12: Slow Your Breath Down
For the first time since they had set foot in it, complete silence descended over the arena. Kíli's target had slumped forward in his seat, double chin slack and watery eyes empty, unseeing. The crowd found its voice again, but where before it had sounded to Tauriel like a roaring ocean, it now resembled the panicked buzzing of a beehive threatened in its safety.
Tauriel took the few steps necessary to bring her to Kíli's side. If those were, as she suspected, their final moments, then she wanted to spend them as close to him as possible. He was still staring up at the viewers' ranks with his chin jutting out in defiance, but did not pull away when she slipped her hand into his. The welts on her palms stung as he squeezed her fingers, but she squeezed right back, welcoming the pain as a reminder that, for now, they were still here, still alive.
Above them, Gansukh had jumped into action and was leaning over the edge of the arena, barking out orders in his native tongue. Several hatches in the walls of the arena dropped open at once and guards swarmed the fighting ground. Tauriel saw no point in resisting—they were severely outnumbered and unarmed. The only thing she did refuse to do was to release her hold on Kíli's hand. To her surprise, she was permitted to hold onto him as they were being shepherded out of the arena, the guards forming an impenetrable circle around them.
Kíli tugged her even closer against his side as they walked, his eyes restlessly scanning their surroundings. The buzzing of the crowd had slowly transgressed from confused into angry, and Tauriel felt eager to escape back into the darkness and relative quiet of the corridors inside the vessel's bowels, even if she couldn't know what fresh horrors might yet await them there.
At the far end of the arena, a gate had been opened which was larger than the small hatches scattered around the walls. With the guards still encircling them, they stepped through the gate, leaving the cries and hisses, the roars and shouts behind. Tauriel had not expected to simply be taken back to their regular cells, not after what had just happened. Still, she was surprised when their journey did not take them very deeply into the depths of the moving fortress at all and both she and Kíli found themselves pushed into a room similar to the one the guards had taken her to before the fight. Only, where the other room had been mostly empty, this one contained a clutter of old barrels and crates stacked haphazardly on top of one another.
Unable to hold herself back any longer, Tauriel whirled around and opened her mouth to ask the guards what they had been brought in here for, but barely made it past the first syllable before the door was slammed in her face. The sound of a bolt being shoved into place on its other side echoed loudly through the small room. Her hands came up to rest against the splintery wood, her head bent forward under the weight of the frustration she struggled to hold inside.
For a few seconds, she just stayed like this while she took a couple of steadying breaths. She was reluctant to turn around and put her anger on display before Kíli, afraid that he would see the misery in her eyes and misinterpret it as her blaming him for the way things had unfolded back in the arena. Apparently, though, he did not need to see her face to draw all the wrong conclusions.
"You are angry with me," he spoke into the silence. It wasn't voiced as a question.
Tauriel turned, then, keeping her back pressed against the door behind her for some measure of support. He looked... not defeated, no. He still exuded that air of stubborn defiance. He did, however, appear resigned. Resigned to their fate and to whatever he had read into her silence.
"I'm not," she blurted out. His eyes flickered to hers, brows pulled together in a slight frown of disbelief. "I am angry," she amended, "about a lot of things done by a lot of people. But not you. Never you."
The lines on his forehead instantly smoothed themselves out as he briefly closed his eyes, his back straightening as if an unseen weight had been lifted from his shoulders. In a few strides he was in front of her, not touching her, but close enough that she could smell the scent of sweat and blood clinging to his skin, as well as something else underneath, something that was purely and unmistakably him.
"I know it wasn't the smartest thing to do," he said, breaking eye contact to duck his head. "But just watching them sit there and gorge themselves on the pain they inflict on us and so many others before us. . . I just couldn't not do it. And now I've made everything even worse for us. For you."
Tauriel shook her head, both hands coming up to rest lightly on Kíli's shoulders. "I do not believe that. In the end, what difference does it make? We both went in with the conviction that we would not do what they demand of us, regardless of the consequences. There was never much hope that they would show mercy, was there? As things stand, I am grateful that we did not just go down without putting up a bit of a fight. You made sure of that."
Kíli gave a humorless chuckle. "I suppose I did, didn't I?"
"Also," she said when he still would not quite look at her, "you are the reason I get to return this to you, where it belongs."
