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She crosses to him on her knees. He is so very still beneath her hands, still and pale as a stone.
Oh, Kíli.
Dread hollows out her chest, nausea sitting flat and heavy at the bottom of her stomach. Something breaks inside her and crumbles apart while she breathes around it, lungs still working even though everything surrounding them turns to dust. If this is grief it is unbearable, and it is searingly cruel of her body to keep bearing it.
His head sags against her hands when she lifts it from the rock. She straightens out his nerveless limbs; he will at least have dignity in death.
Mercifully his closed eyes hide their empty stare. She strokes her hand down his cheek, thumb running along the curve of his mouth—
Shock courses through her between one heartbeat and the next. He breathes.
Blood drenches the right side of his jerkin. Her fingers slip over the leather and the tunic below when she tries to part it and look underneath. Perhaps she'd seen wrong, a sleight of hand—
She bows her head at what she finds, choking on tears. He might not be dead, but it will be her burden to hold him as he goes.
“I am sorry, Kíli," she says, brushing at the blood on his face, already dried along the edges. Where it doesn't smear on her fingers it flakes away. “I am so sorry." She grasps his hand, hard, and hopes he feels nothing else. Just the pressure of her grip, an indication deep in his slipping mind that someone sits beside him.
A shadow crosses the arched opening, and Tauriel tenses, leaning over Kíli protectively, and reaches for her blade. Her hand drops as Thranduil steps into view, towering and austere.
Thranduil's face is inscrutable, but his tone is urgent. “Does he live?"
“He does," Tauriel replies, feeling numb. "But not for long."
The words burn, the truth in them beyond bearing, but shock pushes them back when Thranduil crosses the rocky outcropping and kneels beside her. Glancing at Kíli's bloody chest, he unceremoniously shoves Tauriel to the side and places his hands over the wound: the cool aura of his usual commanding presence suddenly explodes with light, searingly bright, and pours from his hands like a force from another age.
It's over almost as soon as it starts, and when Thranduil sits back he's once more a hard cold star instead of the blinding sun. With an efficient tug, he rips a strip of fabric a hands-width wide from the bottom of his own cloak: folding it over the wound, he yanks Tauriel's hand from Kíli's and drives it down over the dwarf's chest.
“Press down hard. Do not let up," her former king orders. Rising, he passes back through the dark stone archway, quick and silent, and leaves her there alone.
Tauriel keeps her palm where he'd put it, pressing hard enough her arm starts to go numb. Blood soaks through the cloth and wells up between her fingers. She hopes the flow grows sluggish because Thranduil staunched its progress, rather than Kíli’s body losing so much blood that little remains to hemorrhage.
The light starts to fade. Kíli's chest struggles to expand under the brutal weight of Tauriel's hand; it only leaves room for shallow, panting gasps. In other circumstances, what she forces him to endure might be considered a form of torture.
“Forgive me," she pleads, not relenting. “Forgive me and live."
It's dark when they come with a stretcher to bear him away.
—
The healers of Eryn Galen turn her from the surgical tent where they take Kíli, sympathetic but unbudging, and tell her to come back in the morning.
A stream runs nearby: a near-constant flow of edhil pass back and forth from the water to the camp with buckets, filling large pots to boil for cleaning bloody wounds, washing healer's hands, and sterilizing tools. Wading out downstream, she scrubs the coppery-sweet film of blood off her skin and clothes. She tries not to think of where nearly all of it came from.
The blue night begins to give way to dawn by the time she trudges back up the hillside.
Looking at the camp with a slightly clearer head, she takes in its sheer size with a sinking heart: at least twenty large tents, possibly more, each capable of holding several dozen edhil. Room enough for five hundred injured. Half their host.
A couple porters pass by carrying baskets of bandaging cloth. She follows them toward the line of triage tents where stretchers bearing the non-critically injured wait outside. With surprise, she realizes some of them are people of Dale, picked up alongside her kin.
Hoarse sobbing drifts out of the triage, broken sounds from people who haven't yet received draughts for pain. She waits outside, stomach twisting with desire to escape their cries, until a healer emerges to bring in another stretcher.
“There was a hadhod,” she says quickly, feeling guilty for interrupting the ellon’s task, but not guilty enough to get out of his way. “Do you know where he was taken?”
He points toward a much smaller tent further up the hillside, set off slightly from the rest. Tauriel offers her thanks and leaves the healer to his grim work.
Threading her way through camp, the deeper she goes the more blessedly quiet it gets. Some tents are empty and dark, and others contain patients drugged into a dreamless sleep.
A lantern glows through the walls of the small tent and illuminates a slender figure moving around inside. Tauriel lifts the flap and steps in, revealing a healer washing her hands in a basin of steaming water set on a crate. Kíli lies in a cot nearby, the only other occupant of the room.
An elleth Tauriel knows from Thranduil's court-appointed healers, Alageth, surveys her with clinical eyes. “You must be the one who found him?”
Tauriel nods, distracted, and steps past her to Kíli's side. A sheet covers him from the hips down. His small form comes nowhere near the end of the cot; he might almost seem childlike if not for the dark hair on his well-muscled arms and what’s visible of his belly. Thickly-layered cloth strips cover most of his chest. The rest is nearly black from bruising.
“We could use healers like you, if you are indeed the one who healed him,” Alageth says shrewdly. “Unless hadhodrim possess the ability to mend within themselves the sorts of wounds that leave hundreds of edhil dead on the field, someone else must have done half our work for us before he was brought in. Even then…”
Tauriel keeps her eyes on Kíli and stays silent. Something tells her Thranduil would prefer this kept between them, and even if she felt like sharing, words are buried so far down in her throat that the dead might find it easier to use them than she would.
