She wakes, to blackness and a roof of stone. It is a tomb. His tomb? The one they surely laid him in after—

She still sees the images, too bright and clear to be a dream: the orc captain driving a spike through his armored chest, his still body stained with blood, even—so vivid in her mind's eye—the clean line of a cut that marks his cheek. He died, she saw it, felt it. The pain and shock of her loss tore through her heart, is still tearing it now that she has woken from the nightmare.

Tauriel pushes herself up in bed, feeling suddenly, desperately alone in this room, buried under tons of stone, away from the sky and away from the comfort of any living touch. She has to get out of this sepulcher; she needs to see him and feel him and know he is not gone.

She is slipping down half-lit hallways to the royal quarters before she quite knows what she does. The king's guards give her a bemused look and let her pass, apparently having no experience dealing with distraught elf-women invading the palace in their nightgowns. Tauriel is dimly aware, now, that her visit is highly improper, but the objection hardly seems material.

This door must be his, two down from the king's own, and she knocks or perhaps pounds—she is not thinking of the sound echoing from the stone walls around her, but only of her need to see his face.

She feels she has been standing here hours, though perhaps it has only been moments, when the door opens and Kíli himself is staring up at her, clearly confused. He is only half dressed and his hair is a tangle.

"Taur?" he mumbles.

She falls to her knees before him and begins to weep.

Kíli takes her gently by the shoulders. "What's wrong?" he asks, his voice still rough with sleep.

"I dreamed—" she gasps. "The battle— I lost you."

He pulls her to him then, a little ungracefully and hard enough that her head thumps against his breastbone, but she is grateful for the accidental roughness because he feels so solid and present. She cries against him, the tears a relief now, rather than a pain.

Kíli smoothes his fingers through her hair and whispers something against the top of her head. She cannot tell if the words are in common or his own tongue, but the sound is soothing.

Someone else speaks behind her, and Tauriel realizes she has woken others in her urgency.

"It's nothing to worry you," Kíli explains over her head. "She only needs me."

Tauriel lifts her face from him to see his brother and his uncle both staring at them. Fíli nods then and shuffles back towards bed, though Thorin stares a bit longer, as if Tauriel has suddenly made sense to him at last. He mutters something in what she is quite sure is Khuzdul this time, and leaves, too.

Kíli looks back to Tauriel, and his expression makes it clear that a woman on his doorstep in the middle of the night is not a problem he has faced before. He glances back into his room once, clearly considering the option. No, they both know how improper that would be.

"Wait here; I'll be just a moment," he instructs her. He pads back into the room on bare feet and soon returns, a blanket gathered in his arms. After he has folded heavy wool about her shoulders, he raises her to her feet.

"This way," he says, and leads her back past the guards, whose astonishment is quite plain on their faces.

Kíli takes her to one of the central common rooms. Though there is no one here now, the room is hardly a private one and they will not be suspected of any indecency. He puts more wood on the fire and then joins her on the rug before the hearth.

"Do you want to tell me about it?" he asks.

Tauriel shakes her head and draws her fingers over his cheek, where she had dreamed a cut. His chest, too, is unmarred, the skin clean and whole over his heart.

"I dream about it, too, sometimes," he confesses. "Sometimes I dream I died; sometimes my uncle, or Fí, or..." He leaves the last name unspoken, but she knows it is her own.

She traces the scar on his upper arm, the one mark he truly carries from that battle. The firelight hides the color of scar tissue, though the healing skin is still rough under her touch.

"How do you bear it?" she asks at last. "The thought of losing them?" It is something she has hidden from, for so long. She has never wanted to feel she could lose something so precious again, and now he makes her afraid, because of how much she needs him.

He sighs, and considers her for a long while before answering.

"I suppose..." He reaches out and tucks a stray piece of hair behind her ear. "I think about how lucky we are to be here. But it's not luck, is it? Don't you think, maybe, we're here because we're supposed to be? I think there's more for us to do, and so somebody—Mahal, Eru—" he paused, searching for the name of one of her elvish gods, "Elbereth—is making sure we're here to do it. So whatever happens next, it will be good."

Tauriel looses a long breath, the tension in her chest easing somewhat as she does so.

"That's beautiful," she tells him. He is beautiful, because he has given her hope and wonder when she has least expected to find it. She has known this since the first time she spoke with him.

He gives a slight smile, self-conscious. "Maybe. But not as beautiful as you."

She is, Tauriel realizes with a piercing conviction stronger than she has felt before, one of the reasons he can believe what he has just told her. She is proof of the goodness he hopes in.

"Thank you," she breathes. It is not his compliment, but his faith that she is grateful for.

He nods.

After a moment, he adds "Here, share some of that blanket with me," and she wraps him close to her beneath woven runes.

Before long, they are both dozing, each propped against the other. As Tauriel's head slips off his shoulder for the second time, Kíli observes sleepily, "You know, this would work better if—" He finishes the thought by demonstration, stretching out beside the hearth and drawing her down with him.

Kíli is asleep quite soon, and Tauriel feels less guilty, now, for waking him. She lies awake for some while longer, her head on his chest, replacing the dream-memory of cold stillness with his warmth, his breath, his heartbeat.

He is good, far more good than anything she ever expected to find, and he must be right. They are more than lucky; they are given this time so that they may make something beautiful. She will not let the ghosts of yesterday steal that from her. She will not be afraid.

The shadow of the dream passes at last, and she sleeps.

Author's note:

This story was inspired by "She Wakes" by zjofierose on AO3. It's a lovely short angst fic that broke my heart. I needed closure, and ended up writing this.