A/N: Oh, isn't formatting just a charm? */sarc* I posted this first on AO3 and then promptly forgot to repost it here so now I'm a chapter behind but hey what can you do. I'll catch up soon. This story has been bouncing around in my head for like a year now and I've finally gotten the time to get around to writing it; it's actually the first of a trio I'm planning, and is somewhat but not tremendously AU- basically one thing went super duper wrong many years ago, and while it didn't really change the quest it changes what happens afterwards. I hope you guys enjoy it, I'll have chapter 2 up as soon as feasible, and as per usual reviews are appreciated and will be answered (though it may be a few days).

Nagduz narrowed his mismatched eyes as he scouted out the small village below him in the valley. The tribe was planning a raid. He'd never liked raids and he was halfway tempted to go back and lie through his teeth but he knew he couldn't; as much as he disliked raiding it had been two days since any of them had eaten and Nagduz liked it even less when they would start to eat each other. It was another one of the strange little things about him, ones that made him that much more different from the rest of the tribe. 'Nagduz': it meant 'the pale one' in their dialect. He wasn't grey like the others, he was light but he still took the sun better than them, something he never hesitated to rub into their faces.

He twisted his mouth into a scowl and pulled away from the valley edge, going to tell the chief what he'd seen. This village was hardly worth raiding, but he knew Chief wouldn't care. They would raid anyhow. And they would kill every human they saw there. Five hours later he was strapping on his worn leather armor. The camp's atmosphere was just as tense and muted as it usually was except there was an undercurrent of ugliness and eagerness that was only there before a fresh kill. Nagduz followed behind Chief, fingering the edge of his squarish blade as he and the others fanned out in the growing darkness, waiting for Chief to tell them when to attack.

The chief grunted. With a feral howl, Nagduz and the others charged into the town- and there was no one there at all. No men, no women, no children, nothing. The tribe pulled up short and Chief swung around and fixed Nagduz with a withering glare. "You said they were here," he growled. The younger one met his glare steadily.

"They were," he shot back. "It ain't my fault they up and left." Anything Chief would have retorted with was lost in an answering yell as the village men and most of the boys sprung up from the brush and attacked the unsuspecting tribe. The others fell on the men with a snarl but it was already too late; half of the tribe had fallen before the rest even drew their weapons. Nagduz drew his blade and turned to the nearest man, using his shock as an advantage to swing, trying to take off his head.

He had spent long years fighting with the tribe, so long that he'd forgotten anything that might have come before, but it was obvious the Man had been fighting too. The man swung his blade toward Nagduz's arm, opening up a six-inch cut that sent a snarl and a stream of curses from his mouth. He swung back at the man with a vengeance, and that was where he went wrong. He overstretched, and the man reached forward and wrenched his wrist. His sword clattered down onto the packed dirt. The man tripped him and he fell to the ground, glaring up at him and cursing him with every foul word he'd ever learned from the others. He stared up at his opponent defiantly, baring his teeth in a snarl. The silvery sword arced down to meet him and that was the last thing that he saw.

Jori and his little sister Etta ran down the path through their village, giggling. They were happy, happier than ever, because now the war was over and their father was home and so far as they were concerned that meant that everything would be okay. Their small farming village still lay to the north of Osgiliath, a near miracle- it had been almost wholly destroyed in the Ring War, when the orc armies moved through, killed everything breathing, and burned the rest to the ground. Jori was the only sibling old enough to remember those times and they still sent a shudder of fear down his spine. He was glad his little sister didn't.

They were startled when they got back to their cabin and heard yelling, but they calmed down once they realized it was only their mother. But who was she yelling at? Curious, they hurried up and peeked in the doorway, where a strange sight met their eyes. Their father was standing contritely in between their mother and something on the ground dressed in orcish armor. The kids' eyes widened. What on earth was their father doing with an orc? That was what mama was yelling at him about too. "How could you bring that thing back here? Didn't you see enough of them?" Their papa took his wife's hands, doing his best to be conciliatory.

"He is a man, Del, not an orc. He was there, with the raiding party at the outlying farms."

