So um I am not quite sure how this fic came to be. I don't even ship them, haha? But But this movie did cruel cruel things to my soul and so this horribly dark and angsty wrapping up of Tauriel's plotline came into my head and I don't think this would happen but it begged to be written so now you can all suffer with me. As if you needed any more reason to suffer after that film.
Apologies if I got any dialogue or details wrong enough that it bothers you. Working off of memory from a highly emotional first viewing.
To Be Free
December 19, 2014
She sat on the stone shelf, the broken body of the dwarf she loved lying across her lap. Close to him in death in a way they had never been allowed in their encounters while both were hale and hearty in this world.
They were never meant to be, the elf and the dwarf. She understood that well.
Thranduil's son was far above her even though she'd been his constant companion and captain of the King's guard for far too many years to count. How could she then even dare to entertain the idea that the younger prince of Erebor's throne, a young dwarf who flirted as she turned a key in his jail cell, how could she have imagined that there might be a life for them together in this world? When everyone and everything around them acted together to tear them apart? The good and evil creatures, their enemies and their allies alike?
It was impossible. They had both known it. Even while they both realized with every passing glance just how much they meant to each other.
The elf who loved to walk among the stars and the dwarf hewn of dragon stolen stone.
She had imprisoned him, healed him, and defied her king for him. Kili had warmed to her despite everything, been free and frank about his feelings in only the way a dwarf could be, and fought to keep her alive with everything in him.
Tauriel leaned forward and brushed his frozen, sweat plastered hair away from his face, pressing her lips together so they did not waver.
She was a warrior. Multitudes had fallen this day. She would not cry over one dwarf without caring about the snuffed out lives of any of her comrades. She could not be so cruel and yet, when she thought of the armies that had fallen she felt nothing. It was when she looked at the body beneath her that her heart twisted and threatened to stop beating while he was gone.
She closed her eyes, pressing them tightly together as her arms moved around his shoulder, hands fingering the intricate details on his armor. Each cold link of the chainmail wrought by his forefathers. Every ridge in the inlaid breastplate that had been forged with all the skill of his kin but could not save him in the end.
Her head bowed low over him, her red hair falling about his face.
They had loved each other.
And Kili was dead.
Killed for a dream of his people, drawn back to their homeland decades after it had been irrevocably lost to the wyrm.
Murdered for his uncle whom he loved and whose every order he obeyed, even when it meant walking blindly into a trap cunningly laid for them by their bloodline's greatest enemy.
Martyred for her when she called to him through the fog and they spun in a deadly dance with the orcs that wanted nothing more than their suffering and death.
Well, the foul creatures were destroyed now, but they had gotten what they wanted. Blood spilled over the ice until it snapped and cracked crimson. An iron tang laced the mist that clouded their vision. The cities may be rebuilt in the years to come and tradesman and fishermen may make their homes before the mountain, but this place would forever be tainted by the blood spilled this day.
Kili was dead and now she was left alive to suffer it.
She pulled his hands closer. Stiff with cold but not yet with death, and she gently took them in her own. Ran her fingers over the perfectly crafted leather gloves, surely the envy of the stores found beneath the mountain for nothing could be too good for the King's sister-sons.
He deserved more than this, she thought. He deserved all the sparkling gems that the mountains had to offer that rivaled the light of the heavens. The might that came with his bloodline and the pride of what he could do with it to make the world a better place. He should have grown to be a stout and hearty dwarf with a full beard that she would have adorned with braids she had learned centuries ago.
Even if they could not be, he deserved what he had travelled here to find.
He deserved a home. Halls that were familiar. Stone he understood. That sang to him in his sleep.
Not a slab of unfeeling rock that would cover his face and bury him far away from anything he loved or cared about in this world until no one left living could remember who he was or what he was like.
Relegated to a line in the tales they would undoubtedly fashion to tell the story of Thorin Oakenshield in his quest to regain the mountain from the dragon that had driven them away in streams of fire and smoke.
They would mention his companions. His heirs. Fili of the golden hair and Kili the youngest of them all.
That would be their epitaph. He and everyone who fell this day.
