She was going to lose her job, Tara thought resignedly as she threw a handful of sterile bandages into her knapsack and followed them with disinfectant and a few syringes. She was disobeying orders, orders that came from her king, no less: Andrew had declared that no-one was to follow the escaped Tobin and his band beyond the borders of Greenwood. (How had they gotten free, anyhow?)
The last thing she needed—an antidote to the unusual and deadly morgul poison used on Kyle—was locked in the med supply cooler. She didn't have the key code, but Leo did, and he had shared it with her once. I'm sorry, Leo, but I need this now, she thought as she punched the code in. Her unauthorized use—no, it was theft—of secure medical supplies would seal her sentence from the king, but she hoped Leo knew she did not mean it as a betrayal of his trust. She didn't even know if she would reach Kyle in time. Morgul poison was swift but unpredictable, its speed seeming to depend as much on the victim's strength of will as of body. She prayed Kyle was stubborn.
She tucked the bottle of serum into an inner pocket of her bag, zipped it, and made for the infirmary door. There was no point in being stealthy; surely she'd been caught on camera, and she could only hope Jones in security was too busy with rebooting the security system after this morning's fiasco to pay attention to her looting the infirmary supply room.
The few guards Tara passed on the way to the garage hadn't questioned her as she swept past them, the urgent purpose in her stride real enough, even if she had no orders to justify her. Once there, she signed the vehicle log for a set of Jeep keys, praying that Tompkins wouldn't check her authorization and discover there was no border inspection scheduled for tonight.
She had set her knapsack in the passenger seat of the Jeep and was fighting to steady her nervous breathing when she heard a footstep behind her and froze, her heartbeat zooming once more into panicked overtime.
"It's not stealing if you let me drive," Leo said behind her.
Tara let out deep, shaky breath and turned to find the prince watching her, his expression somewhat amused but not upset. He wore sturdy civilian clothes, the kind one might wear for camping, and his blond hair was pulled up in a messy bun.
"I thought you were Tompkins," she breathed.
"Were you really going to leave without me?" he asked.
Tara shrugged, guilty. "I wanted to tell you, but I knew you'd never let me go."
"Not alone; did you stop to suppose I'd come with you?"
"Leo, this is blatant disobedience," she protested. "The king said we weren't to help them."
"But you think we should."
"Oh, Leo, they live in the same world we do; evil isn't going to stop at our borders once it catches them. When did we stop caring about any kingdom but our own?"
Leo looked aside, troubled. "Erebor is not the only throne that can fall." He met her gaze once more. "Tara, you're my friend and I trust you. I won't leave you to do this by yourself."
"Thanks." Tara caught him in a brief hug before handing him the keys and climbing into the Jeep after her bag.
She found she was deeply grateful Leo had come; she had not planned yet how she was to get past Greenwood's borders, but the guards on duty had simply saluted their prince and let them pass. Yet it wasn't just his authority she valued; she was glad for his support of her conviction that they must not leave these good folk, who had once been their neighbors, to meet their fate alone. She was angry that her king had denied help to Tobin: he was the rightful ruler of Erebor, and the Usurper was their common enemy. But old grudges died hard, she thought bitterly. It wasn't right that lives should pay for a past misunderstanding. Kyle hadn't been there—he probably hadn't been born!—when the old feud began. Anyone who had spoken to any of Tobin's men, who had known them as people rather than prisoners, could not have dismissed their plight now.
"There's a thermos of coffee in my pack," Leo directed her once they had found the highway that would take them by a more direct path to the lake than the river which Tobin and his men had followed once they had escaped via the palace sewer system and stolen a boat.
Once she had poured them each a cup, Leo asked, "You can tell me the truth: this is also for your little Irishman, isn't it?"
"My—?" Tara gasped, confounded by his insight. "No one deserves to die just because kings are too damn stubborn to work together!"
"No," Leo agreed, and Tara was glad he didn't press the matter further.
They reached Laketown near two in the morning. The city was really just an over-grown fishing village, with some of the houses extending out over the water alongside docks and boathouses. As they pulled up to the toll-gate at the city entrance, Tara wondered how they were to find Kyle and the rest of them in the middle of the crowded little city. They could check motels, but she doubted Tobin would have taken lodging somewhere so obvious, with the Gundabad mercenaries on their trail. Yet as Leo rolled down his window to ask the man in the tollbooth if any foreigners had been through town in the past day, the man had eyed him suspiciously and said, "Yer not the first to ask, but I'll tell ye this fer free: ye don't hurry an' the 'Bad men'll catch'em b'fore you do."
Tara had only half listened as Leo haggled with the tollman for directions to the house of someone named Bart; she was already digging knife and gun out of her bag.