"So why not kill him, then?" Del returned, raising her voice. "He was fighting with those bastards. It wouldn't be more than he deserved."

"Because he is not one of them!" their father replied, raising his own voice slightly. The still figure on the ground stirred but didn't get up. "He is a human, Del, not one of those monsters! He is a man and he deserves a chance to live like one."

"And what if he's only a man in body, Hohn? What will you do?"

"I do not know," Hohn answered, sounding drained. "All I know is that I have seen death enough for one age, and now I wish to see life." Del sighed, seeming to lose her anger in an instant. She reached out and pulled her husband into a hug while Jori and his sister crept inside. They skittered over to the lump on the ground and they were surprised to see that papa was right: the orc really was a man, but he hardly looked like one under all the grime that was caked on his skin. Jori reached out and rubbed at some of it absently, jerking backward with a start when the man's eyes opened. He stared up at them levelly, not angry, but there was certainly no friendliness in his gaze.

"Papa," Johri called over his shoulder, "he's awake, papa. His eyes are different colors." It was true; the man's left eye was steel grey and his right was a dark, stormy blue. He looked down at the rope binding his hands to the solid steel grate that outlined their small fireplace and tugged on it, scowling and muttering under his breathe when it didn't give an inch. Hohn came over and knelt in front of him, holding out his hands in the universal gesture of non-violence.

"It is good to see you awake. I worried for a moment that I had killed you." The man looked at him blankly, not seeming to have remembered their encounter the evening before. "Do you not remember me?" The other man continued his blank stare and then muttered something in a dark, guttural tongue that set all their hairs on end. Hohn tried a different question. "Do you speak the common tongue, lad? Do you know anything I'm saying right now?" The frustrated sigh and its accompanying glare was all the answer he needed.

"You mean he only knows the orc-speak, papa?" Jori asked. The man jerked towards him, cocking his head in confusion. His father commanded him to repeat the sentence and he did, noticing that it was the word 'orc' which got a reaction from him.

"Orc?" Hohn asked him. "You know that word?" The man nodded but it wasn't to the question, only the word. He pointed his bound hands at himself awkwardly.

"Orc," he repeated.

"What does he mean, papa?" Etta asked. "He's a man." Their unexpected guest nodded quickly, once again only to the word. He pointed to Hohn and Jori.

"Man," he said deliberately. He pointed to himself again. "Orc." Jori's face fell as he realized what the man meant; he thought that he was an orc. He shook his head and pointed back.

"Man," he said, stressing the word. Their captive stared at him like he had the brains of a rock and shook his head slowly.

"Orc," he replied, stressing the word just as much. Jori, however, had a toddler-aged sister. He was versed in the arts of stubbornness.

"Man," he repeated again, pointing to the older one's chest, then at himself and his father. "Man." If anything, their visitor just looked confused. Etta had already wandered off, her short attention span taken up by the cooking her mother was working on. He turned to his father. "Papa, why does he not think he's a man?"

"When I found him, he was raiding with an orc pack. He must have been with them for so long that he remembers nothing else." He sighed expansively. "It will be hard to reach him, I fear."

"But we will, right papa? Like you said to mama, he should live too." He wasn't quite sure why his dad's eyes were shining when he clasped him on the shoulder and then turned away.

Later that afternoon, once the man had eaten (and been forced to relinquish the knife he'd tried to steal from the tray) Hohn and Jori removed his cracking black leather armor. The stench coming off of him bordered on unbelievable, but all in all it was only to be expected; orc tribes never spent much time on cleanliness. He glared at them but complied with their ministrations while Jori rifled through the armor looking for weapons. He found quite a few, including some rather nasty looking things he'd never seen before stained with what he was quite afraid was blood, and deposited them all off to the side in a small mound. He had to admit, the sheer size of the collection was rather impressive.

The filthy, worn underclothes were the next thing to go, and here the man fought them like a wildcat, kicking and snarling and trying to bite them, but eventually Hohn got him restrained enough to get the garments off and into a corner to be burned sooner rather than later. He and Del had dragged the washtub over to the corner and filled it with water earlier before she took their daughter out to the market, not wanting the girl to see more of the male anatomy then she should at her young age. They had to give their visitor one thing, he certainly had no shame. Here he was, in front of two strangers and naked as the day he was born, yet all he did was glare at them mutinously.

