Chapter Forty: Blood and Pus and Fire

Emelia was a dragon. She was breathing fire at him, engulfing him to the point that the skin cooked off his flesh and blackened his bones. Each time he thought he was really and truly dead, he was alive once again and Emelia was laughing at him, bearing her teeth in a snarl. He thought she might eat him and just be done with it, but she never complied. She enjoyed toying with him, watching him squirm, before she burned him alive again and again.

Kili tried to back away from Emelia, scrambling over piles of gold to get away from the red dragon. She didn't have her hair like this and her eyes were the wrong shade of green, but he knew it was Emelia. He knew she was his. Or at least, she had been his.

She had the same laugh as her human self, as her soft non-homicidal self.

She liked to laugh at him right before she burned him with fire for what felt like the hundredth time.

"Just kill me!" Kili screamed up at her, stumbling over a particularly large jewel. "Just kill me and be done with it!"

Silence.

"Why do you keep toying with me?" Kili flattened himself against the wall, pressing his fingers against the cold stone for a bit of relief. The room was scorching, from either Emelia the Dragon or his own panic he didn't know. His lungs filled with smoke as he yelled at her, suffocating him. He coughed violently, being forced to use the wall as a support.

"You're a silly little man."

"Why are you torturing me?" Kili's eyes were watering painfully. She was laughing again, this time the sound much closer than it was before.

He moved sideways along the column, keeping his back pressed against it as best he could. The ground was vibrating as she got closer to him. The gold coins tumbled down from their elaborate stacks and clattered against the stone floor, bouncing like little pebbles on water. He stared at one for a moment too long and felt his panic surpass all other previous measures when the coin melted right before his eyes. The molten gold sank into the cracks of the stone floor, disappearing before his eyes.

"Come out, little man." Emelia called to him, a humorous lilt to her voice. Normally, he would have liked the sound of that, but in the current circumstances it made his stomach feel as if it had gone to rot. "I don't like waiting."

"Are you going to kill me?" Kili called, fingers digging into the stone of the column behind him.

"Don't be silly, Dwarf." The sound of her laughter made the walls shake. "I killed the rest of them, why wouldn't I kill you?"

"Because I have survived this long." Kili said, eyes scanning the room for an escape route.

"I do not reward cleverness." Kili nearly lost all of the contents of his stomach when she appeared in front of him suddenly, yellow teeth bared. "You will die, just like the rest."

He wasn't aware it was possible for a dragon to smirk, but there she was proving him wrong again. "You are handsome, for a fleshy little rat."

Kili felt nauseous. He had to tell himself that it wasn't Emelia anymore. It had been, but the creature in front of him wasn't her. She sounded like her, but it wasn't her. He closed his eyes and tried to get the picture of sweet little Emelia, with her red hair that drove him insane and her freckled skin that he wanted nothing more than to touch. He didn't want to touch her skin now, not while it was a scaly mess, covered in surface scrapes from his companions and their failed attempts at killing her before she could kill them. He didn't want anything to do with her now.

"I've told you that before though, haven't I?" The dragon snaked closer to him, wrapping her tail around the column above his column. "When we were alone in Lake-town I told you I loved you and that you were the most handsome man I had ever seen." The words felt like knives to Kili. "How very ridiculous of me. You can't even grow a proper beard." Her head moved closer, her nostrils flaring as she sniffed him. His hair moved with the breeze from her inspections as he pressed back as far as he could to get away from her. Her chest was starting to glow, just like it had when she had killed the others, when she had played with them and left him for last. He didn't know why.

"Kill me. You killed everyone else. Why make me suffer like this?"

"You would like that, silly dwarf?" The scales on her chest glowed even brighter. "You would like me to ease your passing to your little company?"

Kili nodded his head, closing his eyes to avoid looking at her any longer. "Yes."

"I never took you as the kind to ask for death."

"I never took you as the kind to give it."

Kili opened his eyes long enough to look at her before she opened her jaws and engulfed him in flames once again.

