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Chapter Text

Wednesday April 27 2941

 Bilbo Baggins was sitting on his bench in front of his smial, blowing smoke rings as he waited for Gandalf to arrive. He tapped his pipe thoughtfully as he watched the tall cloaked figure make it’s way up the path. He brought the stem of the pipe back up to his lips and held it loosely between his teeth, the taste of wood spreading across his mouth. Gandalf made his way slowly up the row, and then stopped, stooped over his walking stick in front of Bilbo.

Bilbo watched the looming figure impassively, without changing expression or offering comment, not even when Gandalf stared at him rather ominously from under his bushy eyebrows and the rim of his pointed hat. For some minutes they regarded each other in silence. At last Gandalf let out a long huff and shifted his hold over his staff. “Good morning.”

Bilbo puffed on his pipe and hid a small smile. "What do you mean?" he said. "Do you wish me a good morning, or mean that it is a good morning whether I want it or not; or that you feel good this morning; or that it is a morning to be good on?"

Gandalf almost reared back, looking properly flabbergasted. Bilbo grinned at him unrepentantly. Gandalf opened his mouth and shut it again, and then said, “All of them at once, I suppose.”

Bilbo nodded and gestured with his pipe. “And a very fine morning for a pipe of tobacco out of doors, into the bargain.” He took another long draw on his pipe. “What a lot of things we do use good morning for, eh?”

Gandalf only blinked at him, his eyes drawn to the hand holding his pipe, undoubtedly tracking the numerous little nicks and scars he’d earned wielding Sting over the years, and others from climbing far too many blasted mountains, or conversing with rather too large dragons for the taste of Bilbo Baggins.

“Bilbo Baggins at your service my good sir,” Bilbo said, inclining his head, unable to hold in this little throw away statement. No, this was certainly not how this interaction had gone down the first time around, but then it certainly wasn’t the job of Bilbo Baggins to ensure that everything went down exactly the same way it had the first time.

Gandalf merely regarded him for a while and then said, “I was looking for someone to partake in an adventure.” He could see the old man’s eyes regarding him carefully for any reaction to such a statement.

Bilbo only nodded with a little thoughtful grin. “Aye, if you’re looking for a hobbit in search of adventure in these parts you must have had to travel a goodly long way. What use could you possibly have for a hobbit on an adventure, do pray tell?” He lazily blew out another smoke ring, being careful to direct it so that it did went around Gandalf instead of into the old man’s face.

“Hobbits are quiet folk and they could be quite useful for a number of endeavors.”

Bilbo hummed. “One can only imagine. But you did not come here to talk with a hobbit in the shire, Gandalf the Gray, and yes I remember your name quite well. You’re here to recruit me as accessory to some grand plan. Pray do tell me what the particulars would be?”

Bilbo was fairly certain he’d broken Gandalf. The old man was spluttering and coughing quite uncomfortably in that way he tended to do when he didn’t understand something (which was seldom) or was perturbed (something Gandalf would never have admitted to being without a fair amount of grumpiness stitched on to temper it). Bilbo smiled around the stem of his pipe— he couldn’t help it, he’d been an old man for far too long and if he had a chance to throw Gandalf off his rhythm then there was no way that he wasn’t going to take it.

“You knew I was coming.” The Wizard’s eyebrows were furrowed almost dangerously now, and the way he tilted his head made his hat cast his face in shadow. “How?”

Bilbo liked the way that Gandalf managed to assume that Bilbo had informants among some sort of darker power, and that the middle aged and unassuming hobbit was well on his way to trying to take down uncrowned dwarf kings. Bilbo chuckled at the thought. “I’m far too old to be frightened by your little tricks of light, dear Gandalf. Either you will kill me or you will not, and I’m rather inclined to think that you’d not harm most hobbits without a great deal more motivation than I’m capable of giving. And furthermore you’re quite suspicious of someone you’ve just met.”

Bilbo stood up and shuffled his feet a bit to dust them off and raised an eyebrow at Gandalf. “If you must know, there is at least one of the Valor who is quite fond of the hobbits, and the Green Lady is rather not very fond of how things went last time around.”

Gandalf seemed to draw himself up all at once and the look of an old man that he seemed to  drape about him like a mantle was rapidly fading. “Last time around? Do not speak in riddles, I am not amused by them, hobbit. Speak plainly.”

Bilbo’s mouth twisted up in wry amusement. “Ah, am I then reduced to the mere title of hobbit? So quickly? Peace, Gandalf. There were others, hobbits that had seen more of the forests and the green things that she might have sent back but they were too young to have made a difference in what she wanted. And furthermore for all the death they saw in their days they weren’t too unhappy with the way everything turned out and they could not have been very well incentiveized to change history. Yavvanna could have sent back one of the Ents I suppose but they are a very unmotivated lot in general, and they are quite unlikely to leave their forests at any rate, even if they are old enough that she could have sent them back about as far as she wished. And furthermore I had a direct hand in what she wanted altered. Put simply, Gandalf, I have already lived (and quite a long life for a hobbit) and died, done and things that even you wouldn’t have predicted when you came here eighty years ago to whisk me away on an adventure. I’m back again to do things over again.”

He puffed on his pipe. “Don’t look that way at me Gandalf, I’m not about to let you peek round at the ending of the story, and you can believe me or not if you wish. But you and I were ever friends in the past. I would not change that.”

Gandalf frowned and was silent for a while. “If you were indeed sent back, then for what purpose. Begging your pardon but I wonder what use indeed a hobbit could be to the wider world that was worth the trouble and danger of sending him back again to live his life twice! And what is this talk of Ents? Where did you even hear of Ents?”

“Yavanna is very fond of her trees indeed. Some bad things will happen to them in the future if matters get on as they’ve been going. And anyways, my cousin told me about the Ents, and about Treebeard in particular who he spoke to most. And Gandalf, unless I’m quite mistaken this adventure will be most amusing for you and very good for me.” Bilbo flashed the old man a quick smile. “Anyways if you and the dwarves tried to leave without me I’d just follow along behind you until you were forced to do something about me. And it’s not as if you’ll find a better place to host all these dwarves for supper. Really Gandalf! You could have given me more warning last time around. It was all very unsettling and uncomfortable I’m sure. Even if it was eighty years ago I’ve not quite forgiven you you’ll see, for dropping thirteen dwarves and yourself on me for supper all unawares.” The hobbit tysked disapprovingly.

Finally Gandalf let out a long huff and relaxed just slightly. “Good morning to you as well Master Hobbit.”

Bilbo laughed then. “What a lot of things you do use Good Morning for! Now you’ll want to have the last word and say the conversation is at an end. That won’t be any good until I know you’ve calmed down and we’ve got an understanding.”

“Not at all, not at all Bilbo Baggins!” Gandalf said hurriedly. “I mean nothing of the sort.” However the speed at which he said it seemed to indicate that had been his exact meaning.

Bilbo smiled. “Come in for tea then, won’t you? Surely you can spare some time just now, and then put your little magic mark on my door after. Shame, it was painted only last week!”

Gandalf made an uncomfortable sound at that, but followed the little hobbit through the gate and up the steps into the comfortable little door into Bag-End. Bilbo could almost feel the Wizard’s eyes darting about to all the things that should not have been in a hobbit hole— or at least not Bilbo Baggin’s hobbit hole, and certainly not this far back in history. Maps and books and all kinds of little items stacked and strewn about, some papers tacked onto the walls and some mathoms and little odds and ends managing to clutter almost the entire length of Bilbo’s massive table. “Don’t worry it will be all cleaned in time for the dwarve’s party and everything will be well enough in order. Do not think I have forgot that I’ll be hosting a king, even if he is rather uncrowned at the moment.”

Gandalf muttered something about hobbits that knew more than their fair share of things but didn’t seem overly startled until he caught sight of the little sword resting on one of the table chairs. “Where did you get this?”

“There are swords in the Shire, Gandalf, if you’ll do your looking in the right places. We’ve fought off Wolves and goblins and even the odd unsavory man or two in our time. Most weapons will be in attics gathering dust and spiders but…well, they are here. I think you’d be surprised what hobbits can manage when put in a tight spot.”

Bilbo managed to detain Gandalf almost against his will, for several more hours, convincing him rather thoroughly of his story while also not telling him much anything of import about the future. All really that Bilbo was willing to part with of what he considered major import was that he’d not been sent back to his younger body exactly, just de-aged into being young again, and so he’d all his old scars and marks from rough and tumble days of his youth. Gandalf eventually gave up trying to learn anything the hobbit did not want to tell him and only was able to beg off when he confessed to having business with the dwarves soon if all was to be put in order. He made his mark on the door then and then was very quickly off and on his way, leaving Bilbo rather smug and satisfied.