They secured one of his wrists, tied the other end of the rope around the foot of the tub, and then deposited him in the water, all the while getting looks that indicated their visitor was pretty sure they'd lost their wits. He stared down at the water skeptically and then looked back up at Hohn. His message was clear: what the hell am I supposed to do with this stuff? It was apparent that he'd never taken a bath before, at least not one that he had any hope of recalling, so Hohn decided to lead by example. He rolled up his shirt sleeve and dipped his arm into the water, scrubbing it down with the soap bar. He was lucky he'd gotten a little extra pay this month, because he was pretty sure that they would need more than one bar to clean the stranger off. Maybe more than ten. Or twenty.

Once he'd gotten his arm soaped up he dipped it back into the water and washed it off, showing it to the man, who now seemed to get the idea- at least, they hoped he did. Still looking as though it was the most foolish thing he'd ever done, he repeated the process with his own arm, copying it with all his other limbs. By the time he'd gotten his upper body clean, the water was clouded with soap, dirt, and grime. Hohn had already cleaned and bandaged the cut he'd opened on the man's forearm and the stranger paused when he got to it, inspecting the clean white cloth curiously. He pointed at the man and raised his eyebrows in a silent question. Hohn nodded and he looked more confused than ever.

He kept scrubbing himself down, seeming just as surprised as them that he could actually look clean, until he'd gotten everything washed but his back and his hair. He steadfastly refused to put his head under the water and after the earlier debacle with the declothing Hohn didn't have the energy to press the issue. Besides, to be perfectly honest, he wouldn't have wanted to put his head under that water either. The stranger looked like he was going to wrench his arm trying to wash his back, so Jori reached out and took the soap from him, motioning for him to turn around. Giving the boy the same look he had earlier, the man turned around and Jori scrubbed his back, getting his exercise for the day just trying to rub hard enough to get the dirt off of him.

He was in for a shock, though, and almost dropped the soap into the dirtied water when he moved the stranger's hair away from his shoulder. A series of raised lines stood out thickly against his skin, deliberate cuts that formed a word in some language he'd never seen before. "Papa, why is he all cut?" he asked. "That must have hurt." Without thinking about it, he reached out and touched the first scar, jerking backward when the stranger spun to face him with a scowl and what sounded disturbingly similar to a snarl. Hohn grabbed his son and pulled him backwards, sliding in front of him and glaring back at the other man until he backed down.

"Jori, are you alright?" he waited until his son nodded and then turned to their visitor, pointing to his back. "What are those?" He raised his eyebrows, hoping that tone and expression would be enough to get his message through. To his surprise, the man smiled proudly and thumped a closed hand to his skinny chest.

"Nagduz," he said. It took Hohn a moment to get it, but he finally caught on- that was the stranger's name. He pointed to himself and his son.

"Hohn, and Jori," he replied.

"Is that his name, papa?" Talking too fast to wait for an answer, Jori turned to the young man. "Hello, Nagduz. It's nice to call you something other than stranger and now that you're clean and stuff you really do look like a man." He prattled on, seemingly oblivious to the uncomprehending stare he was getting from the direction of the washtub. Hohn, meanwhile, went to get some clothing for Nagduz to wear. "I suppose though we should probably give you a haircut except you have very sharp nails and I don't want to get scratched and I've heard that orcs bite people and I don't want to get bitten either-" He stopped for air and his father put a joking hand in front of his mouth.

"Jori, the poor man has no idea what you're saying, remember?"

"Oh," Jori blushed red and lowered his head, embarrassed. Nagduz frowned thoughtfully and looked at him, not sure what these men were saying. Truth be told, he wasn't sure about much of anything right now, but the men didn't seem like they were going to kill him or anything. Still, he figured, it wouldn't hurt to ask- if he could find out how. He pointed at Hohn and then made a rapid slashing move in front of his neck before pointing at himself, eyebrows raised in a silent question. He had already decided that it would be stupid to fight them now but if they intended to see him dead they had another thing coming. To his surprise, the man looked somewhat shocked at his question and shook his head rapidly.