When he awoke to a woman with red hair and green eyes leaning over him, lips pursed and eyes narrowed, his first instinct was to back away as quickly as possible. He used his elbows to scramble back from her, kicking his legs out in sheer panic. His good leg, the strong one, caught her on one of her shins. She fell to the floor with a thud. He backed up until he was against the wall, pressed against it like he had been only a few moments before in the bowels of the mountain. His injured leg screamed out in pain when he used the muscle to keep Emelia at a safe distance, foot pressed against her chest so she couldn't come any closer to him.

"Kili?"

"Stay back." Kili said, switching his injured leg out for his good one. It was much easier to keep her back. "Just…"

"What on earth has got your panties in such a twist?" Emelia asked, pushing his foot off her chest. He immediately put it back, kicking her away from him with so much force she landed on her backside.

"Please."

She rubbed her chest and pulled her legs up underneath her, eyeing him with a mixture of concern and fear. His stomach clenched when he noticed the second one. She lifted her shirt so that she could peer inside, eyes scanning for a moment. He had forgotten about the scar on her chest. Regret filled his chest, although it didn't stop him from keeping his distance. She seemed to want to move towards him, but debated with herself. Some of the panic left his as he stared at her. Emelia wasn't the person he expected to see, if he expected anyone at all. The last time they had spoken she had been irate with him, livid even. He wouldn't have been surprised if she didn't even want to say goodbye to him when they left in the morning.

"I wasn't able to sleep so I was sitting out in the common area. I heard a thud from your room and came to check on you to see you had fallen out of your bed."

"I…" Kili rubbed the back of his neck, instantly feeling regret bubbling up inside him. It was Emelia, the very human Emelia, looking at him like she didn't even know him. "Emmy."

"Kili, why did you just kick me?" She stood up and moved over to stand above him. He involuntarily flinched at the sight of her looming over him. "I'm aware I sometimes deserve a good smack, but…" She stopped speaking and maneuvered herself between him and the wall, bending down so that they were even. She wrapped her arms around his shoulders and heaved, noises of protest betraying her body. "God, why are you such a fatass?"

"Emmy."

"I mean, here I've been wasting away and all this time you've been sneaking pastries." She struggled to lift him again. "You could help."

He finally got his senses about him and used his other leg to push himself into a unsteady upright position. She hadn't been lying, he had fallen to the floor. He noticed a small pool of blood and pus on the floor, obviously from his leg. It was smeared and stunk worse than death. He shook his head and reached his hand down to wrap around his wound, trying to be subtle in cleaning up the mess that was his leg. A bit of blood squeezed out from between his fingers. He could feel Emelia staring at him and immediately removed his hands, sitting on the bed so that he could cover his leg with one of the thin pillows that had been provided.

"So, kicky McGhee, explain." Emelia sat next to him and tried to remove the pillow, only to have Kili stop her. He still couldn't look at her without seeing flashes of flames that made his skin feel like it was slowly, but surely, burning. "You're feverish, by the way. Just in case you decided to be bothered by you own declining health."

"You ate Fili." Kili blurted out, unable to hold his tongue any longer.

"What?"

"You ate him whole. Him and everybody else."

Emelia's eyes narrowed. She looked at his face, searching it for a moment, before her hand reached forward slowly. She placed it on his forehead and pressed it. He noticed she had blood on her hands and on her sleeves. "Don't be silly." She said, pulling her hand back. She did not seem to put much stock in what he was saying.

"Emelia, you were a dragon."

"With nasty, gnashing teeth?" She stood up and moved to the end of the bed. She grabbed the linens that were bunched on the floor from what Kili assumed came from him falling to the floor and started ripping them. When he didn't respond she looked back at him. She placed her bloodied hand on her hip and shook her head, smiling at him. "You were dreaming. You're projecting your fears about that mountain onto me, which is weird by the way."

"Why are you here?" Kili couldn't help but wonder.

