Kili is the wild one, the brother who breaks the rules and the dishes, the safe bet if there's blame to be given. "Why do you do these things," demands their mother, hauling Kili to his room by what remains of his hair. Her rings are harsh in the stubble on his scalp, and Kili cries and insists: I don't know, mother, I don't know why.
Fili is why. Fili is the why of everything Kili does, in the end, because he can't abide the sight of Kili behaving, because he can't pass up a chance to goad his older brother; and Kili will always, always rise to the bait.
That first soft beard is ages in growing back, and Kili is confined to his room for almost two months while his naked chin darkens and itches. Fili is the only one permitted in to see him; and they fight like animals, Kili with his temper and Fili with his laughing insults, and wrestle until they are winded, and compete to see who can throw stones the farthest up the light-shaft until they hear a click and Kili knows he's struck one of the focusing crystals that carry sunlight to his deep chambers.
And they sleep, because Fili will not leave his brother's side, tangled in each other's arms and legs and kicking for control of the blankets; and it's here that Fili tells his secret: that his body is changing, that his pud has started standing up sometimes in the mornings.
Kili keeps his silence, knowing what this signifies, but Fili needles him for information as he always does, and eventually Kili caves.
"It's for begetting heirs," says Kili importantly. "When you get married you put it into the lady, and she has a baby."
"That's disgusting," says Fili. "Does yours go up?"
"Of course not," says Kili, because the truth is still embarrassing; and Fili falls into a concerned silence that lasts until Kili is well asleep.
In the morning he awakens to a strange warmth, a touch; he opens his eyes, and Fili's fingertips are pressing upon him, feeling his morning shape, and Fili is looking at him with grave relief.
"I knew yours went up too," says Fili. "You shouldn't lie to me about things like that. I thought I was deformed."
"You are deformed, gob-face," says Kili hotly, not moving; there is a light and burning nausea inside him, a feeling he doesn't recognize, and while he knows it's wrong to let anyone touch him there it feels... not terrible, not evil. And at any rate, Fili is smirking at him, daring him to roll away; so Kili lies still in defiance, cheeks burning, until Fili shrugs and pulls his hand away.
"You're deformed too," says Fili.
Later he tells someone else what Kili has told him, only garbled with youthful naivete and enthusiasm, and their mother hauls him to her machine-room by his scarcely-grown-out braids and smacks him with a stropping belt until he screams.
Uncle Thorin has come to visit, and he is fighting with Mother, bellowing about the Old Ways and the Mountain and a whole long dreary list of names neither Fili nor Kili have ever heard. They are in the shed-yard, chopping wood and cursing at each other with the familiarity of brothers; they are chopping wood because the town where they live now is far above ground and has never felt the warmth of the earth's veins.
"This is why we left the Iron Hills," screams Mother inside the house, and Kili rolls his eyes, but Fili knows that he has always resented leaving their lovely deep chambers, and he will never be content to let Kili pretend to be happy.
"Why, mother," mutters Fili sarcastically under his breath, "so we could scrounge in the dirt topside, and you could do laundry for the neighbors?"
Kili punches him before he even realizes his feet have left the ground, and they fall in a whirl of kicking and gouging and screaming; there is a sound like a boar charging, and suddenly they are hoisted into the air by their collars, and Uncle Thorin is roaring at them and his biceps flex and their skills crack together so hard they see stars.
They are sent down to the river to wash their clothes and bodies, which are filthy from the farmyard; and they do so grudgingly until their tunics and hose are laid out in the grass and the time comes to throw themselves into the cool water.
It is ice cold, still snowmelt from high in the hills; Kili shrieks and gasps and chokes, and Fili bowls into him from behind, submerging them both; and after this the water is less unbearable, with their braids and beards soaked, but the chill is still bone-deep. Kili scrubs himself with sand from the riverbed, shaking so hard his teeth chatter, and Fili remarks:
"We should huddle for warmth, like you do in a blizzard."
"You've never been in a blizzard," Kili snipes, but half the words are lost in his shivering, and Fili sidles up to him until their hips touch.
"Waaaarmth," taunts Fili, and by the maker's hammer he is warm, a balm to Kili's freezing skin; and always ready to follow his brother's temptations, he gives up and curls into Fili's side, and the two of them twist and huddle until they are crushed against each other, still quivering from the cold.
