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There was a beautiful Elf-creature with strange eyes and hair like bubbling lava staring down at him, long fingers folded neatly before themself.
“Who are you?” Frodo demanded, alarm bells going off inside his head, practically screaming at him.
The creature blinked slowly, tilting their head in a manner reminiscent of a cat. They did not reply, only stared at him rather intensely with slitted, golden eyes; Frodo thought to call their expression bemused , for they searched his face with slightly furrowed brows, almost as if they could not understand what they were seeing. Frodo saw in his mind an image of the old Gaffer inspecting a potato, old eyes straining to find its secrets; in his mind, though, he was the potato and the creature the Gaffer.
“Well,” the creature said, voice low and curious. “This is certainly a development from the last one.”
A knock sounded on the door of his study. Merry entered with an apologetic look on his face. “Frodo dear,” he said. “Lobelia is adamant about seeing you. Are you alright? You look like you are seeing ghosts! I’m going to call a healer, the stress of the party and Bilbo leaving is clearly getting to you.”
Frodo shuddered back to reality. He shot Merry a faint smile. “No, I’m alright. I just need… a cup of tea. Send Lobelia right in.”
When he glanced back to the corner the creature had been standing near, it was empty. Perhaps Merry was right.
“What do you want from me?”
Frodo found the creature’s cheek intolerable.
“What do I want?” he scoffed. “You are the one who has now appeared twice in front of me with no clear purpose. I certainly did not summon you. What do you want?”
The creature was very soft spoken, reminding Frodo of a slithering snake. With a huff, the creature folded their long legs underneath themself, very graceful and elegant. It was driving Frodo mad, this being unable to tell if they were a he or a she . As someone who had faced that line of questioning his entire life, he had grown to be weary of people’s almost fanatic obsession with labels when the lines could clearly blur so easily; but nonetheless, it was disconcerting to one second be quite sure the creature before him was certainly a female only for them to be, without a doubt, a male the next. On and on it went, and Frodo had half a mind to ask them himself.
“I mean,” they said, rolling those cattish eyes. Frodo thought it made them look almost human for a moment. “What can I give you so that you will leave me alone?”
“Need I remind you,” Frodo began slowly, as if he were talking to a very unfocused child, “that you are the one showing up in my mind in the middle of the night to bother me when I should be sleeping?”
“You don’t understand.” The creature was growing irritated. “I am tired of not having a body. What can I give you that will convince you to relinquish the rest of my spirit back to me?”
“You’re hurting my head,” Frodo told them. “Why would I have any part of your spirit?”
A long suffering sigh. “They will try to take it by force,” they told him.
“I’m sorry, are you threatening me?”
The creature was gone, though. He rolled over on his mattress beside Sam, nuzzling against his shoulder, hoping for some comfort. The creature left him feeling extremely uneasy. Sam was asleep by now, but he put an arm about Frodo and was very warm; the steady, quiet creaking of Strider’s chair rocking beside the window lulled him to sleep.
“You’re very pretty.”
“Shut up!” Frodo growled. “I have not slept in three days!”
A long-fingered hand began to crawl toward him, as if to caress his hair. He slapped at it, but his hand only met dirt.
“I am losing my mind, truly, then.”
“I could help you lose it… some more,” the creature whispered in a low, sultry voice. Frodo yawned.
“You sound like old Ted Sandy coming onto the baker’s daughter,” he murmured. “Just off putting and alarming.” The creature gasped indignantly. “Besides, as wonderful as I’m sure you believe yourself to be, you’re apparently made of air. Not sure how that would work.”
“My charms have always worked quite well, this is uncalled for, I assure you.”
“Can you charm me to sleep?” Frodo asked curiously. The creature hummed thoughtfully.
“I suppose I could try and talk you into a mind-blowing orgasm. I know that works quite well for some people, you’ll just have to do the actual touching yourself; but picture that it’s my hands, they’re very soft and-”
Raising a brow, Frodo turned on his side to contemplate the creature before him. “Blunt,” he said. “And also not what I meant. You could try singing?”
“Hm,” the creature tapped their chin. “Alright, I will sing you the song of the captive king and his dashing torturer-lover.”
“What the fuck,” Frodo muttered. The creature paid him no mind, instead launching into a- while pretty sounding- rather horrific and graphic tale of a great king who rode out to steal gems from a god. The god captured him and assigned his favorite servant to wheedle information about the king’s land and battle plans from him, and there grew to be a great mutual attraction between the two. One day, though, the god told his servant to bring him the king. The king was chained to a great mountain and left until an evil prince from across the sea came into the land and stole him away, leaving nothing but a mangled hand and the echo of his song in their wake.
Frodo was very much awake after this. When the creature finished, looking to him as if for approval, Frodo drummed his fingers in the dirt.
