#kilielweek

"Kili," Tauriel says one evening. "I want a baby."

Kili, sitting on his desk across the room, immediately stiffens, his back going ramrod straight. Then, he slowly turns around and just… stares at her, his brown eyes as round as saucers. He doesn't say anything, just stares, and the resulting silence is almost suffocating. 

Tauriel shifts awkwardly from foot to foot, waiting for him to say something. It seems like he might, a few times, opening his mouth, and then closing it, and then opening it again, but he never speaks. She bites her lip. Probably should have approached this more delicately. "Kili?" She asks. He starts, like her voice has snapped him back to reality. 

"Sorry," he says, suddenly standing up, "I just… now?"

Tauriel nods determinedly. No backing down now. "Yes. Now. I'm ready now."

Kili blinks. Suddenly, he's closing the distance between them, throwing off his shirt, and kissing her all at once. Tauriel bursts out laughing and welcomes his enthusiasm- they know it will be a long night. 

.

Upon waking the next morning, she immediately knows it worked. She can sense, somehow, a tiny life beginning to grow inside her. It's what Kili would call a 'spooky elf power', to just know, right away, but she just… does. She places her hand on her stomach and turns her head to look at her husband. Kili is a messy sleeper, as usual, all sprawled out, the blankets barely covering his naked body. He's matured past the young dwarf Tauriel met in Mirkwood, having grown into his body much more, thickening out from the gangly (for a dwarf) young idiot she fell in love with, a longer beard and several scars also being obvious indicators of the passage of time. Tauriel scoots closer to him and rests her head on his chest, the weight of it waking him. Kili tenses up in a stretch and a yawn, extending his arms above his head, and then wrapping them around her. 

"G'mornin'," he mumbles, rubbing her bare shoulder with one large, rough hand and pressing a sleepy kiss to the top of her head.

"Good morning," she replies. 

"Wha' time izzit?" 

"Early. The sun has not yet risen."

"Amrâlimê," he groans, grabbing the edge of the blanket and yanking it up to his shoulder. "Why did you wake me up? I can sleep in today!"

Tauriel bites back a soft laugh, helping him by pulling the other edge of the cover up and gently rubbing his chest. "I did not mean to. I apologize."

He lets out a wordless grumble, rolling them both over so he's snuggled up against her front, face against her chest, arms around her middle, and legs tangled with hers. "You're lucky I love you. Any other dwarf would protest quite heartily to an elvish witch waking them up before the sunrise."

"Elvish witch?" She asks with fake indignation.

Kili has the audacity to giggle in reply and she tugs at one of the braids that was left in his hair from yesterday. He lets out a shaky breath at that.

"I'm trying to sleep, witch."

"Are you?" She asks cheekily.

"Yes!" He untangles from her and rolls away to the very edge of the mattress, but Tauriel follows him, pressing her body up against his back.

"Kili," she whispers. "It worked."

"What worked?" He grumbles, trying to hide under the blankets. She chuckles and slides her arm around his middle, worming her hand under his arm until he lifts it to let her in. 

"I'm pregnant," she murmurs in his ear. Kili goes still again. Then, he snorts. 

"You're teasing me. You have no idea if it worked. Not yet at least."

"Oh, don't I?"

"Of course not. That's impossible."

"Mhm. Well. We could always try again, I suppose, just to make sure."

The speed at which he rolls over and on top of her is honestly impressive and she finds herself laughing into his mouth.

.

“I was being serious,” she says as they fall apart on the mattress, sweaty and sated. Kili looks over at her, wiping his bangs off his brow. 

“What?”

“I was being serious. About being pregnant.”

Kili gapes at her, his eyes as wide as saucers. Then he sits bolt upright. “You were?!”

“Of course I was! Why would I joke about that?!”

“I don’t know!”

Kili covers his face. “Sweet Mahal. I’m going to be a father. Already. Y’know, I thought we’d have to try a few times at least! I didn’t think we’d get it in one go-- wait, how do you even know?!”

Tauriel props herself up on her elbow, thinking. “I don’t know. I just... do.”

He nods. “Fair enough.” He takes his hands off his face and looks at her. “We better start thinking about names.”

“Oh, we have time, meleth nin, don’t fret. We’ve a whole year to plan and get ready.”