She settles on the grass next to the cot. Kíli's hair smells clean, still slightly damp from being washed. Someone scrubbed all the blood off his face. Taking his cool hand in hers, she notices they even cleaned under his fingernails.
Dimly she hears Alageth say someone will check on him later, and then she and Kíli are alone.
The sound in the room condenses into distant cries, a light wind coming down off the cliffside of Ravenhill, and his breath. While his chest rises and falls visibly, he strains over each inhalation like he has to pull in air through a few folded layers of wet linen. His exhales have the damp sound of someone who is about to cough, but he never does; and the longer she sits there, the harder it is to listen.
She recoils when something hot and slick like blood trickles between their palms, but when she drops his hand all that remains is a bead of sweat—
His blood caked on her hands—she scrubs and scrubs, but it remains in the creases of her knuckles and the grooves around her nails—
Smeared on his armor, on the stones—
The stone—
Her fingers dig for the runestone in her pocket. She rubs her thumb over it, concentrating on the smooth curves, on the rough-etched lines that spell out sounds she doesn't know how to say. A word for a mother's wish.
His blood on her hands—
His wish, young and foolish, given to her.
His blood—
One hand holding his and the other clutched tightly around a stone, Tauriel keeps a long and lonely vigil.
—
In the early evening a commotion breaks out halfway between the edge of camp and Kíli's tent. Immediately she recognizes the voice. She untangles her fingers from Kíli's with reluctance and heads down the hill.
Fíli stands tensely inside a circle of edhil, none of whom she knows well; most of the Guard are either in a healer’s tent, or clearing the sick and the dead from the battlefield. No one has a hand on a weapon, but Fíli's rests on his belt close to his dagger.
“I saw him go to Ravenhill,” Fíli snaps. “He's no longer there, he's not among the injured from Dale, and he's not with us. So unless you are prepared to tell me you tossed the body of a prince of Erebor onto a pyre with orcs, you'd best tell me what else you've done with him.”
Tauriel approaches the circle. “Fíli, Prince Under The Mountain,” she says, interrupting the tense silence following his sharp outburst. Eyes widening in recognition, Fíli strains to peer between the bodies of his detainees to see if Kíli is with her. At Laketown, Tauriel spoke too little to Fíli to get to know him, but the way his jaw visibly sets when he realizes she stands alone makes her chest ache with empathy.
For a brief moment, Tauriel's voice carries the weight of a Captain of the Guard — instead of what she is now, nothing more than an exile. "I accept responsibility for him. Let him pass.”
Disapproval tightens several of the elves' faces, but they part to let Fíli through, and Tauriel gestures for Fíli to follow. He nearly has to trot to keep up with her long gait. Banked coals of fury smolder on his face, but the closer they get to the tent the more a desperate, anxious hope replaces his anger.
When Fíli enters the tent and catches first sight of his brother, his breath leaves him as though it’s been punched out. He crosses the last few steps in a quick, uneven stride that makes Tauriel slightly anxious he’ll trip on his own feet, and drops to his knees by the cot.
“Kíli, brother,” he says, his voice strained.
Kíli doesn't answer. Fíli folds the limp hand Tauriel had held for hours into his own, and presses a kiss against it before looking up, his golden face stricken. “What happened?”
“He was stabbed here,” Tauriel says, fingers pressing against her own chest, opposite her heart and a hands-width lower. “Through and through.” The sight of the blade pushing through his chest will stay clear for as long as she lives. She’d have it otherwise, if she could.
Fíli looks back at his brother. He’s silent for a long moment, holding Kíli’s hand.
“Will he live?”
“So the healers tell me,” Tauriel says quietly.
Fíli brushes the back of his fingers along Kíli’s temple. “Thorin would have me demand you hand over my brother, but I haven't forgotten what you did for him in Laketown. I’ll leave him in your care.”
“We will treat him as one of our own. You have my word, on my honor.”
“He believes you honorable,” Fíli says. “I’ll attempt to do the same.”
He turns back to Kíli. Tauriel stares at them, feeling out of place. Fíli is the one with a claim here; he has the right to sit vigil. She’s simply the one who feels as though her heart’s being wrenched loose when Kíli is out of sight. There is no inherent right associated with that.
Fíli catches her eyes, and surprisingly his face is kind; he jerks his chin toward the other side of Kíli’s cot.
“He has two hands,” he says, the hint of humor showing under his mustache. “I’ll stay until I receive word that my uncle is awake again. He must know how Kíli's doing if there's to be any hope he doesn't limp the whole league over here himself and cause a scene.”
Tauriel gives a wan smile: Fíli has caused quite a scene himself. Valar spare her the stubbornness of dwarves. “How is your king, then? I've heard no news of him.”
Fíli shrugs. “Worse than me and better than a blade through the chest,” he says wryly, and then in a more serious tone continues, “he’s in and out. He might lose his foot. That cursed white orc broke half a dozen of his ribs, and whenever he wakes he coughs up blood, but that’s easing off, at least.”
“I could have a healer sent,” she offers, but Fíli only huffs a dark laugh.
“A healer of yours would have a harder time getting into that camp than I did getting into this one.” He strokes his mustache. “Perhaps if they stripped at the perimeter.”
Tauriel isn't sure if he means belongings or clothing; it's starting to become apparent that he is in fact related to Kíli, and perhaps shares a sense of humor.
