A netless net cast on shallow shores.”

There’s a pause, and you wonder if you’d crossed a line at the sudden seize of him— until he lets out a breath, akin to a wheeze, almost. 

It’s a small sound, but enough to catch you off-guard nonetheless. You've never heard him laugh before. 

“You disagree?” asks Halbrand, amusingly. 

“Not entirely.” You cock your head, sidling a hip at the table as you playfully stare him down. “It is elusive and fragile, yes. That it is an inferior material? No. Shaped correctly, pottery can endure centuries. It does not rust like steel, erode like stone, or decay like wood. It can outlast an age. Outlast even us.”

Us. He tarries on the word more longer than he should. He suddenly remembers he isn’t Mairon the Admirable— not just a craftsman speaking to another craftsman— but Sauron, hiding beneath the veneer that is Halbrand, a mortal man with a seemingly inevitable end.

He looks at the pot sitting underneath the table beside you. Bright green and lustrous, with elegant filigree of cresting waves and boats adorned with sails carrying the sun. Then he looks at the bucket by his feet, filled to the brim with broken shards of colourful ceramic, toeing it with his boot. 

“And yet,” is all he says.

You wrinkle your nose. “Those will be repurposed. That is its very beauty.”

“There is no strength in fragilities.”

You uncross your arms with a narrow look, as if he’s missed your point, and pick up a cup from the tray of bisqueware. Then, to his utter surprise— toss it casually aways from you. 

Reflex serves him well.

He catches it before it can shatter. “What—?!”

“The nature of the claypots strength relies solely on how one holds it,” you correct his previous statement. “And therefore, its value.”

Sauron looks at you then, and realises what it is you’re doing; what it is you’re asking of him. 

The thought should not have been that frightening, frankly— but there lingers still an ache in his nape and the unseen scars of a thousand daggers across his chest. There sears still a phantom hole in his beating heart, however much he decides to stubbornly ignore it.

“Trust,” he states, finally. The word sounds bitter to hear coming from him as he grips the delicate cup in his hand. “You know, I can very well crush this, Eärmaril.” 

“Yes. You could.” That is to say: Exactly my point!

He huffs out his nose, bristling. Halbrand moves over to return the cup in your palms. 

“You don’t know what you’re asking of me.”

There’s the Judgement of Eru and Manwë echoing like a chorus in his head. There’s Mairon long gone, and Sauron that remains. The Great Deceiver. The one who cannot be trusted, because he had made it so with his bare hands.

“I am asking a man—”

“I am not—” A man, Sauron very nearly overrides. “—who you think I am.”

“What about who you can be, then?” You catch his wrist just before he can step back to retreat, and he can feel the ignition of a flame running through his arm like a frisson. “Isn’t that what this all is?”

“Halbrand, you told me you’ve done evil; irrevocable, irredeemable sin. Yes, so what shall you do now, then? This repentance of yours— to whom are you atoning for? The dead? The Valar? They are not here. What can they do with it? It is your life, after all, and your freedom.”

You let him go. Sauron stays rooted, prickled by how this feels alot like one of his unspoken, one-sided conversations he’d have with Uinen’s statue back at the cells.

“I will carry this regret with me forever.” His voice is heavy with a fell conviction. “It is not something your seas can absolve me of, or whatever other metaphor it is your people like to believe in.”

You hum at that. A reluctant assent of agreement. It’s infuriatingly patient. (This is an unfamiliar battleground. He’d expected you to be put off by him; to be angry— instead he’s been unsteadied with startling kindness.)

“Well, I am not asking you to forget, Halbrand. I am asking you to be free of it,” you roll your eyes, voice light and matter-of-fact. “You can choose to spend it wallowing in misery; shackle yourself to your past like a victim of your own villainy; But that would be the true evil— a disservice to those you’ve so claimed have suffered under your deeds. The real victims.”

Another voice interrupts the both of you. Apologies! says the young messenger, shifting timidly at the foot of your atelier with a scroll in hand, It is urgent. 

You wave in assent, then look back to Halbrand.

“You pace so long in your cage you’ve conditioned yourself to its unseen shadows,” you muse, and Sauron can hear your steady voice, both as delicate and as mighty as freshly-fired clay. “Remember this: What you do with the second chance the seas have granted you is what will define your atonement— nothing more, nothing less. Do not waste it on being a jailbird.”

And then—

And then.

You’re off, brushing past him like the sweetness of a saltbreeze, leaving him standing in your wake and staring at the cup you’ve left purposely behind.