“That doesn’t seem like enough time,” Kili mumbles. 

“We did have several years before this,” She teases. 

…

They don’t start thinking about names until a few months in, nor do they tell others about the pregnancy. The reaction from family and friends is ecstatic and the two of them are practically overwhelmed with well wishes and gifts and birthing advice and baby care tips. Tauriel finds herself quite glad that many of the dwarves are still cautious around her, especially when Cassia informs her bluntly that she very well might have perfect strangers come up to her and try to touch her belly the instant she starts showing. And that does not sound fun. Neither does the cravings or aches or morning sickness…  For the most part, though, Tauriel is truly enjoying the experience of it. Her body is growing a tiny life! There is a baby inside her, living and developing and moving! She thinks it is beyond amazing and never passes up an opportunity to gush about it. 

.

As the pregnancy progresses, they start thinking more seriously about names in between preparations.  Kili has been insistent on a dwarven name, while Tauriel quite likes the idea of an elvish one. 

"What are you thinking about?" She asks her husband one evening before bed. Kili is smoking his pipe and Tauriel is trying her best to knit a baby blanket. He blows a smoke ring thoughtfully. 

"Names for our baby," he says. "I think it'll be a girl, so I've been thinking of girl names."

"Oh have you?" Tauriel asks, smiling. In her brief distraction she drops a stitch and frowns. This is harder than Dis and Cassia make it look. 

He nods. "It’s tradition for the Durin line to give lasses names that end in "-is". My mother is Dis, my sister is Rhís, my great aunt was called Frís, and so on." He takes another drag from his pipe, his eyebrows furrowed in a way that lets Tauriel know he's been thinking quite hard about this. 

"What have you come up with?" She queries, carefully unravelling and fixing her mistake. 

"Eydís," Kili says. "It means 'good fortune' and she'll be our little treasure. What do you think?"

Tauriel frowns and lowers her knitting into her lap. "Well..." she says but is interrupted as Kili points his pipe at her in a joking manner. 

"You don't like it,” he declares.

Tauriel hems and haws, not wanting to hurt his feelings. It’s a nice enough name, but not exactly what she had in mind.

"It's not that I don't like it, I just… I've gotten rather attached to the name Minasel."

Kili squints. “Minasel? What does that even mean?”

“It means tower of stars. I was thinking, since I want her to rise above all opposition…” She trails off, seeing the unimpressed look on Kili’s face, feeling anger flare. “Well! It’s better than Eydis!”

The argument about names does halt for the entirety of the pregnancy, Tauriel will say how little Minasel is being especially active today, or Kili will rub her belly and ask how little Eydis is that day, and from there the same repetitive argument will begin again. Both parents are exceedingly stubborn, and if one would give in, the other would have to give in just on principle and argue that the other name was much  better than their idea. “No, really, it's a lovely name!”  One will say. And the other will reply, “Well, I like the name you picked better!” And then they'd be right back at square one. 

.

"What if you never decide on a name?" Fili asks one evening. The two brothers and their families are having a day off together, gathered in the large sitting room in the royal apartments.  Kili shrugs. 

"Then we hope the baby is a boy," he replies.

"And if it's not?"

Kili frowns. "Uhm…"

"How did you come up with the names for your children?" Tauriel asks her brother in law. “Didn’t you two ever argue about that?” Fili, bouncing his middle child, a lad named Kirin, on his knee, shrugs. 

"Not exactly. Cassia's only request was our first daughter be named after her mother, and mine was that our first son be named for Thorin."

"What if you never have a daughter?" Kili challenges, "what then?"

"She thinks we will."

"I know we will!" Fili's wife, Cassia, enters the room, holding the littlest child in her arms. The infant, named Arnin, has just woken up from his nap, and blinks sleepily at them all over her arm, sucking on his fingers. "I just have a feeling our next will be a girl."

"After three boys?" Tauriel asks. Cassia sits down beside her friend and hands her the infant. Tauriel coos at him and tickles his stomach.

“I want at least eight children,” the Queen says, leaning back in her seat. “I’ve decided.”

"Eight?! You already have a preposterously large family with less than half that number!" Kili splutters. 

“It’s how many she wants,” Fili says, as if that’s a perfectly valid reason.

