Kíli awoke, as he did often enough, to Tauriel's touch. He paid little direct attention at first, content simply in the awareness that she was near.
Her fingers drifted over him, brushing his ribs, tracing an arm, sweeping the hair back from his brow. Some time later she prodded his leg, and then, carefully, tugged the bed linens off his feet. He felt her hands on first one foot, then the other.
"What are you doing?" he said at last, still not opening his eyes yet.
"Taking an inventory of your scars," Tauriel replied, her voice matter of fact.
"How many have you found?" he asked, wiggling his toes at her.
"Seven."
"Only seven?" He yawned and rubbed his face before finally opening his eyes to find her leaning over him, her own vibrant green eyes very intent and serious upon him.
"You're very interesting, Kíli," she said, with the solemn air which he knew was very near to laughter for her. In these brief few weeks of marriage to her, he had found she approached their intimacy with equal amounts of humor and reverence, sometimes both at once.
"So, what have you found?"
"There is one here." She touched his right elbow.
"Ah." Kíli yawned again. "Fíli clipped me with a shield during sparring. Damned thing had an iron rim."
Tauriel took up his left hand. "And here?" She touched a mark on the back of his hand, just below his thumb. "This looks like a burn."
"That was the day I learned to be more careful casting with the centrifuge."
"The what?"
"Ahh, the device you use when you're casting with a closed mold. It spins around an axis and drives the metal into the hollow mold. I forgot to make sure I had the mold secure, and it flung molten silver all over the shop. I was afraid Rúni, my teacher, was going to yell at me, but after he'd made sure I was all right, he just looked at me very hard for a few moments, then said, 'I don't suppose you'll be making that mistake again, will you?' and went on with our lesson as if nothing had happened." He chuckled. "Old Rúni was a good match for me. He never got flustered, even when I was frustrated because something hadn't turned out right. 'Well, you've learned one way to do it,' he'd say when I complained."
"And how old were you then?" Tauriel asked.
"When I got the burn?" Kíli hummed, thinking. "Sixteen, maybe? Uncle started me learning combat when I was nearly thirteen. It was a few more years after that when he engaged Rúni to teach me jeweler's work."
Tauriel nodded and considered him for a moment, as if trying to imagine the shape of that young dwarfling's face.
She then pressed a finger to his side, tracing the line of an old cut that ran low along his ribs. "This?"
"Oh, that..." Kíli smiled, inadvertently coloring slightly. "With all your centuries in the guard, I'm sure I don't need to tell you why it's important to wear armor when sparring with steel." Even the blunted practice blades could deal a not-insignificant injury. "But there were some girls watching, and Fíli especially wanted to impress this one lass. So we didn't wear armor. Or shirts, either, as I recall."
Tauriel pressed her lips together to suppress a smile. "So you've always been reckless."
"For a pretty lass? Of course." Kíli reached up and tweaked her chin. "I believe Dwalin was entirely serious when he told me that if I'd got myself gutted, I'd have deserved it."
"Then let us be glad you don't receive everything you deserve," Tauriel returned archly.
"Oh? And just what else do I deserve?"
"Maybe I'll show you. But I haven't finished my count."
"You were only up to three."
"Yes. Now, this one, I would say," she laid a hand against his thigh, "looks to have been tended by an expert healer. Or, no—" She studied the mark, tracing its outline with her thumb. "Perhaps not so much an expert as someone who cared very much that you lived and did all in her power to save you."
"I've always believed that was it."
Tauriel smiled warmly at him before removing her hand from his leg with a light caress.
"There's this one," she went on, taking his left foot between her hands and indicating a pale line alongside his arch.
"When Thorin first told my mother he was planning the quest, she stormed at him. She'd already lost so much, and she didn't believe Fíli and I were ready. She and Uncle had a dreadful row, and she even threw one of her own pottery dishes at him. I'd just come in from the bath (it was out behind the forge, for the hot water) when I heard the crash and the shouting, and I ran in to the kitchen to check on Mum and stepped right on a great pottery shard with my bare foot. You can imagine that made Mum even more furious. I don't think she so much as spoke to Thorin for at least two days after that."
"Hmm..." Tauriel rubbed thoughtfully at the scar that was evidence of that still-recent family quarrel. "But she decided to let you go in the end."
"She saw she could not keep us," Kíli said. "Fíli and I were eager to go, and we'd trained all our lives for it. What would we have been saving ourselves for, if we passed up the quest? And if we failed, well, it came to the same thing. What was there for us beyond Erebor?"
He shrugged against the soft linens of Tauriel's bed. "But it hurt, knowing Mum was so sorry to watch us leave. Fí and I both thought she worried too much. But I remember standing on the wall inside the entrance to Erebor, with the battle raging below us, and knowing that she was probably right: we'd come halfway across the world just to die."