It’s set precariously close to the edge of the table.

Open invitation.

(Mairon’s finger twitches in instinct.) 

He looks at the cup, and thinks, then looks and thinks again— only to conclude he couldn’t think at all, that you make it irritatingly impossible to do so. His mind is too far fixed on the fond smile of your face and your sunburst laugh carrying up the docks; the striking touch of your hand when you’d grabbed his wrist and the sincerity in your eyes.

No. He shan’t take your bait.

He ought not to entertain this little exercise of yours— this petty endeavour. Ought not to give in to this fairytale you fancy yourself a saviour in. 

He shouldn’t.

He’ll leave everything untouched as you left it.

…The cup is pushed noticeably further— safer— into the table, pristine despite the telling thumbprint of soot, by evening when you return.

You smile.

He had been unprepared for how aimless this would all feel, even in the dusty comforts of a forge and the timely strike he makes on every metal he wills to bend.

What could a great, primordial Being in the material shell of a common, mortal man do? For as much as Mairon now sought peace, he had no idea what to do with it. Where to go from here— much less begin. 

“Lost the way to your rookery, fair lady?” says Halbrand, not blinking an eye from his worktable. 

Even between the thick silt and smoke of the blazing forge, your nebulous presence sticks out in the air like a phantom itch he couldn’t ignore. 

“Do all Southlanders bite the hand that feeds them?” 

Puzzled, he pauses mid-polish of a blade, looking over his shoulder to see you’ve set a lidded claypot of what he assumes to be dinner, to heat on stray coals of the hearth.

“Wolves do,” he muses warningly, going back to turning his sword in his hands to scrutinise it for any flaws. “They tend to have an appetite for harmless little seabirds who don’t know any better than to fly too close to the snap of jaws.”

You laugh.

It feels like a tender caress.

Halbrand fails to resist the urge to turn to the honey-sweet sound.

“I suppose a hound was, indeed, how you looked like,” you tease, feigning distant recollection. “Locked in a cage, backed in a corner…”

He raises his brows. “I remember being right at the bars of my cell.”

“When we were at the Queen’s court,” you correct, remembering the way he seemed to shrink before you when the guards had unshackled him. “I didn’t mean the prison. Though— ah, pass me the tongs, would you?— you did look quite like a wet dog in there, too. ”

The casual request knocks him from getting scathed at the passing insult. He passes you the tongs, and watches as you use it to lift the lid of the claypot and examine the braised Snapper between the steam, before setting everything back down, back wholly turned against him.

Something about how easy you move around him, how easy it is to turn your back towards him so calmly— flickers a spark of annoyance in him. It isn’t so much that he felt less of a powerful being around your aloof-self— he still is a Maia, after all, even if constrained in certain aspects; and his entire plan is to appear mortal, anyway— but moreso in that you are vexingly… trusting? Foolish? 

“Shall I toss the spoon?” you heartily jest. “I imagine Great Halbrand the Wolf hardly needs one—”

“I’ve had time to think,” he interrupts rudely, finally putting aside his sword to cross his arms accusingly. “That if it’s not 'grand adventure and finer things' you seek, seabird, that it must then be something much more intangible. Personal.”

“So tell me, what do you expect this kindness will bring you? Is this your version of penance? Are you— as you’ve so eloquently described it— defining your atonement?” He dips his head to meet your gaze from where he’s leaning against an anvil, and the firelight paints him razor-sharp. “You pace a cage of your own, too, Eärmaril. I can see it.”

A beat. If you had been rattled, you didn’t show.

You look up at him, and your face is impassive. 

Sauron decides, then and there, that he hates it. He’s decided a lot about you, lately; That he detested your courage, your blind faith, your pestering kindness, and your utter unpredictability— though none so much as the look on your face here and now: startlingly dim and devoid of your usual sword-bright light. 

He has half the mind to rescind his words.

“I’m glad to see you’re not your old Master, Halbrand,” you comment, and mistake the flinch he’d made for a timely shift in his weight. “Who was as pitifully brittle as a sand dollar and outwitted by something as simple as clay.”

“Yes, I pace a cage. But it is not entirely of my making,” you allow, and leave out: Not like yours. 

Unlike him, your cage is being unhistoried and irreconcilable, found as a waif with no one but a white seabird standing guard by moon-water and jagged black rocks. Your cage is a sandbar between diaspora and anemoia, appearing and disappearing now and then like the ebb and flow of tides.