"I might be mad at you, but that doesn't change the fact that I care about you." She held the strips of linen up in front of her, inspecting them with clinical eyes. "I was worried so I came to check on you." She balled them up and put them under her arm. "I'll be back. I figured this would make Oin's job easier. Don't try to move too much."

She started towards the door, which caused even more panic to settle in Kili's chest. When her small hand settled on the doorknob, turning it, he couldn't stop himself from shouting at her, desperation lacing his word. "No!"

"No?"

"You can't tell Oin." He stood up and used the end of the bed to steady himself. The room was spinning but he refused to allow her to see that. She opened to the door ever so slightly, letting in the warm glow from the hallway into the room. They were being housed in the guest houses of the Master of Lake-town. The rooms were close to each other, bordering a nice common area that had a center hearth that was kept burning by a few maids. If Emelia opened the door any further the other dwarves would be able to hear them and that wasn't a risk he wanted to take. "Shut the door. Please."

"You left a puddle of blood on the floor." She pointed to the smear with a hard look on her face. "I've tried to be nice about this, I really have, but I can't do it anymore. I'm telling Oin and Thorin."

"They'll make me stay, Emelia."

"Good. That's what I'm hoping for. You could lose your leg, Kee. Have you thought about that?"

"You can't do that to me." Kili knew he sounded desperate. "You can't. I've lived my whole life imagining what it would be like to enter that mountain beside my brother and uncle. I was meant to go with them, not sit here like a useless sod."

"I find you to be horrible hypocritical." Emelia shut the door with a resounding snap. "You coddled me like an infant when I was cut by the Goblin King. You didn't let me talk my way out of getting stitches, even though they made me pass out from the pain. And now, when I'm telling you that I'm worried about you and that I want you to get help and to take a break from being your usual annoyingly stubborn self, you tell me that you don't want to because you don't want to be kept from the mountain. Do you realize how much that pisses me off?"

"The situation with the Goblin King is not the same. You were…"

"I was bleeding just like you are." She would normally move closer to speak with him, but this time she kept her feet firmly planted by the door, hand still resting on the doorknob.

"I'm perfectly capable of acknowledging…"

"I don't think you are. That's what worries me. You're acting like this isn't something to worry about and it is. It's the only thing you should be thinking about."

"I am thinking about Erebor."

"And I'm thinking about you." Emelia pulled the door open again.

"I won't forgive you if you do this." Kili said, watching as her face darkened considerably. "Emelia, I have wanted…"

"Fine. If this is how you want to be, then I'm done. If you want to ruin our friendship for this then I'm okay with that." She stalked out of the room, leaving him standing there. She was gone for a half a moment before she stomped back in, glaring at him. "If you're going to insist on being an idiot, at least wrap your leg."

She threw the ripped linens at him violently and walked back out, slamming the door behind her hard enough that the walls shook.

Emelia could feel Kili glaring at her but she found she didn't care. Thorin had made him stay behind and, while he was as angry as she had ever seen him, that meant that he would be safe for the foreseeable future. She knew that he was turning his anger towards the situation on her. She snorted to herself at the hypocrisy of it all and kept walking towards Bard's house. The dwarves were supporting Kili along behind her, trying to shush his angry diatribe as best they could.

The other dwarves and Bilbo had been gone for almost an hour by the time they had been able to convince Kili to seek medical attention. He had insisted they take a boat and follow after Thorin, sounding drunk from the pain in his leg.

Emelia had done all she could not the punch him in the face to make it worse.

It wasn't as if he was the only one chapped about being left behind. The annoyance she felt was bubbling just below the surface, threatening to spill out every time Kili slurringly complained about being left behind. She hadn't even been given time to argue when Thorin started pointing people to the boat. He had pointed her to the side with a pat on the shoulder and a small smile that she thought was worth nothing.

He seemed to think that she would be happy to be left behind with Kili, that she would be better off now that she wasn't alone.

