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Speaks to the Trees	By : kspence Category: Lord of the Rings Movies > Slash - Male/Male Views: 4968 -:- Recommendations : 2 -:- Currently Reading : 0
Disclaimer: I do not own the Lord of the Rings book series and movie series, nor any of the characters from it. I do not make any money from the writing of this story.

Chapter List
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4. Nightmares and shadows
It was none of his business, Shagrat told himself as he set off briskly on his way; but after going only a short distance, something - and it might well have been something other than pity, or perhaps even the tiniest flicker of conscience; in any case, some barely-recognised form of emotion made him stop.
He could still hear the lad whimpering to himself, all alone in the dark and as he listened to it the sound began to stir up certain old memories of Shagrat’s, of traumatic events from a past he had never quite been able to put entirely out of mind. The Orc shivered, and in spite of himself looked over his shoulder warily, being unable to quell a mounting sensation of fear and dread.
For Shagrat had not survived the fall of Mordor in full possession of all of his wits: his first encounter with Faramir, many years before, had had a dark and brutal ending in which the Orc, having deliberately allowed his former prisoner to walk free, was sent to make payment for his actions in the terrible fortress of Barad-Dur.   The Uruk’s experiences there had slightly unhinged him; isolated in the darkness and under the duress of near-constant, excruciating torment, hallucinations and other visions had started coming to him thick and fast.
His head spinning with vertigo as he stood in the wood, Shagrat experienced a terribly familiar sense of disassociation: all those years ago, at first in the dungeons and afterwards, much more frequently, he had begun losing track of himself for increasingly prolonged periods – the duration of which even now, he could never be quite sure. Having been delivered into the eager hands of one of his fellow Orcs following his initial imprisonment, Shagrat would reluctantly return to awareness and find himself engaging in all sorts of violent, degrading acts – or actually more often given the character of his personal warder, to find some form of viciously inventive humiliation being enacted upon him. Under these circumstances by far the best option for Shagrat was simply to stay away - ‘out’ of his head - for as long as he possibly could and consequently he’d gotten quite good at it – even though this fact had greatly hampered his painful and slow recovery.
Listening to himself whimpering that night in the dark of the woods, once again Shagrat’s occasionally-tenuous grip on reality faltered, and for a moment he genuinely wondered if after all he really was back in his dungeon, only conjuring up far-fetched dreams of a life after escape. Of course he was aware that the faraway voice he was hearing was far too soft, as well as too high-pitched to be his own, but that sort of doubt was certainly no guarantee of veracity: on one occasion he remembered, thinking he’d been kept up half the night by the agonized shrieks and yells of the fellow chained next to him, he’d come round the next morning with his throat screamed raw, finding himself alone in his cell with the dawning realization that it was he, himself who must have been making all that embarrassing racket.
Some things were still second nature to an Orc like Shagrat, and he moved over to one of the larger trees by the side of the path and put his back against it. Hunching his shoulders he dropped his head and bared his teeth, snarling out long and loud and at nobody in particular, into the night at large. But there was no answer from the dark or the surrounding trees and panting slightly with the effort, he forced himself to think back over his current situation, as he struggled to get a grip on himself.
The Orc thought he was currently standing alone at night in a forest, but throughout his incarceration he’d often believed himself to be hale and hearty, out of doors and free - when in fact the reality was that he was lying naked in some pit or prison cell, beaten and broken in captivity. To combat these rising doubts Shagrat tried thinking for a moment about his lover Faramir, and his sweet acceptance of him.