“So no, it is not an atonement, rather a purpose I have given myself. Something you ought to do, really, lest you become aimless.” 

Too often do mortal men reduce regrets into nothing more than abstract performance; do not tread the erroneous path of causeless martyrdom— is probably the more appropriate way to warn him, but you decide against that. 

“Is that what I am to you, then?” he finds himself snapping, the same tone he’d used on Galadriel when they’d been stranded at sea on that raft. “A project to bide your time with? A means to an end?” 

“No!” you bite, aghast and suddenly severe. That jars him. He very nearly averts his gaze when you level him with a stricken look. “You’re my—” 

—Friend, you mean to say, just before you felt dwarfed by the admission. I hoped for us to be friends.

You let it hang tenuously in the air instead. It’s the first he’d ever seen you look so small.

“You have far too much faith in the hands of others,” Sauron begins, calmer now. He remembers the light weight of a white cup in his grasp, the thin daintiness of its handle. “Trust broken is far worse than trust never first given.”

(He’s far away again, with a carafe in his hands, by a shape upon a dark and nameless peak.)

“Yes,” you recognise. “Though one would lead a terribly lonely life without taking that risk.”

“But I will leave you be, Halbrand, if you so desire. You need only to tell me,” you say, solemn and abrupt. “I can go back. I can leave you; to your hammer and your tongs and your metal; like the lone wolf you fancy yourself to be.”

Your expression is solid— but not cruel. 

He doesn’t think you’re capable of that, now that he thinks about it. 

You’re not like Sauron, not like him.

He is a Smith, after all; And Smiths value strength and resilience above mercy and benevolence. Every hammer strike must be measured and every blade sharpened to its finest point. Mairon is born with the endogenous instinct to craft nothing short of mastered perfection and intention; and more often than not that calls for an unyielding, iron fist— to control instead of cradle as you do.

(The claypot is spared the dilemma of the steel sword; that is, preservation of peace through necessary violence.)

It’s no wonder Morgoth was quick to corrupt him into Sauron; Into a Being with too cruel a grip, too demanding a voice, too pragmatic a soul and too utilitarian a heart. 

And yet—

“…No,” he remarks quietly, suddenly inconceivably panicked at the very thought of you (and your light) turning away from him. 

But his answer had made him feel too vulnerable— too exposed, and so he says, “My days of commanding people are over.” And is quick to deflect before you could question him, by going: “Regardless, I hardly believe it’d take that little to stop a pesky seagull.”

“Seagull?” you hiss, diverted by the non-sequitur. “What happened to seabird?”

“I see no difference.” 

You scoff, but without heat. It relieves him more than he should’ve allowed it. “Then you’re a—! How does the saying go? An albatross around one’s neck. Except you’re the albatross, and you’re around your own neck.”

You childishly swat at the space between you, and with it went the uneasy tension in the air as a gust blew in. It had simmered the furnace, and he caught the scent of you between the coals and the dish you’ve slid off it, and he found you smelled like your earthen clay and the salt of the seas.

You smell like— not life, per se, but the very act of living.

“I was like you, once upon a time,” Sauron blurts. “Young and unbearably credulous.”

“You mean young and at peace.”

An indefinable muscle tics in his jaw. “Peaceful, but not as ignorant.”

“You’re just cynical.”

“I’m a realist!” Mairon states, sounding offended. 

“Pessimist.”

“Agree to disagree, then,” Halbrand finally sighs, rolling his eyes as he uncrosses his arms after a dismissive wave, feigning surrender. 

Your eyes reflexively travel up the rugged curl of them, before settling on his face. You’re surprised to see there’s a ghost of a smile across it— As if he’d enjoyed the mindless banter.

“Very well.” You offer a friendly shake to end the mock-parley, only to catch him by surprise when you playfully tug him a step forward after he meets it. 

“What?” blinks Halbrand, after a quiet moment.

“You look different in the forge,” you say fondly, looking up at his towering figure, “Less a jailbird, more a… More at home, maybe. Walls down.”

There’s green in his eyes— Viridian. Verdigris. Otherworldly, almost. You never quite noticed it until now, this up and close to him. It’s beautiful. (He’s beautiful.)

A powdery streak of black soot marks the smooth of your skin now. It feels less like a dirty stain, and more like a sacred covenant of sorts— as if both of you have piously hallowed into your bones the dawning of something he couldn't quite yet fathom; as if an uncrossable threshold has miraculously been crossed, or an act set in sacrosanct motion, and neither of you could ever turn back from here.

