My Strange Persephone

Part one: worse fates

Adar woke up. That was the first strange part about it. He was sure he was dead. He'd been stabbed twenty seven times in the chest. That tended to leave someone not quite living. However, Adar was alive enough to feel an overwhelming grief and sadness about what had happened to his people.

Adar opened his eyes, and looked around. He was somewhere unfamiliar, and he was lying in a bed. He sat up. It was a small room, full of bookshelves, with a large closed door at the end. Adar recognized the writing on it. Elvish. What kind of a waking dream was this?

Adar tried to stand up, and frowned when he realized he wasn't wearing his armor. He had a thin black tunic, dark pants, and black boots, without the slight heel he preferred to make himself appear taller. Quickly, he looked down, and breathed a sigh of relief. The bandages Adar used to bind his chest were still in place, unmoved. Cold realization ran through Adar's veins. There was no way his improvised binder would have survived being stabbed in the chest that many times. So, whoever had saved Adar knew he was transgender, and bound his chest. There was only one person in the world who knew about that. Sauron.

Ah. So, Adar hadn't really been rescued, he'd been kidnapped. Adar began to look around the room for some way to escape. There was no telling that if he opened the door, he wouldn't find Sauron waiting on the other side of it. Adar went over to the window, and sighed. He was a good forty stories in the air. A simple bed-sheet rope wasn't going to cut it. The window wasn't large enough to jump out if either, just a small, box shaped view of the outside world. Adar refused to belong to Sauron again, and he refused to fight his children in order to free himself. So if Adar was going to save himself, he was going to have to get creative.

Adar started to think of ideas. Faking dead wouldn't work, because Sauron wasn't that easily deceived. Faking a deadly illness or poisoning was also out, as Sauron would just be able to heal that. It really was infuriating how much Sauron could do. Adar looked around for his armor, and couldn't find it. A strange hope flickered through his mind. Maybe, by some chance, Sauron had removed Adar's armor back in the forest, and maybe, by some even more unlikely chance, Galadriel would return to the site of his almost death and find it. And maybe, but the unlikeliest chance of them all, she'd care enough to come looking for him.

Adar shook his head. If he was getting out of this, he wasn't waiting for anyone's help. He had to put all thoughts of Galadriel out of his mind. She was kind, and the first elf he'd met that didn't look at his scarred form with revulsion. But that didn't mean he could allow himself to hope that someone, especially not someone like Galadriel, could actually like him romantically. Like Sauron always said, he was the only one that Adar could ever find love in the embrace of. Well, Adar had had enough of that kind of love. If it was Sauron or nothing, Adar could settle for being alone.

As Adar was wrestling with his thoughts, he heard a knock on the door. Adar didn't have it guess who it was, and started searching the room for a weapon. There wasn't a high possibility Sauron would have left Adar anything useful, but he still tried. He settled on a heavy, hardcover book that would probably hurt if it hit someone in the head.

Sauron opened the door, Adar threw the book, and the book bounced off an invisible force field around Sauron's head. "Really, Adar." Sauron said wryly. "Throwing books? I thought you elven lot liked protecting your knowledge." Adar glared at him. Sauron looked the way Adar remembered him, dressed in a black robe, with long blond hair, and a crown of his own design. This one didn't have spikes on the top, though. Apparently, Sauron had learned his lesson.

"What right do you have to come here?" Adar hissed. "You enslaved my children. You used your magic and trickery to get them to almost kill me. And..." Adar didn't want to ask that next part. That would be giving Sauron what he wanted. Well, even more than he already had. They'd all played into Sauron's hands. Every last one of them. If the Uruk had wanted to kill Adar of their own volition, he wouldn't have fought back. That would have been democracy, in his opinion, and Adar had never been an absolute ruler. But this was Sauron's sorcery, and Adar wasn't going to stand by and let this tyrant take his people.

"You want to know what I did to Galadriel, don't you?" Sauron guessed correctly what Adar had been about to say. Sauron smiled, and made a humourless laughing sound. "You care for her." He said, a statement, not a question. Sauron smirked, and walked closer while Adar backed away, until his back was up against the wall. "Do you really think someone like her could love a monster like you?" Sauron asked, and placed one hand on the side of Adar's scarred cheek. "We've been over this, my strange Persephone." Sauron said coldly. "The only one who could ever love you is someone like myself, someone as tainted by the darkness as I am."

Adar balled his fists. "I don't care that she loves me or doesn't." He said, though that was a lie. "I just care that you don't anymore." Adar grabbed Sauron by the wrist, and pulled his hand away. "You had my people try to kill me. You don't do that to someone you claim to love. Get your hands off me, or I start snapping your fingers, one by one." Sauron laughed. "I forgot how fiery you could be." He said, getting right up in Adar's face. "I like that."

"Why am I alive?" Adar asked, not rising to the challenge. "And what am I doing here? You know I'll do everything in my power to stop you, or at least make you miserable. You'd be better off killing me." Sauron smirked. "No, you'd be better off if I killed you." He said, and a cold shiver went down Adar's back. He didn't doubt that statement for a second. "What makes you think I have to tell you anything?" Sauron asked, then put one hand on either side of Adar's head, and forced his lips against his in a twisted, brutal sort of kiss.

It lasted a few seconds, Sauron doing that. He knew Adar hated that, and he knew how much it creeped him out. Like all elves, Adar had an age he stopped aging at. For him, it was twenty five. For Galadriel, it was twenty six. However, when Adar had met Sauron, he'd only been eighteen, and really a teenager, not an immortal one. He'd thought Sauron to be the same age, and they'd grown older together for a few years before Adar saw him for what he was: a demon, and a very old one at that. The fact that Sauron was ancient and immortal, even by elven standards, really creeped Adar out that they'd started their relationship when he was so young. Once, Adar had been rather smitten with Sauron. Now, all he felt at Sauron's touch was revulsion.

Adar pushed back against Sauron, while Sauron placed one hand on Adar's back, drawing him closer. Sauron always liked these kinds of shows of control, where he could physically overpower Adar, and Adar would be unable to fight back. Another huge red flag, and one of the major reasons Adar realized that relationship was as toxic as they get.

Suddenly and randomly, Sauron pulled away, a smile on his face. "Heh. Our mutual lady friend really picks her timing, eh?" He said, and Adar had no idea what he meant by that. He was just happy Sauron had let him go. "Well, I have to go take care of something now." Sauron said, and gave Adar a very condescending pat on the head. "Take care, pet." Sauron said, and with that, he was gone.

Adar waited a few seconds to make sure he was really gone, and then took a step backwards. He collapsed back onto the bed almost without thinking about it, and pulled his knees up to his chest. Everything had gone so terribly wrong, in such a short amount of time, and now Adar was in a living hell. But he wasn't so out of it that he didn't realize what Sauron had let slip.

Galadriel. She was still alive. Whatever had happened after the Uruk almost killed Adar, she'd survived it. 'Our mutual lady friend'. That could only refer to one person. Galadriel was still out there, somewhere, undoubtedly faring somewhat better than Adar. And that gave Adar some small sliver of hope to hold on to.