Emelia sidestepped a barrel full of fish guts and kept walking. She had done this to him. She had requested that Thorin leave Kili behind for his own good, but she had never imagined he would actually listen to her. She supposed she should be happy that Kili would be getting the help he needed, but she couldn't shake his words from his head. He had said he wouldn't forgive her for trying to help him and he seemed like he meant it. He hadn't spoken a single word to her since he had been told to stay behind and that didn't seem likely to change.

Fili was sympathetic, if anything could be gleaned from his soft expression, but he hadn't spoken to her either.

None of them were speaking, as a matter of fact, and she decided she liked it that way.

She was angry. She was angry at the situation and she was angry at the Master of Lake-town. She was angry at Thorin, although she didn't know why, and she was angry at the cold that seemed so much colder than it ever had when she was in Alaska. Most of all, however, she was angry at Kili.

She clenched her hands into fists underneath her borrowed clothes and kept walking, ignoring Kili complaining behind her and the dwarves trying to quiet him. They weren't doing a very good job.

Emelia was amazed at her ability to find Bard's house again. She supposed she shouldn't be that surprised, however, considering how she had been in a similar state of mind both times. The sun was just starting to burn away some of the early morning clouds by the time she stomped up the steps and knocked on the door. Bofur sidled up next to her, sending her a small smile which she didn't return.

There were footsteps inside the house accompanied by muffled voices.

Emelia tried to smile at Bard when he opened the door but all she could muster was not frowning so deeply.

"Absolutely not."

"We need your help." Bofur said, stopping Bard before he could shut the door. "Kili's been shot."

"I've had enough dwarves for one lifetime." Bard tried to shut the door again, only to have Emelia roll her eyes and move forwards to stop the door with her foot. "The Master will help you."

"The Master is a greedy, mold covered, piss smelling creep and I wouldn't want Kili anywhere near him or his life in his hands."

Bard's eyes flashed to Kili for a moment before he begrudgingly opened the door for the dwarves and Emelia to file in. Once they were all inside he shut the door behind them and gestured over to the table at the far side of the common room, where his daughters were busy setting the table for breakfast. Bain was sitting in one of the wooden chairs whittling a lumpy piece of wood over the low burning fire, flicking the shavings into the coals and watching them as they turned to ash. When he saw the dwarves he dropped the dull knife and stood up, moving around the table with a confused look on his face.

"What's happening Da?"

"Clear the table."

"Why are they back?" Sigrid asked, holding the last plate to her chest. "I thought they left for the mountain at dawn. The trumpeters heralded their departure."

"Clear the table, Sigrid."

Sigrid's brow narrowed into a straight, distrusting line, but she did what her father told her. She kept shooting looks at the dwarves and Emelia as she cleaned. Emelia noticed she paid extra attention to Kili and his now blood soaked leg. She paused, hands hovering over the dented metal cups that had been laid out. Emelia glanced back at the dwarves briefly before she moved towards the table. "Let me help you." She gathered the small bowl of salt and the little pot of honey and put them under her arm. She picked up the plate of hard looking biscuits and walked them over to the small kitchen. The dwarves hefted Kili up onto the table as soon as it was cleared, all hovering around him as Oin started cutting off the end of Kili's blood soaked pants.

Emelia noticed that Kili had ignored her when she told him to wrap her leg. She clenched her fists and looked away. Tilda appeared next to her, holding a lumpy pillow aloft towards Emelia. Emelia looked down at it and back at Kili before she felt her petty-self rearing its ugly head. She looked around the room, searching for something else to prop Kili's head up with. She smiled to herself when she saw the bag of walnuts. Hard and uncomfortable walnuts. She stalked across the room and grabbed the bag, smirking to herself. She moved up next to Kili's head and edge the bag underneath.

"Perhaps you could have found something more uncomfortable." Kili said disdainfully, glaring up at her. She shoved the bag harder under his head for good measure and walked away, spotting Bard standing in the little kitchen.

"What happened to him?" Bard was leaning against the butcher's block that served as their counter, watching the dwarves.

"He got shot in the leg by an orc." Emelia cleared a spot on the counter and jumped up. She realized half a moment after she did that it might be considered rude and immediately backtracked. "You don't mind?"