"You'll have to scrub my back," says Kili, whose arms are curled up between them in a pathetic shield against skin-to-skin contact. He is very grateful for the icy water, although no amount of shrinkage quite blots out the impression of his brother's cock against his thigh; and even though he tells himself this is a terrible idea, he lets Fili wrap his arms around him, and scrub his back and shoulderblades with sand until the skin glows warm and red.
All the while they are very still against each other, not even shifting from foot to foot; for they are precariously balanced in place, and the slightest tilt of their weight would send them toppling, and the water around them is cold and deep and dangerous.
Their mother is sick, and although she pretends to be recovering, Fili whispers in Kili's ear that she's sent for Uncle Balin as well as Uncle Thorin. And when their uncle arrives he brings other with him: their Uncle Dwalin, who only Kili has met and neither lad can remember, and others besides: Óin and Glóin they are called, and Glóin's boy Gimli, who is red-headed with a thick bristling beard that already covers his mouth, and Glóin's wife Nímin, who is grave and fierce and lovely.
Óin and Nímin sequester themselves with Dís, for Óin has his herbs and Nímin a gift of healing; Balin and Dwalin and Glóin sit before the hearth, arguing amongst themselves and keeping watch from the front windows for Thorin; and Gimli follows Fili and Kili into the yard and insists upon a competition of shies, then a game of fists.
Gimli may be young, but he is a doughty fighter as well as a competitive little kûk, and the brothers shuffle back indoors at sunset thoroughly bruised and sore, sheepishly scraping their boots and sleeves alike on the jack. Uncle Thorin has arrived, and the tone of the discussion at the hearth has taken a darker turn, and Fili and Kili are sent to bed early.
Fili can always make him forget himself, whether in breaking rules or in leaving behind the horrors of the moment; so when the singing begins downstairs, old sad funeral hymns that fill Kili's heart with unexpected dread, he crawls into his little brother's pallet and curls around him and whispers, "Are you sleeping?"
What he means is: do you think she will die, and Fili turns to face him, and twines his arms around his brother's neck. "I don't know," says Fili, who goads but never lies, even when answering a question nobody has spoken aloud.
To his horror, Kili feels tears welling up in his eyes. He blinks furiously, trying to breathe past the constricting band of his own rising sobs; and he might have succeeded, but Fili can't leave well enough alone, can't let Kili deny even the most ruinous of feelings, and he rests his forehead against Kili's and clasps him by the hair so that he can't twist to hide his falling tears.
"She's our mother," says Fili, low and earnest, permission for Kili to transgress even this deepest law of manhood; and even though Kili knows that his brother is young and foolish, that he has never crossed the line between childhood and full growth that brings derision with each violation of custom, this is a small dark sacred space where nothing can be wrong.
Tears mark his face and bead upon his beard; his face stretches into a rictus, weeping and dread together, too profound to be voiced; and Fili weeps too, and he presses his cheek to Kili's, and he kisses the fall of tears as their mother once kissed them, his lips a strange new thing to Kili's skin.
Even when the tears pass, and Kili's grief becomes a sore emptiness in his chest, Fili still kisses him, pressing lips slow and again to his eyelids, to his cheekbones, to his brow and his jaw and his throat just under the ear; and it is soothing, it feels good, so Kili lets him.
If he told his brother to stop, he tells himself, Fili would only laugh at him, and remind him that Kili can never lie to him, that he always knows what Kili wants. Better to take what comfort is given, to let himself be laid bare in the anticipation of loss, to let his heart leap and his skin burn for a moment's respite from his woe.
Fili's lips are at the corner of his mouth, where they stop still from their kissing, only pressing, nose laid alongside nose and eyelashes brushing temples; and still Kili does not protest, wondering if his brother will cross this line too, if there is any rule he will not push Kili to break.
But then he draws away, and a sick dread falls over them, the knowledge of something almost done that is too much to be borne, something even larger and deeper than their mother's slow death; and when they are called in the wee hours of dawn to stand at her bedside and hold her slim hands (burned away by fever, dry and pale), they are too solemn for tears.
She dies before sunrise.
After this they push their pallets together and sleep curled beside each other, and if Fili does not kiss him again while they live in that house, they are always remembering.
They have been sheltered; Kili knows that now. They have only been traveling with their uncle for a week when they are first overtaken by bandits, when Kili kills his first man.
