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The first cell Maedhros is thrown into, he’s still more shocked than scared. His back is bleeding from a whip-crack and he has the first purplings of a bruise across his face, but he’s full of fire and life. He rails at the bars, furious that Morgoth broke his word.
You were stupid, he tells himself, to expect honor out of mercuriality, order out of chaos. But he doesn’t yet regret believing; he doesn’t yet regret trying his best.
It takes him a while to notice that there are other people in the cell with him.
They hang back, fearful where he is not, and stare at him with eyes that don’t glow. Queer eyes that reflect the light of the torches that Morgoth’s servants hold. He’s only seen such an effect once, on a long camping trip with his grandfather to the Outer Reaches when he was young. So far from the Trees, Finwë’s eyes had lost a little of their all-consuming glow and recalled the days of the Darkness.
Some of them still have scraps of clothes. The cloth is unlike his own, and wholly different even from the Sindar he had met between Losgar and Mithrim. He doesn’t understand. They speak a dialect he is unfamiliar with, the little Sindarin he has scraped together in the weeks before his capture almost wholly useless.
They’re scared of him, of each other; but they cluster together for warmth. Eventually he grows desperate enough to join them, his red hair mingling with the silvers and browns most common to their people. He learns some of their language, this way – words like warm and cold and hurts and love.
He isn’t with them for long; he rotates through cells like they’re going out of style. Þauron doesn’t appreciate the way he gives the inmates hope, riling them to riot.
It’s in one of those latter cells that he meets a kind-eyed elf, not yet broken by the conditions; not yet on her way to orc-hood. She speaks in a kind of Beleriandic Quenya, more similar to the words Finwë spoke quietly to Indis than to the formal, shining language that Rúmil and Fëanor loved so dearly. She wants to know what year it is.
Maedhros looks at her with sympathy, doing the calculations between the historical Dark-years and his own familiar Tree-years in his head. He tries to remember what Olwë told him of the old counting methods – how many hours in a day, how many days to a year? He gives her his best guess.
She laughs, then, and tells him that it’s been mere weeks since she was captured, nearly three hundred years earlier.
He doesn't understand.
Time moves differently here, she says. The god twists the doorways and chooses what he likes. Have you not noticed in the tunnels that it does not pass at all?
But why then do you laugh? he asks.
Because you have given me hope, she says. When I escape, I will tell my people that our kin across the sea will come back to us one day.
She tries to find a way out, intensely hopeful; Maedhros’ heavier chains forbid him from ever following. She is tossed back once, then twice, burnt and bloody. Her eyes grow darker.
Maedhros is moved to a different cell before he knows if she succeeds.
He wonders initially why Morgoth lets him be kept with others, rather than in isolation; he realizes later that it pleases Þauron greatly to know that he tries and tries to make escape plans, to communicate, to connect, and is foiled every time. Most of the prisoners he meets have grown exhausted of trying; this is the first step to enthrallment, to turning elves into orcs.
The oldest are physically twisted, skin having lightened under long years of deep darkness and cold hands, but he comes to learn that most of them look just like his cellmates. Just like him.
Some are beautiful, still, possessing the long hair and fine fingers of their birth. Some can sing, still, summoning seductive power. But none of them have a will; none of them do a single thing that is not commanded of them. It chills Maedhros to the bone and swiftly becomes the thing that he fears the most.
Morgoth knows that unbearable physical pain and violation will lose him prisoners; it allows them to cut the bonds of their fëar and flee.
Thus it is that Þauron plans his slow emotional torment: a monotony of loneliness and frustration broken up with the occasional mutilation, reminding him to stay constantly on the edge of fear and distrust and in enough lingering pain that little comfort can be found.
Maedhros’ mind grows dull, tense, tired; yet he knows that he cannot lose his will to fight, his will to exist, his hope for the future.
(The last might already be lost. He is, in truth, halfway to an Orc already.)
He no longer asks new cellmates when they hail from; who they knew. It isn’t worth it. He saves his energy.
It must be twenty years on when he is thrown into a cell broken and bleeding, two teeth and an ear sacrificed most lately to Þauron’s tender mercies. He’s scared, now, fearful and untrusting. He’s met prisoners who have tried to kill him out of rage, out of mercy; he’s bitten their throats out with his teeth, hands still bound to the bars that had spread his legs.
(As his mind has grown dull, his teeth have sharpened. The teeth that Þauron chose to do away with were two of the dullest, a punishment and reward in one.)
His new cell is large but almost entirely empty; a solitary figure lies curled up on its cold stone, back against a wall.
Maedhros eyes the other elf, wary; yet exhaustion plies its cold fingers upon him and the need for kind touch is overpowering. A spark of fire flickers within him, urging that he should not give in to Morgoth, to the distrust and dissension that the dark god aims for.
So he drags himself over to the other elf and lies down against the dark chest, bloody and smeared. Body heat was the one gift prisoners could grant each other in Angamando, shared freely in a place where they had no other resources.
He relaxes infinitesimally as his back warms; his eyes keep watch on the door. Inside, his injured mind focuses only on the slow, steady breathing he can feel at the back of his neck. He doesn’t know this elf, almost as tall as he is, but he hopes their teeth will not drip with his blood when they awaken.
It should worry him that he does not care enough to stay awake, but he has not the energy.
The elf wakes, eventually; his breathing changes. He doesn’t bite. He watches Maedhros with dark, reflective eyes and says nothing.
One gets dragged out; then the other. They nestle into each other when they return.
