So Comes Snow After Fire

7.iii

Tauriel was beyond beautiful, Kíli thought. He had somehow never properly appreciated how very green her eyes were, like emeralds, or leaves with the sun behind them. As she gazed at him now, her eyes seemed to hold a thousand unspoken words; words that were, at last, about to spill out over her rose-colored lips and reveal, without a doubt, everything that she felt for him. She leaned over him, and her hair fell down, enveloping them both in a curtain of flame.

She said nothing, but she caressed her fingers over his cheek and brushed them through his hair.

"Tauriel," he said and reached out to her. He could find a way to unseal those lips...

The light shifted, and he saw that the ruddy glow around him was the light of his own fire, and that standing over him, where he had dozed in his chair, was his mother.

"Tauriel?" she questioned gently, sweeping his hair back from his face once more. "That's no name for a dwarf."

Kíli drew himself back up in the chair. There was not point in lying to her; she would know the truth soon enough, and better it came from him.

"She's an elf," he said slowly, half from reluctance and half because he was not yet fully awake.

"My dear boy, what am I to do with you?" Dís caught him in her arms, and then, to his surprise, she began to cry. Kíli closed his arms round her, suddenly feeling embarrassed and a little guilty. She hadn't cried when she'd arrived and found them all well. Was this news so much worse than hearing of the death they had all so recently faced? He would almost have preferred if she'd been angry with him. He hated knowing he'd made her cry.

"Mum..." he began, not really sure how to explain himself to her. All of the reasons he had rehearsed suddenly did not sound right. "She's not— We— Um."

"My dear heart, I nearly lost you." She said nothing else for a long while, but simply held him, her hands making soothing motions over his back, as if he were the one in need of comforting, not she.

At last she let go of him and sat back at his feet, her hands resting at his knees. Kíli brushed at her wet cheeks with his cuffs, though the gesture seemed helpless and awkward. But Dís smiled up at him.

"Innikh dê," she said.

"I did."

"You did," Dís affirmed.

Kíli knew he should return his token, the runestone she had given him to mark his promise. For the first time, he wondered if what he'd done would seem a betrayal.

"Mum, I gave my promise away." He hoped she would not cry again.

"To Tauriel?"

He nodded. "Forgive me. I should've—something else—but I had nothing—"

She stopped him with a gentle shake of her head.

"Kíli, it didn't matter who you came back for. I just needed you to remember that someone would always need you."

"Oh."

"Does she?"

Did elves, who would live forever, who could have everything, need people like him, who had maybe two hundred years to give? But Tauriel didn't have everything. He had known that when she had listened to him eagerly through prison bars, as if his stories of trade caravans and backwoods wonders could mean as much as anything she had known in her long life.

"She does," Kíli answered.

Dís nodded.

"Oh, Kíli, I am sorry," she said tenderly, laying her hand against his cheek. "I am sorry you should want something so impossible."

"Does it have to be?"

His mother shook her head, but Kíli couldn't guess if she were answering him or asking him to forget such pointless questions.

Kíli stood when she did, and she pulled him into one last hug.

"I love you," she told him.

"I love you, too, Mum," Kíli said and he kissed her cheek, all the while wondering how it was possible that loves could keep people apart as much as hate did.