It feels like a bind.

“Walls down…” Halbrand repeats, voice a low rasp that sends a shiver through you. His thumb slides tentatively across your forearm as he hums. “Must I put them up, Eärmaril?”

Your voice is endearingly light. 

“Not around me. Didn’t you call me a harmless little seabird?”

Then you’re laughing. Soft, susurrus, dulcet; Fair as the sea and sun—

And a terrible, fleeting catharsis blooms in Mairon as he realises: it’s a sound he doesn’t mind drowning in.

Footnotes in AO3!

[sun-snatcher]

Chap 3 wip underway and Sauron realising he’s essentially homeless in Númenor shouldn’t be that sad to me

[sun-snatcher]

Repentant!Sauron AU following the TROP timeline. A plot-driven reader-insert fic that is also just an excuse for me to explore the brief repentance implied in the Silm.🤞🏼

[sun-snatcher]

OOOUUUGG THIS CHAPTER WIP MAKES ME SICKK

[sun-snatcher]

( credits to @perryabbott for this phenomenal gifset ! )

1/? | SEAWARDS, TO YOU. ; REPENTANT!AU

summ.  Mairon Sauron repents. The Valar test his resolve. or:  A Seabird meets a Jailbird.  pairing.  (Repentant!Mairon/Sauron) Halbrand / f!reader w.count.  4k a/n.  AU!s1 in which the Valar are the ones who habit Sauron into Halbrand’s body , Númenor timeline is extended ,  Reader has an established Númenórean name , Galadriel’s call-to-arms is Sauron’s temptation , The Valar are just curious which path he’ll take atp

[This looks to be setting up for a series... Feel free to send requests so we can explore this AU together!]

HE BEHOLDS A LIGHT.

And then— and then.

Grief follows.

Great and bitter and relentlessly pitiless. 

It swallows him whole— spirit and body and thought alike— an all-consuming maw of devouring sorrow that he’d been forcefully severed from. All that Melkor— no, Morgoth— had sought to smother and sunder from his very esse, stirring back to life from where it’d first been cast to the black depths, like a scalding brand of hot iron against skin.

An eternal, burning reminder.

RETRIBUTION—

—howls the great Winds. 

It muffles his screams from unseen heights. Pure, unadulterated agony; his heart aflame of every pain he’d ever wrought throughout the age, throughout the centuries—

It takes a moment for him to realise he’s dying.

Enough, comes a soft-rising lament. He despairs. He is not yet forsaken. 

The voice lilts like a mournful dirge, and with it had come a gentle peace, and the torture seemed to cease nigh in an instant. 

Any will despair in the face of Death, booms another. It rumbles across towering pillars and a cavernous hall of light.

He is not as others. A mighty wave crashes on unseen shores. There’s a swelling cascade. He is Mairon, Maiar of Aulë. 

His name lights the world alive. Other voices have come, now. A curious crowd, a divine council.

He seeks repentance---Does he deserve it?---He is dying---Irredeemable!---He has yet to weep a single tear in the name of any that is good---You would grant him a chance to inflict the same corruption?---Cast him away--- Condemn him to the Night!---He is but a servant hand of M—

A fierce billow of wind. Lashing and deafening, enough to sweep the black name into muteness; into nothingness. 

INVOKE NOT THE DARKNESS HERE.

Quickly follows is a crescendo of music, a song of all Age and that carries all note of harmony, so beautifully terrifying it chills him to the bone. Strikes an utter fear in his heart he hadn’t felt since he’d first been tortured by—

“Let him speak,” commands One.

At once, All had fallen into quiet. The tides recede. The earth stills. The stars dim.

And then—

“Peace,” Mairon trembles, bowing low and terrified, guilt-ridden in his and all eyes. “I wish only for peace.”

Halbrand startles awake.

There are tears down his face.

Númenor, he remembers. He’s in the prisons of Númenor.

His senses are devoid of howling winds, of rumbling earth, and of roaring waters. No thundering night sky of stars. No agonising pain.

But then, echoing from behind, a voice resounds— delicate and openly gentle— and for a terrifying moment he thinks he might still be dreaming; that one of the Valar is speaking to him unseen once again, or perhaps the statue of Uinen graced outside his cell has come to life.

“Nightmare?”

A beat. 

“…Memory,” he answers tentatively, from where he’s curled in his cot. He rubs his face awake. “Where is Galadriel?”

“Trying to win over the heart of the Queen, still.”