On a warmer day, when the orcs have not come for a while, they sit up against the wall together. Their throats are too torn to bother speaking. Slowly and quietly they brush out each other’s hair and install new braids with shaking, tired fingers. In unspoken agreement, they take mutual pleasure in one of the most intimate acts two Quendi can engage in.
(If Maedhros has yet a scrap of trust in his body, it is entirely for the large, rough hands of his cellmate that run through his hair.)
Maedhros’ locks are uneven; Þauron burnt a large braid away from it upon his capture as evidence for ransom, and the singed ends have continued consuming any new growth.
The other elf’s hair is brown-black and twisted, long enough when braided to settle by his hands at rest, and Maedhros runs his fingers over it and thinks of Fingon.
When are you from? Maedhros finally wants to ask. The elf looks Ñoldorin, though his eyes do not bear the light of the Trees - but neither do Maedhros’, anymore. Maedhros hopes for news of his people, even if it is centuries to the future. It is wise, he says to himself, to look for hope.
(He is no longer convinced.)
But his throat is so ragged that he cannot form the sounds, and the characters that he tries to scrawl in the dust of the cell spark no recognition in dark eyes.
The last time they see each other, his cellmate has been given new manacles and a collar with spikes on the inside. There is blood running down nearly every part of his body. He is shoved back in the cell as Maedhros is yanked out, and in their last chance at communication the elf grins with bloody teeth.
A salute, Maedhros thinks.
(But to what?)
Þauron drags him to an unfamiliar room and dresses him in a clean shirt. Maedhros is dreadfully confused but can barely bring himself to care; his eyes dart around to the knives Þauron arrays on himself like jewelry, sparkling with fresh blood.
I hear thou hast been getting along with thy cellmate, Þauron says, the words dripping from him like jewels out of a tumbler. Clink, clink.
He drags a knife along the side of Maedhros’ face when he gets no answer. His metallic fingers trail delicately as he splits the skin with care.
Time for a new home, I think, the maia declares, and it is no surprise.
(It pains him nonetheless.)
Þauron drags Maedhros through the door and out of time, through passages that are impossible to keep track of. Eventually they emerge into fresh air, and Maedhros can barely believe it. He gulps in great lungfulls of it in the darkness as the stars wheel above; they seem so bright to his sensitive eyes that they nearly burn.
They are standing on a cliff; the land spreads out before them, a feast to starved eyes and a dull, closed-off mind. Natural rock; dirt; grass; a pool of water gathered in a dip in the earth. It all seems new and lovely to Maedhros, who has for twenty-five years slept, lived, and been tortured within perfect carven stone.
Þauron removes one of his manacles as he stands still in his new shirt, bathed by the light of the stars. He tries to drink it in, sure that something awful is coming. Þauron bustles around him and attaches the chain holding his right wrist to something snaking over the cliff.
Then he pushes Maedhros over the edge.
It’s been fifteen years since Angband - since his impossible rescue - and Maedhros walks now on the green shores of Ivrin with Fingon by his side. Their hands twine, and Maedhros almost feels like smiling. He isn’t sure that what he has right now is hope, but his mind is no longer dull, and his love for Fingon bubbles up like strength deep within him.
They watch as Turgon runs past, following his daughter and laughing for the first time in a long while. There is a gloriously long-haired Vanya in tow - one of the few who came with Fingolfin, Maedhros realizes. Golden hair is a rare sight indeed on these shores; he saw it only once within Angband, on an orc charged with whipping him.
(He doesn’t say that out loud.)
He and Fingon watch them go and continue on their path; and then someone following them runs into him with force, knocking him over into the grass.
The feast’s atmosphere has infected him, and Maedhros has worked hard to discard the reactions that were bred into him in Angband. He stops himself from lashing out, from snapping his too-sharp teeth; his jaws clack shut quietly instead. Fingon kneels next to him.
And then he registers the face grinning above him, whole and hale and dark. Sharp teeth. A strong, scarred neck below. The elf helps him to his feet, apologizing in clear Quenya with an accent like Finwë’s, and Maedhros’ eyes catch on his wrists, where round, puckered scars are rough and faded.
His world narrows.
“It’s you,” he says, lost for anything else. Language is inadequate to capture what he is feeling.
(And oh, he is feeling.)
(Fingon looks on curiously, his smile quieting with confusion. He does not understand what is going on, but his presence is comforting.)
“Hello,” says his old cellmate, eyes Tree-bright. “I’m Rog. It’s been quite a while, hasn’t it?”
Maedhros steps forward; grips the front of his tunic with his left hand and rests the stump of his right on the broad chest. “When–” he stops, starts again. “When were you from?” he whispers, the question burning on his tongue.
Rog holds his wrists gently, soothingly, a familiar touch that had become rote over years of comfort. Maedhros leans into it unconsciously in a way he does not do with Fingon.
(He loves Fingon with all his heart, but they have never been injured together, dying together. He trusts him - but it's different.)
“A long, long time ago,” Rog says to him surely, softly. “Before the Journey.”
Maedhros shakes his head. “You escaped,” he says, disbelieving, even as the truth stands healthy and strong in front of him.
(He had worried for an instant that Rog's time was yet to come. If he should he tell him. Now he finds himself wondering if Rog had made the same decision.)
Rog grins again, his teeth a match for Maedhros’ own. “So did you.”
He shakes his head again. “No,” he says calmly, remembering the way Fingon clung to him desperately, reaching up to saw viciously at his wrist below the iron as his lovely blue tunic slowly became stained with fresh-running blood. “I was rescued.”
Rog shrugs. "He rescued your body, sure enough," he says, and leans up and taps Maedhros' forehead. "But you were the one that didn't break."
Maedhros smiles.