Leo found the place easily enough, though they'd had to leave the Jeep a few blocks back; the streets became too narrow near the lakefront for any vehicles to pass through. Bart's house was a tall, ramshackle thing from the last century with a porch that would have been nice in the warmer months of the year. Even from a block away, Tara could see the front door had been torn off; light was streaming out along the road. She started to sprint, with Leo just a breath behind her.
A woman screamed as they reached the porch steps. Leo passed her, dashing up and through the door, and Tara followed into a sudden clamor of shouts and crashes as all hell seemed to break loose.
She was in a small, brightly lit kitchen. Immediately in front of her, a couple of teens, a boy and a girl, had attacked a large man in black with what looked like a boat hook and a cast-iron pan. Beyond them, a few of the men from Tobin's company—she did not know their names—had tackled a second mercenary, and to their right Leo was attempting to disarm a third.
As the man in front of her made a grab at the young woman with the frying pan, Tara caught him by the back of the collar and drove a knife in his back. He crumpled and gasped, and the young woman looked up at Tara with wide eyes.
"Who are—" she began, but before she could finish, there was another scream, the shrill voice of a child this time. The young woman spun round and Tara followed her frightened gaze to see a girl of about twelve years old in the grip of a fourth man, who must have come in from the back door to the kitchen. He was dragging her from under the table, and he had a club in his hand.
"Getch'er hands off her!" someone shouted and then a body launched towards the mercenary from what Tara had thought was the window. Whoever it was caught the girl with one arm and aimed a punch at her assailant with the other. As the mercenary struck his attacker a blow in the midsection, Tara saw that it was Kyle. He fell back with a heavy "Ooff," but he managed to catch the girl as he fell so that he landed with his body over hers. Tara was readying a spring across the room to them when the mercenary tripped backwards with a crash. Reaching him, she found the young blond—Kyle's brother, Phil, she thought—holding the mercenary in a choke while his companion, who must have tripped the man a moment before, still gripped his ankles.
"Are you all right?" Tara asked in the ensuing silence, not quite sure who she was addressing.
"I think so," the young woman said shakily behind her.
"I'm going to check out back," Leo said curtly and was gone out the far door.
"Tilda!" the boy was shouting, tugging at Kyle's inert form. Tilda pushed Kyle off her and tumbled into her sister's arms, crying.
Tara saw Kyle take a slow, shuddering breath. Good; he'd only been winded. "I'll come back," she called, and turned back out the front door.
Skirting the edge of the house, she looked for other signs of entry. All she found was Leo, tipping a man's limp body into the shallows of the lake, which came up under the back end of the house.
"Ugh," he said, his voice taught. "That was...nasty."
Tara nodded. "Lucky we came."
Back in the kitchen, Phil and his companion were dragging out the bodies, and the teenage boy was mopping up blood with a grubby towel, a sick look on his face. Tilda had stopped crying, and was bending over Kyle, as her sister and another, older man with white hair tried to move him back to what Tara saw now was a sort of window-seat bed. Kyle was moaning, and when they lifted him, he struck out blindly with his arm, just missing the young woman, who ducked back.
"Quiet, lad!" the older man called, catching Kyle's arm and holding him down against the floor.
"Leave her!" Kyle muttered, struggling a moment longer before he collapsed.
"How long has he been like this?" Tara demanded.
The older man looked up at her. "Since noon, lassie. He's not good, and nothing I've done can bring down his fever."
"I know," she said, kneeling at Kyle's side. "It's no ordinary infection; he's dying of a morgul toxin."
"Can't we do anything for him?" came an anguished voice at her ear. Tara looked up into Phil's troubled face. "I can't lose him!"
"I will certainly try," Tara promised. She glanced up, searching for Leo. There he was, coming back from disposing the last body. "Go to the Jeep and get my bag. Hurry!"
Leo nodded and dashed out again.
Tara studied Kyle, her heart breaking at how little he resembled the lively young man she had last seen. His skin was a sort of greenish-grey; she hadn't thought people really could turn that color. As she watched him, his brows contracted and he turned his head sharply, as if trying to struggle away from something or someone, though she could not tell what from his inarticulate cries.
"You'll have to hold him," she said to Phil, who nodded and obeyed.
As Kyle struggled and moaned, Phil looked up at her, his expression somewhere between hope and fear. "Who are you?"
"I'm Tara," she told him. "I'm a guard from Greenwood."
"Right, Kyle mentioned you. But why are you here?"
"Because," she said, looking up at Leo as he came back through the door holding her knapsack, "I have the one thing that can save him." She snatched the bag and dug inside, coming up with syringe, alcohol wipes, and the bottle of serum.
The older man seemed to guess what she was doing, because he tugged up the sleeve of Kyle's ratty, oversized fisherman's sweater, and tore open a disinfectant wipe.
Tara ripped the cover off the needle and filled it, trying to calculate the dose between Kyle's size and the poison's advanced progress.