Everything was, so far at least, all in order. His deal with Yavvanna was more forced than he would have liked, since she’d sent him back regardless of his protests, but he had to admit that he was getting a very good deal of it all. More time with his dwarves, a chance to save Thorin Oakensheild and Fili and Kili and even Balin and Oin. A chance to prevent Frodo ever getting the Ring and getting all mixed up in such terrible things. More chances to redo all the terrible things he’d seen in all his long life and spare whoever he could. In turn he’d protect the trees and drive out the shadows from over the woodlands, and hopefully wake up the forest guardians to ensure that all the green things in the world would be safe for an age at least.

Bilbo had not been very well pleased that he, a little hobbit, had been sent back to fix everything over again, rather than some elf or man or dwarf or even Gandalf himself for pete’s sake! But apparently Yavvanna was the only Valor who was overly concerned with this plan, and her options were limited. Bilbo would not have thought himself champion material if he’d had to assess. But it was what it was, and he certainly did not have time to waste lamenting it. Not least because he would very soon get to see Thorin Oakensheild again.

It had been eighty years but he did not need any help remembering his face. A sharp handsome face, with a long nose and a shorn beard, framed by long dark hair with just a hint of silvering in it, light blue eyes that Bilbo thought of as more gray than anything, and the ability to look inexcusably attractive and majestic even with dirt, mud, blood, or anything else on his face and person. …Yes he was very eager to see Thorin very much not dead again. And Yavanna must have known it too, for most of her deal involved Thorin more than anyone else.

But if he did not need any help remembering Thorin, then he also did not need any help remembering how he had died. However if Bilbo had any say in the matter (which according to the Valor, he apparently did) the line of Durin would not be so easily broken. 

Chapter Text

The doorbell gave a tremendous ring just before tea time and Bilbo set down the stack of papers he’d been examining and hurried off to the door. Last time he’d been quite flustered and surprised at this first ring, but luckily that was a mistake that he would not make twice. When he opened the door there stood a massive dwarf, darkening the entire entryway. He looked gruff, the way Bilbo had remembered, but not angry. Just as soon as the door was open he pushed his way in as if he was expected (ah that dastardly wizard and his meddlesome ways, how this had upset and confused Bilbo last time).

He hung up his cloak at the nearest peg and turned back to Bilbo, giving him a visible up and down look. Probably trying to figure up if Bilbo would live more than five seconds in a fight. But if that was what he was thinking, or whatever his conclusion was, he did not show it on his face. “Dwalin at your service!” He said with a low bow.

Bilbo smiled widely. “Bilbo Baggins at yours and your family’s!” Bilbo gestured down the hall. “Supper isn’t for a while yet, but Tea is just ready now if you’d like to have some and a bit of a meal now. You must be hungry from your journey.”

Dwalin hummed an affirmative and followed him with no further convincing. When the dwarf saw the long table already partly obscured by covered dishes, and the way that tea and some uncovered cakes had been set to the ready, he actually gasped a little. If there was one thing that Bilbo Baggins had learned in all the long years he had known dwarves, it was that thought they could go without food for far longer than a hobbit could they were nearly as fond of it when it could be had as any creature in all of middle earth.

Bilbo smiled privately while Dwalin hurried over to a chair and started on his meal. Bilbo walked back into Dwalin’s line of sight and adjusted one of the plates to ensure that none of the steam would escape before it was time to eat. “I’ll be in the kitchen, Master Dwarf, if you need me. I do believe the others will be arriving soon.”

Dwalin nodded, his mouth too full of delicious hobbit made cakes to reply verbally.

Bilbo went back to his papers and checked the cooking and brought out more and more food (he could be just the tiniest bit smug at Dwalin’s increasing looks of disbelief if he wanted to), and soon enough Balin arrived. That meeting went nearly the same as it had the first time and Bilbo began to suspect that this evening would go much the same as it had before. If a few tears swam into his eyes when he saw the old dwarf again, well Balin had always been his friend, and no one noticed his emotion.

Balin joined Dwalin at the table and they were soon talking and eating happily together. When the doorbell rang again twice, he knew who it would be. Fili and Kili dead, beside their uncle, cleaned and laid in a cold stone room, neither of them ever got to chance to live out their lives. They had both always been so loud and ridiculous, full of life, and now their silence was almost more awful than Thorin’s even if Bilbo (even if he felt terrible admitting to missing one dead person more than another) missed him more than the brothers.

Bilbo opened the door to stave off the images of the young princes dead bodies. The two brothers were grinning, bowing in unison before “Kili at your service!” “And Fili!”

“At yours and your family’s!” replied Bilbo with a smile, forcing his eyes to stop burning out of sheer force of will. The two young dwarves pushed their way excitedly inside, dumping a bunch of weapons on Bilbo, and going on about Balin and Dwalin and about Throngs and about how small hobbits really were, and was that table full of food?! Bilbo set the weapons in a little pile by the cloaks and pointedly ignored muddy dwarf boots. The four dwarves quickly drew each other into conversation about mines and gold and goblins and dragons and other dwarvish things. Bilbo ducked into the kitchen, rubbing at his eyes briskly before grabbing a stack of plates and bringing them to the table. He caught Fili and Kili’s eyes. “Would you set these out for me? I have to finish mashing the potatoes.” The brothers jumped to their feet and Kili said with a grin. “Of course Master Boggins!” Bilbo rolled his eyes at that, “Thank you. That will be very helpful to me. I’ve only got so many hands you know.” He tapped his nose with one finger and grinned. The two brothers burst into laughter, as they tended to do at the slightest provocation and quickly got to work setting the table quite neatly and then they followed Bilbo into the kitchen to inquire where they might find silverware and serving utensils for the food. Right as Bilbo was putting down his masher to point out the drawers in question the door bell rang again.

Ding~dong~a~ling~dang. Bilbo raised his eyebrows, almost impressed that someone had managed to draw such a sound out of his unsuspecting doorbell. “Someone at the door,” he said dryly, giving a the brother’s a side eyed look. They paused collecting the silverware and Fili nodded not noticing his brother’s grin at Bilbo’s humor. “Some four, I should say, by the sound,” Said Fili. “Besides, we saw them coming along behind us in the distance.”

“Aye,” Said Kili, and he snatched up a handful of silverware.

Bilbo headed over to the door frowning to himself a bit. Something must have changed already from his memory. Next after Fili and Kili should have been Gandalf with Bifur, Bofur, Bombur, Dori, Nori, Ori, Óin and Glóin. Only four dwarves would certainly change that order, and Bilbo tried to recall if the times between the dwarves arriving were much different from the first time, but ultimately it was all eighty years ago and he wasn’t about to remember perfectly. He sighed and went to open the door.

He had hardly opened the latch before not four but in fact five dwarves were pushing their way inside, bowing and saying, “Dori at your service! “Nori at your service!” “Ori at your service!” “Oin at your service!” “Gloin at your service!” and then they hung up their hoods on the pegs and they quickly went to join the others. Kili waved cheerfully as he finished setting out the spoons.

Bilbo shook his head fondly even as he tried to figure out what could have possibly changed the order of the dwarve’s arrival. Did this put Dwalin earlier than last time? Or was Gandalf simply later? How late would Thorin be? His talking to Gandalf yesterday was the only thing that he could think of that could have changed anything so soon. However…that wasn’t entirely true, even if he couldn’t see how what he had changed had such an effect. In fact Bilbo had been sent back about two weeks ago, and since then he’d been collecting supplies and doing all sorts of queer things to get ready for the journey. He’d not been acting very hobbitish much since his return and though it seemed improbable that he could have sparked such a change, it might have somehow affected something he wasn’t aware of. Perhaps he could ask Gandalf when he arrived.

So Gandalf, everyone is arriving at times that are different than the precise order I was expecting due to past events. Anything to add? Bilbo snorted and shook his head. But really, how could gathering dried foods and packing them in waterproof containers, or digging out a sword from a shire attic, or even discovering that there was in fact armor in the shire if one looked hard enough. It had needed to be adjusted but it was far better than nothing when one was to be faced with trolls and goblins and all other manner of ridiculous things. But how hobbit armor could convince Gandalf to change his schedule (Gandalf tended to arrive at places whenever he liked and nothing much would alter that) was beyond his—

There was a great thumping on the door as if it was being beaten with a stick. Bilbo jumped and squeaked, startled a bit out of his thoughts. Gandalf. Already?! He dashed to the door and yanked it open hastily. Unfortunately he opened it far too fast and four dwarves fell in a heap on his front mat. Behind them was Gandalf, leaning on his staff and looking far too innocent but also far too amused. Bilbo supposed that Gandalf was old enough now that he had private jokes with himself that no one else knew because everybody that knew them had died a long time ago or else they were elves and were sitting around being…elvish.

