your killer and your lifeline too by kimaracretak

Chapter 1

Read Chapter 1

Shadows in the trees were nothing new. Shadows in the trees that seemed to move with the wind, to twist and dance and whisper amongst each other - those, too, Lúthien knew. They had been her only companions since she fled, as ever-present as the blood under her nails and just as thick.

Tonight, however, something seemed different.

She pulled the thick leather of her cloak tighter around her shoulders and sank deeper into the shadows of her own, at the base of the towering pine that had sheltered her for the past -

- how many times had the sun turned over her sleeping body since she first donned the cloak? She counted the nights now, let moonlight soothe the aches of this new life from muscles unaccustomed to such daytime stillness or dusk-limned flight. Brought her knees to her chest and pressed her forehead to them, let the drape of her cloak and hair form a mockery of a safe haven.

The scent of blooded skin was impossible to escape, in such a place, and for that reason she could not imagine stretching out to lie naked and free under the starlit canopy. Such vulnerability was not for her, not when it came with the potential of surrender to the thing in and under her skin, a monster she had welcomed with clear eyes but had never expected to see unleashed.

This was her life now; a price paid when she kissed the vampire, took her knife and slit her throat to navel and let the skin fall away. Her own skin, shielded under the bat-fell, was nevermore to be called her own. She cupped the air with Thuringwethil's wings, let Lúthien's hair shake loose as she dipped and spun amongst the grasping branches and deepest shadows, and in the space between earth and sky Lúthien let all her senses fall away as well.

There was joy to be found in flight, she knew there must be, as much joy as she had once found in her dance, but her claws were unpractised, and she had yet to claw such delights from this strangely wrought form. Perhaps if Thuringwethil yet lived she would have something to share - not advice, Lúthien couldn't imagine something edging so close to kindness from a creature such as her, but there was a comfort to be found in knowing that somewhere in the world something moved that was like you.

She should take to the air. The restlessness gnawed at her belly, a hunger that frightened her with its growing familiarity. She felt in it a mirror of the darkness that had once shifted over her heart, and more: she felt her new skin shiver in anticipation every time the hunger grew.

It was a hunger not easily sated, not by the food that had once brought her pleasure nor even by the hunt that set the blood racing in her ears, her fingertips, her toes. Satisfaction was a fleeting thing now, tasted more often in anticipation than in its true form.

And the worst of it - Lúthien licked her lips, tongue flickering over the sweet chalkiness that the cloak always left on her mouth when she hid beneath it for too long - the worst of it was that with each passing night she knew she moved further and further away from the will to deny herself.

Why should she, when she wore a monstress' skin so? Once she had believed something different lay beneath Thuringwethil's venom, that she could be convinced with words and flesh and jewels to abandon Sauron's cause.

But on the island, when everything had fallen and all guises been stripped away with knives and claws until hardly even bodies remained, Thuringwethil had chosen to die under Lúthien's blade, crumpled, starving, and still clinging against all reason to the appearance of one who had not been defeated so much as chosen to test Lúthien's resolve.

And if she was truly to be the last of these skin-changers, Lúthien knew she would soon be forced to make a choice between her hungry skin and the life that she had once led.

She worried over such futures in the furrows of the world, the spaces of the in-between that she was sure held answers she had yet to grasp. Thuringwethil's skin did not come with her memories, but Lúthien knew what it meant when the world she saw no longer responded to her song. No more could she draw flowers from the earth, or ask the waters of Sirion to dance beneath her outstretched hand.

She had yet to try to use her voice in the shadows. The world had changed enough already - she had changed enough already - and she did not need to bring more darkness to the surface. The melodies remained trapped under her tongue with the memory of Thuringwethil's last kiss as her throat grew sore with disuse.

She should fly.

The sounds of the woods around her were muffled in the air, the absence of her own voice less noticeable. And there was always, always the knowledge that -

"You're not much longer for this world if you remain on the ground."

Lúthien startled at the voice, her head snapping against the tree trunk as she searched the branches for its source. It was familiar, in a sideways way that tugged at the very edges of her memory - an old voice, one that only met the air with great effort. In another life, Lúthien thought, it might even have belonged to ...

"But it does." The creak of bone against bone is as unmistakable as the scrape of bone against bark, the rustling of the needles and branches as something above crept even higher. "You wear my skin, elf, and you still think I would ever be gone from you?"

Lúthien scrambled to her feet, still clumsy under the weight of wings. "You lost the skin at my hand," she said. "What paths have you traveled, to make you think I want any more of you than what I have?"

Some memories of the time before the visage she had only meant to borrow had sunk its nails deep into something past the heart of her and made itself as good as her own had faded. Not so the memory of the figure in the rubble, red and slick in the sunset light as blood spilled from her lips and she wished Lúthien flight with all the force of a curse.

"You'll have all of me or none." Crimson still gleams above her, though even through the branches Lúthien knows that it is not nearly enough light to be the whole of the creature. "

The red blinked, caught on starlight. Her eyes, Lúthien realised, and knew in that moment what was different about the night's shadows.

Tonight, the shadows watched her back.

Thuringwethil watched her back, as Lúthien dug her nails into the bark and began to climb. Her silence was worse than her taunts, and she offered neither help nor hindrance and Lúthien made her slow way towards her.

The whorls of branches spiraling out from the trunk should have made for an easy climb, yet Lúthien found her grip far too weak, her wings snagging against the old growth. Thuringwethil's eyes were red slits against the night, the only guide Lúthien had as the needles rose around her to obscure the sky.