Fíli lapses back into silence for a long moment. He stares at the bandages swathing Kíli’s chest. “I assume he was brought here at your request, no doubt saving his life. Tell me, what is my brother to you?”
Tauriel folds her free hand in her lap and considers the question. In her mind's eye, she sees Kíli’s crumpled body on the rock; she struggles to push back that horrifying sight, to breathe past the despair. It claws into her, a vice gripping her body in place as his head is pulled up by the hair, eyes locking with hers: he seems to be imploring her to forgive him, as if he is at fault. She was the one who'd stumbled and given him cause to rush in—
A small, shuddering breath escapes her lips. Only a memory.
A memory like him feverishly sprawled out on a table—
Do you think she could have loved me?
She draws a smooth rock from her tunic pocket: a talisman, a promise to return. One she’d gripped tightly through the night. The tether drawing her back every time her mind circles around the sight of him on that ledge.
Turning her palm up so Fíli can see what she holds, she slips the runestone into Kíli’s pallid hand and curls his fingers around it.
—
Kíli wakes the fifth evening, hands restless at his sides, and by the time Tauriel drops the mildewed book she'd found in Dale, he's already coughing and struggling to sit up.
She sits on the cot and grasps him by the shoulders, pulling him back before he manages to tumble more than halfway to the floor. He fights, trying to shake out of her grip; but after a few vain attempts at twisting side to side, he lets out a rough pained cry and allows his head to drop into her lap. His back and shoulders spasm against the tops of her thighs as he strains for breath.
I am here, she says; you are safe. You are safe. Be brave.
Slowly, his breathing evens out. Tauriel brushes sweat-soaked hair back from his forehead and sings while his eyes drift shut.
She emerges some time later to find peace from the night, exhausted, heart heavy with hurt over Kíli's struggle. To the east, wisps of high white clouds cross swiftly over the moon. Stars glint in a brief break in the clouds: farther out of reach here than they ever seemed in Eryn Galen.
Legolas stands a few paces from her tent. He turns from his own observation of the glinting dark at her hesitant approach. Dried mud flakes from the sides of his fine boots and dark streaks cover patches of his tunic: it seems he spent the day alongside his subjects handling the deceased, clearing them from the field and piling them to be burned in a pyre separate from orcs and goblin-filth.
She knows what that work is like. When Fíli or one of the others sits with Kíli—their own healer Óin, who brings salve for Kíli’s chest he makes himself, or the quiet-spoken one, Ori, who passes the time sketching in his journal, or the grave and dignified Balin—she goes to Dale and removes bodies from the streets, from houses, from futile hiding-places under crushed tables or in collapsed street corners, and gives aid where she can.
“Were any still alive?” Tauriel asks, because that is a better thing to focus on than the seemingly endless piles of the dead.
“A few. Fewer than yesterday, but we continue to search. How fares the hadhod?”
“Kíli woke today.” Tauriel hugs her elbows close to her body. “He seems aware of little, but he is frightened, and in pain.”
Standing at her side, Legolas nods, eyes fixed intently on some far point. “I know my father's role in this,” he says, rather abruptly. “Unlike ada, you are no master healer from the days of Doriath,” he adds, looking askance at her with a subdued teasing smile, “as anyone who has ever been on the receiving end of your attempts would know.”
Choosing to ignore Legolas's teasing, Tauriel glances at him. "Why did he do it? He hates hadhodrim, he made that abundantly clear. So why...?”
Legolas’s sharp blue eyes bore into her like she’s being particularly dense. “For love of you, of course.”
“He cast me out for treason. What love could he bear for me?”
“You know what his temper is like, and yet you still chose to defy him. You forced him to reconsider his motivations. I think he respects you for it.”
“For my insolence?” Tauriel says archly, raising a brow. She realizes her shoulders are curling inward from how tightly her arms press into her chest, and she breathes out deeply, letting the tension go.
Legolas glances past her to the tent, and then he looks her in the eye and resolutely grasps her shoulder.
“Nay, it is your heart he respects. And though I claim no understanding of it, so do I.”
Just like when they were children, he plants his feet next to a commoner, stubborn in the face of propriety, doggedly faithful as the morning's last star. It makes Tauriel's throat tighten. She settles a hand over the one on her shoulder, grateful beyond words for its presence.
“I do, however, think your dwarven princeling is too short to be Beren,” Legolas adds with mischievous eyes, and Tauriel chokes on something between a laugh and a groan: he was listening to her singing through the tent, of course he was, and now she'll never hear the end of it.
Blushing, she attempts a nonchalant shrug. “And I am no Lúthien. But there are no ballads for ordinary ellith.”
Legolas smiles. He pulls her closer against his side into a comfortable, loose embrace. “I wonder, sometimes, what our heroes would make of the stories we tell. I think she would be proud that what you see in her story is not her great beauty, but her love.”
“I cannot even say what he is to me,” she whispers. “It hurts too much to be love.”
“Nethig,” Legolas says on an exhale, tilting his chin up toward the stars, “the next time you sing that song, you should listen to the words.”
Wrapping an arm around his waist, Tauriel leans her head against his.
—
Fíli returns late the next day, and this time he has a full guard.
Leaving his armed companions outside the small tent to bristle at their equally distrustful elven hosts, Fíli takes in the sight of his brother's head in Tauriel's lap, Kíli's ashen face half-hidden under his own messy hair and tucked against a pillow, without surprise or scorn.
Fíli looks exhausted. Judging by the taut line that runs from his shoulders all the way down to his hands, he chooses to clasp his fingers behind his back partially as a means to keep himself upright.
