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insomnimoni · 8 months ago

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( credits to @sugurugetos for this phenomenal gifset ! )

♛ — TUNNEL VISION ;

summ. Sauron breaks Elrond’s mind in the only way he knows possible— through you. or: Elrond receives psychic damage via nightmare. pairing. Annatar (& implied Elrond) / f!reader w.count. 4.2k (Whew) a/n. post-s2 , ‘loose’ POV to match dream-logic , slight nsfw , nothing explicit , just chock-full of innuendos & heavy-petting , Sauron is canonically TWISTED in this one y’all sorrynotsorry , established Elven name , Elrond has a psychological breakdown LOL

ELROND STILL NEEDS to sleep. Now that— that is the most frustrating part of being half-Elven.

Albeit, he can outlast restlessness and the need for sleep longer than the average Man, yes, but never in the ilk of Elven-folk; who need only to sit and idle peacefully, and could exist in a state of a dreamless calm that mended their spirits.

Perhaps the most curious thing, however, that set him apart from the average mortal, is that he can tell he’s dreaming, every single time. A strange coalesce of Elven senses with that of Man.

It’s why he can tell the image of you infront of him now is but a figment of his imagination, as much as the lilting tune of you humming a song sounds so real to his ears, sketching neath the firelight of Celebrimbor’s forge.

You glance up to look at him.

Elrond almost smiles. Almost.

You’re looking through him. Beyond. As if he isn’t standing before you.

And then— a shift in the air. Something oppressive. Something dark.

Pure and pitiless.

“Sauron,” Elrond snarls.

Something shifts in shadow at the corners of his eyes. He can never catch it— always a second too quick to sink into the cornered murk of his peripherals wherever he turns.

“You’re aware,” Sauron muses, voice pleasantly delighted. He had taken on the fair-form of Annatar, in all his serene-like, Elven glory. “I was hoping you would be. This will be fun.”

A hiss. “Get out of my head, Sauron.”

“My Lord?” comes your voice.

Elrond whips to you. The world is quick to warp into a fixed scene:

Eregion, under the stars; With the Kingfishers long since homed to their nests for relief, and the night sky filters through stained glass windows of the Forge, where Sauron had spent his days and nights smithing with—

“Lórielin,” the Deceiver calls to you, drifting into the room. “The hour is late. Do you not wish respite?”

You round the drafting table and tuck your sketches underneath a holly-carved paper weight, speaking over your shoulder. “Ah, well, sleep tends to… escape me.”

Yes, Elrond can’t help himself, You always stayed up with me until I fell asleep. I’d wake up to my book marked with a single leaf, because you know I hate dog-eared pages.

“I wonder,” you cock your head curiously, a teasing smile as you watch him climb the stairway up to you. “Does a messenger of the Valar require such necessities?”

Annatar lets out a small laugh. It reaches his eyes as he ducks his head down in humility. “Admittedly, no.”

“One would have so much time in their hands,” you muse aloud. “It must be nice to be tireless in every pass of night.”

His gaze falls inward at that. For a moment, you wonder if you’ve said something wrong with the anguished look that flashes across his eyes, enough for an apology to begin hanging at the tip of your tongue.

“It…” He pauses as he enters your space, tries to search for the right word. “It is lonely, more oft than not.”

Elrond scoffs. How pitiful.

(But buried in the petty scorn is an unease; fraying and wary. You had welcomed the Deceiver into Eregion— had this been how it had gone during those times spent together? Is this less an illusion and more a memory?)

“You don’t have to be, tonight,” you murmur, so quietly it could’ve been missed even in the mute air.

You’re suddenly extremely conscious of the proximity between you and Annatar— You, sidling against the edge of a workbench scattered with papers and scrolls; and him, cornering you with his dizzying height and heavy-pinning gaze.

“No one awaits you?” he asks, hesitantly. It's a loaded question; one you can translate based off pure cadence alone: Do you belong to someone else? Does your heart?

