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For the first time in Kili’s life he feels like his heart is full, it's brimming with it. Neurons firing, his mind spinning something like orbit, something like gravitational pull.
He looks at Fili, Fili and his blue eyes, how it seems like the sun is always in them. His smile that stretches across his face, pulls his lips back and shows his teeth. How his adam’s apple moves against his throat when he laughs, the curve of his palm, the white of his knuckles.
Kili thinks to himself that this is love, this is what he’s been waiting for his whole life.
“What are you so happy about?” Fili asks, his hands going to Kili’s waist, pulling him in, always pulling and Kili always letting him.
He smiles against Fili’s skin, tastes the salt of his skin. Lets his tongue trace circles before he answers.
“You, always you.”
A familiar sound cuts in, something similiar to a beeping.
“Do you hear that?” Kili asks pulling back a little, just enough to shape their bodies into a V.
“Hear what?” Fili asks, his voice fading out.
Kili looks at him with confusion.
“Kili? Kili?” His mother’s voice breaking through, melodic, gentle like a bird song. “Kili? Are you awake?”
He wakes in a hospital, to bright lights and stark white. He wakes to his heart monitor machine beeping, he wakes to his mother’s hands on his.
“Kili!” Tears run down her face, tears that remind Kili of the first sunrise that him and Fili ever watched together.
He looks around the hospital room, at the familiar faces surrounding his bed. He doesn’t see him amongst them, doesn’t see his golden hair, his broad shoulders, doesn’t see his still frame.
His heart races, confusion spilling into him.
“Where’s Fili?” Kili asks trying to sit up, his body stiff, unused and working against him.
Dis sits on the edge of the bed, her eyes moving from Kili, then to Thorin, to Bilbo, then back to Kili.
“Who’s Fili?”
Coma.
“You were under for months, the car accident-” words fade in and out, he stays motionless.
All he can feel is the ache in his chest, carving itself a home, a slow knife pressed against his organ, carving, carving, carving.
He thinks it’s because he always wanted an indescribable love, mountaintop love, unconditional, savage as the waves kind of love, breakfast in bed sunday morning kind of love.
He thinks it is because he wanted so much that it’s why it was only a dream.
“He’s real .” He says it with conviction, with the power of a preacher and a sermon. He says it with heaven stuck in his throat.
“It’s common for coma patients to have vivid dreams. There are people he can speak to-”
Kili cuts the doctor off, “I’m not speaking to anyone.”
Instead he lets himself remember.
Remember how people are drawn to Fili, drawn to him like moths to light. Some of them more vicious, savage, with teeth that bite. In this version of him he remains still, remains calm, remains himself.
And Kili?
Kili is another moth, being pulled in.
“It’s impossible to miss someone that you’ve never met.”
“Of course he’s perfect for you, you created him.”
He was like sunlight, each one of Kili’s exhales creating him.
“He doesn’t feel made up.”
“He was. He’s not real, he’s not-”
“No. He is, he is and I’m going to find him.”
The universe stretches out, and Kili lets himself wonder if they’ve ever listened to the same song at the same time, been to the same beach, seen the same grains of sand. He wonders if the universe has given them that at least.
If he isn’t real then he wants to know how he knows how it feels to have Fili’s favorite mug in his hands, the one with the chip on the mouthpiece, just a small turn from the handle.
“What’s his name?”
“Fili.”
A pause.
“Do you find it odd that his name is so similar to yours?” Bilbo asks, his voice soft and dripping with concern.
Hesitation. “No.”
“I believe you.” Bilbo’s hand reaches out to his and for the first time Kili lets himself feel hope, feel relief, he lets himself believe.
It always ends when his eyes meet the horizon and his hands on top of another's on the stick shift.
“If you do find him, if you do, what if it isn’t the same?” Thorin asks him, cautious of his nephew, cautious of his big heart, how it seems to keep expanding and bumping into things and getting hurt over and over again.
“It will be, I know it will be.” He thinks about transcendence, something about them being bigger than all of this.
He remembers how Fili stood against the kitchen counter, the marble counter top pressing into him, his hair pulled back and his face smeared with pancake batter. He remembers wind against his skin from the open window, the birds in the tree outside. He remembers snaking his hands around Fili’s waist. He remembers chocolate chip pancake Sundays the same way that he remembers everything leading up to the accident.
He lets the memories swirl together. The one’s with Fili feel different, not muddled, not the way some of his childhood memories do. Everything with Fili seems brighter.
