A Better Place - The Hobbit Fanfiction

Seventeenth Entry - A Bath and a Bottle

Tauriel came for me the next morning and gave no indication of our melancholic exchange the night before. I had slept poorly and woken with my hands around the carved bars of my cell again. She smiled when she saw me, as she and the other elves—save for Legolas and his father—always did. She let me out and as happened as often as not I didn't know where we were going. She led me through a multitude of paths and caverns, and at an easier pace than Mirinel's brisk stride. After several minutes we reached a cavern filled with loose jumbled echoes and my eyes widened when I spied a clear blue pool carved out of the pale gold stone we walked upon. Etched stone arches soared above the pool and small nooks had been cut gracefully out of its flowing sides. Neatly folded linens were stacked on wooden shelves affixed to the smooth walls.

Before Tauriel even knew it I was out of my boots and in the water. She whirled just as I leapt from the edge and crashed down into the still water. When I resurfaced she was standing a pace back from the edge with her arms crossed.

I shook water out of my eyes and treaded water, loving the way the warm water felt sliding between my toes. "Your cloths and dishes of water every day are all very well but they just don't compare," I informed her. I had no intention of getting out. She would have to come in herself and drag me. "You don't have anywhere to be right now, do you?" I bit my lip. "I can be quick."

Tauriel sighed. She folded herself onto a stone bench and crossed her legs. "I have no urgent assignations until this afternoon."

I sighed myself, relieved. "Oh thank goodness. Selfish I may be, but only to a certain point. I don't want to create trouble for you."

"Would you like me to inform you if your actions would?"

I nodded. "Yes, please. Since it would make me unhappy to think that I had, or to find out later. There are different kinds of happiness after all."

"With that I agree."

I found a ledge cut into the wall and swam to it. I pressed my back against it with my feet underneath me because I wasn't tall enough to keep enough of me above the water to be comfortable. I should have taken my hair out of its braids before getting them wet, but they were stuck now, so I began picking at them. Tauriel came soundlessly to kneel behind me and felt her gentle fingers dismantling the braids much more efficiently and painlessly than mine.

"Do you miss your home?" she asked me after several minutes of plucking and unweaving.

"Sometimes."

"What do you miss about it?"

I had to think hard to put my small internal aches into comprehensible words. "I miss knowing where I stood with people. I understood them better than I understand any of you. Not knowing things makes me anxious sometimes."

Tauriel hummed. "I see. What else?"

"I think that is the root of all of the things I miss. I never know what to expect here."

"Are we very strange in comparison to your people?"

"You are very different. I think I have figured out perhaps some of why others are intimidated by you, too."

"How so?"

"I have been here for weeks and have yet to see a single houseplant or pet-animal in the place you call your home. Do you have any plants that you tend? Or any pets?"

Tauriel's hands never wavered as she thought. "It is difficult for us to keep plants in here with less true sunlight, but we have many that we cultivate for food or drink outside the immediate walls. We have fewer pets, because they die so easily and we hate to lose the ones we love. Did you have these things at home?"