You swallow thickly. Shake your head. There’s… Elrond— your childhood friend and everything more— but he’d never once shown an interest; never once seemed to be looking your way.

Annatar’s fingers brush the cuff sleeve at your wrist, surprised to see you uncharacteristically shy of all things. You’d always been a spark of a character amongst the others in the Forge; it had been what had drawn him to you in the first place: your unapologetic brightness, your steady resolve.

That he could have you buckle like this, needless to say, is— satisfying.

“My Lord,” you say, faltering at the urge to pull him closer.

“Annatar,” he corrects gently, ghosting his finger to your chin. “Please, I believe we are long past honorifics. Are we not friends?”

You suck in a breath as he lifts your head an inch, chasing your lucid gaze and finally meeting his eyes.

“Friends?” you whisper, goosebumps lining your skin when he delicately tucks a stray strand away, and hovers his palm over your cheek. “Is this what friends do?”

Annatar blinks. His mouth opens then shuts. (A pretense of nerves; he could never actually be taken aback. Not by a game of his own making.) “My apologies. If, If I have misread— Or overstepped our—”

You set your hand atop his before he can pull away.

“No, it’s just…” you swallow. “I think… this is beyond friendship.”

Elrond seethes from behind the imaginary veil. This is not real. You cannot deceive me, Sauron.

This is hardly an illusion, echoes a voice, scorching and coarse. More a memory, if you will, played in a dream.

Bide your time playing tricks elsewhere; I am not a fool. She would never entertain the likes of you.

Wouldn’t she?

Annatar’s gaze darts to your lips.

You’re craning your neck up to accommodate his height, and the sight of you looking up at him— starrily doe-eyed and hopeful— has his control wavering. He could take you here and bend you down and bow you to his own will, he could. Easily. But this is a strategic pursuit, in the end; a game of his to shatter Elrond’s psyche, bit by bit, into irreparable splinters.

You’re just a pawn. A sinfully delicious one, that is.

Annatar dips closer to you. Cat-like. Languid.

His molten-slow gaze glides.

They roam across arching shoulders and the valley of your collarbones, follow the high juncture of your nape and then up, up, up the tresses of your hair and to the apples of your cheeks, where he finally meets the fond look in the blown out pupils of your eyes.

A perfect portrayal of Temptation, he thinks hazily, with how the dying forge-light spills and paints you like a sundusk vision; how he catches your rich, citrus-sweet fragrance behind the stinging taste of metalwork and silt.

But—

The truth is, Annatar had failed to deceive you.

In reality; In the waking world: He had almost swayed you, but you had remained faithful. Devotedly loyal, to someone who had yet to allow you into their heart.

(It’s admirable. Borderline pathetic, yes, but admirable, still. You would’ve made a favourable ally in another Universe. Rather unfortunate he had to settle with Mirdania so briefly in the end.)

But all Sauron needs to do to unsteady the great Elrond is to plant a single seed of doubt—

And the only way is:

To plant that seed in you.

Literally.

…Figuratively?

What does it matter, here, really, in a place of dreams where sense is so easily undermined and logic is not bound to the rules? This realm is merely a scape of Elrond’s making, and all Sauron had to do is sculpt it with a tinge of his own manipulative shadow.

Cease this, Sauron.

Me? I’m not doing anything.

You’re the one who closes the gap.

Annatar is the one who sighs into your kiss.

His hand frames your face in a soothing cradle, lips slipping into place like lock and key. The other roves to handle at your waist, and you can feel him thumb at your side in tentative reverence.

There’s always a rush of unseen power in Annatar’s presence, but now that you’re tasting him—?

You want to devour him. You want to fold him into the spaces of your ribcage and keep him there forever, drunk on the searing feel of his touch, his wanton affection. Your palms drag across broad shoulders, resting over the rampant beat of his chest as he inhales deeper into the kiss—

The hitched sound that splits you when he reluctantly pulls apart from the seam of your mouth is nothing short of obscene.