Thuringwethil blinked, and Lúthien felt her grip falter, her wings spreading instinctively to buffer her against the fall. Thuringwethil's laughter seemed to lift her back, floating under her wings until her hands once again met the bark. Balanced again, Lúthien stared up into the dark.

"You left me alone," she hissed. "What on that island could possibly have held so much of you that you would have left me to bear this alone?"

"You needed to think." Thuringwethil's voice is but a sliver of mist above her. "To remember. I wanted to see what would happen."

"And are you pleased?" The tree was growing cold under her fingertips.

"Not yet." Something twisted inside of Lúthien at the words, a pang of disappointment that she was unused to - that she hadn't expected, given that the disapproval was coming from a creature such as this. "Come up here, little bird. I have so much I want to show you."

Lúthien pulled her wings closer, bit her tongue and let the taste of blood fill all her senses. "I don't believe you."

Thuringwethil drew a long, rattling breath as what passed for her lungs worked against the night. "Since when did that matter between us? Belief is more fleeting than the rain, and just as unnecessary."

Lúthien remembered then that it hadn't rained since the first time she had wrapped Thuringwethil's skin around herself. The storm that had chased her and Beren from Angband had forced her to flight too early and ripped her away from the bodies of her companions, and since then the skies had been clear: a bright, mocking reminder that a journey home that she no longer knew if she desired was yet barred to her.

With rain, with storms, it would be easier to justify her continued shelter in the hollows.

In the face of such memories, Lúthien returned to her climb, aching legs wishing only to leave those vision of the path on the woodland floor below. The hunger receded for the first time in the face of the long bones from above that descended in offering, brittle fingers too blunt to be knives but too precise to do anything but ask her to rise.

When her head broke the canopy, she saw Thuringwethil whole for the first time since Tol-in-Gaurhoth. Whole, in that she was more than the gleaming starlit eyes, and yet - not much more. She was bone covered over with a mimicry of life, wingless and withered. Skin grew in patches, mottled and grey over her chest and arms and hanging in tatters from her cheeks. Little there was in her of the powerful creature who had once held Lúthien's throat in gentle teeth.

And still, Lúthien found herself unable to look away.

Thuringwethil laughed again, a shiver in the night, and an answering shudder raced down Lúthien's spine. This Thuringwethil was her creation, as much as the flowers and springs of Doriath had been in her youth, and Lúthien desired her all the more for it.

Thuringwethil's thin lips curled back over her fangs still sharp after all she's lost. "Not what you expected when you left me for dead, little bird? Change is never so simple."

"No," Lúthien said. Her throat was dry, despite the blood still lingering on her tongue. "What will you be next, skin-changer? What more did you have to give me tonight, and why did you want it so?"

Thuringwethil was quiet for a long moment, and this time Lúthien could feel her gaze piercing down into her heart. "Part of your spirit aches for your old body still," she said. "It does not befit one who would wear my name."

"I never took nor desired your name," Lúthien snapped. Indeed, a name was perhaps all that Thuringwethil had had left to her in the rubble.

Thuringwethil no longer had face enough to frown, yet her eyes narrowed in equal displeasure. "And so you took my skin with no knowledge of what it meant, hm? I do wonder what your mother taught you. Or did you think her still clothed in light?"

She taught me to stay away from the likes of you, Lúthien might have said, yet she did not know how to lie to Thuringwethil after all. And she knew well what her mother saw at the edges of their realm. "I needed only your skin," she said instead, and did not mention what else she had desired.

"That you had, during the nights we lay together," Thuringwethil reminded her, and Lúthien's stolen skin burned with the memory. It was those nights that had first given her the desire to slip underneath Thuringwethil's skin, though at the time she had never dreamed the form that such a surrender would take.

She watched Thuringwethil watch her remember, pull back from the time before the few sensations that yet remained vibrant. "Yes, you meant to steal only my skin," Thuringwethil said, her voice rasping against the night. "But that's a cruel impossibility, elf. Haven't you flown? Haven't you hungered?"

Yes and yes, and the teeth of emptiness sharpened against Lúthien's belly. "I could take the skin off," she said, and it sounded more like a wish than a threat. "I could ... I don't have to be you."

Thuringwethil tilted her head, and Lúthien saw for the first time the smooth expanse of pale skin down the side of her neck, the sweeping point of her single ear. And knew, at last, what Thuringwethil's new skin was growing into. "Then who will you be?" Thuringwethil asked. "I did not take you for one so willing to pass on into nothingness."

"I am not," Lúthien said, but she saw the price that Thuringwethil had laid out before her. It should have seemed a much dearer one to pay than the one she had when she carved Thuringwethil open the first time, and yet -

"I'll find you whichever you choose," Thuringwethil said. The branches creaked as she moved closer, the thin tip of the tree bending with her movement. "Fall or fly, little bird, you'll have tasted the promise of my skin regardless."

Lúthien felt the pressure of her half-grown hands on her shoulders a moment before their bodies connected. And once they had, she was plummeting from the tree as if she had been pushed, although Thuringwethil's fingers had barely brushed her wings.

She counted the seconds as she fell, counted each pine needle that drove itself into her body, each bruise that bloomed under her skin, each blink of the crimson stars above.

And then at last she spread her wings, caught the shadows and allowed herself to spiral upwards. It was not that she mistrusted that Thuringwethil would follow her past the fall, but rather that she could not bear to fall without knowing if Thuringwethil could sate the hunger that no one else would ever know existed.

Lúthien looked down through the deepest night, and watched her own red-eyed face watch her from below.