She reached into her waistband of her leggings and retrieved his rune stone from it, briefly tightening her fingers around it before pressing it into his palm. She moved her hand back to his shoulder while he held his stone for a moment before carefully slipping it into his shirt pocket. "Thank you," he said, his voice both quiet and sincere.
He finally raised his head, one corner of his mouth lifted in a soft smile. Their eyes met and the awareness of how close they were did some very strange things to Tauriel's insides. There are no bars here, a devious voice inside her mind whispered. Nothing to hold you back.
She tried to silence that voice and was mostly successful at doing so. However, once the thought had entered her mind, it was already too late to stop her fingers from tightening ever so slightly against Kíli's shoulders. She meant to pull back, meant to release her hold onto him entirely, for this was most certainly not the place and even more certainly not the time for such things.
What happened instead was something entirely different.
Maybe it was the grip of her hands onto his shoulders or maybe it was just their general proximity to each other. Either way, she witnessed the exact moment that Kíli's mood shifted to match hers, his eyes widening as his pupils dilated. Hands that had been clenched at his sides before now came up to rest on her hips, sliding around to her lower back as he took the half step necessary to align their bodies. Now Tauriel did release her hold onto his shoulders, but only to wrap her arms around his neck and draw him in even further.
This was—oh. This was something very different to exchanging hesitant, tender touches through a set of unyielding, cruel bars.
Tauriel had the curious sensation of just melting into Kíli, the forces which held her body together and separate from the matter surrounding her quivering with her need to get closer, closer, closer. Kíli's lips found hers with a sigh that was produced by either her, or him, or the both of them, and they kissed deeply, each so very eager to give and so very greedy to take.
Kíli leaned into her more heavily, the door firm at her back as her body was pressed into it. The contact with the wood reminded her quite unpleasantly of the wounds the Warg's claws had left on her back, but she was not about to bring this fact to Kíli's attention. Not when his touch was doing things to her that far outweighed any discomfort she experienced.
One of Kíli's hands left her waist, trailing downward over the curve of her buttock and then lower, until he was able to grip her thigh. He hoisted her leg up, draping it around his waist, and canted his hips forward. Tauriel was so startled by the shameless moan which spilled from her lips at the delicious friction this new angle created that she almost lost her balance.
A shrill voice inside her head squealed its indignation at this latest development and saw fit to remind her that she ought to be investing her energy into finding a way out of this most recent prison of theirs. Then Kíli's lips dropped from her lips to the side of her neck where he attacked her sensitive skin with renewed vigor and whatever voices she may have heard in her mind stuttered to an abrupt silence. It was not as if they had anywhere to go, even if they did manage to leave the room.
Her head fell back against the unrelenting wood behind her as a string of words spilled from her lips. "I cannot—There's no—I need—"
Kíli's tongue darted out to flick her earlobe and the one leg on which she currently supported herself nearly gave away. Her arms tightened around his shoulders. "I simply wish we had more time," she lamented, giving up on any more elaborate explanations of the way he made her feel.
Kíli's sigh was a hot gust against the top of her collarbone as he rested his forehead on her shoulder. "As do I. The things I'd—there's just so much I'd still like to do. With you. Mahal, to you, if I'm completely honest."
Just his words were enough to send a delicious tingling down her spine, her breath hitching in her throat. She ran her hands up his shoulders, his neck, until she was able to cup his face in her palms and guide his lips back to hers. Their kiss was no less deep than before, but where a few moments ago all their actions had been driven by an almost mad sense of urgency, gentleness now governed their touch. There might not be enough time to do all—or any—of the things they longed for, but there was time for this.
When they broke apart it was only far enough for their foreheads to rest together, their breath mingling in what little space there was between their bodies. They didn't speak. For some things, to say them now it was too soon, for others it was already too late.
The thump of heavy footsteps in the corridor outside made them pull away from each other. Kíli's fingers briefly tightened around hers before he stepped back, taking up a defensive stance as far away from the door as the small room permitted. Tauriel mirrored his position, standing close enough to him to feel the heat radiating off his body through her thin layer of clothes.
The door was yanked open from the outside, admitting a single person. Tauriel blinked in surprise. She had expected a whole squad of guards assigned to deliver their punishment rather than. . .
