drink my blood and call it holy by cytryne  

He screamed as the knife carved its path around his cheek, thrashing as much as he could. It did nothing. The straps around his face and chest were too tight and Sauron far too practiced to be shook off by something so simple. He stayed crouched without his hands shaking at all, weight firmly settled across Celebrimbor’s waist as his elbow dug into his sternum.

It hurt.

He’d thought he'd become inured to cuts and pain after so many thousands of minor and major wounds alike. Accidents of clumsy fingers, the poorly evaded edge of a sword in battle, the endless, haunting incommunicable rage of Maia demanding—pain was pain was pain. Simple. Straightforward. It lacked the complexity of everything else that had destroyed him. But this—

The blade itself was cool. It slipped through his flesh with the ease of a well-made tool, the pain a second behind the sensation of layers of skin and fat peeling apart. He would've marketed its lack of wobbling as a benefit, once, and encouraged the craftsman to continue using their skill on even more complicated projects. He would've teased Annatar for doing something so simple and laughed when Annatar flirted back, his blood hot with intrigue at the suggestions he would've made rather than the inevitable response to pain. He might've leaned in close and instead—instead Sauron bent deeper over where he was pinned. The same enchantment as at light flirting hung in his eyes as he paused after each stroke to follow with the gentlest tip of a finger, cauterizing the split wound more precisely than any fire, and transforming mild pain into something worth fleeing, if only for a moment. If only deeper into the past that had never existed.

“Shh, Tyelpe, you will hurt yourself if you keep going like that.”

Words evaded him. Celebrimbor gasped out something mindless in retort, a hoarse croaking attempt at something other than screams, but it made no difference. Sauron's other hand came to rest under his chin. With just as much gentleness as the cauterization, he slipped the fingers into Celebrimbor's mouth and pressed his jaw closed with the palm. Sticky gore spread across his chin.

The taste of his own blood and charred flesh flooded his senses. Celebrimbor recoiled. He thrashed again, side to side and back to front against the slight give of the leather bonds keeping his head turned to the side and his arms at his legs, his throat revolting out of instinct, but Sauron was not shaken. His hand was as unbending as steel even when Celebrimbor bit down on it with all his force. He tried to scream more, to force his jaw open, but it changed nothing. None of it did. None of it ever did anymore, if it ever had.

Had it?

The world spun. Acid joined the taste of metal in his mouth, his cheek splitting and burning in equal measure, and he just wanted it to go away.

Celebrimbor whimpered. He shoved at the fingers with his tongue in one more stubborn, desperate attempt to dislodge them, to do anything, but they did not move. Sauron hummed. He stroked his fingers down along the line of his tongue, steadily pushing it down into the gums below until Celebrimbor could not move any further, and paused in his butchery to kiss Celebrimbor’s forehead. The softness of Annatar remained still. Macabre and heartwrenchingly ironic, it had been strip bare to reveal a god dismissing his subject for a good it could not understand.

“Calm yourself, precious, it will only be a moment more.”

He closed his eyes. Tears slipped through alongside horrible, sickening little whimpers from his throat as he trembled with what energy his body had left, beyond his own will or ability to stop. The eye took shape slowly. Curve met curve in an artist’s hand, cauterizing flame just as controlled as the blade, and scarred its way through his cheek. He could feel it pressing against his mouth from the outside but not quite breaking through.

It should have stabbed him. It should have broken through, harmed him beyond Sauron's ability to fix without a flaw, so that this would finally end.

Sauron stroked down his tongue again and Celebrimbor huffed out a sob. He didn't want it. He didn't want his twisted, meager attempts at comfort, the degradation of responding to that of all things—but there was nowhere to escape it. There was nothing else he could do, nowhere else he could move, nothing.

Time stretched on.

Celebrimbor floated in the pain. His mind fumbled along half-formed ideas of how to make a similar blade, concentration muddled too much to string any steps together. He thought of his once colleagues and their students. And he thought of Annatar as the strokes came together into something fine, the talent he had to make anything beautiful and determination to perfect it no longer its extent. The eye stretched from right ear to nose in delicate curves. Three accentuating lines brought it down to his jaw, every millimeter of their shape an endless agony. But, eventually, it didend. Sauron set the blade down next to his head with a clink of metal on wood and chased it with the last burning line soon after.

The pain did not.

The dark cell vanished under a wave of brilliantly red hair as Sauron leaned forward, isolating them further from the world. Out of the corner of his eye Celebrimbor watched as he stared down at his work with a sort of fascinated possessiveness. The finger that bore the One Ring traced it lightly, cool enough to make him whimper again, a wave of nauseating, heart-wrenching relief settling over him as the pain disappeared under his touch.

The world floated again. He found himself relaxing into the table, tension draining out of his muscles as it all lightened. Sauron's teeth were sharp when he smiled. His hand slowed down in response, prolonging the horror of the pain as he drew it in the same path a heartbeat at a time. But the pain was still taken away.

