Chapter Text
It’s smaller than Kili expects.
They are usually smaller; fear playing tricks on the minds of those who live to tell the tale.
Around a 100 pounds, male, and unusually for this time of the year, alone.
Kili freezes, listening to the forest around him, sensing that their game is almost over - the dawn isn’t too far off.
The wolf has to die – there is no doubt in Kili’s mind, no sympathy. He’s seen the corpses; throats ripped wide open, all the way to the spine, missing hands and fingers, mangled limbs.
When it happens, there is no warning.
By the time he can catch the soft, thundering sound of paws barely brushing the ground, the creature is almost upon him.
The Golden Death the villagers call it, but all Kili can think of is the tortured blue eyes.
On a single breath he notches an arrow, draws and loosens it – eyes trapped by the silent grace before him, no more than an involuntary reaction of the body.
It flies, but it doesn’t fly true, and Kili watches it rip the fur, skin a muscle on the wolf’s right shoulder – laughably little and certainly not enough to stop the wolf.
He knows he signed his life away.
His last conscious thought as the 100 pounds of muscle barrel into him, tackling him to the ground, is that he’s wearing a light chainmail with a collar around his neck. It will take time to chew through and if the creature is as intelligent as Kili believes, it’ll go for the internal organs instead.
It’s not going to be quick.
---
Fili comes round to the taste of blood in his mouth.
Again.
No.
He retches violently and immediately collapses back to the forest floor, gasping from the agony ripping through his chest at the movement.
Too soon.
Like always, it takes time to get used to the pain, but when he does, he will try to find the body, try to memorise whatever’s left of the face.
He doesn’t notice the wound on his shoulder until he’s upright again.
So this one didn’t run; this one tried to stand his ground.
The bravest people are usually the kindest ones. Or the most foolish ones.
This one –
Shallow breaths, eerily still, unconscious. Blood mostly around his left forearm, hip and side. A mop of brown hair covering his face, like fingers reaching out to close his eyes one final time.
Fili drops to his knees. They never lived before.
It’s been so long since he touched another that the warmth of the stranger’s skin almost burns his fingertips.
A tiny, treacherous part of his mind whispers promises of a voice capable of spinning words and eyes able to comprehend. A much bigger, more familiar part insists: if he lives, we will have to move.
There’s a certain quiet ease to having nothing left, to not having to care, to being able to take his chances.
He isn’t strong enough to carry the stranger, and his right hand keeps slipping, slick with the blood lazily trickling down his arm, but he grits his teeth an drags the body along the rotting forest floor.
---
“You should stay here. There are horrors in the dark that you cannot comprehend.”
It is hard to distinguish shapes through the trembling, clumped eyelashes, but Kili does remember this: a man with long blond hair, watching the sun slowly lean towards the uneven line of trees.
He can’t see the face, can’t see the eyes.
After that, nothing.
---
Fili watches the way the damp chestnut strands twist into ringlets, heavy with moisture. He stares at the red flowers blooming through the linens wrapped around the pale skin and thinks of poppies. He looks at nails, dirty with soil and finds something soothing about their shape.
He tells himself these things captivate him because they’re a bit like movement, like laughter and the things he thought he forgot.
He tries not to nurture any hope, but he does put in countless stitches, just in case.
---
It isn’t much. The hunter’s lodge they’re using has only the barest of necessities: one table, one chair, one bed. A dusty fireplace. Roof over their heads.
It’s hazy at first: hands that aren’t cruel, a glimpse of a jaw covered in a short beard and the voice that sounds like the murmur of the forest.
He’s hurt; he can feel the pain radiating from his side.
But somehow he feels safe.
---
“Why?”
“Isn’t it the right thing to do?”
“Nobody lives in these woods. Not since the attacks.”
“I’m not from around here. I was just passing by.”
Kili swallows the lies together with the water and contemplates the incomprehensible.
---
Sometimes, when Kili is asleep he leans into his hands as they run damp cloth over his skin.
It won’t last of course, but Fili carefully files the sensation away.
---
It’s still out there, at night.
Kili can hear the howling, just the one voice, and he can’t help but think that it sounds like cries.
---
“You never told me your name.”
A part of Fili wants to laugh and he doesn’t know what to do with that feeling. “What does it matter?”
“There are bandages under that shirt, but you’re pouring chamomile extract over my scuffed knuckles to clean them. It matters enough.”