"You," she breathed, her eyes narrowing in suspicion.
Gansukh closed the door with deliberation. Again, Tauriel could discern no weapons about his person. She would have bet, however, that the corridor outside was populated with guards ready to step in at the slightest threat to their master.
"You sound displeased," Gansukh drawled, "when you ought to rejoice that it is me who has come and not one of the many who are clamoring to see you drawn and quartered and your remains fed to the brothers and sisters of the Wargs you just killed."
Tauriel balked at the vivid, violent image, but was steadied by Kíli's hand closing around her elbow. "How come you are not joining your people in that plea, then? Neither of us did as you demanded, after all," he asked their visitor. If Tauriel had sought any sort of confirmation that Kíli, too, had received a personal offer from Gansukh before their fight, this was it.
Gansukh gave a cold chuckle and leaned against the door, his arms crossed in front of his chest. "That is an understatement, I believe."
If that had been a bait to get Kíli to defend his actions, he did not take it. "Fine. Why this unexpected grant of clemency, then?"
Tauriel was torn between wanting to kick Kíli in the shins for his exaggerated display of stubbornness and wanting to kiss him for staying true to his nature, no matter what. Seeing that neither seemed entirely appropriate in their current situation, she settled on a somewhat strangled sigh. This, in turn, earned her a sharp glance from Gansukh.
"You ought to take a leaf out of your companion's book," he commented to Kíli. "She, at least, seems to acknowledge that what you did was not particularly wise."
"Mhmm, not wise, no," Kíli agreed. "Still, not unwise enough to get myself killed in return, if you are to be believed."
"Ah, no, now that would be a pity, wouldn't it?" Gansukh returned, adding a wink in Tauriel's direction that sent a shiver down her spine before returning his steely gaze to Kíli. "No, you are much too useful to me to be dispensed with so carelessly. You see, your little act of rebellion solved a problem for me which has been bothering me for weeks. Not in the way I imagined it would be solved, I admit, but I can work around that."
A sideways glance at Kíli showed him with a puzzled frown on his face. This conversation was not going the way either of them had expected.
"Solved your problem? How?" Kíli asked.
Gansukh took his time to reply. "The time of powerful kings in the Eastern realms has long passed. Tribal leaders like me have taken their place and many believe that uniting the tribes under the promise of wealth and glory will suffice to aid us in conquering the West. If only they would care to take history into consideration, however, they would see that the sort of triumph they dream of can only be achieved at the hands of true, undisputed leadership. At the hands of a king."
"And you aspire to be that king." Tauriel thought she was beginning to have an idea of where this was going.
An unpleasant smile stretched Gansukh's lips. "I have told you before, I do not approve of false modesty. I am destined to lead my people to greatness—even if the truth in that is yet obscured to some of them."
"One of which Kíli just disposed of for you."
Once again, having her captor's complete attention rest on her unsettled something deep inside Tauriel. Whatever this man wanted them to think he was, he continued to be one thing above all others—dangerous.
"Mhhm, I have said it before, and I have no qualms to do so again—you have a sharp mind. Like a blade glinting in the darkness just before it takes its first strike. You, on the other hand," he added, turning to Kíli, "are a flame kindled in dry grass. Impossible to predict, but certain to be destructive." He clapped his hands, once. "Together we shall achieve great things."
"What precisely gives you the impression we would participate in any of your plans?" Kíli's glare was scorching and most would have recoiled from it. Not Gansukh, though. If anything, his unpleasant smile grew even wider.
"That is the beauty of it," he said. "You do not have to do anything to ensure my rise to power. The mere fact that as of today, you, strong and capable as you may be, are mine to do with as I wish, will cause those who still doubt me to reconsider their stance."
"Yours to do with as you wish?" Tauriel asked over a sudden ringing in her ears.
"Of course." Gansukh angled his body towards her. "Once we reach Riavod, all the goods we've acquired on our travels will be distributed among the leaders of the tribes. I have been bidding for the pair of you for days now. The only one who could have outbid me was Bratakh, but you—" he nodded at Kíli, "kindly took care of that issue for me. And after the shocking display back out there, I doubt anyone will challenge my claim. You may be strong, but for most of those cowardly fools you will seem like too much of a risk."
