Chapter Text
Once, Fíli watched as Freya ran towards him so they could escape the dragon, and trusted that she would reach him in time. Now, while a piercing note split the air, and his stone sense screamed a warning, he ran to her because she wasn’t moving at all.
He had to drag her the first few steps. She stumbled, fell, and burned her hands and arms where she touched the bridge. He ignored her gasp of pain when he grabbed her other arm, and ignored the infinite agony of his own body as he got her to her feet.
The ringwraith who got past him right before the end writhed as the power of its master collapsed. The one he held back and stabbed now lay dead at the entrance of the sammath naur.
He heard the dying cries of their beasts outside, and kept running.
Barely cognizant of the danger, she followed his direction and leapt from the bridge to a raised rock that took them out of the path of the blast of heat and the flow of lava. He forced her to jump to another, keeping his hands on her as they went. She was too weak to reach the third, so he half-tossed her to it, crying out as the splintered bones in his arm cracked farther. Then he chased after and dragged her to the highest point as he looked for where they could go next.
They were clear of the thickest flow of toxic air, but molten rock already surrounded them, spreading more poison in the steam. There were only a few stones large enough to serve as refuges above it.
He found a path between them. Not easy, not all the way, but enough distance to wait out the eruption. Maybe from there he could see a longer route.
Except. The first leap was too far.
He could make it. Frey wouldn’t.
At the start of this, he’d been strong enough. He would have put her over his shoulder and easily made the jump. Now, after months on this journey and weeks in the wasteland of the Gorgoroth, after his arm splintered when he struck one of the nazgul, it was impossible.
Frey clung to his shirt to stay upright on trembling legs. It took a long moment for her to focus and find what he was staring at. She was slowed by denial, the confusion that muddied her mind for so long, and the poison they were breathing.
She shook her head feebly, slumping into his chest as she did. “I can’t, Fíli. ‘s too far. No more. M’sorry. Cannot.”
The first words she’d spoken in days were a surrender.
When her legs wobbled, Fíli got his arms around her, and helped her to her knees. Like a doll with cut strings, the strength fell out of her, and she hissed in pain, putting all her weight on the right. She gave no other reaction. He sank with her, as if him going willingly meant that they could get up when they wanted to.
She braced against his shoulder, and straightened enough to see his face.
Then she smiled.
An actual smile, not one stained by dead-eyed torture. No longer a lie she was telling to make him feel better so they would continue. An actual smile. It was filthy, streaked with dirt and blood, but the first time it was real since they entered Mordor. Maybe since Edoras. Not just a smile, but herself, present, with him once again. She knew who she was. For so long, she was a shell who rarely knew her own name. She disappeared into her own mind to keep the Ring from taking control.
“Fíli, it is good. I promise. It is good. You can get away, yes? You? There and then — then there, yes?” She gestured limply to the same boulders he’d mapped. Her hand fell onto his chest. Her fingers caught between the ties to touch the skin above his heart, and she smiled again. “You are safe. We did it. Promised I would. And you will be okay. It is good.”
Her hand was on his chest. His.
No longer clinging to the chain to hold the Ring against her own. No longer clutching at the hilt of weapons she had lost the coordination to use and then the strength to lift before she lost them entirely. Her eyes were glassy, but the constant press of the Dark Lord’s malice was gone. Old cuts and deep bruises covered her, and the damage to her leg, never healed, barely cared for, made her foot twitch when her weight shifted. Around her neck, the ragged swatch of abraded skin was chapped and weeping from deep cracks. Her face was gaunt and the shadows below her eyes were deep.
They ran out of water two days ago, and food a week before that.
Sinew, bone, and spirit.
That was all that was left of Freya as they knelt on a boulder in a swirl of caustic heat and fumes. She gave everything. She had given past the point of her own ability, and he kept her going until she gave the rest.
And she was smiling because he could still survive.
“We need to move now, Frey,” he encouraged her, like he’d done for weeks. “It isn’t safe here for you. Or for me. We need to get to the next one, then you can rest again, I promise. Just a little more. Just the next one.”