"Nuncle Kili?" Fili and Cassia's oldest, Thorin, tugs on his uncle's pant leg. He had been playing on the floor. "What does proptserisly mean?"

"Preposterously," Kili corrects him gently, bending down to be at his level. "It means absurd or foolish."

"Oh. Are we pre...pre… prepops…"

"Preposterous?"

"Yes. Are we?"

"Indeed," Kili says, scooping him up into a hug. "Beyond a doubt!" 

Thorin giggles and hugs him. "Mama!" He shouts, "we're propsterus!"

Cassia gives him a blank look. She hadn't been listening, busy talking with Tauriel. "Are we?"

"Nuncle Kili said so!"

“Kili, stop teaching him long words he can’t pronounce,” Fili says as Kili sets Thorin back down. The child runs to his mother and climbs into her arms. 

“I’m improving his vocabulary!”

“Kili, he’s barely nine, when is he ever going to use the word preposterous?”

Tauriel laughs as the brothers argue, stroking Arnin’s curly hair. “If our baby is anything like this little pebble, I don’t think we have any cause to worry about them taking after Kili.” 

Cassia fakes a shudder of horror. “Another Kili, running around causing havoc? That’s awful!”

The two of them giggle. 

.

The months pass all in a rush, but also nowhere near fast enough and near the end Tauriel is well and truly fed up with being pregnant and Kili is desperate to meet his child.

The day of the birth, Tauriel goes into labor in the very early morning, and Kili sprints off to fetch the midwife. His mother and sister in law come to help with the birth. He is permitted to give his wife a kiss but is then promptly booted out the door to spend the time with Fili and his boys in their apartments, waiting with bated breath.

“Would you sit down and relax?” his brother says, blowing a smoke ring from his pipe. 

“No! I cannot! I don’t know how you can expect me to sit down and relax when my wife is giving birth!” Kili shoots back and continues to pace. Fili raises an eyebrow at him. 

“You’ll be pacing like that for a long time.”

“How long, adad?” Thorin asks sleepily, leaning against Fili’s side. He had awoken from the commotion of Cassia leaving and, despite the early hour, had been too excited to go back to bed, so Fili had permitted him to stay up. 

“It depends,” he says, rubbing Thorin’s head. “It took all day for you to be born, so probably about the same.” The lad groans. 

“All day?! But I wanna meet the baby now!”

“So does your uncle, but we’re all going to have to wait.” 

After about half an hour, Thorin drops off to sleep and Fili tucks a blanket around him before walking over to stand next to his younger brother. “Here,” he says, offering his pipe. “You need this.”

Kili takes the pipe and inhales, letting the pipeweed calm his nerves and still the shaking in his hands. 

“How long has Tauriel been having pains?” Fili asks, “Do you know?”

“She said she was beginning to feel it when we went to bed last night. She didn’t want to sleep but told me to.” Kili chews worriedly at the end of the pipe. “I feel like I should be there, helping her or something! I’ve never seen her in so much pain, Fi! Her face,” he waves his hand in front of his own, “was just white. I want to help her, Fili! I need to help her!” Kili cries, before placing his head in his hands.

“You’d probably get in the way if you tried,” Fili says bluntly. He places his hands on his brother’s shoulders and the weight grounds Kili, “Nothing will happen to her, she’ll be fine. You just have to relax.”

Kili looks up at Fili. “Are you sure?” He asks nervously. Fili nods.

“Of course I’m sure. Tauriel is one of the strongest people I know.” He pauses. “Don’t tell Dwalin I said that, though. He’d get indignant.”

That manages to make Kili let out a soft laugh, the tension in his shoulders fading away. Fili is right. Tauriel will be fine.

.

After what seems like an age, Cassia returns to fetch Kili and bring him to Tauriel. Right before he enters the room, he stops on the threshold, suddenly nervous. His sister in law turns back to him when she notices he’s not beside her anymore. She trots back to him and frowns, giving him a little shove toward the door.

“Are you going in or not? Go! Go see your wife!” Kili stumbles through the doorway and hurries into the room. Tauriel is sitting up in bed, holding a little bundle. She looks exhausted, her face drawn and her forehead sweaty, but her sunlight smile is beaming across her face. She is clearly happier in this moment, despite her pain and weariness, than she has ever been before.  