“Very tragic,” he said. “But I don’t like the way the prince is framed as bad for rescuing the king. They were friends, and it was not right to torture the king, so to me it seems the god and his servant are evil themselves, and- wait-” he jerked upright. “Did you just sing me the story of Maedhros One-hand?”
The creature looked surprised for a moment before scowling. “Well, I suppose that is what some people called him. His torturer-lover preferred calling him his pretty fire.”
At this, Frodo wrinkled his nose. He recoiled just a bit. “That is certainly not normal. I can’t imagine that was a very healthy relationship, the power imbalance would frankly be ridiculous, and the king was likely acting more infatuated with him than he truly was out of fear, at least to a degree.”
“He was not!” The creature snapped. “Why must you psychoanalyze everything? It was a song like you asked for. Anyways, I am surprised you even know the story, halflet creature as you are.” He scoffed and tossed his hair over one shoulder.
“ Halfling ,” Frodo corrected, “is what I believe we are called outside of our realm. And just because I am not a giant elephant like you does not mean there is no room inside of me for brains.”
“Giant elephant? I am very delicate and beautiful,” the creature preened, silken robe slipping over their shoulder a bit. “Great kings of men have sacrificed entire kingdoms for a mere taste of me, elven lords have turned against their own kin to keep me, gods have wept to have me bare beneath them. But you, a halflet, think you can resist?”
“Halfling, Frodo said once more, now growing irritated with the creature and its arrogance. “And I do not know who you are, where you come from, nor if you are anything beyond a figment of my imagination. You are also not my type.”
The creature sniffed petulantly and crossed their arms over their chest. “Isn’t he in love with a girl?” they asked, casting a glance over at Sam who snored beside the fire.
“Shut up and go away! I am trying to sleep.”
The creature laughed. “Ah, so I have found your weakness. Well, if you insist, then I will leave.”
“You idiot!”
Frodo groaned, curling around his stomach both for warmth and to calm the sickness roiling inside of him; a result of the spider’s poison, no doubt.
“What do you want?” he muttered, hardly in the mood for the creature’s unsubtle insinuations- scratch that, their extremely rude and blatant sexual suggestions- and irritating antics.
“You must get up and do something . If your friend is caught by the Orcs then who knows what will happen to me?”
“I suppose you will die along with the two of us, since my mind will die with my body. Oh happy day.”
“That is no comfort,” the creature tried poking at him; as usual, though, their immaterial hand could not make physical contact.
“You are no comfort,” Frodo bit back. “I wish you would leave me alone for good, you are very annoying.” He did not really wish that. He felt horribly lonely in this place. How sad, then, that he had fallen so far into madness that he relied on an imaginative Elf-creature for comfort.
The creature stood and began to pace. They looked worried and seemed to be muttering to themself about getting hands on the Orcs. “I have never liked Orcs,” they grumbled. “Unhygienic, dull-witted, ugly, rude -”
“You’re rude.”
“-bothersome, mindless sheep!”
“But none of what you just said was rude?”
“You cannot possibly think they deserve to be treated with respect?”
“I think they are weak-minded individuals caught and enslaved on the wrong side of an unfortunate war. That does not make their wrongs any less, but I disagree with you making such a sweeping generalization about such a large group of people.” He sighed. “I wonder if you are only the impulsive, judgemental side of my mind. You bring out the Ted Sandyman in me. I guess if we all look deep enough in ourselves, we all have one in us.”
“I resent being reduced to that,” the creature said.
Frodo fell back asleep, only reawakening to the bite of whip as it cut into his flesh. He did not remember that the creature had visited him until Sam returned the Ring to his hand.
Sam was screaming at him to throw the Ring into the fire. The creature was screaming at him to throw Sam into the fire. It was overstimulating.
“Master!” Sam cried.
“Idiot!” The creature shrieked.
Frodo ignored them both, growing rather annoyed with the creature’s obnoxiously perfect face and Sam’s overly familiar one. “I do not choose now to do what I came to do,” he decided, turning away from both of them. “I will not do this deed! The Ring is mine!”
He slipped it onto his finger, sighing at both the familiar comfort and the overwhelming burden of it. The creature began to claw at him; in vain, though. Their fingers slipped right through Frodo.
“You fool! You fool ! What have you done to me?!”
It was this statement that struck Frodo, had him grasping at the corners of his mind for some realization that he had not quite come to yet, but before he could close his fingers about it he was struck hard. Smeagol had found him.
There was a struggle, one that passed in a blur as Frodo fought like a thing possessed; he did not think he was himself. When Smeagol stumbled into the chasm with both the Ring and his finger, Frodo thought he heard the creature sobbing and screaming behind him. When he turned, though, there was only Sam.
Frodo was achingly weary.