Her smile softened as she gracelessly shook her head.
“No, Frey, no. We have to get up. Get up. Kurduslukh, for me, one more time. Just once more. Don’t do this. Not now.”
“You need to go,” she countered, coughing as the wind turned, battering them with thicker fumes. She strained to speak. “Sonofabitch. Dizzymotherof— Faslake. Ow… Go. That one, yes? Then the—”
“Freya,” he rasped, holding her shoulders tighter while he hid from her soft, certain, surrender.
“—next one. Then next. You will be okay, Fí. Promised you. Made you safe.”
Fíli shook his head to refuse, only to snap his eyes open when she clumsily grabbed at his chin.
“Fíli,” she said as sharply as she could. It wobbled, but it was a hint of the spirit he loved, still burning, at the end of all things. “Go. For me, you go. You need to be safe for me. Need to be alive for me. Want you safe.”
“Don’t ask that, please.”
“Maybe eagles will come for me… eventhough Gandalf doesntlike me verymuch,” she teased, trying to make him smile. She wiped at his cheek. “It is okay, Fíli. It is fine. Did this. Saw you again. Did not think I would. Saw you early. Could said to you I am sorry. You will have safe now, so this is good. For me, please, go.” Frey attempted to steady herself on trembling knees as she pulled away, trying to push him back. She didn’t have the strength to stand, but she was using what she had to push him towards safety.
Fíli wouldn’t let her go. He wouldn’t leave her. He didn’t know how to save her, but he had to try. If he could find a way to hold her — he could feel the break, but it hadn’t slipped, for now he could still move his arm — he could reach the next stone. He turned to search for hope.
The ground trembled, or she had to adjust because he turned, or the world simply decided to land one more blow.
She gasped in sudden pain, taking a deep gulp of noxious air, and choked on it.
Wheezing, trying to get control back, she swallowed more fumes. Hard, deep coughs spasmed in her chest. She clutched at his shoulder, and at the ties of his shirt trying to slow it down. He got one arm around her, with the other hand, he pinned her palm against his chest, forcing his own breath slower so she could use it as a guide. Her eyes grew wider as she failed, scared and lost in his arms. He begged her to stay while her choking became a high, gasping fight to find any air at all.
Even for a dwarf, hearty and resistant to the gasses that came from foundries and smelting and mountains, the air burned.
She wasn’t a dwarf.
For another few seconds she stared up at him, wanting to do what he asked, trying to form words without breath. She suffocated in his arms as he watched.
Then her eyes rolled and she fell against him.
His failure tolled as he dropped lower. He sat on searing hot stone so he could pull her against his chest. She was breathing still, too shallow and rapid, but breathing, and he tucked her face closer, like that could shelter her from the pollution around them.
“Freya? Frey, please,” he begged, “Wake up. Once more for me.”
There was no reaction.
There had to be some way out. She couldn’t have done so much only for him to fail her now. The horror of her stuttered breaths wiped away the doubt that hobbled him. He could make the jump with her. She weighed nothing now. He could do it. He would, because the only other choice was unbearable.
There was no new route to take, but if his arm lasted a little longer, if he could wake her enough that she could hold on slightly, if they could make the jump to that next refuge, the ones after it were easier.
He turned, and keened in despair.
A deeper flow of lava divided them. It was too far.
As quick as it came, his conviction collapsed.
Fíli felt it when the Ring landed in the fires, and looked away from the wraiths; they were no longer the greatest danger. He knew it the instant Orodruin quaked beneath his feet. He saw it immediately when he turned to her.
He knew they couldn’t get away, and instead of taking the last moments to tell her what she deserved to hear, he searched for an escape that never existed.
He knew when she made him redo her braid.
They fought for months. Even before they reached Lothlorien, they argued, too angry to say the things implied by the way they held each other.
When the fellowship fractured in Isengard, when Fíli was willing to damn the world to keep her from this place, when he found them lost in a mountain pass, he never told her. By the time he saw how deep in her mind the enemy had invaded, how much had been done to twist her thoughts towards doubt and despair, how much she needed to hear him, she was no longer able.
