here we go again by lonelyvisitor  

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love me or leave me

as is its right as a pg13 movie, this chapter features one strategically placed f-bomb :')

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Gil-galad had inhabited his new body a thousand-odd years, and it had never been burned save perhaps at a barbeque. Yet he now felt scorched, unable to move, as if his feet were molten to the temple floor.

Sauron hadn’t even touched him. It was as if the fire rose up from within—

In a flash of silmaril Elrond stepped between his king and the enemy, fell and defiant as he had been in the shadow of Barad-dûr.

“What is this illusion? The Dark Lord was destroyed utterly with his ring. How dare you blight our marriage rites with cheap conjuring.”

“The half-elf.” Sauron drawled, undaunted by the light. “How tedious. But of course Naneth and Ada’s princess must have his perfect wedding day.”

His beautiful lips twisted in a simper at Elrond’s sour, still fearless expression — at shocked Eärendil and Elwing who had rushed to their son.

Then that fiery gaze flashed across the temple. “Where’s my wedding, Tyelpe?”

All eyes now turned to Celebrimbor, though Gil-galad could only see Orodreth beside him, he who had once faced Gorthaur the Cruel at Minas Tirith. Their hands were locked together tightly.

“Celeborn?” Celebrimbor called unsurely, although he did not cower. “Do you still have my gifts?”

Celeborn, albeit with confusion, dutifully held up some items of handsome cast-iron cookware.

For a long moment no one seemed to understand what was happening, including Sauron. But Celebrimbor laughed.

“The skillet! That should do.” He left Orodreth and came down the aisle. “Same principle as the Ring, you know. Circle.”

This aside was spoken to Mithrandir of Lórien, called Gandalf the Grey in Middle-earth, who did not look like he knew at all.

Passing Celeborn, Celebrimbor armed himself with the pan.

Sauron’s look had turned amused, like a wildcat playing with what soon would be the corpse of its dinner.

“You think to turn my own arts against me,” he spoke, as Celebrimbor chanted guttural Valarin, holding up the skillet like a glaive. “Our arts, rather, for it was of our mingled spirit that all the Rings were made. Would you like to tell everyone why I’m here, Tyelpe, in these lovely lands from which we were both exiled?”

Broken from the shock, people were now straining to come to Celebrimbor’s aid, for the temple was filled with many who had been named Sauron’s enemy—but the smith’s foreboding glare held them off. When Gil-galad made a single step forth Celebrimbor shook his head chillingly, but he did not cease his chanting.

“It is the Elvish custom, I believe.” Sauron smiled anew. “One need not have such pomp and ceremony to be wed. All it takes is a solemn vow of mind and body, and the honeymoon lasts all the ages of Arda.”

His speech brimmed with wicked delight. Celebrimbor cried out with his weapon held aloft and glowing strangely, empowered by his spell.

“I kept no part of you in Mandos. What taint there was upon my soul burned off, lost to the Void as the rest of your evil.”

Yet his friend of old stepped in to close the gap between them, as the air crackled with Song, and a sinister perfume wafted from Sauron’s wrists.

“Come now, Celebrimbor. Ever did you strive to see the good in me. Surely there was some fond memory retained in your rebirth, a slim thread that still ties us. For you sensed my coming this hour, did you not? As you fled?”

With emphasis upon his final word Sauron let this sink over the crowd, to another rabble of astonishments.

For a moment Gil-galad saw contrition in Celebrimbor’s eyes, and shared it—thinking none of this would have happened without his foolish desire, his utter selfishness in seeking out his sundry fathers.

Would he even find the answer he had so vainly hoped for, before it all came to ruin?

Before Gil-galad’s eyes, with practiced hammer-form, Celebrimbor slammed the skillet down upon his foe.

Yet it was unstruck Gil-galad who fell, ears ringing and vision darkening as his wedding day gave way to total nothingness.

###

Orodreth ran.

Past the scandalized guests, past Celebrimbor—his frying-pan falling with a clang—and Sauron gleeful and unharmed, he stumbled to kneel by Celebrían and Elrond, who had rushed to aid their husband, and Círdan who held his foster-son by the shoulders, anger roiling his stoic, sea-grey eyes. Elrond was muttering diagnostic cantrips, but to Orodreth Gil-galad looked deeply asleep—though breathing still, he felt with a flood of relief, before he turned back in rage.

“What have you done to my son?!”

“Ah. The little lord of Tol Sirion.” Sauron made a mocking little bow. “Your son, you say. How amusing it is, that you continue to believe you have anything that was not first your uncle’s.”