“I cannot give you what you seek,” Annatar states, breathless, feigning tremulous restraint. “Not— not here. You deserve… You deserve an altar, at the very least.”

Your answer is startling.

High and tight and needy.

A plea that rattles Elrond to his marrows. He’d never heard you speak in such a way his entire lifetime.

“My Lord,” you exhale the honorific like Servant begging to Master, fingers wound around his black sleeves. “Please.”

Despite the scant space, you don’t catch the ghost of a victorious smirk upon Annatar’s lips nor the sweeping cold, calculative, hunger in his gaze; far too distracted with blinding desperation for a single caress.

But Elrond does. “Don’t you dare. Enough with this sickening fantasy of yours, Sauron—”

It’s like he’s not even present. Ignored; A phantom, shackled to haunt the unfolding scene.

Annatar is undeniably intimidating like this. Looming like a shadow over you. Towering. Eclipsing. He knows it. Enjoys it. (So do you. And he knows this, too.) Some warped power-play; Predatory gait of a wolf stalking prey, that makes you wonder if he’s the type to play with his food.

(He is.)

But he’s Annatar. Lord and Sharer of Gifts. Compassionate and generous. He keeps up the act by pretending to give in to you— pressing another passionate kiss so endearingly gentle; belying the darkness underneath that’s beginning to slip through the cracks with each heaty second.

“Why, when you plead so sweetly…” he trails off, securing you further against the desk with a nudge between your knees.

He lifts you up to the tabletop with so much ease it sends your feverish thoughts spiralling into just how strong he is compared to you; just how long he’s been holding back and still is; how much he’s truly capable of doing to you if he so wished.

You gasp, head tipping back when he suckles a hummed kiss down your neck.

Elrond knows Sauron’s being too rough with you. Too demanding. Forceful. Taking, taking, taking his raw pleasure for his own.

My own? Sauron muses, voice a hearty rumble in the very air. She enjoys this just as much, Herald. You know it. Look at her. Listen to her.

As if on cue, you let out a sigh between bitten lips. The sound is heady and thin and faraway; your fingers curling tight around Annatar’s raiment in an attempt to anchor yourself when he tongues a serpentine trail below your ear that has you slacking with dizzying gratification.

Your words are a tumbled mess. Half a whine, half a plea.

“Hm?” Sauron hums, nose brushing against your cheek. “Speak up, beautiful.”

Something rabid whiplashes in Elrond’s heart.

“Is that— hah—” You falter at a playful nip on your pointed ear, elbows wobbling from keeping up your own weight. “Is that all the Lord of Gifts has to offer me?”

Annatar’s smile is wicked. You can feel it stretch across your brow, where he’d nuzzled a doting, phantom kiss on the margins of your hairline. It has you melting into his arms, scraping your nails up through his nape and scalp.

“Mh,” he hums in drag assent, nosing his way down the juncture of your neck; letting his hand mould around the bare skin of it to feel your bated breath, your rapid pulse, while he laves an open-mouthed, lasting mark on the thin of your flesh.

His hands are long. Slender. Palms tenderly soft yet rough and callous to the touch from age-old smithing; paradoxically intoxicating and addictive. Has you wondering, idly, just what else he can craft— what else he can do, with fingers as deft as his.

Wrapped vast and expansive across your throat, so much so he could snuff you out in a heartbeat if he wished. A proverbial noose. (You probably wouldn’t mind at all, really— if the gasp that escapes you after his shallow, experimental squeeze is anything to go by.)

“Don’t say things like that to me,” he continues, voice like rough-hewn stone, tongue darting at the edge of his lips. Sauron has half the mind to bite and sink his teeth into you, to draw blood and blaspheme a bind in front of the Herald’s very eyes just for the fun of it. “You make me wish to prove myself, sweet girl, and I can be very convincing.”

“Perhaps you should, my Lord.”

You trail a touch dangerously low. It kindles something white-hot in his abyssal gaze.

