Hello, people! Long time no see! Yes, I know it's my fault and I'm so very sorry. Unfortunately, life happened. My respects to those who still managed to find this story in the more obscure pages this was pushed to after not having been updated in ages, and biggest thanks for the follows and favourites.

heroherondaletotherescue, DiscountJoanJett, Clemmie Cole, Guest, Kirgy5040, enje, xXMizz Alec VolturiXx: Thanks for the reviews, guys! It's been months and years since some of you wrote these, but I'm still here reading them whenever one pops up and it puts a smile on my face. Thank you again and sorry for the year-long delay.

"You shouldn't have come here."

Kili stared at her and saw her eyes changing again, looking at him with anger and another, unidentified emotion, as though he had committed the ultimate betrayal. It made his insides twist. Who on earth had he murdered in a past life to deserve this?

"Can we just cut to the part where you make me feel guilty again?" he said shortly.

Arya scoffed, shaking her head in disbelief as she shifted away from where he sat. "People really don't change at all, do they?"

"Is this still about my brother and Liz?" Instead of an answer, he was rewarded with a glare from the corner of her eye. It was enough to take the hint. "You're not going to let that go for the rest of my life, are you?"

"Did you forget to pay your brain bill?" she said hotly. "Because I sure as hell didn't forget to pay mine!"

"I see," Kili sighed resignedly. "For two lives."

"Is this a joke to you? You ruined–"

"Are you angry at me?" he asked wryly. "Because I hadn't realised that!"

She'd resorted to tossing her arms around in anger to vent instead of giving him another bruise to match the one already on his face, "You are unbelievable!"

Kili took hold of her flailing limbs. "I've asked you this again, you had two brothers, didn't you?"

He squeezed her wrists, yet she was too enraged to even take notice. "That's got nothing to do with this–"

"It has everything to do with this," he persisted. "If you were me and that had been one of your brothers, you would've gone to the barricades!"

"No, no, don't patronise me, mister," she pointed a finger to his bruised face. "Don't you dare presume what I would have done–"

He could feel his frustration skyrocket. At this stage, his last nerve was flayed beyond recognition. "Fili knows about this, okay?" he snapped.

Her mouth automatically shut and she was left there breathing in and out heavily, as though her anger was slowly evaporating into aerial form. She stared uncomfortably directly into his eyes for a good long minute to trace any sign of him lying, but found none.

"Yeah. He knows. I told him," the words came out curt, almost challenging her to doubt the truth in them.

She arched an eyebrow. "And? Is he still speaking to you?"

"We drank, we fought, he punched me. Then we drank again." He imagined she wasn't nearly as pleased as she would have been if Fili had actually beaten him to a pulp. "Perhaps my motives seemed insufficient to you, but I did it with the best of intentions. I explained to him why I did it and apologised for it. It's still one of the things that keep me up at night—can't remember the last time I slept more than two hours straight."

"Serves you right," she said with no pity at all. "There's no rest for the wicked."

He snorted. Heaven forbid she'd ever make it easy for him. "But, unlike you," he said pointedly, punctuating every word, "Fili sat and listened and understood. And forgave."

He was surprised to see a chink in her usual armour. An admission of regret, that she had been too quick to judge. She lowered her head, frowning in thought.

The skeptical silence spoke volumes.

"My brother forgave me and it involves him directly," he said and took her hands in his again. "Why is it so difficult for you to do it?"

She looked up then, dead in the eye, and Kili could taste it. The pregnant pause before the surrender... like sizing up the devil before inviting him in. He could feel it. He was on the precipice of finally returning from this long, godforsaken journey to the ninth circle of hell.

It was his eyes that did the trick, she mused; they were wide, endless pools of hazel green honesty that their intense gaze lingered either too long, or not long enough.

And then she pulled her hands out of his grip and took a step back, taking a seat at the edge of the bathtub, both arms holding onto it as her shoulders slouched and her gaze fell on the floor.

They remained silent for the next few torturously long minutes. Kili didn't leave his spot against the washstand and kept watching her study the floor tiles with her eyes as though they were something of grave interest.

It was one of those situations where both people are dying to have a safe distance between them, but neither wants to seem affected by the tangible awkwardness. Kili less so than Arya, but he wished to give her as much space as she needed to feel comfortable. He was too busy feeling like a newborn taking its first breath. The relief was so overwhelming, he felt like crying.