He sunk into the ease despite himself. He let himself drift into the nothingness, eye loosely on Sauron but not really perceiving anything he did with the wariness he should. He shifted his tongue out from under the fingers and traced along the inside of his cheek. Sauron met it on the other side with just enough force to feel the stiffened texture from the inside out, an odd line within the softness of his cheek countered by dull pressure rather than true sensation. It did not hurt. It should have. It should have. That was what wounds did for the Children, in captivity or at peace.

Tyelperinquar was just a Noldo.

He was just a Noldo.

Sauron was still staring down at him. He brought the hand that had been cauterizing the wound up to his own mouth, the same odd softness in his eyes that Celebrimbor would have once called love, and licked the lingering gore off it even as he complimented Celebrimbor. He looked past the Maia, craning his eyes for the faintest glimpses of the dark dungeon beyond. It did nothing to block out the growing bone deep disquiet that crept in under the nothingness. He needed to cry. He needed to move. He needed to—

“You did well.”

He was just a Noldo.

Oh.

Bereft of pain, mind dizzy with the force of simple relief after so much agony, all that was left was the rage. The numbness he'd fallen into over the years had been taken away. Stripped of his safety with every stroke of the knife through each layer of skin, the core essence of his fëa and his inheritance was left raw and exposed. The impulses that had driven him to defy, over and over and over again, to carve his own path and space, to invent even as it fell closer and closer to the works of the Enemy, surged. The hands on him felt unbearable. He pressed his cheek down into the table until it hurt and they followed, intrusive. His jaw strained to accommodate them.

It would be so nice to break them. To feel the bones twist and snap like a mortal thing, the squelch of flesh and blood under his hands like the hands that had tormented him, to make him cry out—

The fingers in his mouth shifted, soft and supple under his teeth, and Celebrimbor froze. He screwed his eyes shut and prayed Sauron had not noticed. His breathe rasped loud in his ears, louder than it should without pain, he had to be quiet, he didn't want to have to be quiet when he should have been able to—

Sauron knew immediately, of course. He always did. His palm tightened on his jaw in warning and Celebrimbor shook his head the little amount he could. The strap sliced deeper into his free ear at the motion, entire abdomen bucking under Sauron again in reflexive, useless rage that sunk in his stomach like a stone weighted by dread even as he did it. He knew better than this. Why couldn't he just accept it?

He wanted to eat him. Feel the not-blood spill hot and salty into his mouth as it ripped away, leave an eternal imprint of his own lesser existence in return. Would Sauron even bother to heal it? Or would he cling to the mark in return, accepting the flaw like he clung to what remained of Celebrimbor's own existence.

“You did," the Maia ordered. He'd performed reassurance better once upon a time but now the demand leaked through, the core attempt to impose his will wrapped around a threat of consequences if he did not comply. He could feel little bruises forming on the skin he'd just healed, tenderness coming back as warning doomed him. Don't be angry. Don't act up.

Tyelperinquar was a Noldo.

He would always be, no matter how often Sauron reinterpreted his identity and actions to suit himself. He would always be, even when Sauron's objectification made him more animal than Elda, more monster than prince, unsalvageable and weak by the nature of his own existence. A culprit and a traitor of his own making.

Celebrimbor 's breath hitched. The damp, hot press of a tongue swept across his nose, removing the tear tracks from his struggles to replace them with Sauron like everything else, and he clung desperately to the anger against the endless, overwhelming depths of grief. Sauron did not.

“Ah, Tyelpe," the Maia whispered into his cheek, mouth on the scar he'd made, tasting all that remained of the pieces he'd destroyed. He sounded like nothing so much as Annatar. Contentment almost dripped from him as he brought his upper body in close as well, breathless mouth and beatless chest pressing in as if he could meld into Celebrimbor and become one in all ways, freed from the artificial restrictions of the Children's faulty separation.

Sauron would eat his hröa if he ever died. He hoped he did. Let Sauron enable him in one final act of defiance in its finite nature, usher in the inevitable outcome of Sauron's disappointment when nothing of him remained. Let him stay with him as a Maia could, outpace all his mortal limitations and be all Celebrimbor had dreamed during the long nights when Annatar was inescapably different. Let Sauron make him a comfort and a curse and an ascension all in one.

"You were beautiful throughout. It compliments you well," the other monster in the room admitted, heartbreakingly earnest, and Celebrimbor—

He wished the pain were back.

The fingers shifted back towards his teeth. Celebrimbor did not let them go. His jaw clamped down even tighter, teeth finally breaking through the skin to be greeted with vague metal in a texture closer to glass than mortal flesh, muscles sucking tight before he even knew if he wanted to. Sauron's laugh was breathy and light. He pushed the heel of his palm into the delicate skin under Celebrimbor's jaw until he choked, airway spasming and forcing his mouth open.

The fingers withdrew until only the pads remained, the ridges of his fingerprint unnaturally symmetric. They slid back in slowly. Celebrimbor let them. Sauron reached until the knuckles pressed into his lips, flawless and unburdened by the scars of mortality, and when they withdrew only to slide back again in a motion he'd done hundreds of times before Celebrimbor lost the fight to his grief. He wrapped his hands around the edge of the table until they dug into his palms. It wasn't enough.