Thorin is going from corpse to near-corpse, mercy-killing the still-breathing and rifling their packs for what scant belongings they carried to their deaths, and Kili- who expected that first kill to be a harder thing, who thought that he would certainly hear the thump and cough of his arrow piercing a throat in every dream for the rest of his life- can't bring himself to care about any of it, would gladly be with his uncle desecrating corpses except that Fili has a cut across his chest and Kili cannot take his hands off his brother even to check himself for wounds.
He nearly lost his brother, and it is more than half his fault; Uncle Thorin had told them, hadn't he, to stay close, to resist the urge to run ahead? He had sprung the trap with his wandering feet, and been parted from the main group, and had he not been the rare sort to carry a bow rather than an axe, the hulking man with his knife would have carved Fili's throat instead of his collarbone.
Thorin seems to understand that none of his rage could even begin to touch the guilt and horror that Kili already feels, with his brother shivering in pain against his side. And yet later he pulls Kili aside, when they are resting around a fire in a dry gully, and begins to speak.
"I know," Kili cuts him off. "I nearly got him killed; it's bad enough, you don't have to say more. I'll listen next time."
Thorin sighs, and Kili understands that there is some secret here, something darker to be told than even an accusation of disobedience. "You are young," says Thorin, "and you cannot see the consequences of your actions, and you want to be free of the rules that govern you. But there are such consequences, lad, such awful prices to be paid... Your mother indulged you, Kili; in her eyes you were always a prince of Erebor-"
But red rage is pouring through Kili's soul now, and he spits at his uncle: "Will you now lay my mother's death at my feet? What vase did I smash, what petty rule have I broken to put that fever in her blood?"
"No, no, I do not blame-"
"I know your dream," says Kili, vicious and shaking with the echoes of fear, lashing out in his wrath. "You want to retake your father's hall, and be a king there, and you want me to be a proper heir and follow your stupid mad grandfather's dead traditions- don't touch me- what if I don't want to be your heir?"
Thorin draws back his hand as if burned. "You may find yourself well-pleased, in the end," he says, and secrets are heavy in his voice.
Kili laughs, a dark brittle sound. "Do you think I fear disinheritance," he says in disbelief. "You have no kingdom, Uncle. At least I have my brother."
It occurs to him as he stomps back to Fili's side that Thorin once had both brother and sister, and all that remains are his nephews. The anger goes out of him in shame and sorrow, and he is ready to apologize, but Thorin does not return to the campsite for hours, and by then Kili is too ashamed and exhausted from his brother's care to bring up the topic again.
Thank Mahal, Thorin is a heavy sleeper, and though he takes a very long time to drift off his snores announce when it's safe for Kili to whisper to his brother, to relate the details of the fight.
He knows something is wrong when Fili stiffens under his encircling arm- for they are back-to-chest, Kili's arm draped about Fili's middle, carefully avoiding the wound- and he waits for Fili to tell him he has done terribly wrong.
"You didn't know," says Fili, his voice so quiet and grave that a cold knife pierces Kili's heart. "He understands; it's all right."
"I didn't know what," echoes Kili, struggling to make sense of this: has Fili kept a secret from him? Is there now something between them larger than... than their secret, than the memory of kisses?
But Fili does not answer, and when Kili presses him Fili gives a broken laugh and rocks back against his brother, sudden blinding distracting pressure and friction that wrenches a gasp from Kili's lungs; for a moment it feels like their old secret returned, the thing they kept their silence for while they labored their last months in that empty house without their mother, where the voices of dwarves coming and going and arguing and snoring somehow failed to erase the ghost-presence of Dís.
If there was heat between them as they lay curled on their pallet listening to their uncle muster his fellows with song and impassioned speech, it had not been acted upon; but one could scarcely share a bed so small without a certain intimacy of knowledge, and Kili had been ashamed of the occasional friction- but now it's deliberate, and meant to divert his attention, and he pushes Fili away, though it feels like tearing himself apart.
"No," he says, "you are my brother;" and all the guilt of years comes over him in a landslide of humiliation, for Fili raises his eyebrows as if it has only ever been a game. But then Fili, who can never lie to him (except about this), sighs and rubs at his face with his good arm, and Kili abandons himself and coaxes, wheedling Fili for his secrets, fingers slipping around his brother's hipbones to beg him with caresses.