"Have you thought of moving ba–"

"How are things up the–"

He laughed at their voices mixing up and she gave an unexpected smile with only half her mouth. Perhaps the other half didn't dare risk showing any emotion.

"Ladies first," he gestured politely.

The half-smile fell from her face and she cleared her throat to shove away any hint of it ever being there. "So what happened with Fili?"

It didn't slip past him that it wasn't what she'd asked originally. Nonetheless, he obliged. "Well... one day she called him to explain what and why, and I'm pretty sure they're in touch ever since. I don't know details and didn't ask for any. It's their business and I'm not meddling."

"A little late for that, isn't it?"

Kili sighed. "Arya–"

"Sorry."

She did sound genuinely regretful, so he let it slide. "You shouldn't have left like that."

It was as if someone plugged her in. Eyes snapped up to his, gleaming warningly.

"I know why you had to come here and I respect that," he explained quickly, literally with a hand on his heart, "but that was no reason to quit your job and move out of the country."

"I didn't know how long I'd have to be away. Could be a week, could be months—if I didn't quit, I'd get fired at some poi–"

"What?" He looked at her in mild shock. "No, you wouldn't! Ever heard of something called unpaid leave of absence? Bloody hell, woman." He sounded genuinely done with it, trying to vent his frustration by rubbing the bridge of his nose but remembering a little too late the extent of his injury. He cursed loudly when the pain became evident.

"Exactly," she agreed pointedly. "Unpaid. I'd still have to pay rent for a house I wouldn't be there to live in. That's a waste of money."

"Fuck the money!"

For a working class individual, currently unemployed, that didn't go down so well. "Kili, not everyone can afford to think like that," she countered. "It just seemed like the reasonable thing to do at the time."

"Now it doesn't?"

She sighed. "Now it doesn't matter. What do you care for, anyway? I thought you'd be glad to be rid of me."

A chuckle escaped him at the absurdity of it all, and he shook his head in disbelief, feeling more or less like he'd been thrown into a miserable time loop. From one second to the next he'd jumped from his spot, covered the distance between them in one impossibly large stride, and loomed above her sitting form like some mythic figure ready to cast judgement upon his flock.

To her credit, Arya barely flinched at the movement. Only craned her neck backwards to see his face and not be on eye-level with his midriff.

"Yeah," he growled mockingly, "calling for days on end and coming all the way down here to find you is me being glad to be rid of you."

She gave a shrug, "Stranger things have happened."

Kili reflexively tossed the towel he'd been holding all this time to the side. It crashed against the wall with a muffled thud and fell to the floor, a spot of red in the midst of the spotless white tiles of the bathroom. Arya's eyes followed its trail almost as if hypnotised.

He began stomping up and down the bathroom angrily, not caring that he was risking getting a noise complaint from the room downstairs.

"You shouldn't have left like that without telling me. I had every right to know."

"Excuse me? Why?"

"Because I was bloody worried is why!" he yelled. "You don't just go and leave like that in the middle of the night, move out of the fucking country, ignore all my calls, and give a shitload of excuses to hung up every time Fili gives me the phone to talk to you!"

Arya sighed in what could pass for regret. She went to open her mouth and say something, explain that inexplicable need to sever all connection with him before she could get way in over her head and fall flat on her face again, but apparently he hadn't finished yet.

"Yes, I made a mistake. I've paid for it ten times over. That's enough," he said with conviction. "Even criminals get second chances, I don't deserve this. If you'd let me get a word in that day in the lift, none of this would be happening right now. Hell, I would have booked a ticket in that flight to come here with you!"

"Why the hell would you do that?"

"I don't know," he exclaimed wildly, "to support you or something! Help out. I could just stay in a corner and do the dishes if that'd help in any way!"

"No need to leave your life to do me any favours. I can manage on my own, thank you very much."

Kili looked like he might crush something against the wall. Preferably his own head. "My god, you're thick, aren't you?"

A snort. "Yes, I believe we've established that several times in the past."

And there came the epiphany. He stared at her as though thunderstruck, only now starting to piece together how much of a fool he'd been. "No, you... you really have no idea what I'm talking about, do you?"

Her furrowed brow was enough of a reply.

Suddenly, all the adrenaline seemed to evacuate his body. His incessant pacing ceased and he leaned against the washstand again, crossing his arms in front of him and looking thoughtful as ever. A new man, with newfound wisdom.