“Here.” Halbrand hearkens, and can see a figure shift neath the torchlight closer to the wrought bars, kneeling down to offer him a sip from a carafe of wine. 

A bitter memory involuntarily resurfaces in him: A bottle of wine in his hands, red as a blood moon, feeding it to a black-haired elf chained upon a dark and nameless peak, scarred to the brink of death.

A blistering ache crawls down his nape. He grimaces. 

“No than—”

The moonlight gleams. Halbrand seizes. 

It’s… you .

The fair lady; from ereyesterday he’d recalled standing alongside the Captain of the Sea Guard, when he and Galadriel had first been brought before the royal court to face Tar-Míriel, and you looked like a vision of gold and ocean-blue. He had only caught a glimpse of your profile at the time, but here, now—

You’re beautiful , Mairon thinks candidly. The kind that would make men drown themselves at sea. 

“…No thank you,” Halbrand repeats, significantly less bitter than before. He shifts to sit comfortably, and leans his head back against the barred wall as he carefully scrutinises your ensemble under the hanging firelight— the shell-braid hair, the fresh-water pearl jewellery, the deep-teal gown. 

Princess? He reckons. No. You carry yourself light in both presence and step, but not sophisticated in the high and tight way someone of noble status tends to— not quite like Galadriel, even in all her salt-soaked mien. 

Politician, perhaps? Considering the attempt at an olive branch; an out-of-place kindness if you were to compare it to the scorn from the other Númenorean folk.

Nevertheless: “I was told nobody kneels in Númenor.” Then, more scathingly: “You’re not supposed to be here, are you?” 

The rough blatancy would have put anyone off.

But instead, you blink in surprise and laugh. It’s a soft, wind-chime of a sound, quickly ducked down so he could only catch the tail-end of your obscured, dimpled smile.

(He was surprised to find himself thinking he should have sat closer to the light to see it.)

“So says the castaway,” you volley breezily, rising back to your feet with your peace offering.

Halbrand finally stands to height before you move to leave. He’d much rather take the opportunity for a decent conversation at the very least, than stare mindlessly at the dark until something else interesting happens.

He’s tall, you come to realise. Dizzyingly so.

For someone who’d supposedly been adrift for weeks in the ocean, he looks surprisingly as hale as the she-Elf. Strong, even. It shows in the curl of his biceps, in the firm way he’s leaning down onto the bars now, forearms poking out as the sea-green shift in his eyes regard you almost inquisitively. 

If not for the tell-tale signs of a bad sunburn and his salt-licked wounds, you wouldn’t have been able to tell him apart from a local Númenorean sailor.

“To whom or what do I owe the pleasure of a fair maiden’s presence?”

But you aren’t so easily swayed. “Flattery will not get you far, Southlander.”

“So says the one who tried offering me wine,” he shoots, cocking his head to your bottle.

Well — 

Well.

Fine. Maybe you are easily swayed. Blame the quick-wittedness of him and that cheeky, roguish smile cutting across his chapped lips.

“Offered,” you correct, uselessly. He can surely recognise it: your meek attempt to have the last say. “You’ve lost your chance.”

He hums. “Hopefully not the chance for a name, at least?” 

Though it seems he’s lost that too—

A clamour descended from a distance; the jingle of skeleton keys, the sound of approaching footsteps in heavy armour. Change in guard shift, maybe, or it could be Galadriel’s escorted return. Regardless, you’re quick to gather your senses and make headway to the shadows.

“Wait—” Halbrand catches your fingers just as you turn to leave. The touch feels like a kindle; a spark of ember. “What are you called?”

“Tell no guard I was here, and I may just yet be able to tell you another day,” you whisper, before quickly slipping from his grasp.

And then you’re gone. Like sand between his fingers, like a ripple in water—

(Something, however, tinkers to the floor.)

“Who’re you talkin’ to, Southlander?” comes a snap.

(Halbrand stomps a foot on the rolling ring.)

“Myself,” he smiles.

You come the next night after.

Galadriel recognises you. 

“Does your father not caution you to speak with strangers?” she bites, when she watches you poke your hand into her cell. It’s a canteen of water.

A shrug. “If you speak of the Captain, you are mistaken.” Then, almost breezily, as if a tale told by you countlessly: “More he my ward and I his charge, if nothing else. Elendil found me in a tidepool, as an infant.”

Something flashes in Galadriel’s mind. A memory that never dims: Seaside, and a skin of water she’d given to a tidal-haired half-Elf, who had been left estranged with neither friend nor kin. 