Still not completely trusting him, and making sure with a suspicious glare that he knew it, Nagduz got out of the washtub, once again standing right in front of them wearing nothing more than he was born with. Studiously averting his eyes from certain private regions, Hohn gave the young man a look-over as he handed him the fresh clothes. He was so painfully thin that you could see every one of his ribs and Hohn was pretty sure that he could have been used as a handy anatomy lesson. It was no surprise: the lives of orcs were relentlessly brutal and days without food combined with living in rough terrain would have turned anyone less determined into naught but a corpse long ago.

In addition to the visible skeleton his torso was littered with little scars and scratch marks, along with a few burns and one large weal along the back of his calf. The man was still young, but he must have seen more in his life than most people would in two or three. Hohn was snapped out of his ruminations when Nagduz, having donned the trousers, tugged at the cord still securing him to the washtub, looking at them expectantly. Jori undid the knot and the stranger pulled the slightly ragged tunic over his head, sniffing it suspiciously. The little boy couldn't resist giggling when he smelled the clean shirt and pulled the same face most people did when they smelled a chamber pot.

The clothes were Hohn's from many years ago and hung off of Nagduz's wiry frame like blankets. Clean and wearing clean clothes now, his human heritage was obvious but it was offset rather jarringly by his tangled, knotted hair and long sharp nails; more than that, though, there was an air about him, something feral and wild, the mark of one who had spent more of their life out of society than in it.

He was reluctant to tie Nagduz back to the fire place but he wasn't willing to risk him sneaking off in the middle of the night, not that it would do him any good- all the remaining orcs were dead. Del, however, had prepared for that, and had bought a small but powerful sedative from the town healer to slip into his drink in the evening. It worked like a charm, and though he was watched all throughout the night, Nagduz never stirred from his slumber.

It was another two days before the man would let them close enough to get his hair combed and cut- and funnily enough it was Etta who actually got near him. The little girl simply sat in front of him until he had grown used to her presence and then scooted steadily closer. Finally she got close enough to tug on the mess that was his hair. It took hours before she could comb through it without stopping and it was probably nothing but her youth and sweetness that kept him from snapping and biting her. He shifted uncomfortably every time she tugged a tangle loose. Cutting his hair took significantly more persuasion- it was only Del who he would let close enough to be convinced to sit and allow his hair be cut to a reasonable shape and length. That was another process that took most of a day.

During all this time Jori, through a combination of mime and example, began to teach Nagduz more and more Westron. It was a slow, painstaking process; none of them knew a word of the Black Speech and Nagduz knew little Westron. There were a few words he recognized: 'war', 'death', and other things like that. By the time the whole hair process was over his vocabulary had expanded to things that were more mundane but less violent.

It was the fourth night he was there that he tried to escape. He pretended to be asleep until he thought all the men had gone to bed and then slipped his hand out of the rope; they hadn't noticed him cutting it during dinner. He looked around, making sure that none of the humans were secretly watching him, and then went for the door. "Dus?" He spun around and came face to face with Jori, who had in fact been watching the entire time. Dus was the boy's nickname for him, a variant on his orcish name since his birth name was still unknown. He thought over his vocabulary lessons.

"What?"

"Please don't leave Dus, I promise we're not going to do anything bad to you we just want to help." Jori knew that he had probably understood nothing more than his name and 'I' but he hoped the message would transfer anyway. Nagduz looked at the boy suspiciously. He wasn't sure what the humans were up to- okay, maybe they weren't trying to kill him. He didn't quite get that but he figured it was true. But he had no idea why theywanted to keep him there. Once again, he ran through his growing word list.

"Why... you... me... here?" It was the closest that he could get, but it was good enough- he'd only been working on his Westron for two days. He had a good head for languages, especially working with no translations at all. Jori wondered how he would do if he could work with somebody who actually knew both Black Speech and Common. Right now, though, he wasn't sure how to get his idea across. He'd gotten attached to the strange, wild man even though he'd been there less than a week.

"You are my friend," he replied carefully. He wasn't sure if that message would get through- there was no word in Black Speech for friendship.