Souls, Hollowed
Summary:
War makes for strange bedfellows, as does grief. Two survivors of the Battle of Five Armies, who fought each other before they fought their enemies, try to make sense of the aftermath and the losses they share.
Notes:
For Nuinzilien.
Author's Note: Written for the Slashy Valentine Challenge 2014. This request proved an unexpected challenge, but I love getting back into the writing saddle again.
Disclaimer: Tolkien or Peter Jackson: the lines are beginning to blur over who owns what now.
Rating: PG-13 for adult themes.
Genre: Drama
Request: Kili with Legolas or Erestor or Dwalin. After the disastrous Battle of Five Armies (in which both Erebor's King and Heir died), Kili is now on the throne - young, grieving the loss of his brother and uncle, and wholly unprepared for a role he never expected to play. I leave it up to the writer whether help comes from within Erebor's ranks or if the Elves take interest in the Lonely Mountain's success.
Seeking sweeter air, Legolas kept on even after the inhabited corridors retreated, limping in the company of dark and dragon-reek.
He could feel himself vanishing in bits and pieces as the dark closed over his head: here a boot scuffed from climbing rocks, a stiffened sleeve, belt, blade, and battered quiver. All empty in the dark. He let those pieces go. They were too heavy to carry just now.
His eyes deceived him though for they still existed, even without seeing (even elvish eyes needed something to work off of, after all). Not until his hand against the wall suddenly sank into open air, and he half-stumbled down a scattering of broad steps did he realize he had come to a chamber. His leg protested its outrage with a strain of stitches as he straightened. Oppression still layered the air where Smaug had lain and brooded longest.
A faint, bluish light hung about him from a hole in the ceiling.
At his feet heaped mounds of coins, precious stones and jewels, emeralds as large as apples, rubies, sapphires, gems worth more than all the hallowed glory of the Elvenking's halls and then some. Upon the walls draped suits of armor, not beaten metal-plate, but something stronger than silver that did not look tarnished despite the dust. Man-tall or Dwarf-stout. Javelins, spears, lances, swords, pikes—even a bow and quiver of arrows with broadheads of diamond that nothing would bend or break—bristled along the pillars that upheld the arching roof.
Legolas had not trembled since the night before the Battle in the valley, and he did not now. But he came near to it now as he stretched out a hand to brush the haft of a great black bow of yew inlaid with silver filigree.
He had been told more than once that he lacked the austerity due his station. That he placed more value on a warrior's aim than a politician's cunning. And his response had always been 'yes, indeed, Sire. I quite agree.' He had neither desire nor aptitude for the argument and bureaucracy his father savored.
The speed of hand to bowstring, of eye to target, of blade to vital part of the enemy's insides, these he understood unequivocally. Warrior-men, he understood.
Stiff-necked as he had been, Thorin was a man he had understood—insomuch as he could understand a Dwarf, at least—before the dragon-sickness overcame him. He would have kept the hounds at bay. Or even the other one, the nephew, whatever his name…had been. He wasn't yet accustomed to thinking of them in the past tense.
As if someone had opened a hidden door somewhere to the outside, a cross-current teased his hair against his neck and cheek.
But he turned his head a fraction too far.
No scent of apples, no slick of beeswax, or flutter of swallow wings, but the vision unrolled before him nonetheless, hit him low, so that all the air he had craved a moment ago soured in the back of his throat.
All was fire.
"That was my uncle's."
The voice startled Legolas badly, and he snatched back the hand not-quite hovering above the wood as if burnt.
"My other one, I mean. Frerin."
There, almost invisible against a pillar, stood the speaker, little higher than a child. But for the tired eyes and ravaged expression that gleamed pale in the half-light of the treasure hall. They belonged to no child.
"Master Dwarf," Legolas said with a slight incline of his head. There was, after all, no reason to not be polite, considering they had saved one another's lives not so many hours ago. He could not for the life of him recall his name. "Your Majesty, I should say."
One of thirteen. The black-haired archer. And newly-crowned King Under the Mountain.
The Dwarf did not acknowledge that last but ran his eyes up the bow.
Legolas returned to his contemplation of it, lips pursing. "The shaft is too thin for the draw. I wonder that it didn't snap in your uncle's hands."
"It did—though it was no fault of Dwarvish craftsmanship. An Orc axe hewed it and him. He died in the Battle of Azanulbizar. The bow was brought here and restored."
There was no sign of as much as a crack. "Hmm."
"That's both of them," the Dwarf continued, stepping a little nearer.
Something lurked in his stance, in his gaze; he held himself close, shoulders hunched as if in pain. Not so unusual, all things considered. Few amongst the host of Armies had escaped the battle without injury of some kind or other.
"Both?"
"I am not a king. Not really."
"Ah." So that was it.
The internment had been private. A family affair. No outsiders permitted though they had heard the bells, their tones jaded after so many decades of dust and ash.
"It wasn't supposed to be me, after all. Fili was Thorin's heir. Trained with him, took counsel with him. He was always so serious about his duty. He knew what it was to be a King. I'm the second son—nephew. It wasn't meant to be mine. Still might not be, truth all told."
Legolas frowned.
He had heard something of this. The debate raging in upper chambers. Even after the Dragon, after the battle, after the reclamation of a treasure hoard no one thought could be won, mortals found it in them to argue: over genealogical tables and phrases like "proximity of blood" and "subject to divestiture," or whether the Dwarvish order of succession could pass through the matrilineal line and if the decree still counted after the king's decease.
The only one with little enough to say during the whole of it had been the heir presumptive himself.
Never in all his life had Legolas ever been so grateful that his grandsire had begat only one son who had begat only one son.