“Sorry, sorry,” Bilbo said. “Here let me help you all up.” He began to help untangle all the dwarves and get them to their feet

“Carefully! Carefully!” Said Gandalf. “It’s not like you, Bilbo, to keep friends waiting on the mat and then open the door like a pop gun!” Left them waiting indeed! Bilbo had barely left them waiting for a few seconds, but he could see the old wizard grinning through his beard and knew it was all in good fun and mischief.

Bilbo leveled an unimpressed look at the wizard. “Let me introduce Bifur, Bofur, Bomber, and especially Thorin!” Said Gandalf. And it wasn’t until that very moment that Thorin managed to get out from under Bomber and level a disgruntled look at everyone at once, and he frowned heavily at the hobbit. Bilbo felt a bit faint and he must have paled. He gave no reply to Bifur, Bofur, and Bomber rattling off their “At your service!” and bowing. They all hung up their hoods and Bilbo’s eyes followed the sky blue cloak that Thorin put on the peg. Oh. Oh god. His brain stuttered to a halt, yielding up no useful information, no thoughts, just excuse me what?!

As the dwarves and Gandalf moved deeper into the hobbit hole, Thorin was looking more huffy than usual. Not surprising, given that he had been at the very bottom of a stack of dwarves, which was rather undignified, and furthermore it couldn’t have been comfortable to have Bomber on top of one at any point. Thorin certainly did not follow the fashion of the other dwarves and said nothing about service. Not that Thorin had done any such thing the first time round, but still. It seemed now rather pointed.

After a long moment where he watched the dwarves all greet Thorin and the others, Bilbo let out a giggle. It was rather funny really, seeing Thorin tossed on his front step under the weight of three other dwarves, even if Bilbo would never have done it on purpose. And having known Thorin for as long as he had he felt he h ad a better idea of what Thorin’s frown really meant. He was just a bit thrown off. Bilbo hurried up closer to him. “Terribly sorry! I didn’t mean to do that, it was all very rude of me.” Thorin gave him a little look and huffed, ignoring him almost completely. It was a very Thorin thing to do really.

How in the world did Thorin end up here so early anyhow? That can’t have been my fault. It must be something of Gandalf’s doing. Well at least he’s not got himself all lost this time. Even if he is still throwing out those darkly handsome brooding looks at everybody in sight, trying to look all kingly and…majestic. Quite the opposite of what Bilbo had expected, he didn’t feel the least bit teary seeing Thorin again. Perhaps it was the shock of it all, the order being changed and his thoughts being buried like they were in wandering in pretzels trying to make sense of things. But instead he was muffling a giggle with his hand. Thorin heard it though because he gave Bilbo a sharp look, though he looked away again as fast as he could.

“Now we are all here!” Declared Gandalf, looking rightly pleased with himself. “Quite a merry gathering! I hope there is something left for the latecomers to eat and drink!”

“Yes Gandalf,” Bilbo piped up from where he was rather sure the dwarves had forgotten him in their bustle, despite that he was still standing rather more in the middle of them than he had dared to eighty years ago. Hands on his hips he raised an eyebrow at the wizard. “Seeing as you’ve so politely managed to inform that that I was to have a party of visitors tonight, there is more than enough food for anyone who wants some.”

Gandalf blinked in spluttery surprise at being so easily knocked off balance, and when Bilbo reached for the kettle Gandalf said quickly, “What’s that? Tea! No thank you! A little red wine, I think for me.”

Thorin glanced between the wizard and the hobbit, slightly confused and somewhat interested now that Biblo could so easily set Gandalf to combat discomfort with deflection. “And for me.” Thorin said.

Bilbo grinned, still, amazingly, not feeling even a whit of sadness gripping him as the bright gray gaze of the dwarf was fixed on him. “Of course, of course. Fili, Kili! Help me in the kitchen please? I’ll need some extra arms for carrying out supper dishes.”

Thorin blinked again as the two brothers swiftly came to the hobbits side and Bilbo dared to send a wink Thorin’s way before he swept off with the young dwarves at his heels.

Right as he left the room he heard Thorin’s deep voice, “What did you say the halfling’s name was?”

Chapter Text

He had prepared what could only be termed a feast and it was quickly evident that his own hands and those of the two young dwarves would not be enough to set it all out. Raspberry jam and apple-tart, and mince-pies and cheese, and pork-pie and salad, more cakes and ale and coffee, and cold chicken and pickles, and he had just put on a few eggs to boil.

Bilbo laughed a bit. “Not enough arms between the three of us for this lot!” He began to set out trays with bottles and dishes and knives and forks and glasses and spoons and things all piled up. However before he could turn to to Fili and Kili and see why they were not laughing at his comment, he realized that the dwarves in the other room had evidently heard him. Dwalin and Balin and behind them Fili and Kili whisked away the trays and set everything out afresh before he could say knife.

Bilbo blinked. Since when did Dwalin know how to set tables? Since when did either of the two older brothers help with kitchen work? Since now apparently, because between both sets of dwarf brothers Bilbo was quite suddenly left with no work at all to do. He chuckled and shook his head, following them back out into the common area and grabbing a stool to sit on. He piled up a plate of his own with lots of food— it had been a goodly long while since his body had been strong enough to take the amount of food that a hobbit ought to eat to stay healthy, and with the trip impending, even two weeks of effort to fatten himself back up from old hobbit skinniness wasn’t quite good enough. Yes even if he was the host he’d do well to eat as much as he could.

He watched the dwarves fondly as he ate, and noticed, much to his surprise that Thorin had glanced over at him several times. However the power of friends and kin and good food and a safe haven was soon enough to distract all the dwarves quite thoroughly and the dwarves talked and talked and ate and ate, and all of them seemed to take no more notice of the little hobbit in their midst. Gandalf might have been watching Bilbo, but then after yesterday Bilbo expected nothing less from him.

For his part, Bilbo had not expected that Thorin would have joined in on the laughing and joking and generally enjoying the party, but it seemed that being so late and hungry and having lost his way had last time dampened his mood more than Bilbo had thought. Thorin looked happy and for the first time Bilbo could glimpse in him a dash of the good cheer that made Fili and Kili burn so brightly. Certainly all three Durins had the same swagger, and it was easier to see now that they were comfortable and happy, not pressed by anything. It was a bittersweet thing, to realize how truly he had never known the dwarves in circumstances they felt comfortable in. Would that he could change things! Silly thoughts is you’re having Bilbo Baggins! You have quite literally been sent back in time to change things. Stop being such an old sentimental fool while you’re at it, will you?

After a while, when the meal seemed set to be winding down, Bilbo turned to the dwarf seated next to him, Bofur, and tapped his arm lightly. “Could you get their attention for me? I’m a bit too small for the job really.”

Bofur blinked “Oh aye master hobbit! Of course I will.” He hastily waved his arm and cleared his throat to the rest of the table. “Our host has something he’d like to say.”

In a moment the eyes of all the dwarves and Gandalf were turned on him again, and he found himself once more with that curious gray gaze of Thorin’s fixed to him. Bilbo smiled a bit. “It’s only, I’m supposing you will all stay for supper?”

“Supper?” said Kili with some surprise. “I thought this was supper.” 

Bilbo laughed. The dwarves were startled by the sound, perhaps even a little disconcerted. “Supper? At this hour? No, master dwarf, I’m afraid this is more to Tea time than anything else. Supper is still a little ways off yet.”

“But if you’ve eaten your supper at tea-time does that not make it supper all the same, even if it is a mite early?” Said Balin, stroking his white beard thoughtfully.

“Hobbits eat seven meals a day when possible, Master Dwarf, and it’s my understanding that we’ll be skipping most of those in the near future, so no, I think I’ll avoid skipping any if I can.”

“Seven?!” Cried Kili. “Surely you cannot eat seven meals a day!” His gaze swept over the little hobbit rapidly. “You look far too thin to eat seven meals a day. It is not possible.”

“Kili!” Hissed Fili, laying a hand on his brother’s shoulder in censure.

Bilbo hummed. “You are right, I have not been able to eat so many meals for a goodly long while, due to circumstance. But you must have seen some hobbits on your way through the shire, and none of them will have been half so skinny as I. And I have been back for two weeks already, so I’m less thin than I was.”

“Back?” Kili was clearly ignoring his brother, who was not subtly trying to shut him up by pressing his shoulder down so that he almost was leaning to one side. “Back from where?”

Bilbo frowned a little at the young dwarf. When he had gone on this journey for the first time he had not understood just how young the pair of them were for dwarves, and most especially Kili. Even after they had died he hadn’t understood. It wasn’t until years later when he traveled back to the mountains as an old hobbit that he learned more of the customs and ways of dwarves that he was hit with the knowledge that they were quite young indeed. He had been hit with a new wave of grief both unexpected and terrible in it’s nature. For weeks their still faces had haunted his dreams in fresh dreams unlike he’d had for decades. “I’ll tell you later, Master Dwarf. I’m sure the nature of the business tonight will get itself around to where it becomes relevant.”