Fili actually pauses at that. “I don’t have much,” he says slowly, staring at the dirt mixing with blood and water in the darkness of his wooden bowl. “But it doesn’t mean I’m not allowed to care. There are some things that cannot be taken away from me.”
“Mine is Kili,” the man almost interrupts, as the last vowels of Fili’s response still hang heavy between them. “You saved my life. I won’t ask again if you prefer, but it will make for an awkward conversation.”
“Fili,” it bubbles over before he can stop it and he thinks that words are little traitors that enjoy roaming in herds.
He sighs, because laugh lines are easier forgotten when they don’t come with a name.
---
The first time Kili decides to follow his host into the night, he’s still so weak, there is no way he can keep up.
That leaves him a fair distance behind and, conveniently, downwind.
He doesn’t understand what he sees: a thick, naked body, collapsing to its knees with a groan, painted in golden in the last rays of the setting sun.
He blinks, but the image is forever imprinted in his eye.
Then screams, as the same body is strung up by an invisible force mid-air, by the wrists. Something happens, but Kili can’t see, watching from behind, except for the trembling muscles of the man’s back, the legs kicking out in agony and the cries that turn inhuman. Not animal howls either; just the sound capable of stopping Kili’s heart.
To hunt without fear is to throw one’s life away. And yet he’s never felt anything like this grip of terror he feels now.
Something splatters wetly to the ground, then several things hit the leaves with a dull click.
It all ends, horribly, mid-scream, with a single violent spasm, and Kili knows, deep inside, that the man who cared for him is dead, killed by something so powerful that it crushed him like an insect.
He flees as fast as his weakened legs will carry him, ignoring the pain in his side, ignoring the loud thuds behind him, ignoring everything except the need to find the deepest, darkest hole possible to crawl into.
There are always worse nightmares lurking in the dark than the ones you know.
---
He stares at the exhausted man walking through the door shortly before noon.
He has no weapon, except the ability to keep a passive face. He doesn’t think he’d live, if his host was to turn him away now, or worse, if he decided that Kili wasn’t allowed to walk away with the knowledge –
It’s lies, of course.
Lies he wraps around the Big Bad Darkness like blankets, like a child who believes they are safe to sleep on top of the bed when there are monsters living underneath it.
So long as he keeps his feet under the covers –
He sees the way Fili holds himself, as if he was brittle; the way his every movement is like a penance, the distance he keeps, the briefest of glimpses of the person buried under it all.
That is the truth.
And if Kili is absolutely honest with himself, the way Fili’s eyelashes are so pale, they sometimes seem to glow in the strong light captivates his soul enough to provide for days of quiet contemplation and eclipse the howls in the dark.
---
He knows he is watched; watched and judged and untangled piece by piece, and he bristles each time Kili nearly reaches out a hand to hold him up.
He likes to pretend that somehow this whole thing could still end without any consequences.
He should know better; he really should.
“Why are you here, my liege?” Kili asks quietly one crisps afternoon and Fili draws into himself. “What happened to you…?”
“Don’t call me that.” Eyes averted to trace the shadows in the corners, hoping that Kili will drop the matter.
“You disappeared three years ago. How long –“
“Long enough not to care.”
---
The wounds heal; at least some of them do.
It’s somehow harder to bear now, knowing the sound of another’s laughter and knowing that one day soon it will be taken from him.
---
It’s another three weeks before Kili heads off into the night again.
He can’t tell what is driving him, except that this time he must know for sure.
He can move easier now and he’s always been quiet on his feet, so when it all starts he finds himself in the front.
He won’t look away as the man strips himself bare, takes in the contours and sharp angles chiselled by muscle.
Broad shoulders, pale skin, dusting of golden hair, and scars, quite a few for one so young, too many for a prince, including one still raw and badly patched up on his right shoulder.
I did it, he thinks, cannot stop the thought before it sinks in.
He makes a mistake when Fili’s chest is revealed from under the thick swatches of bandages. There’s a barely closed wound there, flesh torn apart so many times, it looks more like raw meat than living flesh.
Kili gasps and it’s enough for the blue eyes to lock with his.
“No –“
But it’s too late, and Fili is falling to his knees, fingers flying to press against his wound and a pained groan ripping itself from his throat.