“My uncle is dead,” he admits in a flat, heavy voice; “it happened quickly. I would've sent…”
“Fíli,” Tauriel warns, too late. Kíli stirs in her lap and tries to lift his head.
“Brother,” Kíli says hoarsely.
Fíli looks stricken. He kneels beside the cot. “Those are not the first words I would have had you hear from me,” he says, sorrow on his face. “Mahal, it's good to hear your voice.”
Kíli moistens his lips. “I suppose that makes you king,” he whispers, trying to smile, but it rings hollow below wet lashes. “I wish I could stand beside you in our halls when—”
His throat closes on the last word, body tensing. Fíli looks on in mounting horror while his brother starts to cough: over and over Kíli goes rigid trying to hold back the spasms for as long as he can and then gasps, shaking, when he runs out of air.
Tauriel cups Kíli's jaw and presses him against her stomach, preventing him from folding forward. He keeps a bruising grip on her other hand. If she were alone with Kíli she would sing to him, would tell him stories as a distraction: about the green lofting caverns of Tauroth he'd seen so little of on the way to the dungeons; about her parents; about the darkness encroaching her forest and the stars above it that stay bright and pure.
They aren't alone. He has someone else to be brave for, clenched jaw and curling hands fighting to keep his struggle away from Fíli's sight. Tauriel knows for certain his actions make it harder for him to endure, but he's stubborn and proud and full of things to prove, and nothing she could say will make it better for as long as his older brother and king stands there looking scared to death.
She turns her efforts toward Fíli instead. “It will pass,” she says, pouring as much reassurance into it as she can, when what she wants to say is please leave.
“What if it doesn't?” Fíli says, swallowing. He looks desperately uncertain. Helpless.
You watched Thorin suffer through this, she realizes. You watched him die from a punctured lung, gasping just like this.
“It will, Fíli,” she says.
Fíli nods, once, and lets out his breath, slow and steady, as if he's trying to do it for Kíli. Beneath Fíli's tawny-gold beard his face remains bloodless, but he keeps his composure like a king should, and like a nephew and a brother should never have to.
At last Kíli levels out. Too exhausted to raise his head, he slips into sleep, or something like it, and Fíli bends and kisses his brother's sweat-damp brow.
“Is there nothing more you can do for him?” he asks Tauriel quietly.
Tauriel shakes her head, but she squeezes Fíli's forearm through his vambrace. “Take heart, young king,” she says in a low voice. “If Aulë wishes for his company now, He will have to fight me for him.”
If Aulë wishes for his company ever—
Fíli ducks his head in a brief smile. When he looks up, some of the tension has left his boyish face. “I almost believe you'd win.”
—
Over a month passes before Kíli regains enough strength to hold Tauriel's elbow and leave the tent.
She walks with him down the snowy path toward the sloping overlook near the elven camp. The view, while not particularly grand, provides a clear vista of Erebor not obstructed by tents, and of Dale to their right. They stop often: even with a fur-lined cloak and hood protecting Kíli from the worst of the wind, the cold irritates his chest, and the wet sound of his breathing risks turning into a hacking cough.
Once they reach the cliff's edge, he pushes back his hood and tilts his face up to the sun. It’s a strange sight, a dwarf who loves the natural light. Or so years of hearsay would have her believe: the same tales that describe a greedy and arrogant people, and not the ones she knows, who are no more greedy or arrogant than individuals of the ellath, and instead fierce with loyalty and immovable in their love.
Kíli gazes at the great broken gate marring the mountain.
“I wish I could have seen my uncle, one last time.”
Thorin was placed in the halls of his ancestors over a fortnight before. His kin had waited as long as they could in the slim hope that Kíli would be well enough to join them.
Tauriel had left the brothers alone the afternoon Fíli came to describe the funeral for Kíli. She’d returned at twilight to find the tent so full of dwarves that some of their shapes bulged against the canvas walls, laughter and song leaking out into the night air. Some of the ellath may have felt that such raucous behavior made light of death, but Tauriel knows it is simply that they take care of the ones left behind.
“He is watching you now from the halls of Mahal,” she says, because she knows that’s what hadhodrim believe. “If you were to look on him now, all you would see is a memory. Hold instead to who he was in life. Let it be a blessing.”
Kíli looks up at her. Tears drip down his face, unashamed. “I wish I could have said goodbye,” he clarifies.
“You still can," Tauriel says, picking her tone with care; his grief is a tender, precious thing, and she has no desire to add to it. "Either here or in the halls where he is buried, he will hear it.”
Kíli brushes at his face and lets out a controlled sigh. Even in mourning, his damaged lungs will betray him if he acts carelessly. Turning back toward the mountain, he starts to sing.
This is not the light-hearted hum Tauriel had heard while Kíli passed time in the dungeons. Its drawn-out cadence resembles a chant, but the rise and fall feels like poetry; he pauses between each long, low note to catch a shaking breath. Wind rises from the valley and lifts Kíli's dark hair around him like a cloud.
Tauriel stands at a respectful distance while he sings, but the sound carries. For the first time since knowing Kíli, she’s glad she possesses no familiarity with Khuzdûl: this is for him, and for Thorin, too, watching alongside his forebears while his nephew pays respects. She pictures them singing along with him, their dirge echoing through those mighty halls the same as it has since the beginning, the same as it will until all of Aulë’s children have gathered there.
All of them, including this one, whose heart called out to hers; this one, who shines brightly as a star in her hand that will soon rise out of reach.