Unfortunately this only made things worse; no doubt about it, because the greater portion of Shagrat’s fevered imaginings in his dungeon – the earlier ones, at least - had involved Faramir sweetly accepting him. This was in stark contrast to the tone of their last meeting, during which the young Gondorian had railed at him, bitterly accusing the heart-broken Orc of having taken despicable advantage of Faramir’s youth and inexperience, exploiting their hostage /captor relationship in the most base and disgraceful manner, acting only towards the gratification of his own vile ends.   Actually Shagrat, in the privacy of his own thoughts, could quite understand why his erstwhile prisoner might have felt like this: that he might have dreamt up a (for some reason, somewhat older-looking version) of the Faramir he’d known and that the proud young man was now willingly associating with an Orc - and coming to see Shagrat on rather frequent visits, if you please! Well obviously that was all so fantastic as to be beyond ridiculous. The Uruk passed a trembling hand across his face, dashing away the beads of cold sweat that were gathering on his brow. While there was not yet all that much to go on, on balance the odds that he was tangled in some sort of bizarrely intricate lucid dream seemed definitely on the increase.
After slamming his fist – followed by the back of his skull, both with painful force – back against the tree behind him in the attempt to wrench his thoughts away from a distractingly compelling, if patently false ‘memory’ of older-version Faramir slap bang in the middle of making love to him –
Faramir half-naked, with his fair hair falling in his eyes was sweating, the pale, smooth skin of his shoulders and flanks seeming to glow in the soft light from the candles that lit the bower or couch they were lying upon. Leaning over Shagrat, who was resting close beside him, he grinned down in anticipation and began softly kissing his mouth; whispered his name and kept kissing him as he closed his hand around the Orc’s upstanding cock -
Shagrat shook his head violently to rid himself of this painfully vivid delusion of mutual pleasure shared, for it threatened to overwhelm him with (amongst other things) its breathtaking level of attention to detail: he imagined he could recollect everything – from each nuance of sensation as Faramir’s hands moved over his body, caressing him, to the sweet scent of his lover’s arousal, and his ragged gasps of ecstasy – the groans of pleasure in his throat. He thought he could even remember the feel of the rich fabric covering the velvet bolster on which he was resting his head -
‘Velvet cushions!’ the Orc thought, a little hysterically, half convinced by now that he really had begun to lose his mind. Gritting his teeth, he did his best to force himself to concentrate upon the problem in hand, automatically performing a swift weapons stock-take: he felt for both his swords and his various daggers and then for the smaller hunting-knife he kept hidden in his boot. He was searching in the pocket of his tunic for a set of knuckle-dusters that often came in handy when his fingers brushed across a stubby, soft and furry item. Blinking in confusion he took it out and looked at it and then thought, as clearly as if he really seeing it in front of him, of the round and ruddy-coloured face of the fellow who’d given it him. This was a real person, a Hobbit, whose name was – and for some reason Shagrat had no doubts whatever about this - Ludlow Pennycress.
*******
“It’s my lucky rabbit’s foot,” Ludlow had explained to him, earlier on that day.   “You carry it with you, for luck. It’s served me very well in the past, you know!”
They had been sitting together by the fire in the mouth of the large and roomy cave (dry all the way to the back, and with not bad clearance-height in the middle; Shagrat could even stand properly upright in parts) that he and the Uruk were sharing up in the Orcs’ hideaway in the mountains –
“Watch your back in there, won’t’c’her ‘arf pint,” Azof had hooted, on first hearing about this strictly casual living arrangement, “ovver’wise you might wake up some night an’ find our fearless leader is ‘ploughin’ ‘is lonely furrow’ in you from behind! Hur-hur-hur –“
“Ignore him, Shagrat,” Ludlow had tutted, and then yelling over to the other Orc:  “Oi! Azof! We all think – what is it again, Shagrat?”
“- steaming great berk,” the Uruk muttered under his breath, deliberately selecting the mildest selection of epithets he might have thought of applying to Azof, for he was beginning to have some serious concerns about the bad influence that he and his compatriots were having on their resident Hobbit’s behaviour.
“You’re a great big ber-erk!” Ludlow called over to Azof, practically singing out the last words, in what sounded to Shagrat to be a reassuringly inoffensive manner. “Well really!” he went on in his normal tone, “I don’t know why some people have to go out of their way to carry on like that!”
Ludlow had been using the last of the afternoon sunshine to finish sewing a hem onto one of Shagrat’s blankets, while the Orc (who was trying hard not to look at the fancy crewel-work designs that his little companion was embroidering along the freshly-turned edge) methodically sharpened the blades of his own personal arsenal.