Fili was glaring quite steadily at his brother now, but it was Thorin that broke the short silence after Bilbo’s words. “We will stay for supper, and after. We shan’t get through this business you mention till late, and we must have some music first.” He clapped his hands. “Now to clear up!”

Thereupon the twelve dwarves, (not Thorin, because he was too busy looking important, which Bilbo supposed surprised exactly no one) jumped to their feet, and made tall piles of all the things. Off they went, not waiting for trays, balancing columns of plates, each with a bottle on top, with one hand. “Careful with those!” Bilbo said warily.” But the dwarves only laughed and started to sing as they tossed dishes about.

Chip the glasses and crack the plates!
Blunt the knives and bend the forks!
That's what Bilbo Baggins hates—
Smash the bottles and burn the corks!

Cut the cloth and tread on the fat!
Pour the milk on the pantry floor!
Leave the bones on the bedroom mat!
Splash the wine on every door!

Dump the crocks in a boiling bowl;
Pound them up with a thumping pole;
And when you’ve finished if any are whole,
Send them down the hall to roll!

That's what Bilbo Baggins hates!
So, carefully! carefully with the plates!

Of course, same as last time they did none of those things, and managed to clean and put away everything safely faster than the hobbit could spin around to watch them. Bilbo watched them with a deep ache lodging itself in his chest at their merry words and lighthearted mischief. This was as things should have been, dwarves being ridiculous and loud and brash, but managing avoid hurting anything at the same time.  He’d been so much at the side of these dwarves, cold and hunger and rain and trolls and wargs and dark tunnels and dragon fire and orcs and funerals and a valley filled with so many dead that Bilbo could not comprehend it fully. This is where it all begins, isn’t it? In a little hobbit hole, in the Shire, tossing plates and being silly. So much darkness and blood can begin so happily.

When Bilbo followed the others back out of the kitchen he found that Thorin and Gandalf were in the living room, smoking. Thorin had his feet up on the fender and he was blowing the most enormous smoke rings. Gandalf was doing something strange to them with his much smaller green smoke rings that would swoop through them and capture them, and then they would come to hover over the wizard’s head. Already he had a cloud of them about hi, and in the dim light it made him look strange and sorcerers. Except that Gandalf is rather more powerful than he likes any of us to suspect, and it’s probably not far off from the way of things. 

Bilbo stood still and watched them, he loved smoke rings. And you love Thorin Oakensheild you besotted idiot. He was reminded of days long ago when he used to sit on his bench and send smoke rings up over the hill and into the wind. Days before his adventure, and the lonely days after when he had returned home a bit richer but with less of a heart. He used to sit blowing those smoke rings as he thought about how to craft the words to his book, and when he was thinking about how things might have been if it were all different.

Bilbo expected that shortly they would be getting on to business but that was not what happened. Rather Thorin looked up, and it seemed to Bilbo that he briefly caught his eye before sweeping over the others, and he said “Now for some music! Bring out the instruments!”

Instruments? What instruments? The dwarves certainly hadn’t had any such things last time. How much had he changed things just by asking Gandalf in to tea yesterday?! But sure enough the dwarves indeed were jolted into action by Thorin’s words. Kili and Fili rushed for their bags and brought back little fiddles; Dori, Nori and Ori brought out flutes from somewhere inside their coats; Bombur produced a drum from the hall (how! Just how? No wonder Thorin didn’t want Bomber falling on him); Bifur and Bofur went out too, and came back with clarinets that they had left among the walking sticks (how would they have even carried those when they were walking? Did they strap them to their backs?). Dwalin and Balin said: “Excuse me, I left mine in the porch!” Bilbo had noticed no such thing, had certainly not seen any instruments on the porch but then, he hadn’t noticed any of the others so then it must be possible. “Just bring mine in with you!” said Thorin.

Just bring mine in? You play an instrument too? Since when? Balin and Dwalin came back in with viols as big as themselves (How did they carry them on the road!? How?!) and with a harp wrapped in a green cloth which must have been Thorin’s going by the earlier exchange. A harp, really, Thorin Oakenshield, the stoic and overly manly? Since when? Since when! Thorin took the harp carefully and unwrapped it with gentle hands. It was a beautiful golden harp, that much Bilbo could say for it, and when he struck it the music began all at once, so sudden and sweet that Bilbo forget everything else for a moment. The pain and weariness and worry was swept away to dark lands under strange moons, far over the The Water and very far from his hobbit hole under The Hill.

Thorin was very mesmerizing, his fingers playing carefully over the harp, so gentle, so different from what Bilbo had come to expect from the dwarf. He was concentrated and looking down at the strings, watching himself play, hair hanging down in long waves over his shoulders. His pale eyes were reflecting firelight and Bilbo thought that this was a version of Thorin that he’d never gotten to see. Quiet and beautiful on a calm still evening, immersed in doing something that he loved but that was ultimately useless, Thorin not striving for anything, just existing. This is what he would have been like if he’d been able to enjoy Erebor, if he’d not died so brutally and cruelly, if the gold madness hadn’t taken him or if the dragon had never come to the mountain.

The dark came into the room from the little window that opened in the side of The Hill; the firelight flickered, and still all the dwarves played on, and Bilbo’s eyes darted away from Thorin briefly to see the shadow of Gandalf’s beard wagging against the wall.

The dark filled all the room, and the fire died down, and the shadows were lost, and still they played on. And suddenly Thorin began to hum, deep in his throat, slowly and surely, a tune Bilbo remembered well from long ago. And then he began to sing, and one by one the other dwarves joined in, deep throated dwarvish singing that seemed to Bilbo enchanting with the voices of their instruments intermingling with it.

Far over the misty mountains cold
To dungeons deep and caverns old
We must away ere break of day
To seek the pale enchanted gold.

The dwarves of yore made mighty spells,
While hammers fell like ringing bells
In places deep, where dark things sleep,
In hollow halls beneath the fells.

For ancient king and elvish lord
There many a gleaming golden hoard
They shaped and wrought, and light they caught
To hide in gems on hilt of sword.

On silver necklaces they strung
The flowering stars, on crowns they hung
The dragon-fire, in twisted wire
They meshed the light of moon and sun.

Far over the misty mountains cold
To dungeons deep and caverns old
We must away, ere break of day,
To claim our long-forgotten gold.

Goblets they carved there for themselves
And harps of gold; where no man delves
There lay they long, and many a song
Was sung unheard by men or elves.

The pines were roaring on the height,
The winds were moaning in the night.
The fire was red, it flaming spread;
The trees like torches blazed with light.

The bells were ringing in the dale
And men looked up with faces pale;
The dragon’s ire more fierce than fire
Laid low their towers and houses frail.

The mountain smoked beneath the moon;
The dwarves they heard the tramp of doom.
They fled their hall to dying fall
Beneath his feet, beneath the moon.

Far over the misty mountains grim
To dungeons deep and caverns dim
We must away, ere break of day,
To win our harps and gold from him! 

It was not quite the same song as Bilbo remembered from long ago, and that he had written down in his book. The song he had sometimes read aloud to himself, or whispered on those long evenings by candlelight, trying to recall what a life with dwarves had felt like.

As they sang Bilbo felt as if he was drifting out of himself and he felt sharply the love of beautiful things made by cunning and magic and dwarf hands long ago. Visions of mountains and and the sound of pine trees waving in the wind and waterfalls crashing mightily down into the deep below. Flashes of cave walls and the musty smell of places where fresh air was a distant memory lodged deep within the dust. Times when Bilbo had worn Sting strapped to his side instead of a walking stick, and when he had first returned to Erebor and seen it restored to it’s full glory, Dain sitting on it’s throne in the stead of the dark haired dwarf playing the harp in Bilbo’s living room on a late April evening.

Bilbo looked out of the window; the stars were out in a dark sky above the trees. He thought of the jewels of the dwarves shining in far away caverns filled with dark and the smell of dragon. Suddenly in the wood beyond The Water a flame leapt up; probably someone lighting a wood fire; he thought of plundering dragons settling on his quiet Hill and kindling it all to flames. He remembered the piercing gaze of Smaug and the smooth scars on his heels from the lick of dragon fire, and Lake town set into fire and water, the wailing among the timbers of mothers who could not find their children and of children who would never find their mothers again. Thorin with gold madness in his eyes, screaming and dangling Bilbo over the walls. The look on the elf king’s face when he returned Orcist and the arkenstone to be buried with Thorin, the look of regret, for even the elf king was grieved to see the dwarf king die. Even Thranduil had not wanted Thorin to die, not in the end. He remembered seeing Erebor flying an old ragged flag they had found from the ruins over the gates, seeing the flag when he turned round and looked back at it before he left to return to the shire. He remembered thinking Thorin never even got to see the flag fly, and the way hot tears had attempted to crawl down his face no matter how much he dashed them away and stared down at the neck of his pony.