It was almost a century before he saw the creature again. Frodo lay in bed, contemplating the merits of rising to help Legolas tend the garden at all, when he appeared.
“Please, Frodo, you must help me,” they began in greeting. Frodo jumped, several of his old joints locking up at the sudden and uncalled for motion. It took his heart a moment to settle down, heart pounding wildly in his chest.
“How did you get here?” he asked, somewhat wildly. “I haven’t seen you since…” he trailed off, some puzzle piece beginning to fit into place inside his mind. How strange it was. Frodo had always been hard pressed to draw any type of negative reaction from them, where now they were nearly sobbing, tears building and spilling over from those uncanny eyes. “Since the Ring was destroyed.”
For all of his tendency to overthink everything, to look at it from every angle, or, as the creature had put it to psychoanalyze , Frodo had been content to assume the creature had been delusions of his mind, sickening with the weight of the Ring’s power over his heart. It was probably somewhat true, but now he remembered that his first meeting with the creature had been the day after Bilbo gifted him the Ring. He had been fiddling with it as he rested in his study, making a decision on what he would do with it.
The creature shook their head. “Please, they are going to send my spirit to the Void. I will waste away to naught; forget and be forgotten. You must not let them.”
A laugh burst from Frodo’s throat. “Some nerve you have!” he yelled, suddenly inflamed even after all these decades of peace and healing. Old pain bubbled to the surface again. He clutched at his shoulder. “Do you even realize how much you took from me? From every single person across the Sea? You destroyed lives and families, murdered and tortured-”
“I didn’t want to hurt anyone!” the creature- Sauron - snapped. He sniffled, and Frodo raised a silvery brow. It was hard to believe this was the Dark Lord in front of him, who had caused unimaginable sorrow, inflicted unspeakable torment and death upon mankind for millenia upon millenia; his nose was red and snotty and tears streaked his cheeks. “I wanted to save Middle Earth. I had seen firsthand the chaos and horror of a world filled with people not united. I knew what I had to do to fix that, but you people could not see the wisdom in that… none could but myself.”
“That should tell you something, dumbass!” Frodo snapped back at him. “You aren’t some righteous prophet sent from Eru the One, you are an unstable control freak with deeply rooted mental issues who decided you would cope with whatever horrors drove you to this point by destroying-”
“Reordering.”
“ Destroying ,” Frodo reiterated, “the lives of everyone on Middle Earth. You cannot tyrannically rule the entire world, take away everyone’s free will and basic rights and call it saving or reordering or whatever other words you use to justify your actions just to help you sleep at night!”
“Well, so what if I was coping?” Sauron sniffed. He looked down. “I have always liked order and control, but if you had been deprived of both by the greatest of the Ainur for thousands of years, reduced to his worthless whore lieutenant, tortured… raped,” his breath hitched, “then perhaps you would understand my need for it now.”
Frodo sighed deeply. “I am sorry that happened to you,” he said truthfully. “I would not wish any of those things upon my greatest enemy- which is you by the way-”
“I thought there was a little something between us-”
“-but that does not justify the evil you have done. And, I have spoken with Celebrimbor-”
Sauron looked up, alarmed.
“He told you almost exactly what I just did. Sauron, you have been given chance after chance after chance to turn away, to choose another path. Every one of the evils you committed is on you and no other.” He paused to let his words sink in. “I have endured torment, too, but have not resorted to tormenting others in my frustration. The same is for Celebrimbor.”
“ Celebrimbor betrayed me! He knew nothing of my intentions yet the moment he discovered my true identity he hid everything we had been working on together for centuries from me!”
“And what were your intentions?”
“...”
“Exactly. And what you are currently doing is called victim blaming , which is when you intentionally cause harm to someone and in an attempt to free yourself of guilt and blame, turn it around on your victim by finding a way in which you can convince them they brought your abuse upon themself. Tell me, when Morgoth used to hurt you, did he ever tell you it was your fault he did so? That you had asked for it, brought it upon yourself?”
Sauron shifted, features growing stormy for a moment before he once again looked down at his toes, mumbling “yes.”
“How did that make you feel?”
“Well, he was right!” Sauron shouted. “Or maybe he wasn’t. I do not know! It is different, though. His only true joy was in destroying, wreaking havoc and tormenting innocent people for sport, while everything I did had a purpose, an end goal.”
“Have you ever read the philosophies of Rúmil?”
Sauron shook his head, brows furrowing at the abrupt change in topic.