Words in a song of how the land had been reclaimed, the dragon had been slain, and Azog the Defiler had been wiped from the face of the earth. Not, however, without taking the heirs to the mountain with him.
His friends would sing the songs in their deep solemn voices until the verses echoed off of the stone, their harps adding to the atmosphere as they played songs for the dead.
Kili deserved more than that. It may have been the customs of his people but he shouldn't have been buried so close to the heart of the mountain that it would suffocate anyone venturing to pay their respects. In the dark cold crevices of rock he had frozen and bled for to no avail. To be referred to only when the drinks had flowed freely.
Her chest constricted at the thought. Of a smile like his forgotten, of eyes like his hidden.
But what would that matter now?
He was dead. He would not smile even if he was left on the ice and he would not look at her with a twinkle in his eyes even if he was lifted on a pedestal until he reached the heavens.
It was too late for that now and he was growing stiff and cold in her arms even as she held him.
He had told her that he loved her. And she believed him. He had given her the carven stone to bind her in promise because he knew she felt the same way for him, even if she could not say it, even if she could not accompany him and his companions to the mountain because she was needed elsewhere.
She wondered now what might have changed had she followed her heart instead of her duties. Probably not much, given how things had escalated in her absence as she scouted out the second army with Legolas. Had she been in the mountain, nothing would have changed. It might even have made matters worse, having an elf trapped inside a company of dwarves while Thorin knew nothing of his nephew's traitorous heart.
But they would have been together, for a little while. Together for a time before he was taken from the world, taken from her.
He was the one who had broken their promise. He was the one who had gone where she could not follow.
She thought of the worn stone in her jerkin. The one that she had first seen in the dungeons of Mirkwood, when he tossed it cockily into the air and told her how his mother worried because he was reckless.
It was his promise to return to her safely.
He had broken that one too.
Perhaps broken it when he gave her the rune stone, when he decided that she was more important than his own safety, that what they might have together in a dream was better than living in a world in which he had let her die.
But shouldn't he have known that the reverse was also true?
And now what was she to do? Where was she to go without him? She had been disowned by her king and her kin. She had no home now, no place to go, and how would anyone here let her stay after all that had happened? She could never have a home in the mountain, even if she could bear the thought of being shut up in the stone halls. Who of them would understand what she had felt for their fallen?
Perhaps the new master of Dale would suffer her to stay for a while but they could ill afford the extra supplies with so many mouths to feed. She could offer her healing skills, what little she could do without the herbs necessary to save half of the wounded that lay scattered, groaning in the long abandoned structures in the old city.
How could she stand it, though, healing fevers when she would see Kili thrashing on a rough wooden table, his head cushioned in a basket of chestnuts as he cried feebly for her to be real. When she bandaged gaping wounds when her mind would be filled with the look on his face as his chest was impaled and the breath crushed out of him for the last time, the evil weapon sliding out of him to leave a wicked hole where his heart beat for her?
She did not think that she could bear it. But how could she bear going anywhere when bereft of her life and his? When everything she would see around her in the world would remind her of all that she had left behind and everything that the dark haired dwarf would never share with her.
A tear beaded down her cheek but she refused to lift a hand to wipe it away. She could not let him go, not when this was the only time she would ever have Kili to herself.
The only time she would have with him because soon his companions would come to collect his body and carry it off to be laid in state and what right did she have to him anyway? What had she ever done for him that he would love her and give her a gift from his own mother?
She gently pulled one hand away from Kili, careful not to jostle him as she reached into a fold of cloth to pull out the blue stone that she did not deserve. Her thumb rubbed over the runes, barely able to feel them for the cold. They had been lovingly carved and worn on the company's long and harried journey. He may have given it to her on impulse as he pushed off from shore, but she could not keep it.
It had been given to him by his mother and he should still have it when she came to see his lifeless body. It was too little, but she would not take that promise from him. She could not let Thorin's sister to see that he had been willing to break that promise for an elf, of all things in the world. She would not take that small comfort from anyone. She could not be so cruel. Not when she had nothing left.
She tucked the rune stone into his gloved hand, forcing him to take it back even when his fingers refused to bend around it.