Tauriel smiled softly. "Thank the Valar they had other plans for you. And you haven't even a mark from that battle..."
"None that stayed. I had a fair number of scrapes and bruises, and I might have cracked a rib. Funny, isn't it, that Mum's crockery left more of a mark than even old Azog and his men?"
In response, Tauriel lay down against him, gathering him into her arms, and kissed him.
"I'm very grateful for you, meleth nín," she said.
"As I am for you." He settled her more comfortably atop him. "Now, you were only at five."
"Well, I needn't ask about this scar." She traced the line, fine but distinct, that ran back along his right cheekbone. "While we were apart, I sometimes forgot that the injury on your face was not merely a reflection of your wounded heart on the night we said our farewells. Now it's healed to a sign of how lucky we are to have one another again."
"Tell me, do I look a little more like Mister Dwalin with a scar on my face?"
Tauriel snorted, then pressed her face against his chest to hide her laughter.
"What? I aspired to be just like him when I was a lad. He looked so fearsome with his scars and tattoos, and I wanted some myself."
Tauriel raised her face then, and with a half-smile still quirking her lips asked, "Scars or tattoos?"
"Both, I think. I imagined you sort of magically got them when you'd proved you were strong enough. But I found scars you have to earn, and tattoos are much the same way. If I'd worn a tattoo, it would have meant "prince" and I already was that, so what was the point in proclaiming it again? Besides, my uncle and my brother didn't wear their rank written on their skin, so why should I, when I merely followed them? Nah, I wanted Dwalin's warrior marks, and I wasn't that, yet."
"You are now."
"True!" Kíli laughed. "Though I don't think I really want them. It'd be like wearing braids you could never take out or a crown that would never come off."
"No, I don't suppose that would please you," Tauriel agreed.
She swept the hair back from his forehead, and then Kíli felt her fingernail trace the thin, straight line that split the outer edge of his right eyebrow. "This is a scar, too, yes?"
"That was my first pub fight."
Tauriel raised her own brows in silent inquiry.
"So, the barman of the best pub in our dûm had a pretty daughter named Frídha—"
"Then it was over a girl," Tauriel said with a knowing smile.
"No, it was over my cousin's beard. You must let me finish."
"All right, so the barman's pretty daughter, Frídha..."
Kíli linked his hands comfortably over the small of Tauriel's back. "She was friendly to me, so naturally I was friendly in return. We flirted through my first few pints; meanwhile my cousin Onar across the table kept glaring at me like he wanted to push me down the next open mine shaft. And so I said I couldn't help it if I was more worth looking at than anyone else there. Of course I should have known better, when he'd fancied her for ages. But I couldn't resist."
"Kíli!" Tauriel's eyes went wide.
"Now you see, Onar had been growing his beard for months, hoping to catch her eye, and he was obnoxiously proud of how full and glossy it was. His beard would have meant nothing to me, except that he had been telling me just that morning that the girls would never look at me if I'd nought but a bit of scrub on my chin. It was quite a lie on his part, and he knew it. So I took my chance to get back at him." Kíli grinned at her. "I remember two things very distinctly before all hell broke loose: Fíli's horrified face after I'd spoken, and the pewtersmith's mark—a star and a crown—on the bottom of Onar's ale mug right before the rim connected with my eye."
"I'm trying to decide whether you deserved it," Tauriel said, the edge of her mouth turned up and her eyes glimmering with mischief.
"Don't tell me."
Kíli drew his hands up her back and she sank down against him again, sighing happily. He spent the next few minutes tracing the lines of her ribs and shoulders while she hummed in contentment.
"Anyway," he went on at last, "I had a glorious black eye for days, and Fíli took far too much pleasure reminding me that with such a face, the girls would only be looking at me in horror."
"Mmm. I suppose that was the only time in your life they ever did," Tauriel mused.
He chuckled. "Actually, I found that girls tend to feel a great deal of sympathy and interest for you when you're injured."
"Indeed," she returned from his shoulder. "And then they do very foolish things, such as run away from home and defy kings."
"You're the only one who has ever done either for me."
"I'm glad. I should be very jealous, otherwise."
Tauriel pushed herself up from him once more. "Thank you, Kíli," she said, "for teaching me to read the stories written on your skin."
Kíli regarded her thoughtfully. "I'd ask to read yours, but save for one little spider's bite behind your knee, I've never found a single blemish on your fair body."
She smiled softly. "I've scars, meleth; I simply do not wear them as openly as you."
"Oh?" Kíli sat up at last.