“Minx,” Annatar grinds out, tugging you back with a controlled grip around your hair. The sound that escapes you has liquid pleasure coursing through him. “What one wants, they must first earn, no?”

You get a taste of his prowess. A glimmer, a sliver; revealed in the brutish way he muscles you unceremoniously off the workbench. It’s brassy and powerful and demanding— a facsimile of the talented smith you’ve come to recognise; in the way he disciplines you like he disciplines unyielding metal— but the fire is smothered as quick as it appears, tucked away into secret, erased from your delirious mind with a slow, distracting kiss across your pulsepoint.

Everything else after that returns to soft, delicate chivalry. An attempt at remorse for the slip in control. Kneading light at your pliant flesh, thumbs skimming like a feather against your arms as he breathes your name hot against your tipped ears; followed by a quiet, whispered order.

“You are vile!” Elrond cries out, “Cease this, Sauron, you filth of a beast—”

Annatar’s laugh is astonishingly bright as he cards his fingers through your lowering crown of hair. “The only filthy creature in this room, at the moment, is busy worshipping me on her knees—”

“ENOUGH!”

The dream flickers.

Sauron narrows his eyes wearily.

Very well, then, he relents, and drops the illusion.

But what Elrond couldn’t see—

He could hear now, instead: A layered cascade looming like a groaning storm overhead; akin to listening through a door ajar, or a crack in a wall; a voyeur to Sauron’s twisted mind. He can hear your susurrus purring and panting, the slick wet kisses and the sound of fabric hiking up and rustling against skin, the muffled hymns of your golden voice going dissonant against Annatar’s black song, all under the damning creak of wood.

Elrond slaps his ears shut. His eyes slam tight.

Wake up, wake up, wake up.

Sauron hisses somewhere in the void, disapproving. She’s even more beautiful like this.

No, no, no. No!

LOOK.

He fails to resist Sauron’s grip. Elrond’s eyes unwillingly fly open and—

Loving bruises mottle like petals on your flesh. No doubt they would clear within the hours (Not that it should matter. This is a dream, afterall. Just a dream. Just a dream. Just a dream.)— but they’re stark and saturated from where you’ve lain back flat on the table. Not yet entirely indecent, but still it smatters visibly across your chest and bite-marked collars, sleeves gone loose past one exposed shoulder and the edge of your skirting dress rumpled from reckless grip.

Your braided hair is now wild and untamed from the unseen yanks, silkened skin now cold and dewy from sweat, lips wet and parted while your damp, harried breaths fill the humid air— And your eyes: Half-mast and misted as you gaze at Annatar, blissed out with so much contentment, it chisels the final fissure into Elrond’s heart and soul to crack open into a yawning chasm.

You look—

(Beautiful, still. Not even Sauron denies this.)

—Ravaged. Unravelled. Conquered.

“Satisfied,” Sauron corrects.

You unconsciously nod in dazed agreement. Annatar coos at you amusingly.

Elrond, from his place, growls.

“You are… disgusting.”

“Have you forgotten?” comes the reply. “You are asleep. This is your dream, Elrond.”

That seems to knock the wind from his sails.

“No. This is your corrupt doing. Never have I once thought of her as perverse as you.”

(It’s an ironclad truth. Elrond’s love for you is pure, and has never bordered past nor beyond that and into the lecher and lust of Man. Sauron had to struggle to conjure this scene up himself from the margins and take the reins over creative liberty— Not that he’s complaining, of course; you are, admittedly, a sight to behold spent and slumped beneath him.)

Sauron tuts. “Perhaps. But do not discredit yourself from your Humanity, Elrond. As half-Elven it’s in your nature to want as Man do; to have an undying thirst that could never slate; or a hunger to slake; to possess that which you desire—”

“She’s not an object to be possessed,” Elrond retaliates, anger coursing through his veins as he watches him whisper sweet nothings to your ear, wipe a stray tear from the exhaustion; the reflexive weep of your eyes.