To someday go to Aman and stand outside those halls, to press her hand against a door she can't open and never to be allowed inside—
When Kíli slowly picks his way back to her on shaky feet, he uses a hand on her shoulder to steady himself on his toes, and reaches up to brush the wetness from her cheeks. She holds back the truth like a vice around her heart: her tears are not for Thorin, or even for him, but for herself.
—
Kíli grows increasingly restless over the next several weeks; more and more his face turns toward the mountain like a flower tracking the sun.
He takes to sitting on a rock some ways off from camp where he can see the gates of Erebor. Wrapped tightly in a heavy cloak, he spends several days out in the cold patching the leather and mail on his damaged armor. When he finishes with that, Tauriel brings him other small things to fix that only require simple tools: ripped boots to mend, broken chainmail links to be swapped out, knives to sharpen with a rasp. He enjoys being helpful, and it keeps his hands busy in a way that carries little risk to his chest.
Tauriel spends most mornings hunting for game to feed the people of Dale. In the afternoons, she works beside Kíli on his projects, and in return he tells her stories about the years he'd passed in the Blue Mountains. Today's topic is how he takes after his mother in appearance, how he trims his facial hair to make archery easier, and how his mother has occasionally attempted to goad him into a beard-growing contest.
Fitting a tip into the shaft of a new arrow to replenish her supply, Tauriel smiles to herself; she likes his facial hair the way it is, but she'd be hard-pressed to get in the way of a competition with his mother.
Kíli drops his own finished arrow into a basket next to the rest. He fidgets with empty hands. “Fíli is to be coronated soon," he finally says. “He sent a raven this morning asking if I'd be fit to return tomorrow. The healers say I should be able to take a pony.”
Tauriel wonders how long he's been working himself up to say that. Her stomach tightens at the words, but they come as no surprise; already he manages all his personal tasks—such as dressing—alone, even if it takes him considerably longer than it would with help.
“You could come with me,” Kíli adds, sounding almost plaintive.
Tauriel puts down her work and shifts toward him on the rock, wrapping her hands around a drawn-up knee. “There is still work to be done here,” she says, not missing the way he nods, swallowing his disappointment with much less resistance than she might have expected. Like he'd already resigned himself to it; that makes it even worse. “The last of my people will be returning to the Greenwood soon, and vile things may yet be on the road.”
“Will you be returning with them?” Kíli asks, and it would be hard to miss the trepidation in his voice.
“Not beyond the border into my king's realm. I no longer receive welcome there. But they are still my people, and I owe it to them to make sure they journey safely home. Once they cross the border, I will come back to Dale and help where I can.”
Kíli looks down, nodding, unruly bangs obscuring much of his face but not his quick relieved smile. “Dale will need more hands to rebuild their walls and houses,” he observes casually, toying with the cuff of his coat-sleeve. “Dwarves are accustomed to hard and heavy work.”
Tauriel has an entirely unexpected image of him with sleeves rolled up and sweat trickling down his neck while he hefts stone blocks into place. She feels her ears pinken. “You should not be doing any heavy lifting for a while yet,” she says in a stern attempt to redirect attention away from the heat in her face. “Or engaging in any other reckless behavior.”
“You needn't worry for me, my lady," he says, teasing eyes bright; “I think I'm about done with being impaled.”
A blunt half-voiced cry escapes his lips as the blade pushes through armor and muscle—body sliding off with a wet, grating sound onto the rocks—
Fingers touch her arm, gently at first, and then insistent, and then hard enough to hurt.
“—riel,” she hears, dimly registering it as the tail end of her name.
“Tauriel,” she hears again. She takes a heaving breath. The hold on her arm immediately loosens, but the fingers stay. Slowly the world starts to refocus, and with it, Kíli's anxious, drained face. His breath comes heavy: the slight, rough catch to it rapidly clears her head.
“I am fine, truly,” she says in reassurance, cursing the way her voice croaks; “please, don't worry. It is only a passing thing.”
Kíli exhales, warm dark eyes locked on hers. “That didn't seem like a…You went far away, and I fear I was the cause of it.”
“No,” Tauriel says, shaking her head. “This is not your fault.”
“I made no claim that it was,” Kíli says, firm in a fair way that seems more like Fíli speaking. He tilts his head slightly, still watching her with such focus that Tauriel feels unsteady and oddly laid bare. “Does this happen often?”
She extracts her arm from under his hand. “It is nothing more than a — a bad dream. You have those yourself.”
Kíli gives her a stubborn look. “I think I know the difference between bad dreams and memory-sickness. Plenty of folk from my uncle's generation have it. It's not a thing to be ashamed of.” He offers her a slightly cheeky smile. “I know I'm shorter, but you can lean on me. You don't have to carry it alone. Whatever it is, you can tell me. Especially if it's…because of me.”
Kíli is young even by standards of the hadhodrim; it seems absurd to talk of him shouldering any of Tauriel's burdens. And yet he is not some edhellen hên. He may be young, but Tauriel knows something of that; of wanting to be old enough, to be strong enough. To be treated as an equal. She sighs; cold air catches her breath and turns it white. Either she lets him shoulder this weight, or she calls him a child. He is worth more than that.
“I was not the one who saved your life, Kíli,” she says tiredly. “I can heal some things, but that…” she trails off, and then forces herself to continue, fingers twisting in her lap. “My lord Thranduil saved you. Without him, I would have sat at your side and watched you die. That is where I go. A hopeless, powerless place.”
At the mention of Thranduil, the concern on Kíli's face slides toward amused disbelief, and then to confusion. “Did I somehow manage to save his life? If so, I assure you it wasn’t on purpose.”