Tauriel coiled her fists and forced herself not to react to the fact that all those held captive by Gansukh and his people had just been referred to as goods to be distributed at will. She and Kíli exchanged a worried glance. It seemed that by trying to break out of this endless cycle of being subjected to the perverse whims of their captors, they had in fact roped themselves even tighter into the bonds which held them prisoners.
Kíli was the first to break eye contact. "So what's going to happen to us once we reach Riavos?" he asked, managing to sound as if he did not really want to hear the answer. Tauriel couldn't fault him for that, for neither did she.
"Riavod," Gansukh corrected him with a sly grin. "Well, as I have explained to you both before, that depends almost entirely on you and the choices you make. You can choose to have a good life in which you lack almost nothing, or you can choose to make things very. . . difficult for yourselves." He rubbed his hands together as if they had just arrived at a particularly satisfying conclusion after a long discussion. "Well, we still have at least a day left before we disembark. Use that time to make sure your eventual choice is the right one."
He turned to leave.
"We are staying in here?" Tauriel cast another look about the small room. Whatever its original purpose, clearly it wasn't intended to serve as a cell of any kind.
"Ah, yes. Well, until we reach Riavod and the protection my estate offers, it would be safest if your whereabouts were not widely known amongst our fellow travelers. Especially after what happened today. Don't worry," he added, wholly misinterpreting the concerned glance shared between Kíli and Tauriel, "my most trusted guards are right outside that door."
With that he drifted toward said door and disappeared through it without another word of explanation or farewell, the sound of the bolt being shoved into place from the outside echoing ominously in the strained silence he left behind.
After a few moments, Kíli ran a not entirely steady hand through his already messy curls.
"Well, fuck," he said.
Tauriel shot him a sidelong glance. "We may have played right into his hands, there," she conceded.
With his back against the wall, Kíli slid down onto the floor, keeping his legs propped up in front of him to rest his head upon. "And it's all my fault, isn't it? Here I thought I was being the rebel when instead I did what he wanted me to all along. Pathetic."
That last bit he spat with such venom that Tauriel's eyes widened in equal amounts of surprise and dismay. She squatted down in front of Kíli, wrapping her hands around his knees after merely a brief moment of hesitation.
"You could not have known things would turn out like this. And besides, all other ways I can think of how this might have ended are equally undesirable. If not worse."
Kíli lifted his head, but not, as Tauriel had hoped, to meet her gaze. Instead, he knocked his skull back into the wall with a dull thunk. "Out there I did not think of any outcomes at all. Once again, I acted rashly, recklessly. This is what—this is exactly why—"
He clamped his mouth shut, trapping whatever words he had been about to utter inside. Tauriel thought she could guess at their meaning anyway. "You still reproach yourself for not being with your people when they reach their destination. When they reach Erebor."
Kíli's head jerked forward so abruptly that he winced and raised a hand to his neck. "How did you—when did I—" He seemed a fair bit flustered, color rising into his cheeks.
Tauriel smiled, hoping that he would see that there lurked no danger in her knowing his secret. "It was not that difficult to put together, after all. I recall those days when dragon fire illuminated the skies in the Northeast well enough."
His gaze turned from worried to awed, as if maybe he had just realized that she must have walked this earth far longer than he had. "Were you ever there? At Erebor, I mean?"
"I was not." She shook her head, one corner of her mouth lifting in a rueful smile. "I would have been considered too inexperienced then to accompany my king on one of his rare journeys beyond the borders of his kingdom. And even if that had not been so, I doubt he would have chosen to take me with him."
"Really? Why?"
Tauriel lowered herself fully to the ground, her legs folded to one side. Her hands slid from Kíli's knees down to his ankles, not quite holding onto him anymore, but not letting go either. "I suspect he always knew something like this would happen to me one day."
"Being locked up in some deranged version of a ship with a random group of strangers while being forced to fight against the foulest creatures Middle-earth has to offer?"
She chuckled and ducked her head. "No, not quite. I think. . . I believe he knew that eventually something would draw me away, out into the world. By keeping me inside the forest, he sought to eliminate any sort of. . . temptation."
"Temptation, huh? I'd quite like to be of service in that regard, if you don't mind me saying so." Kíli's suggestive grin and the way he quirked up a teasing eyebrow made her want to shove at him and kiss him in equal measures.