“That so?” Annatar curls a hand around your neck. The illusion of you keens into his touch; a submission, almost. It makes him grin— canine-sharp and sordid. Seems you think otherwise. “And yet you covet her like one.”

“…No.”

“No?” Sauron repeats incredulously. He leans to press a kiss on the slope of your burning cheeks, purposefully, provokingly slow. Then another on your bitten lips, wet and tender and profane. A vulgar imitation of intimacy. He can still very well crush your used throat at a moment’s notice should he have a change of heart.

(You shudder feverishly at that. Annatar smiles.)

“You reek of jealousy, Peredhel. As clear as I can smell my fair lady here, now: Sweet and—” Sauron cocks his head in thought, and lets out an amused laugh. “—Well, not like a flower. You and I both know I’ve seen to that.”

“You’re sickening,” Elrond spits, turning away.

Wake up, he forces himself. None of this is real. None of it.

“She heeds like a dog on a leash. Quick to obey so long as you mutter a praise in her ears. Beautiful. My sweet girl. Darling one,” Sauron taunts.

Wake up. Wake up. Wake up.

You will not wake, Herald.

“Takes to order so well. I can see why now they call her Lórielin, now. Golden-voiced. I’ve never heard my name sung so sweet in all my time endured here on Middle-Earth.”

Wake up, wake u—

LOOK AT ME, ELROND.

“But you ought to call her silver-tongued, truly. She’s got a talent for that. I might keep her for myself once I cross her path again in the waking world. Allow her to be with someone of better breeding. To brand her on the inside with all of me.”

STOP. WAKE UP.

YOU WILL LOOK AT ME.

WAKE. UP.

LOOK AT ME!

“NO!”

Something slashes in the air.

Sauron howls.

A cut has lanced through Annatar’s pristine visage, slicing skin and spraying black.

Eregion is gone. They stand in a shifting plane of light and dark, the ground rippling like disturbed stillwater beneath their feet. In the distance, there’s a rush of lapping tidewater. Someway, somehow, Elrond has a sword in his hands.

No, not someway. This is his dream, afterall. Elrond’s head. Elrond’s mind. Not Sauron’s domain. It never was.

“Look?” Elrond repeats, in a voice so eerily steady it’d made the very air billow unsettled. “Look?”

Then the half-Elf lifts his head, and—

—Sauron startles.

The glare Elrond casts is one so corrosively pure of Hate. Scalding like a liquid-fire; With something so tenebrous, so mortifyingly raw in unadulterated malignance, that even Sauron seemed to flinch in its wake.

(He ought to leer at this: that he managed to push Elrond not just to the very edge, but into the black heart of darkness and its gaping maw.

But he’d underestimated him.

Underestimated the half-Elf, and his capability to reach into the worst depths of his Humanity— and weaponise it.)

Because now the dream appears to slip from Sauron’s fingers, as if he’s losing the very same strings he’d manipulated to play him like a puppet and a fiddle.

It frays in their fight over control. The realms purl between the battle ruins of Eregion to the verdant fields of Lindon; between a raft in vast ocean to a lonely seaside; between the ashen darkness of Mordor to the brilliant light of Eärendil.

(The world plunges into night. The burning star alight in its epicentre looks like a blinking, slit eye.)

Elrond’s fey is teeming with something horrifyingly anathemic, wicked to the gaze and so abysmally monstrous, that it manages to crack the very edges of this illusion into nothing but splinters.

“You want me to look?!” Elrond snarls, nigh animalistic. He yanks at Sauron with a sadistic growl— nails digging crescents around his throat. “No, no. I’ll make sure you can never look again, Deceiver. That you can never cast another sinful eye over Lórielin or anyone.”

The blade procured into Elrond’s hands is licked in flames. The dream is but an abstract, formless thought, now, and is bending to his will howsoever he deems it fit, no matter how improbable. There are no rules here. Sauron should have no control of this reality, anymore.