Emelia sat watching Kili as Oin, Fili, and Bofur worked on Kili. The day wore on and all she could do was watch and wait for them to make him better. She wished she could blink her eyes and magically transport Kili to an earth hospital, so that they could pump him full of antiseptics and cut out the infection before it had time to spread further. As much as she wished for it, it didn't happen and all she was left with was sitting and waiting.

Bard interrupted her thoughts after darkness had fallen once again. She had sat there for a whole day and not even realized it. "How long?"

"Right before we got here. When we were leaving Mirkwood the orcs that had been following us attacked."

"Orcs have been following you?"

"Well not me specifically. I imagine Thorin pissed them off at some point. He has a tendency to do that." Bard's sour expression turned dark. Emelia squinted at him, wondering just why Bard seemed to stiffen when she mentioned Thorin. "Kili had nothing to do with that."

"I'm not about to boot him out, Emelia." Emelia relaxed, sticking her hands underneath her thighs. Oin was asking for clean water and herbs that she had never heard of, sending Bard to his small kitchen cupboard. Sigrid fetched the water, while Tilda gathered up long sheets to tear up for bandages. Bard gave Oin what little herbs he had and moved back to stand next to Emelia, crossing his arms over his chest. "I heard that the Master spoke to you at great length during the feast."

"You weren't there?"

"No. I find those sorts of things to be trivial and tiring."

"I think I feel the same." She sat up straighter when Oin unwrapped Kili's leg, revealing the wound to the small room. "The Master is a supremely dislikable man."

"That he is." Bard rubbed his beard, eyeing the wound with a look that Emelia did not like. "That's begun to fester."

Emelia gripped the rough surface under hands, digging her fingers in. Kili was moaning, head lolling back and forth on the walnuts. Emelia felt guilty instantly. She jumped off the counter and moved back towards Kili, grabbing the discard pillow from the floor as she went. Fili was holding Kili down as Oin poured water mixed with herbs over the wounds, washing some of the blood and pus out and onto the table. The smell, which filled up the entire space, was horrendous and made Emelia wanted to vomit.

"Can you lift his head?" Emelia asked, peering over Fili's shoulder. Kili had lost all the color in his face and there was something blue creeping up his neck. She had been right, but at that moment she didn't feel like bragging. "Hey, Kee." He grunted and let out another pain filled moan. "I'm sorry about the walnuts. That was…" She trailed off when he screamed, sitting up and reaching for his leg. She looked down at his exposed leg and felt her nausea building. The skin was turning black around the wound. She had never seen something fester and now that she had, she wished she hadn't. How was someone supposed to survive something like that, something so disgusting?

The room shook and dust fell from the ceiling. Emelia stopped mid-sentence and looked up, eyes narrowing in confusion. She gripped the pillow in her hand, staring at the ceiling, waiting to see if it would happen again. The first shake silenced the room, while the second that followed only a few moments later sent Bard's family into a panic. "What on earth?"

"That's coming from the mountain." Bain said, moving away from the window. His eyes were wide and scared looking. "It's the dragon, isn't it?"

"Are we going to die?" Tilda had tears in her eyes that Emelia thought she might mirror soon enough. "We're going to die!" Tilda voice started rising in volume as the floor shook even harder.

We're all going to die.

Emelia closed her eyes, hands shaking, and tried her best to prepare herself for what was about to come.

We're all going to die.

The words seemed to hang heavy in the air.

We're all going to die.

I have not words. I am truly sorry to all my readers for the ridiculously long gap. No excuses, just profuse apologies. I have to say I wrote this seven times and it never felt quite right, but oh well. You win some, you lose some. It was always going to be filler any way. There is only one more chapter until I go on hiatus and it's full of action and angst. Emelia and Kili are obviously not in a good place right now, even after locking lips a time or two ;)

I hope you guys arent as disappointed by this as I am. I promise next chapter will be better! (It would have to be, I think)

Anyway, reviews are seriously the best motivation there is!