A hush prevailed as Orodreth, and everyone else, parsed this rhetorical implication. But then Sauron swept his flaming hand before the crowd.

“How amusing you all are, blesséd Children! You have called me Deceiver, and yet my greatest deceit has never been unveiled. My soul was summoned to Aman this day by the fortunate proximity of two reborn bodies. To one I am bonded by marriage.” He flicked his tongue at shattered Celebrimbor. “And the other by parenthood. For your perfect prince, your King of longest reign across the Sea—Ereinion Gil-galad was born of me...and of him!”

His taloned finger-point landed on Finrod, who had leapt out into the aisle with several daggers somehow drawn from his diaphanous robes. He now, however, looked rather flattered.

“Me!? I never...! But—well, I’ll take him, I suppose!” Finrod attempted humility at the revelation, then pursed his lips: “Is this because of that one night I, er, offered myself...?”

“You really did it.” Galadriel stepped forth to face her brother. “You fucked Sauron.” 

“Mother!” snapped Celebrían.

“As a tactical maneuver, dear sister.” Gravely, Finrod straightened himself. “In effort to bring succor to my fellow captives at Tol-in-Gaurhoth.”

“And Finrod fell before the throne, indeed. There are many unsavory rumors about you, Ingoldo, and yet the reality manages to exceed them all.”

“Excuse me, but why would anyone believe the testimony of Morgoth’s lieutenant on this matter?” Fingon gestured with one of his own several daggers. “Gil-galad is the image of Maedhros. Everyone knows it.”

“Don’t you mean the image of you?” said Finrod, before remembering Sauron’s claim: “But he really could be mine, too, you can see it about the eyes, and in that light he’s practically blonde.”

“There’s a silmaril shining on his face, Finrod, I’d say that makes us all look rather washed out.”

“Would you all just shut up! Shut up!”

Orodreth found he did not care about any of these revelations, nor if and how they could be true. He had been gripping Gil-galad as Elrond persisted in a healing song, maintaining crystalline focus in spite of the many distractions, and finally Gil-galad’s eyes had flickered open, fixing unsteadily on the scene before him.

“...Ada?”

His gaze whirled from Finrod to Fingon to Celebrimbor—to Sauron who during all this interchange had gathered his own eerie light, biding time through elvish squabble—

Yet it was Orodreth who Gil-galad turned to in the end.

“Ada I’m so sorry, I was the one who invited them, I wanted to know who my father was but I know, I’ve always known.”

In spite of—because of—present circumstances, Orodreth did not feel particularly troubled by this confession either. After all that had led to this moment, he soothed his son’s brow. 

“You’re all right, Rodnor darling, your husband took care of you—all will be well.”

But he did not believe his own words, and indeed as they were spoken Sauron laughed, outglowing now the silmaril that Elrond wore.

“Oh, well indeed. Did you miss the part where any injury you do to me will be absorbed by your precious Ereinion? It is his body that brings me here, and you will never destroy me again without destroying him. For he was forged in my crucible, from the seed of golden Findaráto and...other of his recovered biological material.” (Sauron spoke this dispassionately, as many winced, and perhaps wondered if this meant Gil-galad was also part wolf.) “I fooled you all—I made the perfect Finwëan, a bland facsimile of his predecessors, and you went and took my weapon for your king—for nigh four thousand years!”

“Weapon?”

It was Celebrían who turned to face the enemy, scars silvered in the clash of light, and she was laughing.

“You intended Ereinion to be a weapon against the Elves? I would call that a spectacular failure.”

Something in her presence seemed to discomfit Sauron. Celebrían was not unmarred, as others who had come to confront him—her body too bore the work of his hands, in other kind.

“He was only a first draft. Such things come in handy for the able craftsman. Sometimes an idea comes along before its time—and now it seems the time has come.”

As Sauron spoke with prideful pedantry, he had risen up into the air robed in gathered lightning; he feigned to wipe a tear from his gold-rimmed eye.

“Oh, Tyelpe.” The Dark Lord sighed, as Celebrimbor glared at him unflinching, kneeling with the dented skillet. “You’ve given me something so much better than a wedding: the chance to kill all my greatest enemies at once.”

And with a flick of his wrist, fire rained down upon the temple. 

###

It was quenched instantly by the wash of great watery tentacles, borne up out of the Sea.

One aqueous tendril surged up to circle Sauron in a vise of surface tension. The others loomed protectively above the ceremony, undulating for a disorienting moment in swiftly brightening sunlight, before expending themselves upon the guests with a great and sudden splash.