Triple Entente

Summary: Celebrimbor recalls how exactly he wound up in Mordor.

For day 6 of @silvergiftingweek!

Read under the cut here or on ao3!

Here have a crack fic.

Summary: During a visit to Isengard, Ratbag thinks on his own relationship(s).  It’s complicated.

Celebrimbor is trans

It is night where I am my dudes and you know what that means: CREEPY ANGSTY TIME HAHAHA

About Annatar, and masks, this time. A bit of body horror to send you off to sleep hehe. Warnings for self-hatred, horror, implied abuse, and allegory. (Note: no, Sauron would not say Mardi Gras or Halloween. These are comparisons I myself am making, not him.)

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A fair form is a mask.  It’s a pretty one, certainly; more like a mask one would wear to a Mardi Gras parade than a Halloween party.  But it is a mask still.

It covers what hideousness lies beneath.  But sometimes, things slip through the cracks—sometimes, an extra eye appears.  A mouth opens too wide.  A tooth is too sharp.

And then, oops!  A rivulet of fire instead of a vein, burning someone’s limb off.  A dagger instead of a fingernail cutting someone’s throat.  A rumble instead of a breath turning someone deaf.

No one thinks about it, really.  Well, they do in Eregion, but they see it as a Maia’s awkwardness.

In Númenor, it intoxicates them.  They want this power.  They want this strangeness to become normal for them.

But alas!  These are but masks.

Tar-Míriel finds this out when she sees her husband’s advisor take his face off to reveal the beast beneath.  A mouth too wide lined with fangs, eyes everywhere but where they should be, hair that does not just look like fire but is fire.

She runs away, knowing no one will believe her.

Celebrimbor doesn’t realize until his end, when Annatar removes his mask and shows Sauron.

Sauron, who is scarred and snarling and huge and vicious, unlike Annatar.  The only thing that remains are the eyes—ancient, ineffable, filled with a sad sort of love.  “You could join me,” Sauron rasps, voice lilting with a thick Angbandian accent.  “I meant it when I said I loved you.”

“You can’t love anyone.”

The love vanishes in those eyes, to be replaced with a shattered grief.  “I do.  I can.  Just not the way you want me to love you.”

Without his masks, no one would love him.

(Melkor said he did and meant it, but then he went mad and carved out Sauron’s eyes.  There is no redeeming that.)

(The Valar only loved him when he had a pretty face to match his work.)

(The humans only love him when his face matches his words—they place beauty above everything.)

The masks are nice.  But they are lies.

Sadly, they’re necessary.

That doesn’t mean he doesn’t like them.  He likes people smiling when they see him.

But, a voice says, your true friends never cared.  Your face never mattered.

The voice is right.

That doesn’t mean he has to listen to it.