“There! Finished!” Ludlow had said eventually, standing up to shake out the piece he’d been working on. A quantity of dust and dander, as well as a number of long, coarse, crinkly strands that looked as if they must have come from the pelt of some strange and savage animal rose up in a small cloud from it. The Orc watched out of the corner of his eye as these Warg-hairs, turning gently in updrafts of sunny evening breeze drifted slowly down and settled to the ground.
Ludlow was shaking his head. “Really, Shagrat, you should try and air these out sometimes.” He indicated the new stitching on the blanket. “Well then, what do you think?”
Shagrat put down his whetstone. “It’s –“ he cast about for something encouraging to say, but appropriate words failed him. “I thought you were only going to fix some of the big holes! Just a quick patch-up job, you said.”
Ludlow beamed at him. “I knew you’d go for a nice skull-and-bones motif!“ He sat down again next to Shagrat and his manner suddenly became much more serious.
“Look,” the Hobbit said, “I can see you’ve already begun preparing all your – big swords and things, so I assume you still haven’t changed your mind about your plans for tonight.   In that case, I want you take this.” And then he’d given the thoroughly perplexed Orc his rabbit foot.
“I’d come with you myself,” the Hobbit explained apologetically, “you know, to back you up, but I don’t think I should leave.   Not when they’re all so - little. Just not now, you know!”
With shining eyes, he looked over towards a large, battered, wicker-work basket, that was wedged tight beneath a rocky overhang in one of the low-ceilinged areas towards the back of the cave. Out of the basket had squirmed a peculiar-looking young animal, nearly hairless and shaped, with its over-large barrel chest, something like a steroid-enhanced puppy. Obviously only a few days old, there were already teeth sprouting in its protruding lower jaw and as the Hobbit picked it up, interrupting its onward wriggle towards the lighted cave-mouth, it opened its milky new-born’s eyes, fixed him in a cross-eyed glare and snarled at him. Ludlow clasped the horrible infant to his breast - thereby demonstrating against the odds that it had a face somebody other than its own mother could love - and carefully returned it to the dog-bed. The larger version, its dam, which was nursing a number of similar-looking siblings, raised her head at Ludlow’s approach and gave her stub of a tail a couple of quick thumps against the bottom of the basket.
The Uruk grunted. Tiny soft and hairless helpless-looking newborn pink things, as he’d recently discovered, gave him the absolute willies, and he’d been more than happy to have Ludlow take charge of caring for the Warg mother and her new litter.
“So anyway, if you must go down there later on, Shagrat, I think you ought to take it.”
“It’ll be fine,” Shagrat assured him gruffly, hoping the Hobbit would just leave the matter at that. “I won’t get in any trouble. Really.”
“It’s not just the distance. Or all the trouble with those townspeople and farmers and what-not,” Ludlow went on, pressing his little talisman into the Orc’s hand, “although that’s more than bad enough! But down past that village where the wool-weavers live. That old wood there – the people say it’s haunted!”
Shagrat just looked at him.
“Doesn’t it bother you?”
And the Orc, shrugging his shoulders as he reluctantly pocketed Ludlow’s lucky charm, had told him not really.
*********
Standing there remembering all of this in the haunted wood, clinging to Ludlow’s rabbit foot as if his life depended on it, Shagrat - who as far as he knew, didn’t have an ounce of whimsy in him - couldn’t think of a single reason why he might having deluded himself into thinking he was friends with an imaginary – and slightly fussy - Hobbit. Which meant – and he felt a physical release of tension at the prospect – that he was safe for the moment after all.   Well – safe in a relative sense, given that he was alone in unfamiliar territory with an in-all-probability-dangerously-hostile group of locals soon to be hunting after him; but considering the difficulties the Orc thought he might have been facing, mobs of angry locals could only ever count as extremely small potatoes indeed.
Squaring his shoulders, he picked himself up and started back to the youths’ fishing camp.

TBC
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Speaks to the Trees