AU- Tauriel can only watch as Kili withers away. Unbeta-ed
Kili/Tauriel with Fili and Legolas mentions Gimli
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Tauriel watches Legolas leave for the west with Gimli at his heels. His work in Ithilien done, Legolas comes and asks her, begs her really, to follow him as she had in their shared youth. Instead of answering she turns her back and walks away, slow and measured.
"Tauriel, if you stay here, you will be alone."
Her heart is bitter and tired when she turns back to him. He registers it all, mostly her sadness.
"Legolas, I know what fate awaits me," she silences his unspoken protest with a measured look, "and I would have no other."
She speaks those words with resignation.
"You will always have a place in Valinor."
"I know my friend, I know."
But would she really?
Long ago, not so really long ago from her perspective, but long enough ago, Tauriel fell in love with a dwarf. She loves him to this day, and it is a pure sweet tender thing. But in the eyes of her people it is perverted, it is aberrant. The moment she declared her intent to travel with Kili they left her to her own devices, whereas before they spoke her name with reverence, now they spit it.
When she left the Greenwood the world opened before her. Kili took her hand and walked by her side as her friend and lover and guide. Sometimes she still found herself surprised by it, this world of dwarrows and men, but she enjoys their ways. Their candor, and ingenuity and blinding fleeting love even their fickleness and ignorance, she loves the way they live, even if her nature means she cannot follow in their example. She continues in this way, not exactly blundering through this new consciousness, but certainly a walk less graceful than her careful stalking in the Greenwood had been. Till one day she woke and realized she had more friends among mortals than she had ever counted among her own kind.
Save Legolas, whom she turns to and ponders. Does he really speak the truth? It had been a long time since she had felt comfortable among her own kind.
"Goodbye my friend," she bows her head, sorrow coloring her voice and features.
Legolas returns the sentiment and leaves middle earth forever with Gimli at his heels.
Bile rises to her throat, and anger, the like she has never felt.
Kili would never have chosen to leave his brother in the mortal coil, but she would have liked the option. The ability to even consider living with her beloved, side by side in the undying land. But it is not her fate.
She meets Kili again by the road to Minas Ilith. And though his hair is now completely white, and once youthful face craggy and lined, he is still the same dwarf she fell in love with. The laugh, deeper and with a croak brings her back to days sitting about a camp fire in the far north with the Dunedain, his smile larger and lined, reaches his eyes the same way that it used to. The dwarf Tauriel knew still sits under the crags of this older one. She takes his hand in hers and they make their way to mountain, side by side.
But sometimes he slips. He coughs long into the night, and they are deep and wet hacks, like a hatchet to her heart a coldness slips into Tauriel's chest in response. Sometimes he wakes with foggy eyes and beating breath and Tauriel wraps her arms around him, but nothing takes the cold from his skin. It passes, but one day, she fears (knows) it won't.
It comes sooner than she wishes.
They are visiting Fili, and though the King under the Mountain is the elder of the two, Fili has always been the hailer of the two brothers.
She falls asleep with her head on his chest, her copper hair mingling with the wiry white locks of his beard. The moment hearkens back to many before, but she can hear the creaking of his chest, the pale beat of his heart, feel his ashy skin.
In the morning he cracks one rheumy eye open and closes it again. His breaths rattles wet in his lungs and he burns.
She calls for Fili, for healers, for his nieces and nephews and adopted children. Fili dismisses the healers early on. But one by one his loved ones come. Still the bond of brothers is strong, and the others leave, giving room for Fili to mourn.
They sit across from each other, at silent vigil. Fili bows his head and grasps one of his brother's hands in his own still vigorous one. It hangs limp there for a moment before his brother weakly returns the squeeze.
Tauriel intertwines her fingers with Kili's stroking the back of his hand with her thumb in slow measured circles. With great effort he shifts his body to hers and wearily looks her in the eyes.
The old mischief returns, he smiles briefly. "Remember all that we have done my love."
"How could I forget?"
He laughs, it creaks across the room, hearty and weak simultaneously.
Briefly she hopes that vigor will power his slacken muscles, fill his hollow bones, light his sleep seeped eyes. Then he closes them and goes to sleep. Tauriel squeezes his hand again, his doom smothers the room. Tilda looked much the same when she died, and Fili never had stopped mourning her.
She leaves the brothers; Fili needs time to say goodbye and she needs to gather her thoughts.
Tauriel's first memories of Erebor tie and knot together, in the same way the paths do. But she has long since memorized the paths, still she find the idea of living underground strange. Give her sunlight and stars and cold tearing wind. Her booted feet pad across the long bridges that cross the high halls, and even her silent Elven steps echo across the caverns.
She is alone with shadowy footsteps.
When Kili dies she buries him in the grove of old oaks next to the mountain, right in the middle with a view of the stars. Fili would have preferred to have him laid in the hall of kings, but Kili himself requested the grove, their grove. For a moment she regrets her fate, her kin. Wishes that her blood were that of the high elves and not sylvan. Maybe then her love would have been labeled elf friend. Maybe he might have followed her west as Gimli followed Legolas.
Tauriel stands in the clearing for what seems like years clasping the charm he gave her to her breast. It pricks her fingers and blood dribbles down her hand, across her wrist and down to drip from her elbow wetting the recently churned earth.
Before he follows his brother Fili says, "The Queen of Gondor trailed her love into death."
Tauriel smiles sadly, "It is not a choice I have. Arwen Undomiel was half elven."
Fili smiles sadly and takes hold of her hand, "My friend I am sorry."
In the end Tauriel faces the ages alone. Few of the Eldar linger in middle earth into the fourth age, and fewer in the fifth, but she is one. She does not let it stop her from living, she makes friends among the Edain and the Dwarrows, but part of her waits. She dies as the world ends, as is her fate, but before she breaths her last she closes her eyes and realizes that had she the opportunity to chose again, she would not have made any changes.
Tauriel dies with a smile on her lips.