She didn’t know where or who she was by the end, but she always trusted him. Even when she forgot his name, she trusted, and she followed.
Her body failed her, so he kept her walking, so she could keep fighting.
There was a space of a few minutes, if that, when he could have made it right, and he didn’t take it. He was the reason she was here, in so many ways, and he wasted the last minutes they’d ever have.
Frey deserved to know that he’d never heard of any creature, never heard a story or a rumor or an exaggeration that came close to what she’d done.
There were hundreds of stories of heroes that were raised and trained to face down the worst evils and greatest challenges. Freya had none of that, and she tried to do it anyway. It wasn’t even for her own people, but for dwarves and elves who did not trust her, and a world that did not know she existed.
She knew how difficult the task would be. She followed Thorin in spite of that. She accepted the Ring in spite of that. She was leaving him, and he’d never get to show her how all the light in his life broke through the clouds when she came back.
The only thing she wanted, the last thing she asked him to do, was to go, to get to safety, to live.
He didn’t move.
None of his living kin would know how it happened. He and she would be written into history for what they achieved, with none of the details of the last miserable weeks, or the cowardice of his death. They wouldn’t know. No one living would know. They could remember him proudly.
Those that watched him now from the Halls might understand why. They might forgive him for his weakness.
Fíli could make it to the next boulder. And the next. He could go. He could escape. He could survive.
His body was able.
His will to try was curled against him, shuddering through dying breaths.
The sound that came was like a mountain torn in two. A song of gold and stone. A bellows’ rushing draw. A thousand hammers striking at once.
He flung himself forward, wrapping over her as a shield, cursing as old wounds tore, and cursing again when she jolted against him.
It receded like a roll of thunder, but he was too defeated to raise his head and find the source. Protecting her was instinct. He had no will left for a fight.
“You are well matched, Child of the line of Durin,” a resonant voice intoned, familiar and foreign to his ears. “She is as headstrong as any I have known, and you are steadfast enough to match her. Two sides of the same coin.”
The speaker did not feel like a threat.
Fíli raised slowly, cradling her, not sure that she would live through another shock of pain. The dwarf that sat on the boulder with them was unknowable. He looked like Balin and like Nori, and like fragmented memories of his father. He was the size of Fíli, and taller than the mountain where they sat. He was dark and light and soft and strong, and a bare moment looking at him made Fíli’s head throb with an undefinable wrongness.
“What—” Fíli managed, closing his eyes against the ache.
“Do not look, young one. You are not meant to behold me here, that is why it feels so.”
“Sweet maker,” Fíli swore.
The Valar chuckled, “Few would call me sweet, young one.”
It was a relief, even as his gorge rose, and his mind leapt guiltily to his brother, safe in Erebor. It was no longer his choice. It wasn’t cowardice now. His death was not of his own making. But he wanted —
“Mahal,” he spoke as respectfully as he could, while the scant belief and faith that endured this far crumbled in his hands, “I would stay until she has… gone to wherever her kind go.”
“No.”
“Please,” he begged urgently, looking up again, “Mahal, if I must be — agh!” He recoiled from the pain, and turned back to Frey, instead of the Valar who crafted his people. Her breathing had leveled to constant, tiny sips, and though she was trembling, she was in less distress. That was the best he could hope for now. An easy end. The chance to hold her through it.
“It pains you to look upon me because you are not meant to see me in this place, nor in this time. Do not attempt to do so again. It will only cause more damage, the longer you gaze on me while we are outside my Halls,” Mahal ordered, then exhaled with the rumble of a landslide. “I meant only to reject that you would die this day. I have not come for you. Even if this were the end of your time in this world, I am not so cruel as to take you now and leave her to die alone.” Fíli hid from the thought, and curled closer to her. “As gratitude for your own deeds, but for hers as well, I would not do that. I have grown quite fond of this one. As I said, you are well matched. An answer and an echo to each other’s hearts.”