Bilbo stood up; he was trembling. He had half a mind to go hide in the kitchen, perhaps on the pretense of fetching a lantern. Suddenly he found that the music and the singing had stopped, and they were all looking at him with eyes shining in the dark. Even just Thorin’s shadow was handsome, just the barest glint of the harp in his hands still visible.

“Where are you going?” Said Thorin, in that unreadable tone that the dwarf always took when he knew of your mind than you knew of his.

Bilbo shifted under that gaze a bit and said. “What about a little light?”

It was not Thorin who replied, but rather all the dwarves at once. “We like the dark. Dark for dark business! There are many hours before dawn.” Bilbo got a similar sensation from hearing them say those words all at the same time in much the same tone as he felt when he saw Fili and Kili bow in unison. He wondered if they practiced, and if all the dwarves practiced such things. That thought gave him enough confidence to ignore the absurd mysteriousness of the dwarves.

“Of course you like the dark!” Bilbo scoffed. “But unlike you I cannot actually see in it. I am no great large dwarf in a mountain far away to the east. I’m a hobbit in my little hobbit hole. If we’ve no light to see by, then I’ll simply not be seeing.”

“Hush!” Said Gandalf. “Let Thorin speak!”

“Hush!” Bilbo spluttered, “Excuse me?!” But before he could do anything about the wizard’s egregious rudeness, Thorin took the opportunity to begin speaking. And that would not have likely thwarted Bilbo under normal circumstances, for Thorin seemed to think the less words the better, but tonight Thorin was bound and determined, it seemed, to break the script.

“Gandalf, dwarves and Mr. Baggins!” At this last Thorin’s eyes flashed across Bilbo briefly, gleaming in the shadows. “We are met together in the house of our friend and fellow conspirator, this most excellent and audacious hobbit—may the hair on his toes never all out! All praise his wine and ale!—“ He paused for breath and a polite remark from the hobbit. For a moment the opportunity was quite lost on Bilbo, for he realized this was already far more words altogether at once than he was used to hearing from Thorin unless he were angry or else very excited. After a second Bilbo realized that in the odd fashion of dwarves Thorin had even complimented him. Compliments! Already? And friend? Thorin had not called him a friend, even in this sort of camaraderie to a cause way, until much later.

Bilbo huffed a little laugh and raised his eyebrows, quite forgetting to call the wizard out on his rudeness at that moment. “Audacious? Fellow conspirator? Lovely.”

Bilbo was sure the dwarf had heard him, as he’d said it loud enough for all to hear, but Thorin moved right along without acknowledging it. “We are met to discuss our plans, our ways, means, policy and devices. We shall soon before the break of day start on our long journey, a journey from which some of us, or perhaps all of us (except our friend and counselor, the ingenious wizard Gandalf) may never return. It is a solemn moment. Our object is, I take it, well known to us all. To the estimable Mr. Baggins, and perhaps to one or two of the younger dwarves (I think I should be right in naming Kili and Fili, for instance), the exact situation at the moment may require a little brief explanation-" 
 
Thorin seemed really as though he was set to go on for a good while longer, and even with as many words as he’d said, he’d managed to say very little indeed that anyone there wouldn’t have known already. Perhaps Bilbo himself would have found it a little edifying the first time around, but now he was rather more well informed than anyone else there. However the cause of the interruption to Thorin’s…speech? (Thing. Bunch of useless words all lumped together to sound cool. Majestic and dramatic flair out in full force.) Was Rather the fact that ever since Thorin had said the words may never return Bilbo had been trying to hold back a bubble of hysterical laughter…and well that sort of thing didn’t take too well to censure.

It was just absurdly hilarious, considering all the circumstances. Bilbo who had gone back in time to return to this time exactly, and of them all, even the one’s who’d survived, it was he who’d made the most of a return. Bilbo, who before even that had written a book literally titled, the hobbit, or there and back again.

Thorin who’d returned to his mountain, and after his return, when everything had been…returned to him, the dwarf had been buried and never left again. The one ring which would be rooted out of it’s little hole in this journey and eventually returned to the fires from whence it came. Gandalf who would die in Moria and then return. Gimli who left with an elf enemy and returned with an elf husband.

One could even argue that due to the finding of the ring that this journey would cause the elves to accelerate their plans to return to Valinor. Azog had killed Thorin and the dwarf had returned the favor. Bolg had killed Kili and then Legolas had returned the favor, a different prince killing the one who had killed a prince. The eagles that carried to them to the Carrok after they fled the misty mountains with the goblins on their heels were returning a favor to Gandalf who had healed a wound to their king at some point in time. Indeed the entire point of a quest to retake Erebor was to return, and certainly they could not have intended to leave it again. Or better to say, Thorin meant to, if all went well, return to his mountain and not to leave it. This entire bit was about returning!!! Many returns one might say.

Bilbo snorted and then was unable to hold back the laughs bubbling up from inside him and he was very soon sliding down the floor, bent double to laugh loudly. “Never return!” he wheezed, practicality cackling. But for a while he was unable to get any more words out. In fact this went on for so long that all the dwarves began shifting around, and at last Gandalf struck a light from the end of his staff and peered at Bilbo in the blue firework glow. Bilbo gasped in a great breath, trying to calm down but it took another minute or so. He held up one hand in answer to the inquiries of the wizard and the dwarves as to what was ailing him.

“Sorry, sorry,” he said. “Just said something funny. Inside joke you wouldn’t get it, you’d have to be there.”

At this, Gandalf’s eyes grew strange and the look he was casting on Bilbo was more speculative.

Bilbo rubbed at his eyes. “And, also, I didn’t know Thorin was capable of saying so many words altogether all at one time.”

“You’ve only just met me!” Thorin’s face was now illuminated by wizard light, and he looked confused and almost offended, and the tiniest bit dismayed perhaps.

It was too much, and too soon after having been laughing so hard, Bilbo descended into another bout of laughter. He sniffed and covered his mouth and tried to shut his mouth around his mirth, but it was no good, he’d been set back practically into hysterics, with giggles being dragged from him as assuredly if he was being held down and tickled. It was like hiccups, it just kind of happened.

Gandalf spoke up then, over the hobbit’s laughter. “Excitable little fellow, and easily amused. Gets funny queer fits, but he is one of the best, one of the best— as fierce as a dragon in a pinch.”

It was hard to catch his breath again with the wizard saying such silly things, but Bilbo managed. “Excitable? Not at all my dear Gandalf. Only, I am a very old hobbit, and I know things that no one else does.”

Gandalf looked surprised and a bit frightened. What, did he expect me not to tell anyone else that I’ve been sent back just because I told him first? Hmph well he’s got another thing coming, that meddlesome wizard does.

“You don’t look very old.” Said Kili in a doubtful tone.

“Indeed I do not, young Master Dwarf,” said Bilbo, managing to get back to his feet and turning round to grab the matches off the mantle and rummage about for a lantern so that the room could be lit by something else than Gandalf’s odd blue glowing stick. “I look not a day over, what, fifty? In point of fact I am a hundred and thirty three, which is, I assure you, quite ancient for a hobbit.”

Balin coughed into his fist. “That is rather old for a hobbit. How would that happen to be laddie?” It was clear Balin didn’t believe him, and maybe even thought that Bilbo was trying to dupe the younger dwarves into believing him. Bilbo was unbothered by his skepticism.

“Hmm. Favor of the Green Lady. No other possible explanation.” He paused gave some fleeting consideration for the influence of the ring on his long life in addition to him being sent back. “Well, that and the dash of dark magic, but now I think it’s the will of the Green Lady.”

Balin and Gandalf and Thorin all looked like they wanted to interrupt, and even Dwalin leaned forward, moving the stem of his Viola to his shoulder to free his hands to gesture the way dwarves tended to when they were talking excitedly. But Bilbo went on, fixing Gandalf with an unimpressed look. He struck his match and lit the lantern, filling the room with yellow light to go with the blue.

“Now what’s this about me being like a dragon in a pinch? That’s mighty poetical exaggeration if I’ve ever heard it. Have you ever seen a dragon in a pinch? There are a couple of people here and there I’d kill if I got half a chance, sure, same as the next person, but I’m hardly going to go about knocking down cities and eating their inhabitants. And I’ve never in all my life burned anybody alive, and I rather think that’s part of the qualifications.”

His words left a kind of stunned silence behind him. Bilbo set down the matches and put the hand not holding the lamp on his hip. “And I do suppose dragons steal things, and I am a burglar, but really, I think I’m a different sort of burglar than a dragon. I’ve been told I look rather more like a grocer, and I think that’s a comparison that could never be made to a dragon. Leastways not honestly.”

There was an awkward silence that stretched on painfully until Bilbo huffed and walked out of the room in search of the dining room table. “Come now Gandalf, I think you have something you want to show to them.”