She casts her eyes aside. 

“Erulaitalë will begin soon,” you warn. “The guards may likely conveniently forget to bring down your dinner amid the days-long occasion.” (You leave out the obvious: And because you’d socked two of them in the face during your little tirade towards the Queen yesterday.) 

Galadriel begrudgingly relents. 

When you get the canteen back to offer her prison mate, he’s already looming at the bars of his cell. 

“That’s not why you came, though, is it?”

He’s fidgeting with something in his hand. A mixed metal ring— silver and gold— dainty and elegant, crowned with a freshwater pearl in its centre. To someone like him the build is simple. Ordinary. But the startled look in your eyes seems to imply it’s not as meaningless as it appears. 

“You ought to reshape this,” he murmurs, thumbing at the edge as he studies it. Scrutinising, almost, in his mind’s eye— like he couldn’t help a habit of assessing the details and correcting any flaws. “It’s loose.”

You wrinkle your nose. “What would a castaway like you know of craft?” 

His face lights with a soft smile. (Galadriel thinks it might’ve been the most genuine she’d ever seen of him yet.) “Plenty, if you consider I was once a Smith.”

“Captivating,” you dismiss. “Now give it b—” 

You reach out reflexively, but he’s quick to retreat back into the safety of his cell.

“Ah. I believe you owe me your name,” he cocks his head slowly. “Fair lady.”

A huff. It’s almost comical how your shoulders sink in defeat as he continues. “Or perhaps you’d prefer, hm, I don’t know; Seabird —?”

“Eärmaril,” you admit, reluctantly. “Now give it back, lest I cut it apart from your very fingers myself, jailbird .”

There’s a long, tense moment. 

You wonder if he’ll return it to you; if he’ll continue to covet it as a method of leverage, perhaps— but then you watch him slowly make his way to lean on the bars to meet your gaze once more, and to your surprise, gestures for your hand.

You hesitate.

Halbrand patiently waits.

Then, tentatively, you reach out.

Seducer, you want to scoff— 

He carefully flips your hand palm-down, slides the ring gently back in place. 

—But you’re too distracted by the striking feel of him on your fingers. It’s callous, rough, strong. You’re surprised a man of his seemingly boorish nature can handle your hands this delicately at all, much less be this effortlessly charming.

“Sea-crystal,” he dazedly translates your name, once your presence had finally slipped free from the dungeon. “No?”

“A pearl,” Galadriel specifies. “The Heart of the Sea. ”

You’re back, again.

Halbrand is pleasantly surprised, to say the least. He’d half-expected you to stop showing up after the stunt he’d pulled, but there’d also been that gnawing part of him that knew (hoped) you’d return. There’s a stubbornness in you he can recognise from the she-Elf— it must be why the both of you take to each other so easily. 

“It’s no Lembas,” you tell Galadriel, handing her an apple. (Fresh, still. She can smell the dew rolling down its skin.) “But it’s better than what the guards have been offering you, here.”

He knows what you’re doing, if Galadriel’s word is right. You’re trying to turn the tides towards their favour; to, at the very least, get them out of these wretched cells while the kingdom debates their fate. Getting into their good graces, however, and why you’re going the extra mile with feeding them— he’s not quite sure he’s figured that out exactly yet.

“Enlighten me, what do you stand to gain from your act of breaking proverbial way-bread?”

“Halbrand,” Galadriel warns.

“It’s fine. He’s right to be wary,” you say, before turning to him. “Is plain amity not enough of a reason?"

“Not to my esteem. Everyone has wants,” he says. “Besides, looks can oft be deceiving.”

(You can’t discern if that’s a jab or a compliment or something else entirely. Perhaps all at once.) 

“And what is it you think I want, Southlander?”

He leans on the cell, studies you purposefully. “An escape. Off of this island home you’ve grown bored of. That in hopes, if the Queen should let us free, you could set sail along with us,” he says. “I think you long for a grand adventure, outside the shores of Númenor, to seek the finer joys of life beyond your charted waters.”

A stagnant moment passes.

“Hm,” you shrug, sounding unimpressed. “…Of grand adventures and finer things. That shall be my reason, then, if it is enough for you, Halbrand.”

He falters. The name rolling from your tongue sounds like the purl of a steady, clearwater stream. Like he’d been quenched of something he couldn’t quite place; of something he never noticed longed to be slated.

“What about you? What do you want?” you ask, setting the apple in his hands. 

You miss the turn of Galadriel’s head. 

Sauron doesn’t.

