Chapter Text
If he were a proper mythic hero, Fíli would have gone out in a blaze of glory. He would have never allowed himself to be captured. He would have fought to his last living breath and took dozens of Azog's forces with him into death.
As it is, he only fights his captors long enough to realize that if he dies in a scuffle in this labyrinth, no one but Azog's forces will know, and his kin will unwittingly follow him right into an ambush. After that, he drops his arms, allows himself to be captured and pushed forward down the passageway - betting that Azog intends to show off his prize before he kills him. What use is wiping out the line of Durin if you can't do it loudly and publicly?
If Fíli must sell his life, he will not do so for his own glory, but for the lives of his family. For his baby brother, who even now creeps through the tunnels beneath him. If his death can buy them a warning of what waits for them here on Ravenshill -
So be it, he thinks to himself, and the words echo through his mind like the slamming of a great door, a surety that settles within him even as he can barely manage to stomp down the gibbering, shaking terror that also rises up within him.
Of course, he adds to himself, wryly, if he were a proper mythic hero, he wouldn't have been captured in the first place. He wouldn't be willingly marching to his death surrounded by his enemy, for it is a cowardly and undwarvish thing, to bare your throat to the knife when you still have the teeth to lunge for theirs, and his people do not sing eddas about cowards.
It matters not what they will sing of him in his funeral dirge, he tells himself; nor what they tell his kin afterwards. Not anymore. It matters only that there are some left to sing. Only that he has kin left to listen.
He is surprised to find that his teeth are chattering. He clenches his jaw shut, so that his captors do not have the satisfaction of hearing him chitter like a mindless squirrel - though any orc could smell the adrenaline and stifled panic rolling off of him - as he fights against his instinct to fight, to run, to do anything but meekly shuffle forward.
Fíli has faced down death before. He has killed for food and survival and war. He has hacked through the bodies of living orcs and brought their intestines to spill out on the ground, and split the skull of an attacking bandit with a throwing axe. He has watched his brother nearly die on some strange man's kitchen table. Throughout this entire journey, he's known that the possibility of dying lurked around every turn in the road, but the idea of his death has never seemed so stomach-twistingly real as it does now, perhaps because it has never been so sure a possibility. He will die. He will die soon. He will die soon, here. He will die soon, here, by the hand of the creature that gestures for him to be pushed forward -
He is forced to the front of the cluster of orcs, who jeer and prod him as he passes. He is finally shoved into Azog's hands, and Fíli meets his eyes defiantly, staring down his death - the only defiance he will allow himself - but Azog only grins. His teeth gleam dully, a mouthful of knives.
Azog is talking. Fíli does not hear him. They are standing at the edge of the tunnel, where stone meets the open air, and the wind rushes up to him, filling his lungs with the sweetness of new snow. Across the distance, he can see Uncle Thorin and cousin Dwalin, and a smaller figure that might be Bilbo.
They have seen him. Good. They know, now, what lurks in Ravenshill. They will not be butchered alone and unsuspecting in the dark.
In the tunnels, the smell of blood and shit and unwashed orc was so strong he could barely breathe, but out here, the air is clear and sharp. It's colder here than it is in the Blue Mountains, and back home the first traces of winter will only just be beginning, a chill creeping through the night to settle over the mornings, soft and dangerous as a kiss with the promise of more to come.
In Ered Luin, it's the season for chopping wood and hoarding potatoes, for Amad to come tramping home with a still-warm dead deer slung over her shoulders, droplets of the deer's blood trailing behind her like rubies on the frost. She and Uncle will butcher it in the yard behind the house, Dwalin lazing about calling out advice until she throws a handful of entrails at him and he comes down to actually help, and Uncle will laugh at them and smile, one of the rare ones that crinkles up the corners of his eyes.
This is Fíli's family: kings and princen kneeling in the dirt behind their tiny house with blood up to their elbows, walking wounded but still able to laugh, still alive.
Uncle and Dwalin would have helped her with the butchering, but they're not there, and the house they all share is dark and shuttered, not safe for Amad to live there alone, and too big and empty to heat anyways. She'll bring it down to Gimli's mother Mizim instead, the closest kin she has left in Ered Luin, and they'll wait out the winter together. Ered Luin expected no news until the spring, Fíli remembers, for no one knew if the ravens yet lived, and the northern snows were too treacherous for travelers. She'll spend months waiting for her family to come home to her, not knowing that he is already dead and rotting in the stone.
With the excellent timing typical of his family, it is in this moment that Fíli realizes that he doesn't really want this. He doesn't want to be brave or glorious, he doesn't want songs, he just wants to go back home. He just wants to live. And now it is too late, because Azog is speaking and then the sword is being rammed through his chest, and as Fíli's bowels turn to water and his left lung gapes open like a gutted fish and pain roars in his chest, all he can think of is that fucking deer and its dumb, glassy stare -
and he wants to cry out, but he cannot speak - no air, no blood, no life left -
Thorin watching as Azog now throws him from the cliff -
and Fíli did not want this, he did not believe it could happen, he does not want to die -
please, Kíli, run, run back to Ered Luin, at least let my brother live, Thorin Kíli Ama' Ama' Mahal Ama',
and then there is only darkness and fathomless height, falling down and down and down and -