Chapter Text
Sauron always has a plan B, not to mention plans F, V, and HW.
He resents every one of them.
In a truly well-ordered universe, there would be a single, optimal plan, and it would work. It would not be subject to the whims of Man, Elf, or weather. It would not founder on a loose rope or a whim.
It certainly would not leave him adrift on the wreckage of a singularly ill-wrought ship, with the least competent complement of sailors ever to hoist sail.
Their complaints sting his ears as the salt spray stings the skin of this form he’s chosen. The guise of a Man, hale but neither fair nor foul, seemed clever many days and equally many leagues ago. None of those who seek him, high or low, would credit a Man – much less a Man of the Southlands – with more wit than needed to pick a pocket, nor more guile than needed to lie about doing an honest day’s work.
His plan had been to reach Numenor, the greatest realm of Men. Whispers in the right ears would, in time, get him allies for a better, stronger venture than Adar's foolishness with his uruk. He need never return to the scene of his humiliation in the Southlands; he need never take up the leadership of this ill-featured, unruly creatures. Men were better suited for the task of healing Middle Earth: less proud than the Elves, less secretive than the Dwarfs, more ambitious to set order and prosperity in place than either.
Once a-sea, a tiny voice in his head whispered Valinor.
He is centuries overdue to face his reckoning there, with the work of healing Middle Earth so barely begun that nobody would believe his vow to do it. He needed more time …
Valinor. The ring of the hammer on Aule’s forge, clear and loud, carried on bright air. Gold and silver, purer than clean water, pouring into the mold. Gems forming in his hand, shaped from the very stuff of creation. The smile of his first master, who poured the love and joy of his being into every forging…
Sauron slicks wet hair from his forehead. An impulsive turn of the ship’s wheel had taken them past Numenor, headed straight and true into the West… and into the path of disaster. Yearning toward the light had left them here, broken and tattered, unable to move forward or back, bickering toward a slow death because they dared not brave a quick one.
With a strong enough thought, and luck, he might call a ship of Numenor to rescue them.. He no longer cares to bother.
Ambition foundered with his ship. Whatever he does, it will end like this: adrift, befogged, surrounded by fools, failed of hope and promise, gazing into a gray distance where his hopes and promise glitter, forever out of reach. Even exile on Numenor -- a peaceful life as a blacksmith, perhaps -- seems too much effort to yearn for. Let his spirit dwindle; let this body fall beneath the waves or grind in the jaws of a sea serpent. He is as vagrant a spirit as if he'd been cast into the Void.
When the Elf rises out of the waves, he knows her as a deserter or a criminal. Elven ships do not wreck on the Sundering Sea. Either she refused to pass into Valinor, or it refused her. In that, they have some common spirit.
He cannot bring himself to care. Let her be the fairest of the Elves, let her be the lowest of kin-slayers: it has brought her to this same slow, soaking failure, on a sea that heaved like a fearful heart.
Not until the second time she emerges from the water – after some grim survival instinct has goaded him to separate his raft from the wreckage, for while he has little will to continue, death is not a simple thing for a Maia – does he ask her name.
Galadriel.
Elves live long and repeat names seldom. There is but one Galadriel known to him, the commander of the Elves’ northern armies. The fire of rage and determination in this one’s eyes, banked but not extinguished by cold and exhaustion, says this is she.
The she-Elf turning a hand to ropes and sails beside him is the same Galadriel who has sought him across all the leagues and centuries of Middle Earth. She clasped his hand to be pulled from the water, as if his were the hand of a comrade.
It is the funniest joke he has encountered since the sun rose over Melkor’s treachery, and the only person he can tell it to, here on this precarious island of planks, is not likely to laugh with him.