There was a bunch of squawking and muttering and heavy dwarf boots treading on the floor, and Gandalf’s exclamation of “How can you possibly know—?!” And then as fast as could be there were thirteen dwarves and a wizard gathered round the table with a lantern set down in the middle with a big red shade over it to keep it from glaring so brightly. Gandalf produced a parchment from within the folds of his heavy confusing clothes. When he spread it on the table it was rather like a map.

The dwarves became excited, and to their questions Bilbo decided to bypass all of Gandalf’s mysteriousness and tendency to withhold information. “It was made by Thror, and I suspect also that Thrain had a hand in it. Certainly he knew of it, and the key also.”

“You know of my Father and Grandfather?” Said Thorin, suspicious and confused.

“Key?” Said Balin, ever sharp.

“I have had many dealings with dwarves, Thorin, I know a great deal about them. And yes,” Bilbo gestured vaguely at Gandalf. “He’s got it somewhere with him, ready to produce at the most dramatic moment.” Bilbo pointed out some runes on the map. “Look there, the runes speak of a secret entrance. You see that rune on the west side, and the hand pointing to it from  the other runes? That marks a hidden passage to the lower halls. Otherwise, if not for that, this map should be fairly useless I think. Enough of you dwarves remember the mountain and the lands around it, and of where Mirkwood lies and the Withered Heath where the great dragons bred. And there is a dragon marked in red on the Mountain, but it will be easy enough to find him without that, if we ever arrive there.”

Thorin turned to stare at Bilbo unblinkingly with those gray eyes of his. “You are a strange hobbit Master Baggins. Either we should trust you a great deal, or I think, we should not trust you at all.”

Bilbo smiled. “I rather think you should trust me more rather than less, but then it is your business. Not as if anyone could ever out stubborn a dwarf from thinking or doing anything he wished to.”

Chapter Text

“You are talking us in circles Master Hobbit,” Said Balin, and there was a light in his eyes that said he knew there was far more to be said than Bilbo was telling.

Bilbo shrugged. “Am I though? Perhaps it is just that you are confused. I’m being fairly straightforward I think.”

Balin did not seem satisfied, in fact he seemed somewhat affronted by this. “Even if this door was secret once, but who is to say it is secret anymore?”

Thorin grunted and nodded. “Old Smaug has lived there long enough now to find out anything there is to know about those caves.”

Gandalf finally seemed to get over the shock of Bilbo taking over his dramatic reveal and explanations. “He may— but he can’t have used it for years and years.”

“Why?” Said Thorin, glancing back at the wizard. The dwarf’s long hair hung long over his face, swirling at the motion. Thorin was oblivious to it save to brush it out of the way. Bilbo was mesmerized.

Gandalf looked smug to have attention payed to his words once more. “Because it is too small. ‘Five feet high the door and three may walk abreast’ say the runes, but Smaug could not creep into a hole of that size, not even when he was a young dragon, certainly not after devouring so many of the dwarves and the men of Dale.”

Kili popped up from seemingly nowhere, managing to shove in through the dwarves and wizard and hobbit to get close to the map. His face was screwed up in concentration and confusion. “But how could such a large door be kept secret from everybody outside, apart from the dragon?” Fili made a humming noise from just behind his brother, managing to shadow him at all times. The light flickered over both dwarves who were peering at the old piece of parchment.

Bilbo was surprised by this question. Kili was a dwarf! He should be well aware of all the secret ways in which his people kept hid nearly everything they ever did. If there was anything that dwarves were, it was secretive. After a second of watching Kili’s beardless face, Bilbo was hit by the truth of the question so hard that he rocked back on his heels a bit. A deep ache spread through his chest and up to nearly choke him and his eyes stung a bit no matter how much he tried to ward it away. Kili was so young that he had never seen a dwarf kingdom in it’s glory, and all his life the dwarves had been fighting to simply survive. The things that Bilbo thought of when he thought dwarves, magic and songs and dwarf doors and secret languages and piles of gold and pretty things made by hands that seemed too rough for things so delicate— those things Kili only knew in part. Kili had not been much older than this when he had died. Barely even aware of the legacy of his people, he had fallen in battle, and his laughter and smile the sharpness of his eyes and the bashful way he would duck his head and look up through his hair, all of it had been washed away into the slip of time.

Kili had been so young. Terribly painfully young, just a boy who wanted to go home. Just a boy who had never had a home and yet managed to be the most lively, to love the easiest, to be one of the first to accept Bilbo, to be able to dance and sing and be absurd even when overly serious folk were all around him. Kili who bowed at the exact same time as his brother just because he thought it was a fun joke. Kili, who had always seemed a bit un-dwarf-like to Bilbo; now he saw that he was just so young and disconnected from his people and their joys that he was not like them. Kili was a happy young lad, and it made almost too much sense that he would disconnect himself from the sorrows of his people to feel at least a bit of joy even if it were from strangers. Kili had never gotten the chance to be happy and safe with his dwarves, and had never got old enough to become more like them.

Dark haired and dark eyed, shooting arrows and practicing bird calls with his brother, who grew up hearing stories about glory and magic and honor, tales about Valor that had left his people decimated and the days darkened with uncertainty. A boy who had learned to be grateful when there was food to be had and hard labor to be done, but who also thought it funny to laugh about the terror of orcs killing folk at night. He was nearly old enough now for it to happen. To become a bloodless face laid out peacefully, closed eyes dimmed from all their mirth, a gaping hole in his chest. Viciously killed, brutally, laying in a pool of blood on some icy rock until he could be collected and washed, redressed and buried under the tattered flag. So that death could be made palatable enough for the farewells of those who were preparing to go on with their lives and leave him to the realm of memories and dark dreams and wistful stories full of farewells that no more brought his smile back than did cursing at the dry ground bring rain.

A boy buried as a prince who had lived without a kingdom. A fatherless son who was so loyal that he would follow his brother and uncle to death, and would do it gladly.

The sound of Kili’s scream as he saw his brother die filled Bilbo’s ears, echoing about his head. It seemed such a cruel and lost sound in the rounded halls of a hobbit hole so far away from that accursed hill and the place where Azog had fulfilled his oath to cut off the line of Durin.

“In lots of ways,” Distantly Bilbo heard Gandalf’s reply to the earlier question of how doors could be hidden.  “But in what way this one has been hidden we don’t know without going to see. From what it says on the map I should guess there is a closed door which has been made to look exactly like th side of the Mountain. That is the dwarves’ method— I think that is right, isn’t it?”

“Quite right,” Said Thorin.

“Also,” Went on Gandalf, “There is, as Mr. Baggins so helpfully mentioned a moment ago, a key to go with this map. A small and curious key. Here it is!” he said, and handed to Thorin a key with a long barrel and intricate wards, made of silver. “Keep it safe!”

“Indeed I will,” said Thorin, and he fastened it upon a fine chain that hung about his neck and under his jacket. “Though,” Thorin muttered, a little darkly. “I wonder how you came by this.”

“It was given to me by your Father, Thrain, for safekeeping.”

Thorin looked sharp at that, but seemed to be gathering breath to say something and could not be deterred to pursue this line of thought. “Now things begin to look more hopeful. This news alters them much for the better. So far we have had no clear idea what to do. We thought of going East, as quiet and careful as we could, as far as the Long Lake. After that the trouble would begin—.”

“A long time before that, if I know anything about the roads East,” interrupted Gandalf.

“We might go from there up along the River Running,” Went on Thorin taking no notice (and really! Thorin it seemed could go on at long stretches of talking if properly motivated. Or perhaps just properly fed. Had Bilbo ever seen Thorin properly fed in all the time he’d known him? Perhaps not.), “and so to the ruins of Dale—the old town in the valley there, under the shadow the Mountain. But we none of us like the idea of the Front Gate.” The front gate which Thorin had hung Bilbo out over, shaking him with madness in his eyes. “ The river runs right out of it through the great cliff at he  South of the Mountain, and out of it comes the dragon too— far too often, unless he has changed his habits.”

“That would be no good,” said the wizard, happy to take control of the conversations again, though he did give Bilbo a bit of a glowering glance. Bilbo for his part could barely take notice let along offense at this. He was just barely beginning to shake the numbness out of the ends of his fingers and wash the red and gray of memories from the front of his mind. “Not without a mighty Warrior, or even a Hero. I tried to find one; but but warriors are busy fighting one another in distant lands— ”

Here Bilbo cut Gandalf off, finally regaining his powers of speech and throwing off the memories for now, even if they were likely to haunt him in his sleep tonight. “Heroes in this neighborhood are scarce, or simply not to be found.” Bilbo said with an amused glint in his eye. “Swords in these parts are mostly blunt, and axes are used for trees, and shields as cradles or dish covers; and dragons are comfortably far-off (and therefore legendary).”

