So Comes Snow After Fire

16.i Kiss and Take Your Leave

The stars were no comfort tonight.

After parting from Kíli, Tauriel had descended from Ravenhill to the lower slopes of Erebor, where she now lay stretched on the soft grass watching the heavens, an activity which had rarely failed to bring her solace in the past. Yet even with so much open sky above her, she felt a great heaviness at her chest as if the whole mountain weighed upon her heart. And all the stars above— Well, they did not shine for her.

I always thought it is a cold light, remote and far away.

How could she have guessed, when Kíli had said those words, that the two of them could ever be anything but distant themselves? They had been strangers, and there could not have been more space between them, a captain and a prisoner, an elf and a dwarf.

And now, they had come near to being joined by the closest of bonds.

That hope was ended now; she knew that, even if neither she nor Kíli had said so tonight. She could not remain at his side if she would hurt him by hurting those nearest to him, his family.

It was right that she let him go, right that she allow him to act the honorable prince and nephew, son and brother that he ought to be, and indeed, truly was already.

Yet she had so very much wanted—

Tauriel clenched her hands in her skirts, as if she could catch at what had already slipped beyond her grasp.

She had always known she would not be able to hold Kíli forever. Indeed, she had been fully aware of this fact from the first moment she had entertained any thought that she might find him worth loving. Kíli had been on the brink of death when he had wished plainly, boldly, for her love.

Yet to lose him like this hurt in a way Tauriel had not expected. His hope that they would share the rest of his lifetime had been so sure and compelling, and thus she too had counted on seventeen odd decades to fill with their love. In that case, what would there be to regret so long as they used every moment they had been given? But to have him taken away now, when all their own hopes and promises lay before them, unfulfilled, and to know that he lived still while every day in which they might have made a life together was wasted—such were the regrets that might grow to be a great burden for an elf, until perhaps she could bear them no longer.

Had Tauriel truly doomed herself to despair, then, when she had let herself love a mortal? Perhaps it would not have mattered when she lost him: in two years, or two hundred, or two thousand. She would have known this same feeling of something ending too soon, and wished herself ending with it.

But—

She pushed herself up, suddenly restless, her breath coming in gasps.

True goodness could not be measured by its duration. A flower might last but a day, yet such brevity did not make the blossom any less beautiful than the everlasting stars. Kíli was fully worth loving; his mortality could not change this truth.

Certainly, the more ephemeral a thing was, the more courage was required to love it. But hadn't she already tried loving only what was safe? Her king had held his people close within their little realm, but even Thranduil, wise as he was, could not truly make even their little corner of the world eternal and unchanging. Tauriel had been shielded, sheltered, stifled—but not safe. Did she even want to be safe any more?

She wanted to know the world, even if it was rushing past her too fast to reach out and catch anything for more than a moment. She wanted to know Kíli, in heart and mind, body and soul, before he was lost to her till the end of Arda.

No, she did not want to be safe. She wanted to live.

You make me feel alive.

Her tears broke at last, and she drew up her knees and cried into her skirts.