“Elrond,” the Deceiver begins hesitantly, “Wake—”

SILENCE.

—comes the Herald’s venomous command.

“I will ensure that you will rue the day you decided to tyrannise me. I foresee it: your very fingers cut off so that you would never lay another burning, baleful touch on anyone— and that will be when I shall look to watch. I will make sure not even your foul, filthy shadow would ever darken our halls.”

He curls his fingers tighter, raises his dagger above the frightful, frantic dart of Annatar’s wide eye.

“Go on, then, Sauron. Tell me. Tell me to look at you now.”

“Pl—ease,” he strangles out. “Wake up—”

Elrond’s voice is a vicious, thundering crescendo of echoes:

NO.

LOOK AT ME, SAURON.

LOOK AT ME.

LOOK AT —

“—me,” you choke.

“Elrond, it’s me.”

A tear slides down your cheek.

Elrond’s world blinks awake, and—

The point of his blade is so close to the pupil of your eye, it would’ve been a danger to even blink, lest a lash catch on its fine edge.

He flies back.

The dagger clatters.

Oh, God. Oh, God.

“I’m—”

Awake, he realises, absorbing his surroundings in an instant: his blanketed cot, the canvas flaps of his tent, the breeze of the new Sanctuary passing through its gaps. Outside, the idle bustle of soldiers reach his ears, and the distant sound of children playing across valleys now protected by the Three Rings.

“I’m so sorry. I, I was—”

Words fail him.

The look on your face is nothing short of terrified as you scramble for a gasping breath. Your body has pressed itself against an old barrel, as if hoping to sink into its shadow away from him. There are indents on your arms from struggle, marred and angry, alongside a reddening bruise curled around the width of your throat, in the shape of Elrond’s hand.

The thorny vitriol twisted around his heart is replaced instantly with horror— guilt.

He had almost killed you.

“I was asleep. In a dream, Lórielin. Of Sauron’s making. I— I thought—”

Elrond takes an insistent step forward.

You flinch.

“No, I…” He rears back, heart lancing in pain at the sight. Of all punishments he could endure, seeing you deathly afraid of him would have to be the worst. “I just wanted to see what I… Would, would you please look at—”

“Please don’t say that again,” you override, voice hoarse. “Don’t.”

You look at him then: betrayal in your wide-eyed gaze. Fear. He may not have hurt you then, but he may just yet.

“I’m awake. I’m awake, now. He must have deceived me in, in fair form. He made a darkness come over me.”

You shake your head. “Sauron doesn’t make darkness in people. He merely encourages an existing piece of ourselves into corruption. That’s how Celebrimbor and I were deceived with power,” you say, trembling. “That’s… that must be why you attacked me.”

“What? No, I could n—” Elrond frowns, breath a sharp exhale. “There’s nothing in me that could ever be used against you. I could never hate you.”

“The way you could never hurt me?”

He flinches in shame. ”That was, that was a mistake—”

“Then why are you still holding that?”

Elrond blinks.

The dagger is in his palm.

What?

It clatters for the second time. Slips from his unwanting grip as he casts it aside like scalding metal. How—?

“Why did you hurt me?”

I didn’t, Elrond thinks to argue. I, I pulled back. I swear I did. I know I did.

“Look at me,” you command. “I said look at me.”

Elrond heeds in an instant.

You’re hiding from him. Palms up to your cut face. Sobbing. Crying—

—blood.

Red. Fresh and viscous. It slides down your chin and hands, and Elrond lets out a harrowing, strangled sound. The bleeding path trails thick down to the floor, where he’d dropped his dagger, slowly connecting back up from blade to hilt.

Pity, comes a dark voice. Her eyes were so beautiful.

Elrond’s heart drops.

Hadn’t he woken up?

Sauron smiles.

The world dips into shadow, once more.

#someone please let elrond rest #PLEASE #this is soooo crazy though #very much giving last episode of season 1 💅#elrond

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