Chapter XII

When Tauriel regained consciousness, her face was wet. She wondered if she had been crying in her sleep and struggled to remember, to focus her thoughts on what had happened.

For what felt like forever she had been trapped inside her own mind, searching for something. No, searching for someone. Who was it that she had been looking for so desperately? Kíli. Yes, of course. Her dark haired, dwarven lover. He had been there with her, taking her to heights she had never known. Only to be cruelly ripped away from her, leaving her to wander about in darkness, searching, but never finding.

When she opened her eyes, she saw a young elf-maid standing above her, wiping her face with a damp cloth. So that was where the wetness on her face came from.

Tauriel lifted her hand, slowly, sluggishly, and closed her fingers around the other elf's wrist, stilling her movement. She tried to speak, but her throat was so dry that all she managed was a rasping sound.

The young she-elf smiled at her and, loosening Tauriel's grasp on her wrist without much effort, reached for a cup filled with water. She held it to Tauriel's lips and allowed her to drink from it in small sips. The cool water felt deliciously cool as it soothed the dryness of her throat. While she drank, Tauriel looked at the young woman, trying to remember if she knew her. She had light brown hair that was tied into an intricate pattern of braids, coming down to her waist. Her eyes were blue with some fascinating specks of gold scattered around the iris. Her face was gentle, like that of a person born to care for others, to help them when she was needed. She did not appear to be a threat, but a stranger nonetheless.

Exhausted from the small effort of drinking from the cup, Tauriel let her head fall back on the pillow. "Who are you?" she asked, her voice much clearer now, even though it still sounded foreign and hollow to her own ears.

"My name is Nimwen," her companion responded. "I was sent to look after you by Prince Legolas. I am a healer."

Legolas.

Suddenly it all came rushing back to her. He had poisoned her, laced her drink with some substance to make her fall asleep in order to prevent her from leaving Mirkwood. That treacherous little—

She tried to sit up, nearly knocking over the cup of water that Nimwen still held in her hand. The healer quickly put the cup aside and moved to restrain her patien. But that was not necessary. The sudden change in position had caused all blood to drain from Tauriel's head, making her feel dizzy and faint, her vision blurring most nauseatingly. Deflated, she sank back into her pillow, closing her eyes against the uncomfortable sensation.

"What did he do to me?" she whispered weakly, looking at the young woman beside her bed from beneath half-closed lids.

Nimwen looked away guiltily. Then she produced a small flask from a fold in her light blue dress and showed it to Tauriel. It contained a thick liquid that was almost black with a slightly reddish shade to it. "I call it nightleaf. It's my… my specialty."

Tauriel just looked at her blankly.

Nimwen sat down on the edge of the bed and explained. "You see, this is a powerful tincture that I brew. It makes the one who takes it fall into a deep sleep that can last for a long time – depending on the dose. I mostly use it when someone has been so badly injured or has fallen so ill that the strain of simply being conscious is already too much. It gives them time to heal." She paused. "Most of the other healers do not agree with this kind of treatment. I think the thought of, in essence, overpowering all senses of an Elf and forcing them to shut down, scares them. That is why you have probably not heard of my little potion before."

"But I was neither sick nor injured," Tauriel protested, even though she knew that it was pointless to do so now. What was done was done.

Nimwen bit her lip. "Well, Legolas knew of the nightleaf because I used it on a soldier in his command many years ago. He sought me out a few days ago, asking for a few drops of it to… to help a friend, he said. I refused to give it to him without being able to first make a diagnosis of my own, but he… insisted." She blushed fiercely.

Tauriel huffed in indignation. Legolas knew how to work his charm on females—and males, on occasion—when he really needed something.

The young healer looked at her apologetically. "He seemed so very worried about you. He made me promise not to leave your side for even a moment after you… well, you know."

Tauriel turned her head away, hurt at being set up like this. "How long was I gone?" She dreaded the answer, but she had to know.

"Four days," Nimwen answered in a low voice.

Tauriel closed her eyes to prevent the tears that were gathering there from falling. Too long. It was too late now. Even if she did not feel so terribly weak and were able to leave for Erebor right away, she would never arrive there in time. Maybe Kíli was already gone by now.

"Tell me, please," she asked Nimwen in a resigned voice. "Have there been any news of the battle? The one that Legolas rode to?"

The young she-elf frowned, obviously troubled by the topic. She rose and walked over to the window, looking out at the sky. It looked to be around midday. "No, nothing yet," she replied. "But for two nights in a row now the sky has been on fire."

Nimwen remained at the window, hugging herself. Oh Legolas, Tauriel thought, if only you could see what you have done to the poor girl, promising her who knows what. But she also sympathized with the younger woman. After all, her own heart, too, ached for someone who was fighting in that battle so many miles away.

