When Worlds Collide

A Place To Belong

If this isn't my crown achievement of 'it should have been a paragraph but then I got carried away' then I don't know what is.
This wasn't my original plan for Tauriel at all, but the whole chapter just... wrote itself. No, really. I was beyond surpirsed when the thing actually went somewhere. It just happened and I decided to carry on with it, because I kind of had no alternative ideas anyway. It seems I just really wasn't sold on the Tauriel/Kili romance, so I had to reationalize the thing

This is my version of Tauriel then. Tell me what you think.

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Tauriel sighed and slowly averted her gaze from the distant silhouette of the Lonely Mountain. Not since the day she had lost her parents, the only family she had or at least was aware of, had she felt so entirely and devastatingly lost.

Long gone was the proud elven posture, dim was the spark of life in her eyes. Her clothes were bloodstained and covered with dust, torn apart and cut through. There were no lightness in her movements, her shoulders hunched and the head lowered. At that moment the young elven maiden resembled nothing more but an ordinary woman, defeated and robbed by another war started for gold, or power, or anything else of which those who suffered the consequences couldn't care less when mourning their losses.

She held a hand to her aching heart and bit her lower lip, suppressing a mournful cry. She had done enough of crying in the last few days which she had spent lingering just outside the mountain, trying to collect herself after Kili's funeral.

She wasn't exactly the most welcomed attendee, although seeing the sincerity of her mourning and the depth of her grief for her lost love the dwarves took pity and allowed her to attend the ceremony

She didn't stay for long afterwards, for most of the dwarves were, to put it lightly, not fond of her presence. She might have been denied her kingdom, but there was no power in this world which could take her right to be an elf. So an elf she remained. An elf. A former enemy. All in all, the feelings she shared with Kili were strictly their private affair and would be highly disapproved even if they were to become public and the other dwarves became aware of what was happening. The other dwarves shunned her.

Could Tauriel blame them? She wanted to. She desperately wanted to find an outlet for her anger, but no matter how hard she tried, she couldn't find it in herself to make the dwarves her target. Her own kind, the elves, had forsaken the kingdom of Erebor when the dragon had arrived all those years ago and then waged a war against them. And for what? A couple of shiny jewels?

Those kind of wounds didn't heal overnight and there was a long way ahead before the relationship between the two kingdoms would mend.

How fascinating. The kind-hearted and noble elven kind, quarrelling for a few shiny objects.

And yet it were the dwarves and dragons who lived in infamy as the greedy ones.

The irony.

Was she still angry at her king? Or should she start saying her former kind by now? She certainly had been angry at Thranduil, far beyond angry, livid. But it had been a few days ago, which, by now, seemed more like an eternity.

There was something infinitely liberating in having a one single person to blame for everything that went wrong with her life. It never really made the problems go away, or even seem less, but it offered another form of comfort. It absolved the individual from any responsibility and the guilt which stemmed from it. After all, if you knew for sure that someone else had ruined your life, there was no need to rummage through your own actions in an attempt to figure out how your own self might have contributed.