"Would you like to meet your daughter?" Tauriel asks him. Kili is at her side in an instant, nodding. As he moves across the room, he vaguely notices the midwife and his mother off in the corner doing something, but he doesn't exactly care about them. He only cares about his wife and his newborn child. He sits on the edge of the bed and Tauriel leans against his shoulder, moving the blanket slightly so Kili can clearly see the face of his firstborn. The little baby has his eyebrows and nose and a full head of dark red hair, and tiny, pointed ears.

“Hello there,” he whispers, reaching out and touching that miniscule nose. The baby murmurs a bit in her slumber, her eyebrows drawing down in a surprisingly intense glare for a newborn. Kili feels tears burn at the back of his throat.

 “Isn’t she perfect?” Tauriel says, smiling down at the baby, “Our little Minasel.”

Kili looks up from admiring his newborn daughter with a frown on his face. “Minasel?”

“Doesn’t it fit her perfectly?”

“But I wanted to name her---”

“Are you two still fighting over that?” Dis sighs, turning around. “Here, Kili, this is Eydis.”

Quite suddenly, Kili is being handed a second baby. Luckily, he’s held his nephews enough to know exactly how to position his arms and support her head and he does so almost on instinct. This baby is smaller than Minasel, completely bald atop her head, but just as is typical of dwarven babies, has a beard, soft and strawberry blonde.

“Twins?!” Kili shouts. “We had twins?!” Minasel and Eydis, startled by their father’s loud voice, burst into tears. 

“Kili!” Tauriel and Dis scold, scrambling to quiet Minasel while Dis takes Eydis back to calm her. 

“Sorry!”

Soon, the babies are quieted, sleeping peacefully. The midwives finish their work and leave the new parents alone to bond with their children. Somewhere along the line, Kili and Tauriel had traded babies, and Kili is now holding Minasel. Tauriel is nursing Eydis (another thing that isn’t as easy as it looks) and Kili carries his eldest daughter over to the window to get a better look at her. She squints hard when the sunlight hits her face, screwing up into that glare again, and then slowly blinks open her eyes. Kili’s breath catches in his throat. “Hello,” he whispers. Minasel squints at him, then opens them wider. “She has my eyes,” he says softly to Tauriel and draws his daughter up to give her a gentle kiss on the forehead. She sighs and sinks back into peaceful sleep. 

“I’m glad she does,” Tauriel says, “I love your eyes. Eydis hasn’t opened hers, yet.”

Kili comes over to the bed. The smaller baby has finished nursing and is now laying peacefully in Tauriel’s arms, her eyes still squeezed shut. He sits down beside his wife and leans against her shoulder. “Can you show us your eyes, Eydis?” he whispers. To both their surprise, she squirms a bit and then blinks slowly. Her eyes are brown as well— wide, curious, and bright. She yawns hugely and makes a little noise that melts both their hearts. Kili beams. 

“They both have my eyes!” He says happily. 

“They do indeed,” Tauriel replies. “Here, why don’t we lay them next to each other?” She carefully sets Eydis on the bed and pats the space next to her tiny body. Kili lays Minasel down in the open space, and both babies immediately curl together as if they are still in the womb. Kili looks up and Tauriel with a tearful smile. 

“They’re perfect,” he says. Turning to his wife, he smiles softly, “You’re amazing, amrâlimê.”

She blushes a bit. Even after nearly a decade of marriage he still manages to fluster her with his sweet words. “Thank you, meleth nin,” she says.

He leans forward and kisses her gently. 

“Thank you for loving me,” she whispers and he smiles against her mouth. 

“As if I could do anything less, my starlight.” 

“That’s new,” she laughs.

“Aye, trying something out. What do you think?”

“I think ‘Starlight’ would better fit our little Minasel,” she replies honestly. 

“I think so too, but what about Eydis?”

“She’s a little gem, isn’t she?”

“Ithtir and Ibinê,” Kili says softly. Tauriel gives him a confused look. 

“I’m sorry?”

“Those can be their secret names, Ithtir and Ibinê, ‘Bright Star’ and ‘Little Gem’. Don’t you think they fit?”

Tauriel looks down at the twins, a soft smile on her face and sighs happily.