This is a dark AU, exploring the deaths of each living fellowship member, if Sauron had claimed the Ring in time before Gollum and Frodo fell in Orodruin.
A/N on Celebrían's hair colour: (Yes, I am a freak for details.) Her name means Silver Queen, but I took a liberty and assumed she was fair-haired like her mother. If you know that this is wrong, please do not hesitate to tell me. If there are any other inconsistencies, please help to point them out to me, I would be very grateful.
I do not own LOTR.
And far away, as Frodo put on the Ring and claimed it for his own... the Dark Lord was suddenly aware of him, and his Eye piercing all shadows looked across the plain to the door that he had made; and the magnitude of his own folly was revealed to him in a blinding flash. Then his wrath blazed in consuming flame, but his fear rose like a vast black smoke to choke him. For he knew his deadly peril and the thread upon which his doom now hung. From all his policies and webs of fear and treachery, from all his stratagems and wars his mind shook free; and throughout his realm a tremor ran, and his captains suddenly steerless, bereft of will, wavered and despaired. For they were forgotten. The whole mind and purpose of the Power that wielded them was now bent with overwhelming force upon the Mountain.
-The Lord of the Rings, The Return of the King, J.R.R. Tolkien
The defining moment.
Far, far away from the Black Gate before which the Free Peoples of Middle-Earth make their last stand, their desperate distraction, on the shores of Aman, a fair she-elf stands and looks to the East, and her gold-spun hair glimmers in the fading light as she remembers those she loved, those she has left behind, those she will lose.
From Rohan to Harad, Gondor to Mirkwood, Imladris to Tharbad, Rhûn to Bree, Ennor shudders.
They are waiting. The whole world is on the edge of a knife now, and one stray step by one small halfling in the darkest places of Middle-Earth will doom them. One small hobbit and one small Ring, and together they make the uncertain future.
In the fires of Orodruin, two Ringbearers fight.
The Lord of the Rings claims what is his, and the world falls to darkness.
Legolas, more than anyone other than perhaps Mithrandir, feels it. He is an elf, more attuned to the harmony of the earth than any other, and he feels it. He feels every blade of grass cry out, and every tree scream and every animal shriek and every particle of soil as evil enters.
Such complete evil.
Evil is not anything unfamiliar to him. He is a warrior prince of Mirkwood, has felt the dark tendrils of Mordor that reach ever further into his home for years uncounted, had battled the foul creatures of Morgoth, has experienced the cruelty of Sauron, the power of the Dark Lord.
This is not any different- except in intensity. This is evil in its purest form, undisturbed by any faint pinprick of light, hopelessly black. He feels it with every breath that he takes, and the air itself is tainted now.
No more will he walk under the leaves of Greenwood, as he had dared to dream of. No more will the cry of the gulls hold sway over him, for how could an elf seek Valinor in death?
Legolas has learnt resignation. Long years of training have taught him, and he knows when the position of the pieces is so clearly in one's favour that the other must concede. And it is now. The last beam of hope has died, the lone ray of sunlight shut off, and all he has left now is death. Death. So foreign to the immortal elves, and yet suddenly closer than ever, for what other name can the bloodshed in front of him bear?
Death.
So he will grace Mandos' Halls after all.
But before that, there is the business of dying.
And it will be a death worth remembering. He will make the orc that takes him down remember the look in his eyes as he died, he will make the creatures regret that they stepped in his way, and he will blaze the trail of death as gloriously as he has that of life.
He lifts his bow, slowly, unhurriedly, and takes aim. Not at the orcs, not at the Haradrim, not at the Nazgûl. But at the Eye of Sauron, high above the wastelands of Mordor at the top of Barad-dûr, and he lets loose the arrow.
It arcs through the air, soars high, strikes. And it flames and disappears into the endless void that is the Eye, but Legolas is satisfied. He turns on the orcs.
Oh, they will remember this.
So passes Legolas Thranduilion.
Pippin really thought he was beginning to get the hang of this- swing, parry, hurl sharp object at oncoming evil creature as hard as possible- and then the thrill of pure darkness that shook the land, and he dropped his sword.
If he'd been himself, and the rest of the world had been itself, he'd have been embarrassed for one second, before getting skewered.
But this...
This is not his world. This is not the world of green meadows and mischief, of great deeds and songs, of battlefields and bloodshed, not anymore. This is a world of darkness, and he does not want to live in it. Death, although he knows next to nothing about it, has got to be preferable. How bad can it be? He questions nervously, trying not to imagine too much. Still, he thinks, better to die out here, killing orcs with my last breath, than to die running, shot in the back, or worst of all, to die in Mordor under the torture of some foul thing.
No.
He will not do that.