She let her eyes drift closed, half wishing for another dose of Nimwen's strange potion. Wishing that she could simply go back to sleep and find that place in her mind once more where she could be with Kíli, where she could feel his lips on her skin and his breath in her hair, fingers clutching, holding, caressing.

Tauriel gazed at the woods and the sky beyond her window tiredly. It seemed as if nowadays she could hardly muster the strength to keep her eyes open. And yet she could not sleep. If only she could, even if only to escape this unexpected, depressing turn that her life had taken lately.

She had left her bed two days ago, but still she had not recovered enough to stand or let alone move about for more than a couple of minutes. Nimwen assured her that it was normal for nightleaf to have this lingering effect on an elf's body, but Tauriel thought that she caught a hint of worry in the young healer's eyes despite her assurances.

Idly, she wondered what Thranduil had been told to explain her absence from her duty that now lasted for almost a full week. As far as Tauriel knew, no one had been there to see her or to inquire about her. Except for Nimwen of course, who faithfully remained by her side for most of the time. Tauriel guessed that between themselves, Legolas and Nimwen must have devised an excuse to tell the king. It had crossed her mind to ask Nimwen more than once, but each time she had found that she did not truly care for the answer. It was not as if it would have made a difference to her anyway.

She felt so old. As if every single one of the several hundreds of years she had spent wandering this earth was weighing down her body, her spirits, her mind. For the first few hours after she had woken from her drug induced sleep she had raged inside, cursed Legolas for his treacherous actions. Her heart had wept with longing for the young dwarf prince who, in the physical word, was so far out of her reach and yet ever present in her mind. While her body refused to cooperate, her mind had remained set on following through with her original plan of leaving Mirkwood to join the Dwarves of Erebor. To join Kíli. If he would have her.

But then something had changed, as if a plug had been pulled and all her anger, all her longing, her passion and determination had seeped out of her in one long sigh. One minute she had been mostly fine, plotting her escape and planning her journey to a place she had never thought she would visit one day, but then, suddenly, something inside her had snapped, some part of herself that had sustained her, had kept her going, had been broken, destroyed.

She had let out a gasp as a sharp pain had radiated from her chest into every inch of her body. Nimwen had rushed to her side immediately, smoothing back her hair from her forehead, asking what was wrong, how she could help. Tauriel had shrugged her off quickly, telling her it was nothing, she was fine. But deep inside, she had known that she would never be fine again. That somewhere, on a battlefield many, many miles away, the one whom she had lost her heart to had been struck down.

Nimwen had tried to make her comfortable, had offered drink, food, medicine, comforting touches. But Tauriel knew there was no remedy for a broken heart.

Instinctively, she had slipped one hand beneath her blanket, searching for her lover's token, the runestone that was all she had left of him now. Grief had threatened to overwhelm her, when she realized that it was not where she had put it—the pockets of her shirt lay flat and empty against her chest.

"Where is it?" she had whispered, causing her appointed nurse to look at her in confusion.

"Where is what, dear?" Nimwen had asked, puzzled. "What are you looking for?"

"The stone," Tauriel had replied, her voice urgent. "What did you do with it?"

Nimwen had furrowed her brow in sorrow. "I am afraid I do not know what you speak of. I haven't touched any of your possessions, and there is no stone or anything similar here as far as I can see."

Tauriel had frowned. Legolas. He had to have removed it from her pocket. Why couldn't he at least let her have the small comfort of this small token, something to hold on to, to seek comfort in?

Paradoxically, this realization had been what had helped to her to keep it together, to not fall apart at that very moment. Somehow the notion had manifested itself inside her mind that as long as she still had hope to recover the stone Kíli had given her, she could keep going, keep hoping that this would all end well.

So she had settled down to wait for Legolas' return to the halls of Mirkwood, pushing everything else as far from her mind as possible for the time being.

Listlessly, she stared at the clouds moving across the sky without really seeing them. Nimwen had made herself comfortable in a cushioned chair opposite hers. On a small table in front of her, she had aligned several flasks, bottles and small jars, and was busy chopping up various plants, herbs, roots and the like, filling one small container after the other. Tauriel had long given up on figuring out the system Nimwen was following in her work, most of the time it seemed as if she was combining ingredients at random, just to see what would come of it.

To her own surprise, Tauriel did not mind Nimwen's continuous presence at all. She was a quite unobtrusive person and Tauriel thought that, had the circumstances been different, she might have made and effort to become friends with the younger elf. As it was, Nimwen being there helped her retain as much of her sanity as possible, to not lose herself in the dark corridors that seemed to open themselves up in her mind nowadays.