Now he is discovering why his brother could not let him learn to follow the rules, why Fili has always found it so important that Kili be free to do the things Fili- it seems- has always wanted to. For this is Fili's weakness, not his own; it is Fili who shudders and sobs for breath as Kili's thumb rolls across the divot of his navel, Fili whose hairs stand on end as Kili touches him, and though the touches are only a shadow shy of innocent, soon Fili is pleading in short choked syllables as if he cannot bear to finish his words.
"Tell me the secret," says Kili, fingertips following the waist-band of Fili's breeches, depressing the skin in slow gentle traveling motions; and Fili relents.
"You are not the heir," gasps Fili, and Kili's hand stills on him and he whines, so Kili is forced to carry on, to hear the rest of the secret even though he is hot and cold all over, even though impossible suspicions are pulling at him from every direction. "I was still a babe when you were born."
"You lie," says Kili, because he has only just now learned that his brother can lie to him, and he cannot decide which lie will hurt less; but his fingers probe further, as if he is drawing secrets from his brother's skin, and Fili shudders against him and cannot hold anything back.
"I don't- ah- I don't remember it," says Fili, pressing himself back against Kili again. "Uncle Dain insisted. For safety." He laughed, sharp and bitter and all liquid beneath with growing pleasure. "For you to take any wayward knives."
"That's how it should be," says Kili, who would have taken any knife for his brother, in whom is growing the knowledge that even if he has not always been close enough to protect, his back has always been a target between his brother and any assassin. He is pretending, now, that his knuckles are not brushing velvet warmth where it lies trapped against his brother's belly; he is only raking his fingers through rough curls, and any friction is entirely by accident, and if his brother tenses and shudders and groans it is with the relief of telling a long-kept secret.
All that saves them is a sudden break in Thorin's snores, a cough; Kili withdraws his hand as if stung by a serpent, and they roll over back-to-back, each in guilt and laden with new secrets, each hard and aching and terrified and, together, alone.
They keep their secrets well, the youngest of the line of Durin, with such long practice. Kili tells Thorin the next day, and apologizes, and tries not to weep when his uncle clasps him in a crushing embrace and returns his apology.
"It is so unfair to you," says Thorin. "I do not value your life any less than your brother's."
"I do," says Kili, and means it. "It's a heavy thing, to be heir, and I don't miss it."
Thorin sighs and holds him at arm's length. "You would have been a good king someday," he says, and Kili squirms because he really wouldn't have been, not with Fili at his side whispering in his ear; but he will be a good general to his brother-king, someday when a level head is needed on the throne and a fiery spirit required on the field of battle.
This is how Kili finally lets himself believe in his uncle's dream, how his face finds new resolve as they gather family and friends to their cause, few by precious few. He keeps their twin secrets well, guarding his brother's heart from knives and shame alike; they leave their relation to Thorin unsaid, and Kili is never far from his brother's side.
But all of this does not change the fact that Fili has lied to him, over and over for fifty years, lied since the day he learned the truth; Fili, whom he has trusted more than stone or breath. And as they bed down at night, and Fili squirms against him and then stills at Kili's rebuke, Kili understands that there have been lies all along, that Fili has known what he wanted, that the years of accidental touches like thunderclaps have actually been indulgences. That his brother wants his touch.
It would be easier if Kili could despise his brother, or if he could simply give in to his own desires, as Fili has always driven him to; but this is a line which, once crossed, cannot be redrawn. For once in his life, Kili is forced to consider consequences, the impact of his actions upon the future rule of a lost kingdom, as he never considered them when it was to be his kingdom.
Of course Fili was meant to be heir. Fili, who is good, who obeys the rules and sends others to break them in his stead; Fili, who can be honest and vulnerable and still keep the truth hidden even from his own brother, who loves him.
At last they can find no more kin who will join them. Thorin meets with his friend, an old wizard that Fili and Kili have seen perhaps twice before, and he gives them a meeting place and promises them a last ally, a burglar. Thorin sends his nephews to deliver messages, to summon their allies to a place called Hobbiton, while he gathers supplies.
There is an air of adventure about it, and of danger. They have never been alone like this, in the wild with no uncle or family or companion besides one another. The closest dwarves are easy to find, but Bifur and Bofur live in a distant town of the Ered Luin, and they hurry their steps in the foothills and fall asleep together at night, exhausted, legs and ankles and elbows tangled in a single bedroll, each with his hand on his knife.