Fíli managed to nod, and touched the end of the braid behind her ear, tied with a bit of thread from his tunic. Nearly hysterical, unable to explain, she pleaded with him to replace it two days ago when she realized the bead was gone and the braid was slipping. It was no longer the soft, hopeful promise he offered when he placed it a decade earlier, but a bleak and bloody oath she demanded he give.
“You do not have much time, young one,” Mahal’s voice pulled at him. “You will need to move quickly. Strong as I made my children to be, even you will not survive if you linger here. There is worse in the air of this fetid place than in any mine or forge.”
“Not while she—”
“She would not want you to die for her sake. You know this is true.”
Fíli grimaced.
“I swore I would keep her safe this time. Whatever I said after, or what I was willing to destroy, what other vows I was willing to break, it does not undo that oath. I swore I would keep her safe. I failed.”
“Be less a son of your mother’s line and more a scion of your father’s. You kept your oath. Can you say she would have reached this place without you beside her?” Mahal tempered his irritation, but not wholly. “She knew the task she undertook. She demanded it. She persuaded the others when my word no longer carried sway for another attempt. She raged at the greatest of us, knowing that this was the likeliest end, and she fought us for the chance to try. Do not insult her sacrifice to make your own pain into a greater loss.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Nor will you. Her bargain does not belong to you. You must rise, and you must go, son of Durin. You do not have long to waste, and neither of us would wish to see her anger if you do not survive this day.”
“She’s still breathing.”
Mahal’s hand came near her, and Fíli moved without thought, yanking her out of his reach, then crumpling when his arm gave out, and her breath lost its rhythm. The Valar kept talking. Fíli didn’t listen, uninterested in what respect or reverence his Maker might be owed.
He was a dwarf. He was a Durin. Disrespect would not deny him entry to the Halls.
It mattered more that her eyes were fluttering like they might open, and her fingers stayed tucked through his ragged tunic, holding on like she was trying to stay as much as he was trying to keep her. He wrapped his hand around her fragile wrist, barely able to feel her thready pulse beneath the pain in his forearm.
“Child!” Mahal’s voice yanked at him, and forced him to hear it, “You are well matched, but I can no longer say if that is praise or condemnation. She had ignorance to excuse her insolence. You have no such thing.” Mahal reached forward, but did not try to touch her, only held Fíli’s attention. “This may be the only gift that I can offer to persuade you to let her go.”
“No!” He yelled over whatever meager token he would hear, “I spent my life waiting for the cruelties around me to fade and praying that you might take pity on us as we suffered, even once. She is the first time I felt we had not been abandoned, and I will not leave her alone now to pass into some untouchable expanse from which I —“
“Imeptuous youth!” Mahal bellowed, “She will be safe in Itdendûm with your kin.”
Fíli snapped his head up to find any trace of a lie, gagged as his vision warped, and dropped his eyes back at her. “But, she is not a dwarf?”
“She is near enough by nature,” he rumbled, “and I claimed her as one of my own. She is one of my children now, even though another crafted her. She will be waiting in the Halls for you. Yet if you let yourself die here when she has fought so hard to prevent that, neither of us will ever find peace, no matter how many generations and ages pass us by. As it is, I am fated to nearly two centuries of weathering her wroth for letting you put yourself at so much risk.”
Thorin used to console Fíli when he missed his father by telling him stories of Itdendûm, of the Halls of Waiting, and how their kin often watched over them; celebrating and mourning with them, waiting to greet them when the time came, no longer burdened by the pain of old injuries and illness. It was the lone comfort of dwarves during the wandering that their time in Middle Earth may pass, but they would find their kin again.
It was a solace. A gift. A mercy.
The lump in his stomach that had wept all this time for her to keep breathing so he could have a few more seconds with her, shivered and released. She would no longer suffer, and he would see her again. He would not lose her to some unknowable, unreachable eternity.
The Halls were an immortal home. He wanted her to have that, and knew that his father, his fallen friends, and the uncle he never knew would welcome her. They would celebrate what she’d done. She would be safe and loved there until his own time came.
His own time.
“How long,” Fíli asked tonelessly.