Arya allowed herself to be distracted by the contours of his arms, a sight she didn't realise how much she'd missed. Often in the past she'd find herself staring at him when he wasn't looking, eyes tracing every surface as though he was an exhibit in a museum. And like most exhibits, touching was forbidden. So she'd resorted to admiring from afar, where she couldn't do any harm.

Kili ran a hand through his hair; it was an old, anxious habit. He looked around and– There wasn't enough booze in this room, or in his system, to have made any of this a good idea.

Oh, to hell with it.

"Why do you think one breaks it off with another right after they've agreed to move in together?"

It snapped her out of her reverie for good. "What?" she asked, equal parts embarrassed because she'd missed half of what he said and genuinely confused by the other half.

"Me and my ex," he explained. "Remember her?"

Some kind of emotion flitted across her face, but she was quick to stomp it back where it came from. It was a blink-and-you'll-miss-it kind of thing.

"We'd been talking about moving in together for some time," Kili went on. "It was three– No, four. Four months after you came to stay with my brother."

"What does that have to do with anything?"

"We broke it off a few days after we'd agreed to move in."

Her jaw clenched slightly as she turned away from him and gave an eye-roll at the wall. "Yeah, well, shit happens."

"You don't want to know why?"

Her teeth gritted almost punishingly. "It's none of my business, so no," she said curtly. "I don't need to know about you and your girlfriends, exes or not."

"Only exes," Kili corrected. "Haven't been with anyone in a while."

Her grip on the edge of the bathtub tightened. A subtle glare upwards, and she started wondering if the sole purpose of his existence was to reduce her to a punch bag. She managed a condescending look of sympathy, at best. "Happens to the best of us."

"I broke it off because of another woman. And I haven't been with anyone in months because of that woman."

The normally self-assured man who walked around with that blinding smile and all the confidence in the world was reduced to a hunched ball of hurt and anxiety.

"She was so annoying," he said with a half-chuckle that, in truth, sounded closer to a sob than to laughter. "Got to my nerves so much, I almost hated her. I hated her as much as she hated me, probably. And as I realised a couple months ago, I hated her as much I loved her."

Those last eight words were the key to unlock a Pandora's box of phenomenal proportions.

Arya tried to control her breathing. She had that intense feeling of impending doom one might experience before something fateful happens to them.

"Turns out all I ever wanted was for her to notice me. Just a fragment of her attention. I flirted, I teased... sometimes came across as very rude; ended up insulting her, on multiple occasions, because she wouldn't respond to me any other way. I hated her because sometimes she'd avoid me, barely say 'good morning'. I hated her because she gave everyone the benefit of the doubt but me—always thought I had an ulterior motive for every kind thing I ever said or did to her. All she could think of me was that I'm a smartass with an ego the size of a skyscraper. A backstabber, too, as of late–"

She swallowed tightly. "Stop–"

"I didn't know how much I loved her until she got on a fucking plane and moved out of the country without telling me or wanting to hear from me afterwards. I d–"

"Enough. Please."

Kili felt like he'd been slapped. His mouth fell shut and he shifted away from her, suddenly feeling humiliatingly exposed. He had bared his innermost being and now just stood there, unable to deny everything, or take it all back and act indifferent. He actually felt violated in some twisted kind of way when he realised his predicament. Chances were she'd react this way, he knew that, had mentally prepared for it, but seeing it unfold in real time didn't even begin to cover how gut-wrenching it actually was.

Her face made him wince. She jumped to her feet like a coil spring that was let loose.

Kili stayed still, watching; waiting.

Fili had made him promise not to leave in the middle of the conversation; that he'd keep going till the end, until the proverbial thread was unraveled, because keeping all of it inside wasn't healthy. He'd say what he needed to say and once it's all out in the open, then he'd take whatever came with dignity because he wouldn't want the last interaction he had with her to be based on lies and half-truths.

Fili hadn't warned him that she might be the opposite; that if she felt a situation became too much, she'd walk away before she said something she was going to regret later. She first let her head clear and then came back and talked about it.

At the end of the day none of it mattered, really.

Because Kili should have known that that woman didn't do well with emotions. Hell, she'd probably want to run away.

And for once in his life, she proved him right.

Well... you know me, I love me a cliff-hanger. Stay tuned for the next one and drop a comment to let me know what you thought about it, if you want!