I: Copper

He thinks his brother is dead.

He thinks his brother is dead, but he shuts his eyes so he doesn't have to see it, so that he doesn't have to know. Hot tears force their way through his lashes anyway, burning their way down his face to his mouth where they taste like blood, scalding and foul. He lies with the left side of his face pressed against the ground, and when he draws in a choking breath he can feel the grit coating his teeth and tongue. The dirt tastes like blood too, laced with a soft, sour tang of copper ore that his tongue even now can feel and recognize, a shrill song that reverberates through his body, pressed close as it is upon the body of the earth. There is another ore there too, he knows, running deeper and older, something mellow and rich and cold, but this metal-song he doesn't understand, doesn't recognize. Gold, then, or perhaps mithril, pure untapped veins of it pumping life through the ancient stone far, far below.

His eyes itch with the salt of his weeping and he tells himself he is not crying because his brother is dead. He is crying because this is his home and the land of his people and he cannot even understand what these stones sing to him, what dark stories they tell. These ancestral songs are so different from the blunt voices of iron and the sour whine of copper-dust that he knew in the stale tunnels of Ered Luin. He feels even in this moment—especially in this moment—that this is somehow a shame upon him. His first night in Erebor he spent wandering the broken halls like a lost creature, awed and confused and upset, until his brother grew suspicious and came in search of him and together they climbed to one of the high balconies still open to the night air. They had stayed there until dawn, silent and shivering in the cold but each comfortable in the other's quiet. He had gazed into the darkness of the mountain and tried to imagine it lit with a thousand lamps like his King had described it when he was a child, and as the sky paled to a dusty, dry grey behind them his brother had at last fallen asleep, his head dropping softly to rest upon his shoulder like a—like a dead weight.

He did not see his brother fall, but there had been a sound behind him while he fought like a mad thing in defense of his fallen King. Through his fury he had heard it and he had never heard anyone make a sound like that before, not anyone, but he couldn't look and he couldn't stop because his King, his uncle and his King, lay bloodied upon the ground. And so he notched his swords and lost his helm (sister-son, his King had said at its gifting, hoarse with pride before all the Company), and in his last desperation he had given his own body up as a shield against the spears of flint and bronze and bone and now he can't stop crying no matter how it hurts, and he thinks his brother is dead. His brother, so beautiful and so young, who only that morning had stood fierce and straight and steady at the side of his King arrayed, for the first time in his life, as a prince.

He thinks his brother must be dead, because there had been that sound behind him and suddenly his left side had been undefended, filled with goblin yelling and goblin spears. He had stumbled back to stand nearly over his King and he had not shouted for his brother, he had not looked among the dead lying broken at his feet, he had not even allowed himself to think it. He does not remember the last time he saw his brother in the confusion and the slaughter. Instead he remembers the look that had been in his eyes the instant before they leapt out of the fastness of the Mountain together roaring and resplendent in jewels and mail, and how cold his fingers had been in the grey morning when they clasped hands and made a brave jest of their last farewells.

He does remember standing alone over the body of his King and cutting down goblins uncounted until his arms shook with the strain. He remembers his sword shivering to pieces in his hand. He remembers when his shield was struck out of his failing grip. He remembers screaming. At the end, like a child, he had reached out with his hands and tried to grasp the blades before they drove into his body, to push them away like he had pushed his mother's hands away when he was small, in the evenings when he did not want to sleep.

One of his hands is cut open to the bone, his thumb nearly severed and hanging. The other is a tangled ruin of flesh pinned to his ribcage where the spear went through.

He tries to think it was worth something. But his King lies now defenseless and his brother is dead and he is crying because it hurts, oh Mahal, oh god of the Forge and the Quiet beneath the earth, it hurts and if he hurts then his brother must have—it must have—for it was all around them spears, spears all around and there was that sound and if he is hurting now then his brother—

If his brother is dead then he must have hurt like this, and if he is dead then he died alone, and he'll never know the last thing his brother's eyes ever saw but he does know that it wasn't him, that it wasn't his face, that it wasn't anything loving or kind or fair.

He can feel the world fading around him, and his thoughts are growing ever more confused, and he thinks his brother is dead. But he wants so badly for the last thing he sees to be not the spear-hafts jutting from between his ribs, or the black blood and the bright blood co-mingled on the stones, or the teeming sky roiling with bats. He is selfish and he doesn't know how to be alone, and he wants to see his brother's face, even if—

Even if his brother is dead.

(He won't believe his brother is dead.)

(His brother is dead.)

(His brother.)

He will not leave his King even now, even after giving him everything (because sister-son, he had murmured in the treasure-halls of Erebor, and my heir, he had said to the Master at Laketown, and good lad, he had smiled in the narrow darkness of Ered Luin, fondly ruffling his hair). But he drags in another breath that whistles through his torn throat and tastes like red copper, and with the last of his strength he claws his free hand into the dust and with a sob of effort he lifts his head. He opens his eyes.

The pain when he moves is an agony that rips him apart. He screams, once. It is his brother's name.

And the last thing he hears is the metal beneath the earth singing a dirge he cannot understand, and the last thing he sees is the frozen look of terror on Kíli's white and bloodied face, and somewhere there is a bear roaring and a great shadow that blocks out the sun but it is too late, too late, too late.