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“It’s a clear night, lad,” Balin ventures. His nightly visit to the infirm tent is nearly ended. “A fine night for a walk, perhaps.”
Kili shakes his head. “I need to stay here. In case—“
He stops himself; speaking his mind is the last thing he should be doing at this moment. Balin should not know that Kili has been listening for her every night since he’d woken in the tent. But it has been so long since he’s spoken her name aloud, and he misses the sound of it on his lips.
He misses her.
“In case Tauriel comes.”
Balin does not frown, as Kili had expected, nor does he shake his head. Instead, he just glances out the tent flap with the tiniest twinkle in his eye.
“I daresay you might find something quite worthwhile out in the open air, laddie. If you look.”
Kili squints at him.
“What are you about, Balin?”
Balin simply smiles, the corners of his eyes crinkling, and leaves the infirm tent. Kili sits for a while longer, but now that the idea of walking has been planted in his mind, it starts to take root. Stiffly, careful of his still-tender wound, he makes his way to the tent’s flap and outside.
The air is cool and crisp with the promise of spring to come. As he begins to walk Kili can detect a whiff of dragon fire on the breeze, still. He takes a deeper breath and smells metallic earth mingling with the stronger reek of leftover carnage. The Battle has seeped into the very ground around their home; it will be here, he knows, for a long time to come.
Kili thinks that he might understand Thorin’s melancholy a little better now. He walks on, trying not to think too hard. Fili might have teased him about that (“Thinking’s not often a problem you have, little brother”), but Fili is still unconscious in the infirm tent. He clings to life by a thread, Kili has been told. With each day that passes, that thread of hope begins to feel thinner.
He doesn’t realize he’s walked so far from the tent until he turns around and finds he can no longer see it. Sighing, he begins to turn back. But a distant flash stops him in his tracks, glinting in the corner of his vision. A flash of otherworldly red.
Her hair cuts through the deepening night; even under the cover of darkness it is an unmistakable flame. Kili’s stomach drops and he suddenly feels quite unsteady on his feet.
Tauriel.
She is gazing at the sky, her head tipped back and arms clasped behind her back. Kili hopes that her expression holds the same wonder he’d seen in Thranduil’s dungeon, when she’d first spoken to him of the starlight.
He must be making more noise than he’d intended as he moves toward her, because she turns around to face him. At the sight of him she seems to freeze, her entire body still except for the shaking hand she lifts to her mouth.
Kili keeps walking. The soreness around his wound is worsening by now and he should probably be resting it, but there she is, the vision from his fever dream come back to life again. Except this time there is no dragon and no army to stand between them.
He draws level with her. The moon casts a pale corona over her hair, and Kili feels his breath catch in his chest.
“Tauriel.” And oh, Mahal, her name sounds as sweet as ever.
“Oh, Kili,” she murmurs. “Oh, Kili.”
He had never dreamed that elves could weep. But Tauriel seems to crumple before him, sinking to her knees and winding her long, green-clad arms around his shoulders. Kili just watches, dumbfounded that such a being might shed tears over him. Eventually he gathers his wits and embraces her in return, stroking her beautiful hair and wondering if he might still be dreaming.
“You’re here,” he says, just as she is saying, “You’re alive.” They laugh, a little sheepishly, and Kili finds that for once he doesn’t have anything at all to say. He just stands there and looks at her, marveling at the movements of her hands on his face. She does not bother to dry her tears; they glisten in the starlight, making her seem even more like a fable come to life.
“Kili,” she breathes as her hands cradle his face. “I—“
But the rest of her words are swallowed up in the crushing kiss she gives him. There is nothing gentle or restrained—nothing elf-like, Kili thinks—about the force of her mouth as she brings it down over his, and Kili fights to remain standing up straight. Tauriel, for her part, cannot seem to stop moving; her hands leave his face to weave through his hair, and then down over his shoulders. When they break apart they rest their foreheads together, each sharing the same single breath.
“You have been here since the battle?”
Tauriel nods once, pressing her forehead back to his as soon as she finishes.
“They told me that you were awake and healing,” she says haltingly. “I wanted to come to you, but the dwarves insisted I stay away, for the time being. I thought…I feared perhaps that I had done enough interfering.”
Kili shakes his head; she looks so unsure, but he can be sure enough for the both of them. “If it brings us together, there could never be enough.”
“Easy enough for you,” she teases gently. “You are not the one doing the interfering.”
“I suppose not,” he concedes. “But now I am never leaving your sight again, as long as I live. You’ll never be rid of me, I swear it.”
“Presumptuous.” Tauriel smiles and leans into his cheek; Kili feels himself blushing like a dwarfling at the touch of her lips there. They fall silent as they watch the stars. Eventually he swallows and turns his hand over in invitation, and to his silent delight, she takes it. The feel of a cool, round stone in her hand startles him a little at first. But the surprise melts quickly away at the sensation of his promise warmed between their hands, Return to me pressed into his palm.