They make such excellent time that they can relax on the return journey, and instead of dropping into exhausted slumber at night they lie awake, speaking in low voices, feeling each other's breaths in their hair. They transgress their boundaries with such strange freedom now: while Kili wonders aloud what they will find in the halls of the Lonely Mountain, Fili's hand slips beneath his shirt and toys at his nipple, flicking until the nub stands hard and Kili's breath is a bit labored. When Kili awakes in the morning hard and bleary, Fili rocks against him in fits and starts, until the jolts of sensation have cleared the slumber from his head and he can scramble stiff-jointed out into the cold.
There is quiet heat in this. Fili's big toe scrapes mindlessly up and down the sole of Kili's foot, tickling a bit, but then Kili is stroking Fili's belly under his shirt in absent thought, and that probably tickles a bit too.
It's so comfortable, so easy, that the progression seems natural; and this time Kili does not think to pull away when Fili begins to kiss him.
This is not like grief, not like pretending. Fili does not kiss him softly, or chastely; Fili kisses him directly on the mouth, fingers curling through Kili's beard and wrapping around to tangle in his hair at the nape of his neck.
Aside from those kisses before, from kisses that he is still somehow imagining were innocent, Kili has never been kissed. He has no experience in this, nothing to tell him if he is going about it correctly, except that he wants so much and he feels his lips tense into articulation and Fili makes a sound of desperation and hunger.
If this is wrong, it is wrong; but they are past right and wrong now, they are king and brother, and they are alone in the forest with no-one to hear if whimpers float between them. Kili's lips part; Fili suckles gently at his lower lip, and Kili fights him for the privilege, and soon tongue brushes tongue and they are kissing in earnest. Kissing as Kili has never dreamed, even in his most shameful nightmares; kissing as if they will never stop, as if he was made to do it, like some strange form of breathing that his body is learning to remember.
Fili groans into his mouth, and Kili feels his voice as if he himself has spoken. Oh, it hurts, it hurts as he remembers, as the months of self-denial come back to him with their lists of reasons, as Kili recalls that he is now the one who obeys the rules and that Fili is the one who lies.
"No," says Kili, "we can't," because it was one thing to be taunted by his little brother, to be the irresponsible big brother who does what he wants; but now he is the younger, and he must be what Fili was, or... or he's not sure, he doesn't know. He doesn't know yet what they are. He doesn't understand how they can have so easily gone from jokes and memories to this, to Fili's thumbs on his cheekbones while he devours Kili's mouth, to Kili's hips jerking and his whole body alive with liquid flame.
"Of course we can," says Fili, pulling back from the kiss, breathing hard through dark-stained lips. "It's only... it's only a game, it's not serious;" but his eyes are very serious indeed, and afraid, and Kili hears the lie and hurts until he feels like his heart will crack.
It is suddenly very important to him that Fili admit the truth, even if he has to kiss it out of his brother's mouth; and Kili's hands slip up under Fili's shirt and his fingertips press at Fili's shoulderblades as he closes the space between them again.
They don't need excuses, not if Kili is the one pushing; he has never needed any more reason than that Fili wants him to, and even if everything is changing he will only ever want his brother to be happy. So he lets Fili grapple him, as if their clothing is some unthinkable distance between their skin, as if his shirt and trousers peeling away are revealing his heart and leaving it bare.
Fili strips them both, because Kili can't bear to, because the action of undoing laces is too close to all the things Kili has feared between them for so long; and even when they are both naked, a sick frisson runs through him. He is naked; he is kissing his brother; he is touching and oh being touched and if this is not wrong, then nothing has ever been wrong.
He needs to stop this, but he has no defense against it; there is no script in his mind that begins with these sensations, with naked friction of his cock against his brother's belly, and ends with them sleeping innocent and unbroken beside each other, as they once had. He has not even learned to touch himself, not properly, because Fili has always been there, and how could he- it would have been wrong-
But someday Fili will be king, and if Kili lets this continue, Fili will be a king with a terrible secret, the liar-king who awaits discovery instead of the golden vulnerable honest-tongued king that Kili has seen in him. Kili has known for some time now, since that other secret found light, that he will be the one who goes to war for his brother, who (Fili's mouth is hot on his neck, and his hands are creeping downward, and there is a growing rhythm to his movements) will make such sacrifices, who will break the rules and replace them with his brother's rule. He will be his brother's general, and not his lover, and not his queen.