She settled for sliding around to settle next to him with her back against the wall and her side pressed against his. As long as she was careful to only touch the wall with her shoulder blades, the Warg's scratches on her lower back did not bother her too much. They would require her attention, soon, but for now she was content to remain as she was. Reaching down, she interlaced her fingers with Kíli's, pleased how much easier doing so had become when mere days ago it would have been all but unthinkable.
"Look at it like this, perhaps," she said, reverting to the topic of their conversation before his foray into her relationship with her king. "Once we are free of this prison, even if not free in the true sense, your chances at making your escape and heading back west will be much better."
She felt Kíli's eyes rest on her as if he held an internal debate and wondered what it might be. Eventually, he settled down again and squeezed her fingers, careful to avoid putting too much pressure on the angry, red welts on her palms. "Riavod," he said, trying out the foreign name on his tongue. "I confess that I do not know the first thing about it."
Tauriel decided to let the fact that he was obviously not sharing what troubled him, but opting for a safer topic instead, slide for now. Instead, she tried to recall as much as she could of the maps she had studied in the deepest recesses of her king's library, feeling guilty like a child that had snuck into the kitchen for a treat despite the adults having already told her no. He never went as far as to say it outright, but she knew Thranduil did not like for her—or anyone—to spend too much time thinking about the world beyond their real.
"All I remember is that it is a port on the shores of the sea of Rhûn," she said.
"A port, hm? Well, that explains at least how they knew to build this monstrosity." Kíli knocked the knuckles on his free hand against the wall beside him.
Tauriel tried a soft smile, but felt it turn into a frown halfway through. "It likely makes me a terrible person, but I am at least a little bit excited at the prospect of seeing with my own eyes lands which I have only ever seen described in writing."
"There's no shame in that." Kíli rolled his head to the side until his temple rested lightly against her shoulder. "When our party tried for the pass in the Misty Mountains, we nearly got killed by a pair of stone giants. It was cold, and miserable, and dangerous, but still I couldn't help but be in complete awe of everything around us. I grew up in the mountains, but I'd never seen anything as glorious as that."
"I have always wished to go to the sea," Tauriel blurted out before she had time to reconsider her words. "Rhûn will not be the same as the Great Sea, I am aware, but it may well be the closest I will ever get to experiencing the sort of freedom I imagine standing at the shore with miles and miles of water stretching out in front of me would bring."
"It won't." Kíli ran his thumb across the back her hand. "Won't be the closest you get to being granted your true wish, I mean. We'll go to the Great Sea, together, after all this. Because it is everything you ever imagined it to be, and more. And I want to be there with you when you first see it."
That no longer truly nameless thing swelled in Tauriel's chest and she briefly closed her eyes, willing her breath not to hitch, her fingers not to twitch in Kíli's grasp.
After all this. . .
To think, to hope that there was an after for them, that they would get a chance to take what had grown between them and just. . . just live it and see where it took them was too much, too risky, too selfish. Even if they were to somehow both make it out of this whole mess alive, there were countless reasons why they should not be together. More than there were that they should be, perhaps.
And yet. . . and yet. The mere knowledge that Kíli wanted there to be a life for them in which they got to travel the world at each other's side, that he pictured himself by her side a distant way down the road from now, made her feel warm, wanted. Was that what had been on his mind, before, when she had talked about him returning to his people? That the end of this unfortunate adventure did not necessarily need to be the end of them as well?
Shifting her body around so that she faced him, she took a firm hold of the courage which had driven her actions before and reached down to cup his jaw in her palm, her fingers sliding over his stubble as she touched her lips to his.
Their kiss was deep and not without heat, but where before they had been driven by the desperate attempt to make the most of what might very well have been their final moments together, they now took their time. And when Kíli eventually laid down and pulled her with him, her head coming to rest on his chest as they got some much needed rest, she found herself able to relax against him and to allow them both some time to recover from the turmoil of the last few hours. They were still far from safe and it was impossible to tell what dangers lurked on the next part of their (involuntary) journey. For now, though, they were allowed a momentary reprieve from the constant need for vigilance and Tauriel fully intended to make the most of that.
A/N: Chapter title inspired by the song of the same name by Future of Forestry.