Tauriel shrugs. “The prince and I are lifelong friends. I think perhaps Thranduil did it for his son's sake, because he knew Legolas would be distressed by my sadness. Who can say? I have never been privy to his thoughts.”
Kíli nods. Pensive and quiet, he picks at his gloves.
“You thought I was the one you saved you. Are you disappointed?” Tauriel asks.
Kíli's eyes widen momentarily and then his dark brows pull together. “Why would I be? You'd have willingly stayed beside me until the end. That's a far greater gift than simply saving my life.”
Of all the things he might have said—
Tauriel turns her face away, eyes stinging. When Kíli moves closer, she flinches slightly, thinking he might try to turn her head; instead, he just presses against her side, and slips a stocky arm through hers. “Don't go back to that place. Don't torture yourself on my account. Please, I couldn't bear it.”
If only it were that easy. She bites her lip and looks up at the winter-clear sky. “I cannot help it,” she whispers hoarsely.
“Then take me with you next time,” he says, and his hand finds her cloak pocket, and leaves a small weight behind.
—
“We'll take good care of him,” Bofur says with twinkling eyes when he and Dwalin come next midday to fetch Kíli back to the mountain: ever cheerful, that one is, and less prickly than Dwalin by far.
Kíli rolls his eyes good-naturedly, but he allows Dwalin to put his few effects on a pony for him: his sword, bow, and the repaired leather-and-chainmail vest that's still too heavy to wear against tender skin. Tauriel wonders how well he's healing. Over a month has passed since the last time she stayed in the tent while the healers changed his bandages. Once he became well enough to feel the weight of her gaze, it seemed too intimate.
Erebor lies less than a league from the elven camp. He should be capable of a short ride, provided he keeps his pony at a walk. Before she can offer to help, he sets a boot into its stirrup and vaults into the saddle, wincing sharply but holding himself steady and upright. The mare shifts sideways, restless head bobbing; Kíli handles it with a level of instinct that serves as a reminder of his diasporic youth spent on the road, traveling to far-flung places searching for work, and hunting game to fill the hungry gaps in between. Perfectly at ease in a throne-room of trampled grass and mud, he turns the pony in a tight circle until she stops chomping at the bit, and then comes to a halt with his back to his home and the afternoon sun in his eyes.
A few yards away, Dwalin and Bofur start their ponies down the hill. “Come on, lad,” Dwalin calls over his shoulder, in something between good-natured tolerance and exasperation. “You're holdin’ up a feast.”
Cheerfully ignoring him, Kíli smiles at Tauriel, nearly at her eye-level while on the pony, something he seems to enjoy from the way he tilts his head side to side; either that, or he’s trying to avoid the sun. “You know it's not goodbye,” he tells her, confident and assured. He believes in the goodness of fate. Tauriel can’t deny the role that played in her pursuit of the orcs to Laketown, a small voice inside her wishing to prove him right, even though long years have taught her fate is cruel as often as kind.
“Elves never say goodbye among ourselves,” she says by way of answer, squeezing Kíli's leg lightly. “It is too final for us. We say namárië instead. It means be well.”
His face lights up, delighted to have a word that captures his certainty. It's a bittersweet thing to teach a mortal. Fate will break it, in the end.
“Namárië,” he returns, searching out the contours of the sound and clearly pleased by them. His smile, infused with warmth like a candle shining through thin parchment, makes her want to teach him every word she knows.
“Go on,” she says, stepping back. “Be well, Prince of Erebor.”
She watches at the top of the hill as the line of ponies pick their way down to the plains before she retreats back to the camp, shaking fingers curled tightly in her pocket.
—
Thranduil waits for her in the outcropping she climbs to when she needs space to think, halfway up the cliff-face to Ravenhill. It's one of the few places around that has trees. Somehow pines survive in these high places, stunted, gnarled against the wind.
He obviously keeps track of her movements if he knows to find her here. She halts several paces away from his straight back, not forgetting their last real interaction, or his fury, or how close she came to losing her life.
For a few moments he stands still. Wind brushes bone-white hair away from his imposing shoulders. “I hear you have been invited as a guest to the dwarven halls,” Thranduil says at last.
“I have their blessing to attend the coronation of their king,” she says hesitantly. It only now occurs to her that perhaps he doesn’t. That would be awkward, to say the least, and potentially a grave misstep on Fíli's part.
Turning, he takes in her reaction with amusement.
“I have no great desire to stand in those halls, now or ever. That is why I am sending you in an official capacity on my behalf. I doubt that would be a hardship for you. I am aware there is something in that mountain you desire more than all its gold.”
Thranduil stalks closer. Tauriel's face flushes under the scrutiny of those pale eyes. He has never been comfortable to look at, less so when he bears down with his entire focus, but she holds his gaze and keeps her voice steady. “That may easily be true, as I desire neither gold nor jewels. They only bring ruin.”
If her king suspects any veiled criticism in that remark, he chooses not to show it.
“So will this,” he warns, “and yet you will go to your own ruin whether I send you or not.”
There's no point in arguing against something they both know is true, but his silence seems to expect an answer. As her mouth opens to dig for some suitable response, what comes out instead is, “Why did you save him? You were prepared to darken the earth with their blood.”