This is the ice that spreads through him, that quenches his rising blood; he pulls himself back, half sobbing with want, pushing at his brother's hands and chest even while Fili is frantically rutting into him; and, unable to control himself, unable to bring any sense to his brother's need, he pulls himself from the bedroll and scrambles and falls and pulls himself into the leaf-mould where he sits, shaking, hard and pounding and leaking onto his thigh and weeping into the crook of his elbow, because no words will come.
Fili says his name, and his voice is full of distress, the victim of betrayal; he calls Kili back, and Kili can't stand even to look at him, even when he hears the sound of Fili's hand around his cock, even when he knows that his brother is jerking himself to frustrated completion a few paces away.
So Fili finds release, but the sound he makes when he comes is an awful thing like tearing cloth, like a mourner whose tears are spent and who still finds no relief from pain; and after a while Kili crawls back into their bedroll, but he will not face his brother nor permit Fili to touch him, and they fall asleep for the first time in years without an inch of skin touching, only warmth at Kili's turned back.
And Kili takes so long to fall asleep, though his brother falls quickly into slumber, that the moon sets and the only light is that of stars; and he learns about the ache of thwarted lust and the drowning pain of thwarted love, and even when he slips away into hungry tortured dreams his cock is still hard to the point of agony and his throat is still thick with unshed tears.
After Bag End, with their strange soft-cheeked burglar in tow and family and friends at every hand, it doesn't seem so cruel to insist on separate bedrolls. They are still close, after all, and their blankets overlap even if their hands don't, and if Kili is grateful for the safety of distance he is even more grateful that Fili doesn't make things difficult.
Fili never says a word; every day his face grows more kingly, and more distant. Kili is a good brother, and during the days things are lighthearted between them, easy with the camaraderie of brotherhood; but in the evenings they exchange few words, and those tense, as the inevitable separation of sleep approaches.
It's after a not-fight like this that they have their first real brush with death, a thing with trolls that ends well enough; and afterward the scares come thick and fast, wargs and goblins, caves that collapse and giants and the ever-growing fear of death- not that Kili fears death, but that he fears leaving his brother alone, and worse (selfishly) he fears living on without Fili.
Even though, he knows, he is losing Fili breath by breath, night by lonesome night, slipping farther with each slumber; anyone seeing them now would think them normal brothers, men who had never laid hands on each other, young dwarves who had never kissed each other with any passion. It's safer this way.
Through Mirkwood they make their path, through the Elvenking's dungeon, through water and flame; starvation and hard labor, bone-numbing fear and ever-silent wastes and hidden doors, and they grow leaner and stronger, wiser and more grave, and while Fili's eyes are harder and more careful than ever before- for he has no lie to be carried with him, and his soul is laid bare to the elements, and Kili watches in sublime anguish as the callus builds on his brother's vulnerable heart, and feels himself cut every new day to the bone.
He is a mass of scars, which he bears for his brother; he is the sword hand, and his brother is the crown. They are both sacrificing so much for their kingdom, which is not even their own, which is still a distant hope- and now Thorin's eyes are dark with gold-lust, where once they were so compassionate and strong, and when the thrush brings word of Smaug's death and they build their wall against the world, Fili and Kili find each other's eyes.
It is the first time since Mirkwood that Kili has seen what his brother is thinking, and it chills him to shuddering: that Thorin is mad, that they may soon face the options of surrender or death while Thorin is their king, that perhaps they will be forced to choose between loyalty to their uncle and life itself.
And Kili will do anything for his brother, will do anything that Fili asks of him, now and always; his brother's word is law, and doubly so now that he is looking into Fili's eyes and finding that he is, as he has always been, open and true, unable to hide his heart. If Fili rises against Thorin, Kili will be at his side.
Night falls, and the torches of approaching armies appear in the valley, and Thorin gives an impassioned speech that disturbs all of them more than it kindles their hearts; Bilbo, whose eyes have been sadder of late, sits with his hand in his pocket and then creeps away to be alone, and slowly they all disperse, because none of them can stand the sick tension around the small campfire.
Fili takes a torch, and wanders toward the throne room; Kili follows him, and they stand in the cavernous dark, looking around them at the drowning shadows, looking at the throne which will someday be Fili's; and Fili hunches his bedroll off his shoulders and slits it open, tearing the worn seam at the side and foot, and casts it at the foot of the throne, a double width, broad enough for two even if they dare not touch. He cuts Kili's bedroll too, and spreads it over like a blanket; and the two of them strip to their trousers and creep under the blankets, where they rest against each other's shoulders and against the cold weight of the throne, which smells like dried blood on stone.