She turned back to Kyle, who mercifully had stopped thrashing for a few moments. As she held the needle over his arm, she found she was shaking.
"Have you ever done this before?" Phil breathed beside her.
"No— Yes, once," she muttered, only half listening.
She found a vein, held her breath, and pressed the needle in.
Kyle jerked, but Phil and the middle-aged man who had tripped the mercenary held him firm while Tara depressed the plunger on the syringe.
"There," she breathed when she was finished. "I just hope it's not too late."
Kyle had gone very still, and his breath was shallow. His pulse, beneath Tara's finger on his throat, was a rapid flutter.
"Kyle, please, you have to live," she whispered, brushing sweaty hair back from his brow. His skin was icy.
At the sound of her voice, his eyelashes flicked slightly. After a few moments, he said weakly, "Tara, is that you?"
"Hush, Kyle!" She caught his hand.
His eyes opened fully this time, his gaze sweeping over her, and she thought he knew her.
"No, we left her far away," he went on softly to himself. His focus started slipping. "She was from another world. Would she really have loved..." His eyes had gone vacant, fixed on the ceiling.
"Please!" Tara pleaded softly. "God and Saint Christopher, if you're listening, save him." She had a strange moment of clarity, in which she realized she was gripping Kyle's hand very hard, and that Phil was staring at her now, as if she suddenly made perfect sense for the first time that night.
Kyle gave a slight shudder, and his eyes closed again. "I think I'm going to be—" he said weakly, and then turned and was sick all over his brother.
"I never thought I'd get to see you again."
Tara looked up from her tea to find Kyle sitting up at the edge of the makeshift bed in the window seat where he'd been resting since they had cleaned and redressed the knife wound in his leg. Everyone else was in bed, and Leo was outside on watch.
"You would have died," she said, and finishing the last of her tea, pulled her chair out from the table to sit near him.
"Thank you." As he smiled at her, Tara felt how happy she was to see light and life in his lovely dark eyes once more. While still pale, his skin was a much more natural shade now. If he was careful and didn't overexert himself, he should be strong enough to move about in a few days.
"Tara, would you...consider coming with us?" His expression was hopeful, a little vulnerable.
"Kyle, I—" The enormity of what she had just done struck her: she'd given up her home, her job, her king, to chase after a band of exiles and one sweet Irish boy. She wanted to follow him, and yet, it was madness. And to say yes, to acknowledge without a doubt that she wanted something so wild was the most frightening prospect of all.
"What is it? Is it because of who I am? Because of the feud between Erebor and Greenwood? Tara, I don't care. I know what I feel and I'm not afraid."
"I don't—" she began, and then the repaired kitchen door scraped open, and Leo came in. He seemed slightly embarrassed to see them. "I'm sorry, am I interrupting?"
Neither Kyle nor Tara spoke.
"Err, well, Tara, it's important," Leo went on, clearly torn between urgency and politeness. "Gundabad is more involved than we thought; I think they're planning to march. I want to investigate, and we have to leave now."
"Yes, Leo. I'll come in a moment," Tara said, her voice empty.
She looked back at Kyle, whose disappointment showed in his face.
"Look, be careful," he said lamely, and then, as if following an inspiration, he dug in the pocket of his ruined jeans and produced the holy medal. He caught her hand and pressed the medal to her palm. "Take this so I'll see you again."
She looked down at her hand in his.
"Mo ghrá thú," he said, and slipped his hand away at last.
Tara's heart gave a start. Had he just told her what she thought he had?
"I don't understand," she said haltingly, afraid to acknowledge what they both seemed to know.
He smiled. "I think you do."
She stared at him, not knowing how to answer, and then, because there was nothing else to do, she stood and went to the kitchen door. Before she passed through, she glanced back at him, hoping he couldn't see the tears she was fighting back. In the shadows of the curtains by the window, his face was unreadable.
If Leo hadn't needed her, she thought, she would have turned back. But he had risked his father's favor to accompany her, and she felt she owed him this now. Besides, if they did learn Gundabad had forces on the move, her going now might make the difference in saving her kingdom, as well as Kyle's. She had to leave.
And so she turned her back on the young man she had given up everything to save, and went out the door.
Author's note:
This fic is the sequel to Cell Block Tango, and is followed by To See Again the Stars.
First of all, I am aware that anti-toxins don't really work quite like I've depicted here. But this is fiction, and the anti-toxin was standing in for Elvish healing, anyway, so I followed the Muse and not Science.
The story title is from Counting Crows' "Accidentally in Love," and my use of it was inspired by that adorable "Accidentally in Kiliel" music video.
I took a few liberties, but hey, it's an AU.
The world needs more platonic Legolas and Tauriel.
Kili is speaking Gaelic.
Poor Fili. ;)