Thranduil seems to weigh her with his eyes. His neutral expression carries dangerous undercurrents, like a swift river below ice, safe unless one is foolish enough to test the surface and fall through. At last he says, “These are not the hadhodrim who sacked Doriath and stole what belonged to my people. They have returned what was taken, and tried to make amends. Perhaps we might live in peace again. Is that not why you defied me?” Judging that to be rhetorical, Tauriel stands quietly while he paces in a half-circle in front of her. He surveys the edge of their camp directly below and the valley floor far below that. “As for your uzbad-khuzd—” spoken with a mocking accent on words no dwarf would have willingly given him, “—a gift for your years of service. It cost me little. Though I wonder how much it will seem to you a kindness, at the end.”
Pausing, he unclasps his hands and examines his fingers. Starlight catches on his rings. “It also comes with a price. It seems you have made friends with the hadhodrim. I will reinstate you; you will oversee the borders between my land and theirs, and report their doings to me.”
Tauriel takes a step back. Alarm stiffens her spine. “You would have me spy on them,” she accuses.
“I would have you tell me things I ought to know, such as if I should prepare for war. I do not care about their minor pettiness, or the mundane details of their short lives,” he says pointedly. “I trust your discretion to recognize the difference.” He moves past her toward the pathway down the cliff and back to their camp. “You will go, and you will be my eyes and ears between those gates and mine.”
Tauriel looks over the edge of the cliff at the soft lights of the elven tents. She should be relieved that she can go home, but instead all that remains behind is loss: the forests will fail, evil will grow, and the ellath will isolate themselves until they're snuffed out like a candle in the night. The mountain looms in the distance. Inside, fires run hot and bright. Several hundred hadhodrim fill those empty halls with purpose through sheer stubbornness, with more arriving every week: the opposite of Eryn Galen's great ageless majesty slowly turning into decay. Closing her eyes, she can almost feel the heat on her face from forges she's never seen, can almost see the golden light of the halls. She remembers the low thrum of Kíli's voice describing his new home from his sickbed. The longing in it. The way he ran his thumb along her palm at the same time, torn between the place he should be and the simple act of holding her hand.
He is young like that.
She misses Kíli already, and he's only been gone a short while. She misses the mischief in his smile that persists even when he's too ill to have done anything, and she misses reading on his cot while he sits beside her with his head against her shoulder. She misses the shallow husk of laughter that slowly healed into something layered and deep.
The ache of fearing for his life has melted into another ache entirely, a tug leading into a mountain of all places, hidden from the reach of starlight.
No, there is no going back to Eryn Galen, not for her.
—
After Fíli's coronation, Tauriel slips out of Erebor's gates to escape the still-ongoing revelry, and wait for dawn under starlight.
She'd watched the brief ceremony from the back of the Chamber of Thrór. Fíli was dignified, if somewhat nervous. Kíli had been the one to place the crown on his brother's head, his solemn countenance doing nothing to hold back fierce, joyful pride. Despite pressure from his advisors, Fíli had chosen to wait nearly three months out of love for the twin of his heart.
After a long night full of stories and ale, Tauriel's hosts even managed to get her to dance: very briefly, and not on the tables—but any embarrassment at being an object of scrutiny for several hundred inebriated hadhodrim felt worth it for the way it made Kíli’s eyes follow her across the hall, face full of levity and something richer than that.
Sitting on the bridge, Tauriel dangles her feet over the edge while a hesitant wash of color illuminates Dale. Dawn comes slowly here, impeded by the mountain; long shadows bleed away to reveal snow-smattered fields and broken homes along Dale's hillside waiting to be rebuilt.
Behind her the gate opens, and familiar footsteps crunch on gravel and ice. Kíli folds down to ground level with a rigid, straight back, sitting on the bridge beside her. After a moment he settles on his knees instead, which makes him taller, and Tauriel manages not to smile.
“Your brother took the teasing well,” she says, thinking about some of the less-flattering stories that made Fíli's shoulders shake, his crimson face hidden behind his hands.
Kíli's shrug is cheerful, if also somewhat stiff. “A silent hall with no stories and laughter would be much worse than any recount of his youthful indiscretions. Of which there were many,” he says with a wry slip of a grin; “oh, the tales I could tell. He was lucky tonight. As fate would have it, the one person who knows all his secrets is still too short of breath to yell over a crowd.”
He shifts to face her instead of sitting side-to-side. She mirrors him, crossing her legs, and he tugs at her sleeve until her arm leaves her lap so he can lace his fingers in hers, an endearingly indirect way of asking to hold her hand. After long weeks where that was the only real comfort they had to offer each other, the press of his warm calloused palm against her own feels more natural than sitting apart.
“Do you still plan to stay in Dale?” Kíli asks quietly.
She looks to the west, toward Eryn Galen and a past that feels like it happened three hundred years ago, not three months. It makes the years before seem stagnant. Slowly she says, “In exchange for lifting my banishment, my king desires that I watch the lands between here and the Greenwood. Dale makes a suitable waypoint.”
“Why a waypoint when you could have a home? Stay here. Make this your home. Or if you won't, I'll forfeit my birthright and run off to be Dalish.”
“You will do no such thing,” she says, laughing. She squeezes his hand. “Many of your kin would be uncomfortable with an elf living in their halls. Perhaps if you give them time.”
Kíli frowns. “How much time do you think I have?”
Tauriel's throat goes tight. “It shames me to say I fear it too greatly to think on it," she manages, suddenly unable to look at him. Instead, she keeps her gaze fixed on the hand holding hers. How quickly it will change, growing stronger and more assured in the prime of his life, and then sliding down into frailty.
Kíli makes a distressed sound, and Tauriel forces herself to look up. “That was ill-spoken,” he says, his pale face washed with remorse. “Please forgive me, I... When we met, I entertained a foolish dream that someone as beautiful and kind as you might love me. I never considered the cost. Why would I? You were so far beyond my reach. But now I know I ask for far too much. I would understand if…” He can't bring himself to finish, throat visibly closing over the words.