No matter how many times he seems to brush his teeth, how many times he lets the hot water scald his skin, his body still remembers the taste, the feel of Fili against him
“If he isn’t real then how do I know his favorite book is ‘The Journey to the End of Night’?” Kili asks, his hands shaking at his sides.
“It’s a common book, a well known book, a-”
“I’ve never read it. Ever. Not once. So tell me how do I know that his favorite quote is this, ‘ Not much music left inside us for life to dance to. Our youth has gone to the ends of the earth to die in the silence of the truth. And where, I ask you, can a man escape to, when he hasn't enough madness left inside him? The truth is an endless death agony. The truth is death. You have to choose: death or lies. I've never been able to kill myself.’ How do I know that word for word and I’ve never actually held the book?”
Bilbo grips Thorin’s arm, reassurance before speaking.
“That is a good memory, I don’t believe I’ve ever heard you quote literature before.” Bilbo gets up from his seat and walks over to one of the many bookshelves that line the house. He looks for the well worn white spine, the cracking black letters. He pulls the book from the shelf and hands it to Kili. “Perhaps then when you find him, he will be glad to know you have a copy.”
Kili wraps his arms around Bilbo, crushing, buries his face in Bilbo’s hair and is grateful that he has this. “Thank you.” Kili whispers.
“When you do find him, when,” Thorin pauses, collecting his thoughts, “I would love to meet him.”
“I’ve never seen him like this.” Thorin says to Bilbo one night in bed.
“He really believes he’s real.”
“I’m worried if he isn’t, I’m worried about him getting hurt. He doesn’t deserve that pain.”
Bilbo takes a breath before speaking, letting the silence settle between them. “Sometimes things have a funny way of working themselves out and I really want to believe in this with him.”
He remembers the night when they met late, when they met with a tie loose around Fili’s neck. When Kili pulled him back, pulled him down, their limbs in the damp grass, Fili’s tie in Kili’s hands, cloth wrapped around his knuckles.
Fili’s lips against Kili’s whispering, “this, this, this,” as he kisses him burning, kisses him exploding, colliding, kisses him until he feels higher than all of this.
If it’s just a dream, then how do the grass stains in his jeans seem so vibrant.
Time.
Time becomes an enemy. The clock ticking on the wall a reminder. The hands moving a countdown. Each second he feels all of this slipping further away from him. He spends his days waiting for a bomb to go off, an explosion that might happen.
Kili knows the way that Fili looks in the mornings, with sunlight stretching across his skin. He knows how his white cotton shirt clings to him, wrinkles and showing skin across his stomach as his back arches off the bed. He knows the smell of the bedsheets, sweat soaked and mingling with detergent. He knows the way that Fili rolls over, reaches over to Kili and places their lips together. He knows his lips are soft and warm and hold the weight of the sun in them.
He closes his eyes, pinches the bridge of his nose.
“It’s real, it’s real, it’s real.”
The road, gravel, blood and dirt in his mouth. Headlights. The undeniable beeping of an open door on a car when the engine is running. Sirens. Red and white flashing.
That’s the reality.
These memories are nothing but confessions, nothing but dreams and desires, nothing but want. They’re something to prove.
He could do this for years he thinks. Days, weeks, months, years, years, and years. He would rewrite them, deconstruct them, rebuild them. He could find every single variation of them. It’s always the same outcome, it’s always them.
That’s what he does, he spends his days creating new versions of them in his head, versions where they still exist. Versions where it’s not just Kili, where he is not being told that “it isn’t real, Fili isn’t real, he was a part of your coma.”
Instead he still has him, he has him when they’re young, when they’re old, when it’s just them and the world is still new.
It takes the better part of four months.
Kili goes back to the hospital, goes back to the war where his body laid for months, where his mind slipped into a better place. He sits on a chair in the hallway, between rooms. He sits there with his elbows resting on his knees.
It takes him listening to the familiar sound of a heart monitor, its persistent and steady beat. Of course it should be familiar to him, he listened to it for month, of course it should be, they should all sound similar. This? This is different, the cadence in it reminds him of his dream.
His feet are moving before he realizes what it is that he is doing.
He’s standing in a doorway, his hands gripping the frame, knuckles turning as his nails dig into the wood.
“No, no, no,”
There, between rough sheets, IV in his arm, monitor at his side, is Fili. Golden hair that seems dull, his once tanned skin now pale.
Kili rushes to the clipboard hanging off the edge of the bed. His vision blurs and his hands shake.
He reads the name on the clipboard.
Fili.
He learns that he was shot, that he was in the war, that a bullet lodged himself in the back of his skull and he has been like this ever since.
He learns that he arrived the same day as Kili.