Gandalf huffed and drew himself up a bit, tilting his head down so that he managed to cast his face in those ‘scary’ shadows of his. “That is why I settled on burglary— especially when I remembered the existence of a Side-door. And here is our little Bilbo Baggins, the burglar, the chosen and selected burglar. So now let’s get on and make some plans.”

“Very well then,” Said Thorin. But there was a tiny spark of mischief in his gray eyes, and in the way they flickered over to Bilbo, as though he liked seeing the Wizard consistently knocked off his balance. It was the sort of glint that Bilbo had often seen in Fili or Kili’s eyes or even on occasion old Balin, but never Thorin. “Supposing the burglar-expert gives us some ideas or suggestions.” He turned with mock-politeness to Bilbo.

Bilbo paused and frowned, considering. He cast a long look about the room. Really, it was now or never. And they needed to know that he knew things that they did not, or else it would be near impossible to get them to consider his suggestions or trust his assessment. “I do have a few suggestions as it happens, but I think I have a story to tell you first. I cannot be sure if I should tell the proving of my story first, or tell the tale itself! For it is long and full of darkness, and much of it I refuse to tell either in full or in part, and much of it are things already known to dwarves, for they were there to see them.”

Thorin was not the only dwarf whose eyes narrowed and looked suspicious and ready to make a move should Bilbo do anything threatening (though why Bilbo would warn a bunch of dwarves and a wizard who were all bigger than him if he planned on attacking them, Bilbo didn’t know). Gandalf looked displeased. “I do not think this story is necessary.”

Bilbo snorted. “That is because you like to be the only one who knows things that way you can shift things to your own advantage. Don’t misunderstand, I’ve no grudge against you for it, but you’re known as a meddler for a good reason.” Bilbo thought of Rohan and of Gandalf stealing Shadowfax from them, and his mouth quirked upwards. Bilbo took another deep breath and tried not to notice overmuch the oppressive silence the room had fallen into.

It was Fili who answered him, a hand on the table and head tilted far to the side, body tilted slightly toward his brother almost so that he was speaking for the both of them, which was likely true. For either of the brothers usually knew what the other wished to say before they said it or if he stayed silent and did not say it. “Why not show us the proof first then? Your story will be better if we understand it better.” And Fili was a young dwarf and this likely influenced his thoughts on this, but Bilbo, who was truly torn between which choice to make nodded.

None of the other dwarves objected to Fili and so Bilbo shook out his hands some more. “Have any of you heard of the Ents that live in Fangorn Forest? Or well, some live elsewhere, but nearly all of them live beneath the eaves of Fangorn.”

“I have heard of them,” Said Dwalin. This surprised Bilbo, that Dwalin should have any interest in the matter, but then in the latter years that Bilbo had known Dwalin the dwarf had proved himself to have wider interests than Bilbo had at first thought him to keep. In hindsight this made sense, what with the quest being perilous and Dwalin having seen so many dark things in his days. “My father went to Fangorn and saw the trees that talk. Some evil enchantment lies upon those trees he said.”

Balin hummed and nodded, looking serious.

Oin, who had his ear trumpet up to his ear looked a little surprised. “I didn’t know that Fundin ever went to that forest. What was he doing there?”

Balin looked at Oin and replied with a perfectly straight face. “Talking to trees.”

Bilbo could not help but laugh. Fundin had been one of the dwarves who fell in the dark and terrible battle at the steps of Moria. Bilbo did not think that he had been the sort of dwarf who took kindly to talking trees.

“Go on then!” Said Kili, with an eagerness in his tone that made Bilbo truly happy to convey his news for the first time that night. Kili smiled encouragingly. “Tell us your tales of talking trees!” Kili clearly thought it all myth and legend and faerie stories, but then why shouldn’t he think so?

Bilbo nervously shook at his hands again and scrunched his nose and reached up to ruffle at his hair. “Oh well then. I suppose I better be getting on with it. It is, the Green Lady, Yavanna, she made the Hobbits, you know this?”

From the replies of the dwarves they apparently had not known this, and for a bit they were all talking about which of the Valar had made each of the races of Middle Earth, and it was a while before Bilbo could get the attention of the dwarves back to him again. When he did at last go on, he said. “Well, Hobbits are not of course very well known, or compared to other races, quite numerous. The way the other Valar watch over their own races, the Lady Yavanna watches over the Hobbits and the trees (for the trees are sentient and can speak and so are at least by her considered to be like a race, and she loves them most dearly of all that dwells in Middle earth), and the Ents, and also another race not of her own making, though I know not who they are. Not a very numerous one I should think, seeing as what I’ll say next.”

Bilbo huffed and then nearly turned to Fili and Kili and asked them to find a stool, because he was finding this all harder than telling Gandalf had been. Perhaps because Gandalf did not die. Bilbo could not have said. But he did not ask for the stool, because he was about to have to take off his shirt, and doing that while sitting on the tall stool would be harder and make it more difficult to turn about and show the dwarves.

“There is something dark that happens in the future, it is a good ways off yet, though it has been set in motion now for many a year. Many of the Green Lady’s trees will perish. Ents and Hobbits as well, but none more than the Trees out of the three. Now sending a Tree to do anybody’s bidding is an exercise in futility if I have ever heard one.”

“Sending a Tree? And how can you know of the future?” Said Fili.

Bilbo clapped his hands sharply. “Do not interrupt! This is already hard enough to explain without anyone stopping me from saying it.”

Fili fell silent at this, though all the dwarves looked more interested.

“As I said, there is no Tree, no matter how much they know or how wakeful they may be, unless they are really growing more Entish than treeish than can really be availed to complete any task or change the fate of much anything or anybody. Only the Ents truly wake the trees and send them to do their bidding. Well point being, even if you are the Master of all the trees in the world it won’t do you much good to change history. And with the Ents it is much the same for they are slow and unwilling to alter things unless they can see the reasons for it in front of them, and they will not leave their woods, particularly not if they feel the trees to be in enough danger for them to be motivated to do anything. And Hobbits…we are a peaceful people and few of us ever go on adventures, and we are young and soft and we are easily broken. There are very few of us that were ever of the sort that might Do Things in the world that were also born in the time that the Green Lady wanted things changed. Suffice it to say this— I have been sent back in time to alter things from the way they have been. And I have been struck a deal to get to change the things I wish went differently the first time around in exchange for my help. I doubt many other Hobbits would have seen enough darkness to really want to change things. Not that I wanted to be sent back, but I wasn’t given a choice, so here I am and there we are.”

He paused and the dwarves were looking at him with varying degrees of incredulity. “You expect us to believe,” Thorin said quite slowly, as if speaking to a child, “That you were sent back in time?”

Bilbo would have liked to say that this question didn’t affect him; of course the dwarves would react in such a way to such an outlandish claim. Of course before he’d managed to prove anything to them they’d simply be suspicious and, well…dwarvish. But seeing such a look in Thorin’s eyes, that dark suspicious look, it felt like glimpsing eighty years ago, standing on a bridge with the wind through his hair and just the wrong kind of voice booming around him. You miserable rat!

Bilbo couldn’t say anything for half a breath, pinned between memories of what had been and a vague fear of what could be. It felt like when air was too hot to breathe and no matter how much you drew it into your lungs if did no good. It wasn’t an unfamiliar feeling exactly, but usually when Bilbo had felt it in the past he’d been alone in his house or even alone waking up from a dream. He wasn’t hyperventilating, but it could quickly deteriorate into that if things were left to go on as they were. And Thorin’s unfaltering intense stare wasn’t helping at all.

Gandalf spoke up then, the blessed wizard shifting forward to take some of the attention onto himself by physically entering the space. He held a stance that brooked no arguments, but also his tone was calm rather than the argumentative tone he often took with the dwarves, Bilbo suspected mainly to aggravate them. “I have spoken to Master Baggins already on this subject, and at great length. I have determined the truth of his words. There is no question in my mind that he is Twice Born. If he should feel the need to prove it to you that is his own business, but I do not require any such thing.” Which was a big statement coming from the wizard, for Bilbo had no doubt that he wanted to learn as much as he could, even if he had to force it from the little hobbit through the use of intimidating dwarves. Gandalf must have sensed the alteration of Bilbo’s mood and managed to sacrifice his own interest in the matter to ensure Bilbo was alright.

Gandalf you can be a meddlesome old bother sometimes but you truly are a good friend.

“Twice Born?” Said Oin, leaning in. “As in one of those fellows who has been sent back by the Valar to fix something that went wrong in their lives? Oh that is a very good omen for our quest.” The old dwarf nodded firmly, “Very good omen indeed!” He clapped a hand on his brother Gloin’s shoulder and soon enough Gloin was nodding as well.

“Very good omen! If my brother says the hobbit is good for us, then I believe him. After all he is being vouched for by a wizard who picked him carefully out for just such a quest, is he not?”