Tauriel's eyes had been following the path of a small bird flitting across the sky in front of her window for some time when Nimwen drew in a sharp breath, jumping up from her chair abruptly and almost knocking over some of the open flasks on the table before her.

Even with her mind numbed by grief, Tauriel did not even have to turn her head to know what had startled her new friend.

"Legolas," she said, the hollowness of her own voice strage but not shocking to herself anymore.

Inclining her head slightly, she saw him hesitate on the threshold to her room before daring to step inside. He nodded to Nimwen, gracing her with a small smile that was obviously intended to thank her for her service and dismiss her simultaneously.

Blushing fiercely, the young she-elf gathered most of her things together. "I—I am glad to see you alive and well," she stammered, briefly stopping in front of Legolas to give a small curtsy before leaving the room in a hurry.

Tauriel felt Legolas come up behind her. She searched around inside herself to see if she could conjure some of the anger that she had felt towards him back up to throw it in his face. She was mildly annoyed to find that she lacked all energy to do so.

"Sit," she thus simply said, gesturing towards the chair that Nimwen had just left. "Let us speak."

Legolas stepped around her cautiously, obviously still expecting some sort of emotional outbreak from her. She saw his eyes widen in shock when his eyes fell upon her face. Interesting. She had to look as bad as she felt to elicit this kind of reaction from him.

He did not take the chair offered to him, but instead chose to lean against the wall beside her window, crossing his arms in front of him. "I only did what I thought was best for you, Tauriel. I could not allow you to throw your life away like that," he said, defending himself against an accusation that had not been made.

Tauriel closed her eyes, unwilling to lapse into a discussion of what was and wasn't right for her. None of this mattered now.

"The stone," she whispered. "Give it back to me."

She opened her eyes to find Legolas staring at her in bewilderment.

"What stone?" he asked.

"The runestone." Both her hands and her voice were shaking. Now that Legolas was here, she could feel her laboriously maintained control slipping fast. "It was in my pocket. You took it away from me."

Legolas frowned, now looking genuinely worried by her elliptic statement. When he noticed that she was breathing heavily, he left his spot near her window and crossed the short distance to where Tauriel was slumped in her chair to kneel down before her.

"I do not know what you speak of, Tauriel, and am sorry to find you unwell. Please believe me when I say that I did not take anything from you," he said, his voice gentle. "What did the stone look like? Do you want me to search for it?"

Tauriel did not answer him and simply went back to staring out of the window. Now there truly was nothing to hold onto anymore, her mind a black abyss with no light to guide her from it as she felt herself slipping away further from reality, from her life.

"Kíli is dead," she said, not phrasing her words as a question because she already knew the answer.

Legolas lowered his head, staring at the ground with his lips pressed firmly together. If she had been looking for a confirmation, this would have sufficed to tell her that she was right. After a couple of seconds, he rose, not quite looking at her when he said, "I have to go speak with my father now. I came straight here upon my return and I cannot let him wait any longer. We will talk more, later."

Tauriel did not react.

"You are not well," Legolas said. "I will send Nimwen to keep you company."

"No," Tauriel said quickly. "Please, I want to be alone for a little while."

Legolas hesitated, but then nodded and left her room swiftly, as if he could not bear to be near her any longer.

Tauriel remained where she was, her eyes fixed on a random point on the horizon, unseeing. She did not know what she had expected. A miracle of some sort, maybe. Something that would make the pain go away. But now she knew that no such miracle would come and that she would have to go on existing with every fiber of her heart burning with grief and despair, poisoning her mind, making her lose her sanity eventually. Because while her spirit was slowly dying, she knew that her body would not. She was faced with an eternity of heartache.

Slowly, the fingers of her right hand closed around a small object in her lap, which, several hours before, she had hidden under the blanket draped over her body in an unobserved moment. She pulled out the small flask and looked at the dark liquid inside, the reddish glow of which was more pronounced in the light of the setting sun.

Maybe there was a way to escape an eternity full of suffering. A way to set her mind free from her body, to allow it to travel to places that were not accessible to her in the physical world. To be with someone whose face she would never be able to gaze upon again in this life.

Drawing a shaky breath, Tauriel uncorked the small, crystalline container.

Legolas heard himself answer question after question that his father asked him, reporting the losses their kin had suffered during the battle that they now called Battle of the Five Armies, recounting the details of the tentative alliance that had been formed with the Dwarves and their king.

His mind, however, was with the she-elf he had just left—left in a state of obvious despair, overwhelmed by a grief that she seemed unable to express. Grief that Legolas, as her friend, could have cured, but had not.