“Rúmil was one of the foundational philosophers; his works were regarded largely as law mainly throughout the First Age, particularly his ethical essays and theories. He had a universal view of morals, in that he believed each individual should be held to the same moral standard as the other. In his essay Morality, A Universal Truth , Rúmil stresses his belief that we, as moral creatures, should not treat our fellows as a means to our own ends, but as an end in themselves. Another influential philosopher in ethics was Lalwen the daughter of Finwë. She wrote, in her essay Ethics Through the Self , that to achieve a moral life, one must better themselves by balancing their values. For example, one should not be cowardly, but on the other end they should not be overly careless with their own or other’s life. She called the balance of these two things courage. A healthy mix of both self preservation as well as bravery.”
“What does this have to do with me ?”
Frodo sighed loudly. “You treat people as objects, rather than people . Rather than them having intrinsic value or worth in your eyes, you see merely a means to achieve your end goal- which, by the way, you would never have been satisfied with. You are also extremely obsessive, controlling, immoral, cruel, and frankly rude . You have never known inner peace because you do not balance yourself and immediately resort to extreme measures.
Sauron narrowed his eyes. “These are only theories , Frodo, so they are not morally binding. Opinions, if you will.”
“It’s called basic fucking decency!” Frodo yelled. He breathed deeply. He was getting far too old for this stress to his heart. “Look, I understand you have endured difficult, terrible trials. You may tell me about them if you would like, and I will not judge you for it or tell you that because you have done evil your sorrows are erased, nor will I tell you that because of your evil you were less of a victim to what you endured. But I also will not let you guilt me into pitying where you have ended up of your own free will and horrible choices. Well, I do pity you for that, I suppose, but I will not try to ease your mind and say that it is not your own fault.”
With a shrug, Sauron turned his face away to stare out the window. The sun was going down, casting him in a blinding, burning light and further illuminating his hair. It looked more like a flame now than ever. Sauron collapsed on the bed, bowing his head and folding his hands in his lap. “Do you think I need help?”
Suppressing a huff, Frodo nodded severely. “Yes. These are, of course, unofficial diagnoses born of my personal observations and experiences, but I think you have a type of obsessive compulsive disorder, narcissistic personality disorder, borderline personality disorder, post traumatic stress disorder, autism, antisocial personality disorder, and if there is a disorder for generally rude people -”
“Alright!” Sauron growled, sending Frodo a warning look as if he wasn’t a disembodied spirit who had somehow snuck into his mind decades after being destroyed, which was alarming now that he thought about it. “I meant , do you think you can help me escape the Void? If I get help for my… problems, or whatever…”
Furrowing his brow, Frodo sat up. He cautiously reached across the bed and jabbed the meat of Sauron’s bicep.
“What the fuck was that for?” Sauron muttered, rubbing his arm.
“You’re real…” Frodo mused. “You’re not a conjuring of my own mind.”
“Of course I am real! Aren’t I the one who ruined yours, and apparently everyone else’s in the entire world’s lives? Why would you have dreamed that up?”
“Well, yes, you are. But I’ve never been able to touch you before without my hand going through you.”
Sauron swallowed, and Frodo thought he looked a bit guilty. “There are two guards outside the door,” he confessed. “Manwë told me I could make my last visit before the trial to whoever I wished if I thought they could plead my case.”
“And you chose me ?” Frodo’s brows shot up to his hairline. “Also, how long were you waiting in my room while I slept? I clearly was not wrong about the autism…”
Ignoring his last statement, Sauron said, “You are one of the kindest people whose lives I have ever had the misfortune of ruining besides Celebrimbor, so naturally, I came to you.”
“Why didn’t you go to Celebrimbor then?” Frodo inquired. An even guiltier look followed this question. Frodo smiled. “Ah, you are ashamed of what you did to him. As you should be. But this is good, it means you are not beyond saving, perhaps.”
“Really?” Sauron’s face brightened.
“Possibly,” Frodo mused. He studied Sauron for a long moment. “So you wish for me to plead your case?”
“I would forever be in your debt,” Sauron assured him. “Anything, anything to escape the Void.”
“Forever will not be very long,” Frodo chuckled. “I am very old, and soon to pass away.”
“You are hardly old.”
“I suppose I could do one more deed before I leave, though. I have missed getting myself mixed up in matters of the greats that I do not belong in.”
Sauron looked pitiable with his features twisted so in cautious hope. Frodo laughed again.
“You would have to be stripped of all your powers for, at the very least, a very extremely unimaginably long amount of time, if not eternally,” he continued. Sauron’s eyes widened comically.”
“Absolutely not!”
“Well, the Void it is, then. If you so wish it.”
“No! Wait, I am listening.”
“There would have to be extremely intense therapy, as well as a great effort on your part. I also think you should be made to regularly attend lectures and debates on ethics, and a personal and rigorous ethical curriculum be outlined for you. I could help oversee it until I die. Of course, this is all hypothetical, for my case could very well be denied. I do not have much to go on besides the fact that you are a complex, tangled up, rude mess of a Maia who might have a chance if you receive the proper healing and care…”