"Elves must not have such troubles, do they?"
"Not as a general rule, no." Little need for a legacy when one lived beyond the count of years.
"Do you have any other shape to your face but that scowl? It sits ill on so fair a face."
Legolas frowned deeper. "You have been down here some time."
Driven by some tinge of emotion he did not quite understand, he reached for the Dwarf's arm. "Come. I have been told it is not meet to brood so long on gold. You cannot eat it for one thing."
The Dwarf tugged his arm back. "Why do you care? This is not your gold. These are not your people. You weren't even supposed to be here."
Though he did not wholly approve of Dwarves or the madness that had driven Thorin to folly, he could guess what they saw in their gold. It was not its value, but its weight and worth in memory. Its shape held the hands of the one that shaped it.
Someone had lived to make this thing. Someone had died defending it.
"You think Elves know nothing of grief, of loss?"
The Dwarf blinked, a slow, deliberate motion, and raised his eyes to Legolas' face. For the first time, they peered at each other through the dark.
"I know you," the Dwarf said. "You were the one with…I mean, you were in Esgaroth."
Legolas nodded once. Words would have broken him. Too fresh was the fire, the smell of burning apples and hair.
It was strange, the way they talked around their shared grief. A thick and weighty forest stood between them still, but it was a quiet one. None of the old, conventional phrases worked, knowing what the other had lost and that it mirrored his own.
"I'm afraid, Master Dwarf, I have quite forgotten your name."
"Kili. It's Kili."
Yes, that was it.
"I am Legolas."
"I know."
It was an understanding of sorts. If it did not make them friends, it made them strange bedfellows at least, and this time when Legolas moved towards the corridor and the upper halls, Kili followed.
They met no one as they climbed through the back stairways and passages. Legolas was not quite sure where he was going, but Kili would guide him every now and again, always up and out.
At last, legs aching, they emerged through an arched doorway into the sound of falling water. A curtain of silver grey fell in a thin sheet down a height he could not guess. Below, lay shrouded misty lands looking towards the North. The freshness on his face brushed his cheek like the memory of half-remembered knuckles.
Kili glanced at the mists below then beckoned Legolas down a small corridor, up a few more stairs and into a circular chamber that had been recently swept and aired, fashioned with a few comforts. Skins on the floor piled into a pallet, a laid fire cold at the moment, a pack and faded cloak and hood in a corner.
"These are your chambers?" he asked.
"Not as grand as the Elvenking's halls, I know," Kili said, half-apologetically as he crouched beside the cold grate. Legolas did not quite see what he did, but mere moments passed before a flame kindled and caught on the old wood.
Kili held his hands near the flames, feeding bits of kindling into the growing flickers of orange and phosphorous-blue. The pads of his fingers looked rubbed raw and cracked: the rasp of a bowstring, the hard work of a sword. "They would have been Thorin's."
They did not linger though over the names of their lost. Or, rather, not on the fact of their loss. Instead, they turned to stories, a temporary refuge in which they could still pretend the lost were alive. Legolas moved slowly from the doorway to a rickety chair and when it got cold to the fire to hear better as Kili recounted nights in the Blue Mountains, spent ice-fishing at a tarn when the icy surface gave under Thorin, but he came up, flushed and frozen and clutching a sauger as big around as his forearm. He told of starlit nights with his brother guiding miners and craftsmen, watching fire-moons sink behind the hills of Dunland.
"I hate it," Kili said, ruefully rasping his fingers against the scruff on his chin. "Fili always ragged me mercilessly, said I was not a true Dwarf warrior if I couldn't even grow a fair crop on my chin."
"I would not know of such things," Legolas said. "But to the Elves, at least, the lack of a beard is no strange thing. In fact, it is favored."
"Makes me fair does it?"
"'Fair,' no. But a little less ugly, perhaps," Legolas conceded. And the corner of his mouth lifted just the slightest.
Kili laughed outright. And it was that sound, the brevity of it, the strange beauty of the half-dark day between them that made Legolas try. He spoke of Her, softly at first. Hesitant over her face and form, walking gingerly over memories that might cut him if he lingered too close or too long.
The only way he could hold himself together was by imagining her elsewhere. Not Elsewhere, but as if she had but taken a patrol back over the River. When he returned that way, he would see her at the edge of the forest, that old, dark gleam in her eye that said she had gone to the edge of the Wood and found there something he never would.
Kili nodded; he understood. Though by his own admission, he had not—not her, anyway. He was fascinated and infatuated as only the young could be. But it was something they shared, that loss.
In the dark, still more than a little battle-drunk, they moved towards each other, having stepped far enough outside of themselves and into their memories to be all right. For Legolas, it was the sorrow he saw for the first time in the Dwarf's eyes, the understanding, the need to forget grief for a time, drown it in something other than blood.
They reached out to one another without reaching out to one another. Reaching for the Other that neither could reach now. And if the body straining beneath his was tougher and shorter than Legolas was accustomed to, at least, it was warm and alive.
And it was enough.
Daylight was drifting through the window when Legolas stirred from the nest of skins they'd thrown down hastily the night before. In the soft light of pre-dawn, Kili's sleeping face looked young but strong. He understood a little better now.
They took stock of one another's losses, how it fit against their own, how it measured up or didn't. How they handled it and what came after.
It was a choice. Just like the ones their dead ones made. One, perhaps, that neither would have chosen for themselves, but one they accepted nonetheless when the time came. The throne might or might not pass to Kili; they might or might not push back the chokehold darkness threatening the edges of the horizon; they might or might not succumb to grief.
He pondered how long he would stay here in the twilight world. And what would happen when he left.