"Does he think we can fight them," asks Kili eventually, when the weight in his breast is too great to bear, when his brother's skin warms against his side; and Fili laughs, but the sound is dry and hollow.
"If he does, we will die tomorrow," says Fili, staring into the dark.
All this distance, and they have taken so many wounds and suffered so much, and now their lives are in greatest danger at their uncle's hand. Kili rests his head back against the throne, looking up at the great crystal-shafts through which faint moonlight streams into the chamber, like the light-shafts in his old room in the Iron Hills but magnitudes greater; and he turns his head until his breath disturbs his brother's hair, and watches the gold stream from the crown of Fili's head across the blood-soaked stone of the ancestral seat of Erebor.
It is a price too high to pay, all these things they have given up, when at the end they will inherit madness and an empty throne. They have given so much, and hurt so deeply, and what good is it, if Fili is never a king, if Kili is never his general?
Kili raises his hand to touch his brother's face, turning into him, letting his palm fall just short and drop onto Fili's chest, and feels the quake of a sob rising in Fili's throat. What good is this? What good keeps him from his brother's side, even for a kingdom? What could be worth living like this, with Fili's mouth so close and Fili's eyes sad and fixed on some distant prize, while Kili lies looking at his brother and not touching, forever?
A tear overflows, and Kili thumbs it away from his brother's cheek, and remembers how Fili held him once, in the home where their mother died; and he knows what it costs Fili now, to weep unmanned in the hall of their fathers, and he is so tired of seeing his brother strong, so tired.
He leans across the space between them, the inches that have separated them for so long; and his lips press, chaste and careful, to his brother's temple, and again to his cheek, and once more to the curl of beard at his jaw.
Kili hears the intake of Fili's breath, and his hand curls upon his brother's breast; and Fili says, in a low broken voice: "Don't do this, Kili, not tonight, I can't bear it-" and Kili pulls away, his breath stopped in his throat.
"If you begin," says Fili, "I will want to go on, and when you push me away my heart will be broken."
"I will not push you away," says Kili, choking on his regret. "Not ever again, brother, I was wrong, I was stupid-"
But Fili catches his hand and holds it, crushing it against his chest; and his eyes are not distant anymore, as he raises Kili's hand and presses it to his mouth, locking Kili's gaze with his own.
"You were not wrong," says Fili. "You made me a king."
Kili's voice has gone dry and broken. "I would rather have had my brother."
"You have me," says Fili, and he kisses Kili's hand again, and Kili sees how strong his brother is now, that he can pull away even though it breaks his heart, that he can deny himself (for, after all, has he not always denied himself, and made Kili go after what they wanted?) even with such danger at hand.
So Kili kisses him, takes him by the hair and pulls him close and kisses him on the mouth. It is still familiar, all these months later, even after a single night of intimacy and so long separated; the slope of lip and muscle, the curl of beard, the crooked articulation, all are exactly as Kili has remembered, and he kisses Fili with such fervor and tenderness that he has no time to wonder if his brother is kissing him back.
But then he is, grasping at him, fingers sinking into flesh over too-shallow ribs from long privation, groaning into Kili's mouth; and he begs as he responds: please, don't pull back from me, don't leave me alone, and Kili is astounded that he could ever imagine doing so.
This time there is no noble future between them, only memory and skin. They remember each other, bodies that have learned through long slow experience each angle and divide; only now they have given themselves permission, and strange new horizons appear, ways in which they have not touched each other, who have previously thought all boundaries crossed but one. Kili's thigh slips between Fili's knees, and they fit together like lock and key, bones and muscles and flesh sliding across each other through the rough fabric of their trousers, and Kili bites at Fili's neck- marking him, my own brother- and rocks into him with unrestrained ardour.
"Don't fight," says Kili, between gasps and into his brother's mouth. "We'll run; we'll hide in the mountain."
"We can't- Kili- we can't leave Thorin to die, nor the others-"
"If you think I'll stand by and watch you fall in battle-"
"It's our duty, Kili," says his brother, hands slipping down Kili's back and braving the curve of his buttocks, resting in wonder and then squeezing.
