Kíli had never liked the word compromise. He'd always thought it meant you had to give in, a little or a lot, on what you believed was right, and doing that had never felt good to him. Besides, when you chose some neutral middle ground, neither party concerned really got what he wanted, and that didn't seem to make sense, either. Compromise was the kind of thing he knew Thorin expected Fíli to understand, and that was one of the reasons Kíli was glad he'd never be king himself.
And yet maybe compromise didn't have to mean all that. Maybe it simply meant letting other people be part of your choices. Kíli had hoped at first that he wouldn't need to defend the fact that his love for Tauriel was a good that wouldn't undermine his duty to family and kingdom. Wasn't the truth enough to speak for itself? And yet he had been forced to admit that he couldn't go on waiting in silence for the truth to overcome Thorin's objections while Kíli's unspoken hopes tore a rift between him and his family.
Perhaps compromise wasn't in what he did, but how he did it. He wouldn't falsify his love for Tauriel; that was impossible. But if there was a way to submit his actions to his family, to show them that their wellbeing and their approval was part of his decision, he could do that; indeed, he had to. Really, it had been damned stubbornness on his part to suppose he wouldn't have to take others' opinions into account.
This wasn't really about defending a truth that could stand on its own or about earning permission to do something that he knew was honorable. It was about showing his family, showing Thorin, that his love for Tauriel had a place amidst his other loves and duties. If loving her was good and right—and Kíli firmly believed it was—then he could not lose her by relying on the truth. If Kili thought of this as telling Thorin what he needed to hear—that Kili cared about his family and did not mean to forsake them—it was a lot easier to do what he had come to see he must.
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So Comes Snow After Fire
FanfictionIn the weeks since the battle, Kili has kept his meetings with Tauriel secret. Yet when a fierce snowstorm looms, he would rather dare Thorin's displeasure than leave the exiled elf unsheltered on the mountainside. Once Tauriel enters Erebor, of cou...