Vengeance, his heart cries instinctively, meeting Galadriel’s rallying-like gaze. 

But then Halbrand blinks your way. 

“Peace,” Mairon recites. “I wish only for peace.”

Someone else delivers in your stead, this time.

A cadet, who appears still wet-behind-the-ears; tanned with a mop of tight curls on his head, and holding a dissimilar kindness to your own eyes. He seems less inclined to linger in his visit, nor to entertain any of their questions. 

“Where is Eärmaril?” Halbrand asks, when the cadet clarifies your supposed order to him.

“…She regrets her absence.”

“That doesn’t answer my question,” he says, and couldn’t bite back the demand of his tone in time.

“Occupied,” states the cadet.

“With?” Galadriel urges.

“Dealings of which are not of your concern.”

He doesn’t know either, they quickly realise, sharing a knowing glance at each other. 

It’s only when five long minutes pass that the cadet concludes the bowl of scallops prepared will go stubbornly untouched out of distrust, and so decides to clear the evidence away, and turn on his heel to leave.

You fail to appear a night after.

And then the next.

Halbrand just stares at Uinen, and worries.

“Awfully hungry, are you?”

With a handful of fruit, you freeze in place. There’s a chill you feel crawling over you, the type you get when you know you’re caught red-handed; the type a child would get at the icy wrath of their father.

He’s not your father, you try to thaw. But it would be impossible to attempt that. So you allow yourself to look at him as Captain of the Sea Guard instead. “…Very much so.”

“We may not be of blood, Eärmaril, but to me you are still my eldest,” he reminds, “I’ve raised you longer than I have Isildur and Eärien.” 

“Only by three years,” you dismiss, leaning back onto the kitchen counter and crossing your arms.

“You’ve been sneaking to the prison.” He doesn’t sound surprised as he puts it out in the open. You wish he would’ve at least sounded as such, even a little bit. 

“The Faithful have believ—"

But having brought up that subject alone seems to effectively tip the scales against your favour. “Stop,” he says, in the authoritative tone he always uses to clinch arguments, “You will cease this madness.”

“Is that what we’re calling kindness, now?”

Elendil pinches the bridge of his nose.

“You are lucky, foolish girl, that I caught on, and not any other of the Guard. Why is it you care so much for these castaways?”

I don’t know would’ve been a terrible answer, but it would’ve been an honest one. That you cannot explain the call or the pull towards them since the day those two had set foot on Númenor—

“The sea put them in your path the same way I was put upon yours. And the sea is always right.” 

“That was different. You were an infant,” he corrects. “With no past to haunt you, and no intentions hidden in your heart. These are strangers.”

“Galadriel is known to Númenor. She was the Scourge of Orcs,” you defend, waving an arm. “And of H— the Southlander, I have seen nothing in him but the utter desire for peace.”

Elendil’s face twists into incredulity. “You can see that, and yet for Valandil you were seemingly blind to how involving him could have risked dismissal from the coming Sea Trials—?”

“Don’t bring him into this.”

“You brought him into this!”

“He offered to help—”

“Because he has a good heart.”

“—because you declined to help in the first place!” you snap, and set the apple down with an irritated thud. “All you had to do was convince Chancellor Pharazon to consi—”

Elendil huffs your name, and it feels the verbal equivalent of him flicking your ear. “Don’t you dare fault any of this on me.”

“I am not,” you assert. “I am merely stating the truth. I can take full responsibility for everything else, but whatever fault you feel inside of yourself is not my doing.”

Your expression sinks. “And what I asked of you was simple. If you cannot do even that, then at the very least: turn your gaze inwards for once, instead of casting it across the waters.”

That seems to have knocked the wind from his sails. 

(Surprisingly, yours too.)

“You know,” he sighs, after the silence stretched for a moment. “You are so much like your mother, sometimes.” 

“She’s—” Not my mother, you defy reflexively. Though that would’ve been unfair. She may not have been your mother, but you will always be her daughter; she had raised and cherished and loved you as her very own nonetheless; had chivvied and taught you the ways of water and the world better than anybody ever could have. “—She’s gone.”

“She lives in you. I can see it. Everyday,” he says. 

But that is all the grief he allows you to see. His hard, insular gaze set back into place, and suddenly you’ve found Elendil of the Sea Guard, again, as he goes to swipe the bag from your hands.

Later— much, much later, in fact— you learn Elendil’s following meeting with the castaways that night goes a little something like this:

A cut-glass voice, and a stomp of his feet. “Ever since you two driftwoods have sailed into my path,” echoes Elendil, “A discourse has been sown between me and my daughter.”