"You never cared about duty before," says Kili, who has been whipped and scolded a hundred times for Fili's sense of right and wrong. "I've always done as you said, Fili, and you know-" god, the friction, the slow rising sweetness between them, the pulse and pound of that tenuous rhythm- "you know I'll be with you whatever you do; but just this once, just once more let's break the rules."
"Are there any rules left for us to break," says Fili, and his hands follow the curve of Kili's hipbones to his laces, an unspoken question that Kili can only answer with a groan; so Fili undoes his laces, and Kili manages to undo Fili's halfway before he's shoving Fili's trousers down over his hips.
After this it's too hard to breathe, too foreign for words; the shape of Fili's cock presses into Kili's belly and crushes his own cock alongside, and Kili's thigh parts Fili's legs wide as he rolls half on top of his brother; kissing and pressing and moving they roll and rest, there at the foot of the throne disheveled and desperate they thrust against each other.
All Kili wants is to see his brother safe, and to keep him close by; to have Fili goad him to wicked action as he once did, and to see the honesty in his face; and these things are fulfilled here, with Fili beautiful and moaning and wanton, not hiding his desire, and with every word his swollen lips spill, all of which are taunts in Kili's ears: more and please and fuck.
Closer, he wants to be closer, he wants to be skin and skin with his brother, and he withdraws his thigh and pushes Fili's trousers down farther, but they are well-made and they rumple at his knees, binding his thighs together. Fili's hips jerk as they lose contact, but Kili can only bear that separation for a moment, and if he cannot part Fili's thighs he can slide between them; he rides against Fili's belly for a few strokes, and then with his hand he guides himself between, and feels the head of his cock press against the soft skin behind Fili's ballocks and slide. The heat and friction, the pressure of thigh against cock against thigh; and the closeness, the way nothing lies between them but Fili's own length, which is leaving wet streaks with each helpless thrust; these are the things Kili has always wanted, the things he has been so long without, and he rides his brother to ruin and devastation, and damn the consequences.
They are only half undressed, in their haste. They are sobbing as they thrust, whether from arousal or from grief and dread they do not know; their hands are knotted into fists, clutching skin and muscle, wound tight in hair. Kili fucks between his brother's thighs, and feels Fili beginning to shudder as he rocks up against his belly; and when Fili's breath at last catches in his throat and his feet kick feebly in their trouser-bindings, Kili only rides him the harder, until Fili spills between them with a groan like a wounded animal, until Fili's heart races against Kili's chest like a deer still running from the arrow in its side.
Spreading heat and wet between them, starved breaths and after-shocks that flutter against Kili's skin; and after only a few stunned seconds Fili is rolling against him again, this time with thighs clamped and the angle of his strokes measured, and Kili is helpless in that grasp as he has always been helpless to resist. It feels like true transgression, building up in him now; it feels like the final boundary between them, which broken can never be healed, beyond which they are the same person, Fili the head and Kili the heart; it feels like thunder in his veins and fire at the base of his belly, and if he had any idea of holding back (of letting his brother find fulfillment and completion, of letting himself be unsatisfied to keep some hint of propriety between them) it evaporates in that blinding heat when Fili's lips move at his ear and, as they always have, goad him on.
"Do it," says Fili; "fucking do it," and Kili loses himself and falls and fails and is dissolved, is broken on his brother's body and burned on the altar of his flesh, spills between his brother's thighs as if his heart's blood is gushing from his body with each pulse; he is racked with it, torn by it, so far beyond the meanings of words like 'wrong' and 'duty' and 'law' that he is nearly lost, except that his brother is holding him, except that when his final rule-breaking is over and he lies shaking and breathless in his brother's grasp he knows that he is safe with Fili, who can never keep any secret unless it is for Kili's sake.
There is no reason now for them to lie apart, and they twine together in their blankets, not caring if their come dries on their skin or if the throne is dark and foreboding above them; they are lying skin to skin with limbs tangled and breaths mingled. In the morning Thorin will decide their fate, whether the elves of Mirkwood and the men of burned Esgaroth will take a share of the gold or whether they will all lie in their blood by noon; but for now they are together, king and general, the word and the arm of their own law, dark braids and fair upon the stone.
They are together; no more secrets lie between them, no more rules may bind them. They have won their kingdom, and perhaps they will kill for it, or die for it; but they have found the one thing they will not give up for it, and will carry to the grave together, be it tomorrow or in a hundred years.