He tells Thorin, Dis, Bilbo. He tells all of them of the man in the hospital bed, the one that has been there eight months now, the one that arrived the same day as Kili did. After his own accident.
“Maybe you saw him first, when they were taking you into the emergency room, and that is why you dreamed about him.” Dis says, her voice lavender sweet as she smiles lightly at her son.
“No, I didn’t. I was unconscious by the time they found me in the car.”
They all know that he is right and none of them have an explanation for it.
Kili doesn’t want an explanation. He just wants Fili.
Kili thinks about telling Fili how the dream ended for him. Similar to how he got into the dream in the first place.
“We were driving, we were driving. You in the driver's seat and I was in the passengers because you said I get distracted easily, that the scenery was too much for me at times and that you prefered for me to be able to enjoy it. I did, God, I fucking did. I enjoyed you, your laugh, how your head tilted back and your eyes crinkled so much that I could no longer see the blues of your irises. I look from you, out through the windshield, past the winding road and to the horizon, that’s where it always ends for me.”
Kili listens to the monitor, the slow steady beep to it. His feet rest against the edge of the hospital bed, his chin against his knees as he watches Fili.
“What the fuck am I doing?” Kili leans back and runs a hand through his tangle of hair, the matted mess of being unwashed, untouched for days on end.
“You don’t know me, but I know you. I know you and one day you’re doing to know me too.”
He goes to the hospital every day. He tells him about some of the memories, not all. He sits in a worn down chair, a dip in the cushion. It’s uncomfortable and the wood is hard against his skin but he can’t bring himself to move. He thinks himself a permanent fixture in this room, like the lamp or the heart monitor. He’s ok with that.
When it was them, when it was the dream, nothing was ever a question, there were never any fishing hook lines at the end of it, everything was always a statement, because they understood.
He reads to him his favorite book. He makes voices as he reads, exaggerates, the way that he used to in the dream when it was late at night and they couldn't sleep.
He hopes.
Notenough,notenough,notenough.
Fili held Kili’s wrists close to him, held them like a bouquet, like a walk down the aisle, tight and filled with hope.
He pulls Fili’s still hand to his wrists, slowly places the fingers around them to see if it feels the same as Fili lays there in his hospital bed. It feels lifeless, it feels like a funeral.
There’s a million memories buzzing around in Kili’s head, like the way the summer fireflies dip into the bushes and light enveloping night.
“You told me that you loved me with the lights off, when you were crawling into bed. It was the brightest thing I had ever seen.” Kili says with a smile, with his cheeks turning pink, with his chin on his knees.
Fili’s hand stirs. His fingers grip the cloth of the bed sheet.
Fili is in a dream, in his dream he is lying on pavement. He is trying to force himself to stand. The man with the long brunette hair and wild horse limbs is gone, and Fili is panicked. All he can think is gone, that this person is gone, that he feels suddenly empty, lost, confused.
The scenery begins to blur around him, the colors bleeding and fading.
He opens his eyes.
When his eyes open, he looks straight ahead and he lets the feeling of missing settle in his chest like an old house creaking.
He doesn’t realize that what he’s missing has moved against the wall, is watching him with nervous shaking breaths.
He knows that Fili doesn’t love him, not yet. He doesn’t know the dream, it hasn’t come to him the way it did to Kili. But maybe he will love him, maybe he will with his next breath, with his next expansion of lungs.
“Kili,” he breathes it out, exhales it like it’s creating the universe and Kili knows that feeling all too well.
It’s, it’s unexplainable.
Fili heals, he’s released from the hospital. He tells Kili he remembers, he knows how he likes his tea(all sugar, splash of milk), he tells him he knows about the art books under his bed, he knows about the science project he failed when he was fifteen, the exploded paper mache that was stuck on the ceiling for months. He knows about the scar on Kili’s knee, the one from falling off his bike when he was seven, burgundy autumn leaves.
He says he remembers how their legs rubbed together under the covers, all tangled limbs. That he remembers the museum, kissing in front of the art and Kili telling him that he could never come here again, not without him, because anything without Fili was like blood in his mouth, it was like destroying the world's most beautiful things.
Fili tells Kili that he remembers him talking about Dis, about her saying that if the sun never came up then Kili would learn to live without it.
Kili shakes his head, a small laugh. “Never the sun, I couldn’t live without that.”
Fili’s hand slips into Kili’s like muscle memory.
“Is it how you remember?” This time it’s a question.
“No.” Fili replies to him.
Kili feels his foundations shake.
“It’s better.” Fili smiles his radiant smile and Kili believes himself a moth again and he doesn’t seem to mind flying into the light.