Rivulets of blood running down his torso, disappearing into the soft valley between his hip and thigh.
“Run!” he rasps out with enormous effort, fingertips clawing at something that is being done to him, but –
Kili thinks of the same hands patiently brushing his hair away from his face, of quiet, steady voice and the eyes that watch him with concern.
His feet have sunk roots into the damp earth beneath him; there is no way out.
He watches a crucifixion, or something worse.
Invisible strings spread Fili like an eagle in mid-air by his wrists, so he can do nothing to cover himself or what is happening to him.
The last shred of a human soul shatters inside a single look they share just before the skin is ripped open and Fili gives that inhuman howl of agony and throws his head back.
More blood, thick and dark, reflected in the pinpricks of Kili’s irises.
Then a quiet snap-snap of ribs being broken out; one, two, three, four, wild trashing of a strung up body, before the bones are dropped carelessly to the ground like child’s toys.
He can see it then: Fili’s beating heart inside his chest, a frantic, rabbiting pulse that would feel like fear against Kili’s fingertips.
“No!!”
He knows what’s coming; in truth his mind knew all along how this ends and now it’s like peeling the layers away.
When it happens, it’s as if an invisible fist grips Fili’s heart and squeezes it tight, until it bursts in a thick pulse of blood and all the muscles locked in agony release and go lax.
He’s seen death before, countless times, but never like this.
Never a life torn out with such terrifying ease, turning a person he used to know into nothing more than a corpse broken and dripping with blood mid-air.
For a second it’s eerily quiet, not even songbird cutting through the suffocating spring evening.
At least it’s over, at least he isn’t screaming any more, he catches the stray thought, loud in the silence, and immediately hates himself for it.
More than anything Kili wants to take him down, to touch him, as if it could prove somehow that a soul once existed inside those unseeing blue eyes and that soul was kind.
But it isn’t over yet.
As if bored by a toy that won’t jerk anymore, whatever grips Fili flings him with speed that shouldn’t be possible against a nearby tree and Kili wants to be sick at the dull crunch of a spine being broken.
Then again, in the opposite direction.
And again.
Kili cries out when the corpse hits the tree inches away from him, giving him the perfect view of a bruised face.
Eventually the force flings him back at the ground, the body scraping a clear trail in rotting leaves before it all stops and everything goes quiet once more.
This time Kili launches himself towards him, the shock forgotten and his stomach rolling.
Fili feels cold already, when Kili places a careful hand over the bruised flesh of a dislocated shoulder.
He didn’t deserve it, the thought is vicious and sharp with uneven edges formed by the need to lash out, to avenge the man Kili barely knew. Nobody deserves this.
Perhaps that sentiment is enough, perhaps someone or something can hear him, when a miracle happens and the bones start to align themselves with a dull crunch right under his fingertips.
Perhaps it’s about the forgiveness.
He watches transfixed, as the cuts on Fili’s face close and bruises heal, as his whole back rearranges itself to correct the curve of his spine.
I forgive you, he thinks feverishly, even if he has no idea what Fili’s sins are, because it seems to be working, up until the point where his arms and legs seem to melt away into much thinner paws, his chest expands to accommodate a much broader ribcage and his face stretches into a maw.
Kili blinks and before him lies an injured golden brown wolf.
He scrambles back when a shiver runs through the creature, and it gives a soft growl.
He remembers what death looks like.
He remembers the tortured blue eyes that nearly cost him his life.
He remembers the fear.
A snarl and the wolf hauls itself to its feet and Kili thinks that he knew this too, only he got captivated and now he is lost.
It prowls after him, about as slow as Kili is backing away, teeth bared and eyes full of hatred.
They both stop when Kili’s back hits a tree and he pulls a knife from behind his belt.
He thinks there should be a spark of recognition, there just has to be, because this is Fili, somewhere underneath this wounded animal is the person Kili was just getting to know.
There isn’t.
When the wolf launches himself and Kili tightens his grip on his blade, he knows he will sink it all the way to the bone, as many times as he has to, whatever it takes for him to survive.
Except the creature ignores him, veering off to the side and rushing right past him to disappear off into the night.
He can barely feel the damp ground, when he finally allows his legs to buckle under him.
There should be relief flooding through his veins, but there isn’t; there’s only the dull ache of the suffering he has witnessed.
In the thick, dark air of the spring evening nothing is as it seems.
---