“What damage could we possibly have done,” Galadriel says in an undertone, watching him stride in. “Locked in a cage like beasts since our arrival?”

Halbrand shoots her a chiding look. Let me handle this. “Our… sincerest apologies, Captain. We did not intend as such. Your daughter merely extended us a kindness.”

A snort. It’s Galadriel’s.

“I don’t know what she sees in the both of you.” Elendil sighs, and a deep set frown makes itself known on his weary face. The Captain stops short at the foot of Uinen’s statue. “Perhaps a reflection of herself,” he continues, admiring the stone-carved hair blend into crested waves of the sea. “A key to understanding it.”

There’s a cold, calculative look in his eyes as he turns to face them. It’s nothing like the one you wear— warm, assessing. But there’s a kindness, still, in both of you; where the familial thread connects.

It seems you’ve managed to pluck that chord.

“Erulaitalë is a week-long trip to and fro. With the storms we’ve been having, maybe more. I’ve managed to get the both of you an audience with the Queen before then,” he lays the bag of fruit to their cells. “Tomorrow you will have a chance to plead your case. But whatever is commanded of me, I will obey. So for the sake of my daughter, and for yourselves, I ask you tread lightly .”

The last line is said pointedly at Galadriel. 

“Thank you,” Halbrand says. It’s forced— but genuine.

Galadriel says it too, though the day after; and not to the Queen nor Elendil, but to you, after the audience had gone as well as it could have.

Tar-Míriel now considers them guests of the island while she travels to perform her duties amid Erulaitalë, though they will be surveilled for the time being until her return, and will personally ensure the matter of their fate be seen to by then. 

Throughout the final mandate, however—

Ivory white is a beautiful colour on you, Halbrand concludes, distractedly.

“Glad to see the Captain didn’t lock you up in a tower,” he says after, as the Guards unlock his shackles. “Do you always have a tendency to help strays? To beachcomb for flotsam and jetsam that wash ashore?”

“A thank you would be nice,” you scoff, but without heat. “And yes. Call it a mutual understanding.”

The Guards shuffle off. Halbrand is left in the borders of the court, speaking to you, who’s robed in a dress like a monolith of pure light. Salvation, you look like. And you had been, in a way. He cannot deny that.

But he cannot deny he doesn’t trust any of it either.

(Something about things being too good to be true. He’s learned that lesson before.)

“I still don’t know what you want of me, Eärmaril,” he remarks, and was glad to know the sound of your name finally being uttered by him seems to have an effect on you. “But a part of me gathers that staying in those cells to rot might benefit me more, than to be at risk of being at your disposal outside these stone walls.”

Hurt flashes in your eyes. It’s the first he’d ever seen it. 

As if the thought of having someone in thrall to you was— outlandish. And here, perhaps now Sauron will see the malice cut through your façade. That alas, your true colours and intentions will bleed through, as always, like he’s been expecting and predicting all this while.

But then:

“You must have been hurt so, to be this distrusting, Halbrand.”

He seizes.

Your gaze melts into something sickeningly compassionate. Severe, almost, as Estë’s healing touch in his faded dreams.

Sauron doesn’t know what to make of it.

“You— think me afraid,” he manages, terse enough to be a statement more than a question. (Enough, hopefully, to hide the fact you have, indeed, rattled him.)

“No. I think you don’t know what true kindness looks like, even if it’s being handed to you on a silver platter.”

“I’ve done evil,” he says, slow and careful, and accompanies it with an intimidating step into your space; your orbit.

You don’t waver. 

If anything, you’ve boldly bared your throat as you crane your neck to level his steely gaze. “It is said only the sea can wash away all that is evil. That it can erode all given time. I believe that’s why you were adrift and washed here.”

“A baptism,” he muses, suddenly remembering Ossë, between the battle-drum in his ears. 

“Whatever floats your boat.”

Halbrand scoffs. “You think you know me.”

“I know enough,” you say. “I know I’m the only person in this moment who can give you what you want.”

“You alone cannot give me peace.”

“I cannot,” you agree, before cocking your head to the side. “Though, I can lend you a Smith’s hammer and tongs.”

In spite of himself, and against his better judgement—

Mairon lights up.

Footnotes:

Erulaitalë was a ceremony observed on the summit of Meneltarma, the tallest mountain peak of Númenor, in which praise was given to Eru for his works.