Something moved behind her. Not an orc or she would already have been run through with a wicked blade and probably the more thankful for it. She stiffened, but was not yet ready to relinquish Kili's body to those who had come to collect it.
When Tauriel turned to look, however, it wasn't a company of dwarves come to steal him away. Thranduil stood silent and watchful in the stone archway.
She crouched over her love as if the king would take his corpse and throw it back into his dungeon for the pain and suffering he and his people had caused them this day. He took one more step toward the pair but then came no further, an inscrutable expression on his face which softened as moments passed with nothing but the bitter wind to break the silence.
Tauriel did not feel judged for her feelings, as she expected, or condemned for her previous insubordination as she stood before her king with bow drawn. His presence was weary with sorrow and in that moment, he seemed to share it with her.
He grieved for a kingdom lost and loyal and true subjects struck down by foul creatures that they never should have seen and she lay mourning over one of the dwarves that had brought ruin upon her kin.
Yet sorrow is sorrow and there can be no judgment of feelings when the deal lay strewn over courtyards, too many to imagine.
Her throat constricted and her eyes suddenly burned with tears. She looked up at Thranduil, voice cracking. "Why does it hurt so much?"
Tilting his head, he looked at the dwarf, then back to her and softly replied, "Because it was real."
She looked at him in surprise. He gazed back with understanding.
After staring dully at the body she held in her arms, she told the Elven King, "If this is love, then I do not want it."
And truly, she meant what she said. She had never wanted this. She had been content in her life in Mirkwood, companion to the prince and Captain of the King's Guard. She loved the stars and the wooden halls and the fine wine they kept stocked in the cellar. She did not look for love, even if the concept seemed quite a lovely one. It found her. And brought with it nothing but confusion and trouble and pain.
They had never been together. Never done more than briefly touch hands while Kili was locked up or unconscious or leaving her because he belonged in Erebor with his uncle and she belonged on shore.
Now he was dead. Gone. And she was holding his lifeless body, the only thing he had left of him. Soon, that would be lost to her also. Then she would spend the rest of her days alone with the briefest of memories and the taunting thoughts of what might have been. Tearing at her heart and poisoning everything she thought about until the end of her days.
"Please," she begged her King, who owed her less than nothing but still looked at her with eyes that understood her pain. "Please take this away from me!"
He watched her for a long moment, then closed his eyes.
Tauriel bit back a sob as she realized that Thranduil was about to leave her to sit alone with the remains of the dwarf he hated. He stepped forward, however, and knelt on one knee beside her.
She'd never been able to look at him at eye level, never expected Mirkwood's King to stoop to speak with her when he'd made it very clear in the past just how much lower she was than the high elves that were destined to sit on the throne.
What her watering eyes saw before her now was not a king, majestic and lofty, but an elf who had lost more lives under his care in a single day than anyone should have to suffer through.
"That is what you wish?" he asked quietly, deep eyes peering into hers with a strange intensity.
"Please," she said.
"There is a way," he said slowly and she latched onto his every word.
One of her hands still held Kili's and the other blindly ran through the hair around his face. She stared up earnestly into Thranduil's face.
"There is a way?" she repeated in a numb voice, imagining what it would feel like to be without this pain. To be able to breathe again without her breath catching and her heart falling to pieces as it was dashed upon the rocks like so many shards of ice.
He bowed his head, murmuring, "But you must be sure."
She nodded.
"There is no turning back if you wish me to free you from this pain."
Her tears, long held back, now began to flow freely down her face. "Please," she whispered.
"So be it," he replied.
.
.
Hours later the din of battle had ceased and the armies of men, dwarves, and elves had ensured that every foul orc in sight had been properly dispatched, the cries of the wounded called to the healers in their midst and the company managed to find each other again through the smoke and the failing light.
Find most of each other, at least, though Thorin and his nephews had gone off to battle Azog at the peak of the mountain's spur and had yet to return.
Dwalin's face was dark as he led his companions up rough paths of stone and across ice back to where he had left his friend and his nephews. They found Bilbo at Thorin's side, sobbing as he held onto one of his sleeves and rocked back and forth on his bare feet until Bofur pulled him away.
No one needed Oin to come closer to know for sure that the King under the Mountain was gone.