"If only I could ever be tender to you."

The Maia pressed another kiss to the scar. He ran his tongue along each slow curve just as he had with his knife and finger, a slow and careful worship of the wounds he had inflicted. The flaws he had carved into Celebrimbor as a mark of his love memorialized their twin descent. He sighed against Celebrimbor's skin as he did so, the feeling of cloth being removed an unimportant backdrop to the all-consuming this.

If he closed his eyes, it would be to Annatar.

Annatar had loved marking his skin, impermanently and delicately. He had a great obsession with the ways Children remained incarnate. The ways their bodies acted against their will entertained him, the image of his bruises on Celebrimbor for days a joy Celebrimbor took peace in too. Their creation had been a moment of intimacy Celebrimbor needed like he needed water. Annatar changed somewhat each time, his fickleness with form in pursuit of perfection an amusement back then, but he was always so dedicated and honest. Loving.

Celebrimbor kept them open.

Sauron reached down further. The touch of his warm hand against a soft cock, overstimulated already with the pain and the pressure, made Celebrimbor wince. Sauron was unbothered. He ran his fingers up and down his length steadily, the motion so firmly Annatar that Celebrimbor pressed his unMarred cheek further into the table as his breath hitched, rage struggling under the eternal, draining press of grief, guilt, and dread. He knew him. He knew what he found pleasant even as his mind fled from the sensations, the right twist and scrape to make his legs go weak and his jerking to fail into the shaking of a body torn between fight and fawn.

Sauron knew him far too well to take the relaxing of his legs and jaw as proof he would behave for long. He spread the fingers in his mouth and ran one along the delicate underside of Celebrimbor's tongue in time with the strokes up his slowly hardening dick, his motions just this side of uncomfortably firm, and laughed at the way Celebrimbor's teeth sunk into his fingers to constrain a moan.

"You do enjoy this."

Another order, half-mournful, half-confident. The One Ring slid along the underside and Celebrimbor's breath caught. His teeth clenched deeper, the hot-metal not-blood of a Maia finally leaking out into his mouth as the stimulation brought him to partial hardness. The Maia took no notice of the injury to his fana as he lined himself up to slowly press down around him, enveloping him in a tight warmth he'd once wanted to fuck.

Celebrimbor writhed. He grabbed onto the table with all his might, a little wounded noise like a small animal suffocated by Sauron's silencing fingers as he shook at the overloading sensations. The conflict his mind could not reconcile between pleasure and violation only heightened the sensations, the contrasting pulls on his soul Sauron had so firmly grasped so long ago renewing in a blazing tug. The straps across his face sliced deeper and he pushed into that too. Annatar shushed him.

"I knew you would," Sauron said, in a voice he yearned to call smug but was a touch too desperate to ignore. Celebrimbor's vague retort fumbled into a punched, cut off noise as Sauron straightened up and slowly rose up off his length, then lowered. He moved so much faster than Annatar ever had. His fingers slid deeper into Celebrimbor's mouth in time with his body around his cock and then back out, with no regard for his response but a concerning amount of regard for care to avoid hitting his teeth or making him gag.

Why couldn't it just hurt?

He clenched the edge of the table so hard he felt it crumble under his fingers, splinters of wood stabbing him in teeny pinpricks of relief against the clenching in his stomach under Sauron's ministrations. It wasn't enough. He sucked on the fingers with all his might when they next entered, smooth and horrifyingly unnatural after so long damp, and Sauron let him. He swirled his tongue around them and pushed it down with all his might until the nails sliced into the soft spot under his tongue and fresh blood filled his mouth. It stung. It felt so right.

How far had the mimicry gone? Beautiful but breathless, able to lick and fuck him but without any of the true vulnerabilities of mortality, had he bothered with organs? Did the holes lead to anything more than a hollow pit like the one in Celebrimbor's stomach?

He wanted to disembowel him. Split him open and spill his insides out, fill his mouth with the not-blood and see what it did to him to eat a god.

Sauron removed his hand entirely and Celebrimbor swallowed his own blood, heady and nauseating. He stretched his tongue to the side and split the rip open more. It matched the pleasure coursing through him as the softness could not, wrong and unwanted and yet—an agency, in being the creature Sauron wanted. In being what he had wanted, revealed, a monster rather than a god but far more than mortal no matter what.

Sauron lifted his hand up to his face. The blood ran down his finger and pooled onto the One Ring. It dripped slowly, a streak of red sliding under the band and continuing to drip down onto his knuckle. The rest spilled down the outside of the innocent golden band, Marring it impermanently. And, as Celebrimbor watched, transfixed, Sauron licked it off in one long motion, the blood visible on his tongue as he kept his eyes trained on Celebrimbor's one. It would stay in him indefinitely, a piece of Celebrimbor's lesser being eternally linked, proof of his taint.

And, shamefully, Celebrimbor came.

Chapter End Notes

something something the insatiable feanorian urge to think about murder and power mid sex

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