"Yes." Tauriel took his hands, and pressing her palms to his, wound their fingers together. "My hands... I was afraid these hands knew only how to deal death. They have been covered in orc blood and spider's ichor; they have held bow and blade. Sometimes I thought they were tainted by such violence, never meant to heal or mend. But when I saved you, I didn't stop to think that I was no healer; I knew only that you needed me. You looked at me with such hope and belief on your face, and you mended under my touch, as if I were the Vala Îdh herself."
"Not a Vala. My thatrûna." Kíli pressed his lips to the back of her left hand, then her right.
Tauriel then laid his hands one atop each of her feet. "And here is another scar: when my parents died, I ran away. I fled. Even though I had obeyed their command, it was still many years before I forgave myself for leaving them when they were in need." She sighed, her face clouded by the memory of pain. "When I lost them, I was hardly eighteen and therefore considered far too young to choose a warrior's role. Yet I insisted upon being given a bow. Like you, Kíli, I took up arms at a very tender age. But I was resolved I would never again be helpless. I would not leave others to fight my battles for me, and I would not run away."
"You ran towards quite a few fights for my sake," Kíli said gently.
"Yes; that wound, too, is finally healed," she agreed.
"I'm glad." Lifting one of her feet, he kissed it. Tauriel watched him very seriously for a moment and then she smiled.
"And where else do you bear a scar?" he asked.
"Well..." She gazed at him quite teasingly, then took his hand. "Here." She laid it over her ear.
Drawing her close, he kissed her ear once and then very gently took its peak between his teeth. Tauriel squeaked slightly in pretended protest, though Kíli now understood her well enough to know she was teasing as much as he was.
"And what injury was done to your ears?" he asked.
"They are why Thranduil never would have permitted me to marry his son. You remember he ordered me to tell Legolas there was no chance I could love him. I was quite incensed. Did the king really think he had any right to command my love like that? Never mind that I did not want to love his son. I was a leaf-eared Silvan, and that was all Thranduil saw; not that I had long been his son's faithful friend."
"Leaf-eared...?" Kíli wondered, giving her another soft nip.
"Ah! Surely you've noticed my ears are somewhat less... dainty than those of my king and prince."
"I've noticed they're prettier."
"We Silvans tend to have bigger ears than our Sindarin kin," Tauriel explained, trying not to giggle as Kíli pressed his rough cheek against her own ear. "Growing up in the palace, I always found my looks somewhat embarrassing: long ears and this unusual hair. It wasn't till I was somewhat older that I found my hair, at least, made me rather admired. But still, there was no hiding my ears."
"I think you've the loveliest ears I've ever seen on an elf maid. And I wouldn't wish them any smaller." He gently traced the outline of her ear with his finger. "I've big ears too, you know. Tauriel, our children will have such ears."
"Yes, our children," she said happily. "I never even knew I wanted children till I imagined they might be yours. When you told me you would have to take a dwarven bride, those words left a wound, as well..." She drew his hand over her navel, indicating what would surely have remained an empty womb, had he never returned to her. "Though we've yet to prove that I can bear your child, we have no lost chance to regret."
"You are very wonderful, amrâlimê, and I have complete faith in you," he said, caressing her.
"My Kíli," she returned fondly. "Telling you farewell left me yet other scars. I have never had to speak words that pained me so much as I did that night. My mouth played traitor to my heart, and both were injured."
He drew his thumb gently over her lips. "You've said much sweeter things since then. That you'd marry me." He kissed her mouth. "Our wedding vows." He pressed his lips to her breast, above her heart. "Certain other things that I hesitate to repeat now when we are both quite composed, lest they lose something of their original spontaneous charm."
Tauriel smiled, surely recalling declarations made the previous night in an unguarded moment. One of Kíli's favorite discoveries in these past weeks was finding that when they were alone, she shed her elvish reserve and could express her love for him quite as impulsively as he had ever done for her. He knew that such openness on her part was proof of how sure she now was of him.
"I am very happy to share myself with you," she said, linking her arms about his waist. "You have written yourself on me, on my hands and feet, my lips, my heart."
"I have much more for you to take down, my love," Kíli said, tracing a finger over the flawless skin of her breast as if he truly might inscribe his thoughts there.
She sighed and leaned into him.
"Tell me."
Author's note:
dûm - "excavations, halls, mansions"
thatrûna - "star lady"
Îdh is the Sindarin name for Estë, Vala of healing.
I'm pretty sure shirtless sparring is a bad idea, though it does make for some appealing fan art! Obviously, there had to be a reason Fili and Kili would do something they both know is stupid. XD
Kili and Tauriel discuss her spider bite scar and the death of her parents in chapter 9 of So Comes Snow After Fire. The scar on Kili's face comes from an injury he receives in that fic, as well.
The idea that Tauriel's scars are not physical but emotional ones was suggested by That Elf Girl, to whom also go many thanks for giving this chapter a beta read.