Pippin has grown up over the course of this War, though no one seems to believe him. He has seen so much more than he ever wanted to, and he has learnt. He is not the laughing, naive, cheerful, foolishly happy hobbit he was. Oh, he still loves mischief. He is still young and largely untried and hopeful. But he has grown up.
And now he completes the process, as he makes the final transition from hobbit to hero, and he accepts death.
He will die, not the hobbit child from the Shire, not the baggage of the Fellowship, not even the soldier of Gondor. He will die as an adult, and Pippin find bitter irony in the fact that no one is around for him to tell 'I told you so'.
He picks up his sword- so small against that of the orcs!- and raises it.
So passes Peregrin Took.
Gimli had honestly thought he was comfortable with darkness. He'd grown up in it, after all. Durin's Beard, he is a dwarf! And all right, he might have been slightly uncomfortable with treading the Paths of the Dead, but that was different.
And so is this.
There is darkness as in the absence of light, and there is darkness as in the absence of good.
Unfortunately, this is probably the latter.
Gimli grits his teeth. He has stood fast. He has fought the evil of Mordor all his life. He came to Imladris, and he went on the Quest, and he fought in Moria, and he fought at Amon Hen, and he fought at Helm's Deep, and he fought at Pelennor Fields, and he fought here.
And he will go on fighting.
There are many dwarves that yet draw breath in Arda, he thinks defiantly. And I will let you sample the might of the stone children, and you will cower and shake in your pathetic armour and fear the might of the dwarves!
The axe of Gimli raises and glints in the sunlight, and then it shines red with blood as he brings it down, again and again, on and on, and the orcs fall before him. But ten replace every one that falls, and they swarm round, attacking, slashing.
The pain is inconsequential, but Gimli knows when his strength is spent and his time is come.
He looks up.
And he spits in the face of the orc right in front of him.
The expression on that foul face is his last satisfaction as the world fades, and he sees, for an instant, the blond head of Legolas of the Elves, and he smiles slightly. Side by side with a friend, indeed, he thinks, and there is the most ridiculous hope in his heart as death takes him.
It is improbable that dwarves and elves go to the same resting place, but really, what has he to lose if he just hopes?
So passes Gimli, son of Gloin- Elvellon.
Merry shakes.
And Minas Tirith shakes right along with him.
Ah well, he thinks ridiculously, I suppose I should feel no shame trembling, when the great city does it too. Oh, the White City is falling, and the promise made to the last breaths of a dying son of Gondor is broken, and the beauty of Minas Tirith is shattering, and Merry cries.
Slightly to his left, Faramir and Éowyn stand, hands intertwined, staring deep into each other's eyes, and despite it all Merry smiles at them. Their love would have been sung of, he thinks, one of the great romances of the Third Age. And now they will enter the next world as one, hearts beating in unison, two souls conjoined. Theirs is the love of gentle sunshine after frost, of the blooming of a lily, of the healing of a man, and it is so beautiful amongst the wreckage and ruin that Merry's tears fall as his laughter rings, and he watches as the city shakes once more and they fall, into a chasm, the White Lady of Rohan and the Steward of Gondor, and then they are gone.
Gone.
Merry is alone.
He misses Pippin now, misses the whole fellowship, and wishes they were all here so they might finish the failure of their Quest together. Frodo, Sam! Are they alive? He wonders hopelessly, does it matter? They will die soon, better now than later in pain.
He misses Pip. So hard that it aches, so badly. He wants his wayward cousin beside him, to smile at him and joke about their impending doom, to meet that doom together.
But Pippin dies far away in a siege that has failed spectacularly and resoundingly, and now Merry will die in a White City stained red with blood.
His lips press together, and if Pippin had been there he would have laughed, and slung his arm round Merry's shoulders, and commented on his 'determined look', but Pippin is not there and he is here and he will defy.
Slowly, painstakingly, stubbornly, Merry lifts his arm as high as he possibly can, and though the ice that has been coursing through his veins freezes, he will not lower it. He will not.
He runs forward into a fire started by all the destruction, and he thrusts his arm into it.
And Merry dies, the part of him that was touched by evil burning.
So passes Meriadoc Brandybuck.
Hope...
Aragorn muses as he decapitates yet another orc. Hope, he had been named for. And now, should he let go of it...for in all honesty there is no point clinging to hope. It is gone. Burnt in place of the Ring, abducted by Sauron, destroyed. Utterly.
And yet.
The blood is everywhere, the killing is everywhere, but the hope is here.
Estel.
Aragorn, Longshanks, Strider, Dúnadan, Thorongil, Wingfoot, Elfstone, Elessar, Telcontar, Envinyatar.
The names span his past and his future that could have been but now will never be, because the hobbit has failed and the Dark Lord won and he really doesn't want to find out what kind of torture methods Sauron has come up with specially for Isildur's Heir.
Estel.