“She is one of my children, her time there is not—“
“No,” Fíli’s voice hitched, “you said this was not when I was meant to die. How long?”
“She saved you from when you should have come to me. You and your kin.”
It almost sounded like Kíli, trying to distract him. As she always warned, Fíli was meant to die during the quest, alongside his uncle and brother. She saw true, and she saved them from that fate.
“That is not an answer,” Fíli pressed.
He waited, each breath scorching sharper than the last, and his head growing fainter. His vision blurred around the edges, and he shifted to move her arm off the burning stone.
“You are of the line of Durin,” Mahal ultimately answered, “There is no reason you should not live as long as any of your lineage.”
Thorin was two hundred and six, and beyond the grey in his hair, showed little of his age. A rare few of their kin saw a fourth century start. Fíli had not seen the end of his first.
Undeniable, he saw it unspool before him.
He was heir to the throne of Erebor. His obligations to his people were vast, his atonement incomplete, and he could not abandon them. He would serve until his death, and ready an heir to succeed him. The crown could pass to his brother’s or cousin’s children, but he would never ask his brother to leave Tauriel. If he caused the name Dain, King of Erebor to become fact, Freya would claw her way back to Middle Earth with a hammer in hand.
The thought of children and marriage and legacy was part of a distant, vague future. He and Kíli always knew it was a necessity one day for at least one of them, but he had given it no real thought since the quest.
He would marry and raise children, and knew that Freya would cheer his every joy, watching from Itdendûm.
It was the expected choice as a prince, as a brother, and as a dwarf. It was the choice she would insist he make. It was the last thing she managed to say to him.
He wasn’t strong enough.
He learned that a decade ago, and tried to make it right, but it was truer now. The cracks through his soul ran deeper, and he was too weak. His will to try was dying. He couldn’t do it. He wasn’t strong enough without her. He couldn’t let her go.
He accepted, braced for the pain of gazing on his creator, and met Mahal’s eye.
“No.”
“Child, this is no game.”
“I didn’t think it was.”
“I can take her from you now.”
“You haven’t yet.”
“I can move you from her, leave her here, and ensure you are found and brought to safety.”
His head howled with the pulsing rock of a blade caught against bone, like someone was wrenching on it to turn him from the sight. It got harder to resist with each beat, worse when it started pulling in different directions.
He didn’t look away.
“You haven’t yet. I spent nine years without her. You say I will continue here. It could be two centuries or more before I enter the Halls. I will serve my kingdom and my people, but I know what it will be.” He would be a feeble, venal, hollow leader, worse than he’d feared, but he would serve if he must. “I will survive as long as you force me to, but I won’t live.”
Now that he was looking for longer than a glance at a time, he saw flickers of distraction. He saw Mahal’s head tilt back and forth as if he was listening to unseen others.
“Child, were it in my power, I would do as you desire. It is not.” As Mahal spoke, his face flickered between his Uncle Frerin, Thror, back through to dwarves he could recognize as kin, but could not guess their names. Mahal shook his head and his appearance settled as the familiar yet foreign dwarf he wore first. That deep, hammering tearing matched Fíli’s now thundering pulse, but he refused to yield.
“Stop that, it does no good for anyone.” Mahal made him look away with a hand on his head and sighed, “You’re too much alike.”
“You can force me, but I will never forgive you for it.”
“So I see.”
No longer torn apart by beholding the Valar, grief flooded the jagged space that the pain left vacant. He didn’t bother to challenge him again. He said his piece. If he was compelled to keep breathing today, and for centuries to come, his kin would tell Freya that he tried.
His amad always said that Frerin was a romantic. He would tell her.
She would break his nose for being so stupid, and he grinned at the thought of what his dragon heart would do to him after centuries of planning.
The sound of a rockfall and a stir of the air was all the notice he had of Mahal’s departure with her.
He moved carefully, pulling Freya up so he could say goodbye, and shuddered out a laugh when he felt her heart beating.
That was as much mercy as Mahal showed his children.
He’d let Fíli hold her as she endured this final torment. He thought Fíli would leave after she was gone.