Because he knew that Kíli lived. Knew so for a fact because it had been his own hands that had saved him from a certain death, his own arrow that had ended the life of Bolg who had been about to finish what he had started at the gates of Mirkwood when he had shot the young dwarf with a Morgul arrow. He also knew that, while Kíli's injuries had not been exactly trivial, he was probably on the road to recovery by now, tended to by both dwarven healers and some of Legolas' own kin who had volunteered to stay behind and treat the wounded.

But despite the fact that Legolas knew all this, he had not managed to bring himself to say the words when Tauriel had, desolately, stated that the dwarf she had fallen for was dead. As Legolas had sought her out in her room, worried by what might await him there, his heart had wept at the state he found her in, at how pale her skin looked, her eyes listless, dark circles underneath, her red hair having lost its shine, the long tresses falling limply over her shoulders.

All he had been able to think about when he took in her appearance, was that if she were his she would not look like this. That she would glow, that her eyes would shine with laughter, everything about her an image of life itself. But instead her infatuation with the dwarf was slowly draining her, taking away all her happiness, all her zest for life.

And then, when she had uttered those words about Kíli with such utter conviction, a voice had piped up in Legolas' head, asking if it would not be better for her if she thought the dwarf dead, because maybe then she would be able to move on, to once more become the person he had come to care for so much.

So he had kept his mouth shut, allowing his dearest friend to go on thinking that her love was dead. Now, he tried to tell himself that it had been right to do so, that he was only acting with her best interests in mind. But if that was true, why did he feel so terribly guilty, so utterly miserable?

He inwardly shook his head at himself, the irony of his predicament not lost to him. He could have had this so much easier, could have simply stood by and watched Kíli be slain at the hands of the enemy. What was it that had had caused him to step in and save the insufferable dwarf's life instead?

Legolas had asked himself that question many times since, trying to convince himself that his actions had merely been motivated by his hatred for Bolg, who had managed to get away from him more than once before. But somewhere inside Legolas knew that there was more to this. That on some level, he had already accepted Tauriel's feelings for the dwarf, and had reacted instinctively, saving the one who held his friend's heart. Even if now he knew that she would never be his, he cared enough for her to want her to be happy nevertheless. And if her happiness depended on this one dwarf, he had no right to sit back and watch him get himself killed.

If there was any truth to this—an Legolas liked to think that there was, that he was not a spiteful person, but a loyal friend instead—then he had just made a terrible mistake. Against his better judgment, he had lied to Tauriel, breaking her heart. And he had lived for long enough to know what a broken heart could do to an elf.

"Legolas?"

Thranduil was looking at him with raised eyebrows and Legolas realized that he had fallen silent, breaking off his report in mid-sentence.

He stared at his father for a moment, hesitating.

"I am sorry father, but I have to go," he then said abruptly and turned around on his heel, heading for Tauriel's room.

His father was so perplexed that a few seconds passed before he called after him in outrage. "Legolas! We are not done here, yet!"

But Legolas refused to stop and hurried along the many paths and corridors lying between the throne room and Tauriel's quarters. When he was almost there, he almost ran into Nimwen as he turned a corner, the young she-elf wearing an expression of unmitigated panic on her face.

"Prince Legolas," she said breathlessly. "I was just coming to fetch you. Tauriel, she—she—"

"What? What did she do?" Legolas grabbed the young healer by her upper arms, his eyes widened in horror.

Tears welled up in Nimwen's eyes. "I'm so sorry, I did not realize that she took it from me, she must have done so when I was not looking.

"Took? Took what?" Legolas asked, confused.

Nimwen stared at him. "Nightleaf. It—there was only a little bit left in the bottle, but still enough to treat several elves. She took it all."

Legolas relaxed a little, relieved that Tauriel seemed to be here still, that she had not run off somewhere, getting herself in danger in her vulnerable state. He slid one of his hands down to Nimwen's elbow, guiding her back the way she had come from, towards Tauriel's room. "But then she is merely asleep, isn't she?"

"Yes…" Nimwen replied, hesitantly. "It is not just the amount that she took that worries me, but also the close succession of the two doses. I have never used that much of it on one single patient in such a short time, so I do not know if her sleep will merely be prolonged or if there might be other side effects."

They entered Tauriel's room and quickly closed the door behind them. They both gazed at the form of the sleeping Tauriel, who was stretched out on her bed, her long red hair fanned out around her head.

"At least she looks peaceful now," Nimwen whispered. "As if whatever it was that has haunted her cannot reach her anymore."

Shame made color rise in Legolas' cheeks and he evaded the young healer's gaze, the burden of the consequences of his thoughtless, selfish actions resting heavily on his shoulders. What had he done?