He fights and fights and fights and at the forefront of his mind floats the image of someone indescribably beautiful, indescribably tragic in the twilight before nightfall, shining like the Evenstar that she is, and I'm sorry, Arwen, we were wrong. You should have sailed, although I doubt even Valinor will escape the darkness.
Estel.
There is hope, as long as there is one man fighting.
Estel.
Onen i-Estel Edain, ú-chebin estel anim.
He will not fail his mother. Or his father, or his ancestors, or Elrond or Mithrandir or Arwen or Boromir- oh, Boromir, the White City will fall- or Legolas or Gimli or Merry or Pippin or Frodo or Sam or Halbarad...
Estel.
And Aragorn, son of Arathorn, does not die. At least, not yet. He fights, and all who see him step back in awe, for here the ancient kings reflect in eyes of grey, and here glows the gift of hope that one woman and her child gave the world so freely, and here hope will fight till the very end.
Until the very, very end, when the Dark Lord places his hand on the shoulder of Estel, and his light is finally extinguished.
So passes Aragorn, son of Arathorn. Hope of Middle-Earth.
Gandalf.
He whirls and blocks, drives Glamdring deep into the orc, and turns again to meet a new foe.
Mithrandir.
He lifts his staff commandingly, and the wizard who slew the Balrog slays a troll.
Stormcrow.
He strikes again, and again, and again.
Grey Pilgrim.
On and on and on.
Greyhame.
He has toiled for an incomprehensibly long time, a Maia whose mind changed Middle-Earth.
The Grey.
Until one day he met a hobbit named Bilbo Baggins, and then he was changed.
The White.
But he sent the nephew of that hobbit on a Quest, a fool's hope-
Tharkûn.
That fool was wrong.
Incánus.
And so he dies.
So passes Olórin of Valinor.
Sam is scared, so scared he wants to simply lie down and close his eyes and imagine himself back in the Shire, or alternatively, scream.
But he has been that scared so many times on this Quest, he feels almost familiar with it as it comes back with a vengeance. He honestly thinks he has good reason to be scared, after all, Mount Doom is collapsing around him, lava and fire and molten redness flying around, and his master...
Mr. Frodo looks so defeated.
Sam wants with all his heart to go to him, to take his hand, to comfort him, but what is there to say?
Do you remember?
Oh, that question. I do remember. He remembers the sound of water, and the taste of strawberries, and the light of the sun, and the feel of grass, and most of all he remembers a hobbit-lass with golden ringlets laughing, his sweet Rosie, and now- he chokes on tears- now the Rose will be crushed, pretty petals ground to the floor, destroyed, and with her all that is green and good...
"Mr. Frodo?" His voice is halting, but Frodo in his despair is unreachable, and he does not turn.
"Mr. Frodo...I was just thinking if Mr. Bilbo was here right now he'd be sure to remember every slightest detail so he could write it down in that big book of his, you know, and don't you think we ought to remember for him, when we get back, that is...And oh, Frodo, stop looking at me like that, I know we're not going back!"
Stunned into attention, the broken hobbit looks at him.
Sam's voice is raw and vulnerable and tear-flawed in a way it has never been before, and Frodo can only stare and realise it is the first time Sam called him Frodo.
Then Sam sees the fireball.
The trajectory. Straight to Mr. Frodo. His Master. Don't you lose him, Samwise Gamgee.
And Samwise Hamfast Gamgee, Samwise of the Shire, Samwise the Brave, Frodo's Sam leaps forward and the fire takes him and then he is gone.
So passes Samwise Gamgee.
And Frodo is left.
Deep in the foulest places, locked in the Dark Tower, Sauron tortures one that could have wrought his downfall, one small overlooked insignificant perian who carried the One Ring across the lands of Middle-Earth, from Hobbiton to Mordor, one who came so close, so close, to destroying evil forever.
The Ring glistens on the Dark Lord's finger, and that is perhaps the worst torture of all.
The hobbit is naked, painfully thing, bloody and bruised and lacking a finger, hurt and struck and whipped and burnt, needing and wanting and guilt-ridden and longing and so filled with aching regret for what he could have done, one moment of weakness, the downfall of a world. Frodo, Ringbearer. What could have come to pass? Aragorn's coronation. Sam's wedding. Legolas' sailing. Merry and Pippin's homecoming. Gimli's valour. Faramir's strength. Gandalf's sacrifice. Elrond's wisdom. Sam's love... And it had all come to nothing.
And the Ring.
One gold band and the manifestation of beautiful evil. Because he wants it, needs it, must have it, but the Ring serves its Master now, always served him, and he will never touch it again.
It is mine. But it's not. Mine. His. Mine. His.
I don't want it.
The one puzzling moment of Sauron's victory comes when the tiny Ringbearer looks at him, and smiles as he dies, as if he can see the white shores of Valinor that could have been his, Sam's name on his lips.
And so passes Frodo Baggins.
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