Fíli already made that choice.
If he was lucky and followed fast, she would be confused by the Halls long enough for him to say a few things before she started to throttle him for having the audacity to die on the side of an erupting volcano.
“I’m sorry I could not keep you safe as you did for us, rûzdul. I’ll let you win the first few fights as an apology.” A gust of putrid air made him cough as hard as she first did. He would follow fast. “Then I’ll say everything I have kept silent since you returned. All the things I thought while you were gone, and the things I wanted to tell you before you understood the words. I’ll tell you the first thought I ever had of you, and the first moment I thought we needed you. You’re going to be furious at me for how long it was between then and when I let you help.“
He closed his eyes against the stinging wind to press a kiss to her forehead.
It could not be much longer. Mahal may have claimed her as one of his children, but he did not craft her. He had not bestowed the gifts of other dwarves.
Or perhaps she had those gifts, and that was why she lingered. Maybe it brought her far enough to see it done. Maybe he would have lost her sooner.
There was no doubt that she would go before him, and he was grateful for it. Her pain would stop. Her leg would never have fully healed if they had survived. The war within her mind was over, but it must have left a ravaged wasteland in its wake.
Whole again in the Halls, she would have a much easier time chasing him down. Frerin favored hammers. She could borrow his.
With his own aches and wounds gone, he could outrun her. He wouldn’t try. He’d run toward her every time.
She quivered against him. Fíli didn’t have the heart to wish for her to die, but he wanted her pain to end, not tarry in this scorching suffocation.
The gas and heat was affecting him worse and worse. His closed eyes watered. Each inhale stabbed more than the last, and even a dwarf could only withstand so much. He would not keep her waiting long.
A gust of wind made him hunch closer, and the ground pitched, warping around him with the movement.
He thought he heard weeping, like the whole of the world was echoing him as he mourned. For a moment as his head swam, the air felt cool, like a soft autumn evening. It smelled clean and open, and drops of gentle rain fell on his neck.
It was only a moment.
A breath in, a breath out, then gone.
A wish, not truth.
The acrid stench of sulfur and ash returned.
But not the heat.
Fíli blinked open his eyes, confused by the flat ground. Fine dust and jagged rocks stretched around him. No boulders, no flow of lava.
It wasn’t the Halls.
He turned.
Mount Doom was behind him.
Far behind. He was leagues from what should have been his death. Nearly to the Isenmouthe.
Fear reached him faster than faith.
No.
Mahal said he would not leave her to die there alone, but he threatened to force Fíli to some safe place where he could survive and he—
Freya was slumped against him.
Her fingers twitched against his chest, trying to hold on.
She was still alive.
He hadn’t failed yet.
But…
It wasn’t enough. Even now, away from Mount Doom, there was no hope. The break in his arm was going to slip as soon as he put weight on it. They had no water or food. They had to cross Ephel Duath or Ered Lithui to find help, or they had to get past the Black Gate. The ache of exhaustion and defeat, which he’d fought through since entering this place, begged him to wait, or rest, or find a way to wake her first.
He’d let the cost of the journey finally land because he thought it was over.
It wasn’t over.
It would be over soon.
They would both die in the barren grey desolation of Mordor because he couldn’t save them.
He slumped in surrender, and her fingers twitched, almost yanking, where she held onto him.
Fuck that.
Once he began, he could continue, so he had to begin.
It took a moment to turn what remained of his pack strap and sword belt into extra support; a sling looped under her arms and knees, then he pulled it over his shoulders. Awkward as it was with his remaining sword attached, disastrous as it would be for her leg, it was the only choice. He forced himself to stand, teeth clenched around a scream when the bone finally slipped, then waited as the black spots in his vision receded with the worst of the pain. The hardest was done. He could do the rest.
“Thank you,” he said to the empty air, “Thank you,” not knowing who to address in a grateful prayer when his own Maker left them to die. He knew the change of the wind only felt fresh compared to where they’d been, but he clung to the hope that they were listening, “Thank you.”
Then he walked.