It also did not take them long to realize that Fili and Kili were nowhere to be seen. They would not have been split up had any mortal means been able to prevent it. Thorin would die to save his sister-sons and they would have been struck down defending their uncle.
If they were not here grieving the loss of the dwarf they had looked to for wisdom and guidance before they were of age to look at an axe, they must be lost as well, or past all healer's help.
They looked anyway, hoping beyond hope that by some miracle the heirs of Durin had yet been left untouched.
Fili lay broken on the ice, his limbs askew and his face still frozen in a warning cry, eyes staring blankly at the grey clouds above him. They shuddered at how his body lay between them once they had grabbed his legs and shoulders. There was no physical way to preserve his dignity when his bones had been shattered beyond repair, but they tried for the sake of the dwarf who would have been their King.
They carried them back toward the mountain with as much honor as a line of bleeding and battered dwarves could command. Bilbo shuffled along silent beside them and every dwarf with empty hands scoured the nooks and crevices of the rock formations they passed, hoping to find Kili tucked inside one of them for protection until help arrived.
They didn't find him until they'd come to the outskirts of Dale.
And there, on a stone ledge overlooked by an archway into the city, he lay, eyes closed and arms folded reverently across his chest as though he were asleep. Frost had crept into his hair, however, and no living being had skin tinged that blue or a blossom so red spreading across his chest and seeping into the ground below him.
Kili too, was gone.
An elf lay next to him, one hand reaching up to grasp his hand and the other cushioning her head as it lay against the stone.
Bofur moved forward, eyes misting at the sight as he recognized the braided red hair. "Ach," he said, reaching forward to shake her awake, "there's nothing you can do for him now…" he started before abruptly stopping.
She fell over heavily at his touch, rolling stiffly onto her back where he could see that she, too, had a patch of red soaking through the green of her jerkin.
Bofur pulled back, closing his eyes and putting a hand over his mouth as he took a moment to collect himself, imagining what must have happened here. He hadn't missed the glances between them on the shores of Laketown, nor the things the young prince had said while she worked her magic with the aethelas, although much of that could have been attributed to the fever if he hadn't known better.
He was glad that the lad hadn't been alone in the end, at least. A death such as his at the hand of an orc so foul must have been a terrible thing to suffer, but better by far that he had someone to hold his hand as he passed. Someone to avenge him and to rearrange his limbs so that he looked at peace even while the blood continued spreading.
It was good to have someone to die with.
And she seemed to be smiling, as if she knew the virtue of it as well as he did.
Bofur pulled his hat off of his head by its floppy ears yet again that day and he thought that it was fitting, somehow, for an elf and dwarf to lay side by side in death. It only went to show that an elf could be friends with a dwarf just as much as a hobbit could befriend a whole company of them.
The mountain had been reclaimed and defended and ten of their company still remained alive. Would wonders never cease on this most horrible of all days.
He turned back to the rest of the dwarves who stood staring expectantly for news, even though they could all have easily guessed at the situation by the grimace on his face.
"Very well," Dwalin said gruffly as his throat refused to do his bidding. "Let's get him home, then."
"What about her?" Bofur asked and Dwalin shook his head.
"She's none of ours," he decided. "But," he allowed, gratitude extending to anyone who had stayed by Kili's side, "we'll send someone to tell her King that she's here. He'll want to know."
Again, I do not really think this would happen in a million years because Tauriel wouldn't give up in the end like that but:
-we didn't see Tauriel any more after her conversation with Thranduil
-and when she begged him to make her agony go away, all I could think of was the way in which he "set the orc free" in Desolation of Smaug
-he knows enough about love and suffering that he would understand and I could see him doing it if the conditions were right
-the dwarves wouldn't be surprised to see another body next to Kili because they wouldn't have thought that anyone survived on that side of the battlefield anyway. Legolas saw that she fell but not that she survived so he wouldn't be surprised that she didn't make it either.
-we weren't shown any recovery of bodies or burial scenes or anything after the battle ended so, like, this isn't out of the realm of possibility?
It's plausible, at least, even if it would never happen. But yeahhhhh, feel free to punch me through cyberspace anyway.