With a cold, painful flash of insight, Tauriel knows he might understand, but the light in him would flicker out and nothing would rekindle it. How brave he is to offer anyway, looking up at her with a raised chin and tears in his eyes.
Tauriel tucks a strand of hair behind his ear. Silver beads, nestled in dark braids, shine throughout like he's wreathed with tiny stars: a beautiful crown for her beautiful prince. “I made my own choices, Kíli,” she says softly. “You were right to remind me. Whatever time I have is yours.”
Whatever time she has, now or after.
Kíli rises up on his knees. He cups her face in a broad hand and kisses as far up as he can reach, between her brows. It will be her undoing, like his thumb cradling her cheek; like the hitch in his breath, suddenly uneven for a very different reason than pain.
He is a hadhod, a prince. He belongs in his kingdom with his kin, and he'll be gone between one blink and the next, a moth beside a flame—
In ages past, Aegnor kept himself from Andreth because of the fate of Men. But if fate is the only obstacle to loving outside the ellath, then Tauriel will take her chances now; and when the time comes, she'll appeal directly to the Valar in Aman every day of every coming Age until they fix it. She will not be Aegnor. What you see in her is not her beauty, but her love.
She chooses to be Lúthien instead. She chooses love.
Very deliberately, with shaking fingers, Tauriel strokes along the grain of hair on Kíli's jaw. Touching him never felt like this when he was sick, a shock under her skin. She's touched him here already, kissed his brow, untangled his hair; she went about this backwards and loved him before it was a love she could name.
Her hand slips into his hair and settles at the back of his neck, and, oh Elbereth, the soft moan that escapes him at the gentle scrape of her nails.
She can name it now, can let go of this breath she held through a long winter and say it out loud. Meleth nîn.
“Are you going to tell me what that means?” he murmurs, hoarse and low and bright.
Her mouth curls up a fraction. “Do I need to, my love?”
He looks up at her in warm-edged wonder, shaking his head, and leans in close with a steadying hand on her arm to press his lips against hers.
—
(Certainly no one would take a break from their drinking to watch the sunrise from the parapet, and if they did, news wouldn't pass among them in a whisper, look, prince Kíli's kissing the elf; later in the morning gold wouldn't exchange hands among the Company, and no one would be cuffed over the head and warned off from hooting.)
—
Squinting against winter sunlight beating down on Erebor's open gate, Kíli waits for Tauriel to finish adjusting the buckle on the quiver slung across her back.
He holds out a smooth stone in his open hand: she knows its weight and every line etched into it.
“Somehow this ended up in my pocket when I distinctly remember giving it to you,” Kíli says.
Stowing the last few items in her small pack, Tauriel raises a brow. “You ended up on someone’s blade. If that is what happens when I carry your luck for you, then you should carry it yourself, Master Dwarf.”
Heavy memories surface at her flippant words. She focuses on his face instead: how his features scrunch against the light, neck craning up toward both her and the sun. She steps to the side and puts him in her long shadow. Some dwarves might take that as an insult, but Kíli's face merely smoothes out in gratefulness.
She lets him take her hand and fold it between both of his as he firmly presses the stone into her palm. “It is too heavy for me, my lady,” he says in a dignified voice. Only the hint of a smile at the corner of his mouth belies his serious expression.
For some moments they simply stand like that. Workshop scents cling to his hair, coal-smoke and the sharp smell of metal freshly tempered in water. A smudge of grease runs along his cheek. Like all dwarves he manages to get quite dirty, but he cleans up nicely afterwards.
“Ni kurdumê zasamkhihi azhâr,” he says, breaking the silence with soft words in his own tongue, a privileged gift she can't open on her own.
She shakes her head, laughing, and withdraws her hand along with the stone. “I do not have a dwarf's ears. You will have to translate that for me, little one.”
“I plan to,” he says, looking up at her with shining, hopeful eyes. “Someday soon.”
—
Pain still afflicts him, and sometimes he grows short of breath, but by late autumn Kíli can hold his own again. Wherever Tauriel goes he follows, as often as his king can spare him.
Their scouting circuit between Erebor and Tauroth takes them off the path and into dark places where evil gathers, and what would be a two-day trip by road tends to stretch into several weeks at a time. Often they’re joined by members of the Eastern Guard whom Tauriel once counted as friends, and for good reason; they adjust quickly to the presence of a dwarf after seeing he’s sure on his feet and that his arrows hit their mark. The ones whose paths cross hers and Kíli’s most frequently start to speak in Westron so Kíli can take part in their conversations. He delights them by responding to their kindness with small wooden trinkets he carves by the evening fire.
In the spring, they meet edhil Tauriel is unfamiliar with who are making their way north to flee the darkness spreading in Taur e-Ndaedelos.
“You travel with a dwarf?” they ask her in their own tongue, watching with skepticism while Kíli examines the fletching on an ichor-stained arrow he’d pulled from the carapace of a spider to see if it’s worth keeping.
It would be easy to miss the barest hint of a smile on Kíli’s studiously busy face. He knows the meaning of hadhod; nogotheg as well, and several other similar terms Tauriel wishes he’d never had cause to learn.
“I travel with my husband,” she answers in Sindarin.
Kíli ducks his head to hide a grin at their shocked silence.
He also knows hervenn.
∆
If life transcends death,
Then I will seek for you there.
If not, then there too.
― James S.A. Corey, Caliban's War