This was all it took to break the tide, and soon enough many of the dwarves were murmuring in agreement or approval, and the others looked more neutral than opposed. Dwalin hummed and said. “Mr. Baggins may look more of a grocer than a burglar but he has scars on his hands from swordplay, there is more to him than we can see.” And Dwalin was nodding to himself, looking as approving as Dwalin really ever had so long ago.

Balin’s head jerked to the side at these words and his gaze was stuck on the hobbits hands. He didn’t say anything, though he was clearly trying to see what Dwalin had seen (and Gandalf).

This all gave Bilbo a long enough pause to catch his breath before he felt the heavy weight of Thorin’s presence fall over him once more. 

Thorin’s eyes flashed and he looked between the wizard and the hobbit, and then he exchanged a look with Balin, a small ‘oh’ forming slightly on the dwarf king’s lips. “So that’s why he—” Thorin finished his sentence by gesturing vaguely between Bilbo and Gandalf in a clear reference for Bilbo’s habit this evening of unbalancing the wizard.

Gandalf huffed in a put upon fashion. “Yes.”

“Ah,” Said Thorin. He stroked his short beard in deep thought. 

Bilbo looked away and then clenched his hands once tightly before shaking his head. The dwarves were managing to pay attention to him while also talking to each other enough that he was almost invisible in the midst of their attention. It was an odd feeling. The strength of their camaraderie was like a balm but also like flies swarming a wound. Bilbo couldn’t describe the sensation.

Bilbo reached up and quickly shucked off his waistcoat and then undid the top button of his shirt so that he could pull it off over his head and with a little glance at Gandalf, Bilbo closed his eyes and waited, turning his body just slightly so that the Dwarves could see the evidence of the truth of his words written on his body. 

It took a moment for the sound in the room to cease, but not long after that for the sounds of outrage and disbelief, of dwarf anger. Bilbo did not wait to understand their outrage or to separate one grievance from the next. “I dwelt with your folk for many years, I traveled with you for over a year, and then I had dwarf visitors on occasion until when I was older and I left the Shire again to travel back to the mountains and I stayed in Erebor then for several years. Of course I would know some part of your tongue! You lot are so secretive and suspicious that you cannot even imagine it, imagine that there would be anyone outside of your own race that you would trust enough to tell them such things, but I assure you it is true. Or do you think that I would let people write things on me that I did not understand?”

The dwarves had quieted enough to hear his words, for they most assuredly wanted an explanation, but they were angry again at that, and Bilbo turned towards them, hands on his hips. Bilbo opened his mouth to say that he refused to hear anything ridiculous on the subject, and that this was the end of it, and he had more important things to say, but before he could, Kili cried, “The dragon, it’s the same as the one on the map!”

Bilbo blinked, and looked down. He’d forgotten about that one in his nervousness for the dwarves to see words in Kuzdul written on his body. “Ah, yes.” On the front of his left shoulder was a dragon inked in red that was in fact an exact replica of the one on the map currently lying on the table. He would have said something about being rather fond of that particular one, if it had not been for Thorin’s sudden interruption.

“So you are saying the dwarves return to Erebor.” There was a ferocious look in his eye that Thorin only ever had when speaking of the lives and glories of his people; it made Thorin so different from anyone else Bilbo had ever met, and it also made him dangerous. Even in his madness it made him more dangerous, more unpredictable. Thorin was someone with whom Bilbo could trust anything at all, and yet someone who would smell betrayal in every suspect breath and would ruthlessly destroy anything that stood in his way. Even if that something be little hobbits. Hobbits who had his best interests in mind!

“Yes,” Bilbo said. “Of course. The dwarves of Durin return to Erebor and the bells of Dale are forged anew, the dragon Smaug is slain, and the Lonely Mountain is once more a bastion of the North. Yes, the quest is quite successful, especially considering that you fools barely planned anything at all the first time round, and even I, though I’ve had decades to think over all the pitfalls, have only had two weeks of thought for what I should see changed. And changing things can hardly stand in for proper planning. But what can one do,” Bilbo gestured to Gandalf, “When one is in the company of the Grey Wizard and,” he gestured to Thorin, “A very stubborn dwarf king.”

Gandalf, it seemed, was enough offended by this statement to put in his two cents rather than doing his trademark, let everything play out, and then say something clever. “I do believe, Bilbo Baggins, that you were supposed to be offering your suggestions for this quest!”

Bilbo side-eyed the wizard and then looked back at Thorin. “You should travel to Rivendell first, before attempting to cross the Misty Mountains. Don’t give me the arguments about how horrid elves are and all that rubbish. They will give us shelter and food and supplies, and from there we can be set upon safe roads through the mountains. If we must go to the mountains (and we must) then we must go to Rivendell.”

Thorin looked almost comically outraged. “Rivendell and those stinking elves will be of no help to us! What do we need from them?”

“I do believe I just told you what you needed from them, you stubborn dwarf. Yavanna help me, you’re proving my points before I can even be bothered to! I should say that you need the help of Elrond to read the moon runes on the map, which Gandalf has not mentioned yet, but I was there the first time round, and I remember what they say well enough. However if you cannot be convinced to go to Rivendell, then I will simply refuse to tell you what it says until you do! After all, I could probably manage without telling any of you, as I know fairly well firsthand what will happen and any information about what needs to be done.”

Thorin had clearly not looked to be so quickly thwarted, and he growled out, “He will try to stop us!” He, meaning Elrond, though Thorin couldn’t even be bothered to say the name of an elf unless it suited him to curse one.

Bilbo felt unimpressed and exasperated, and he reached up to trace a scar he’d gotten on his right forearm from a stray orc blade in the Battle of Five Armies. “Of course he will! What are you going to say to him, ‘oh yes I’ve decided to march into the home of a dragon, which by the way has previously killed most of my people, and I’m doing it all without a plan and I’m likely to wake the dragon and set him loose upon the countryside and also did I mention I don’t have a plan?! Because I’m of the mind that as long as I have my thirteen friends with me, I can defeat him by the power of friendship!”

Bilbo snorted. “And I know exactly what Elrond will say to that,” He shifted his stance, and recalling all his years of living in the Elf-Lord’s halls, did his best impression of him. “Some would not deem it wise.”

Chapter Text

Gandalf gave a start and a sharp look at Bilbo’s imitation of the Elf-Lord. “You have met Elrond?!”

Bilbo blinked. Had that not been obvious?

But evidently it was not, for Balin followed up the Wizard’s question with curious and confused, “Why would you say that?” pointed in Gandalf’s direction.

The wizard’s reply was dry and amused. “He does a startling good impression of him.”

Bilbo crossed his arms over his chest. “Of course I know Elrond! I lived in Imladris, which is his house, might I remind you, for at least an odd twenty years. And anyways Elrond is so old that making a good impression of him isn’t that difficult due to the fact that he’s quite predictable.”

“You lived with elves!?” Kili cried.

Bilbo snorted a laugh at the young dwarf. “You sound so scandalized! I have lived with most kindly races of free creatures at some point or another, though some only for very briefly. I have lived with dwarves, a bit with men, some with some other creatures you’d probably not understand very well if I tried to explain,” (Gandalf’s look changed but he did not interrupt the hobbit) “And with hobbits of course, and with more than home of elven folk. Out of every sort of folk I’ve lived with aside from my own of course, I’ve lived with Elrond’s folk the longest. He’s a wonderful host and he’s rather fond of Hobbits even if he does manage to call us Halflings a disturbing portion of the time. I’m not half of anything!” Bilbo shook his head with fond exasperation.

Several of the dwarves appeared disturbed at this information, and the looks they gave Bilbo were more bothered than they had been with the information that Bilbo had been de-aged and sent back again with enough knowledge of history and their own culture’s to change things to however he wished them to go. Typical dwarves.

Bilbo expected a long line of interrogation on the subject, and to be asked all sorts of questions about the matter of elves and what in the world he had been doing there, and how one could be friendly with both dwarves and elves at the same time with any measure of success, even though Gandalf managed to do it simply by being himself, though dwarves conveniently forgot that whenever it suited them. Instead what he got was Gloin stepping forward and batting the hobbit’s little hand away from the scar. The red haired dwarf leaned in and peered at his arm. “You got that from a sword, but it looks odd. What happened?”

Bilbo frowned and glanced down. “Oh, I’m just rather more short than your average orc, and I guess slashing down alters that force enough to do this. And anyways it hit higher and my arm just was unfortunate enough to catch the tail end of it.”

“What do you mean?’ Gloin demanded.

“Oh, I was wearing mail.”

“I cannot imagine there is much mail that would strong enough to deter the sword of an orc as tall as you describe.”

Looking around at all the faces of the dwarves Bilbo recalled just how much a dwarf, any dwarf really, was fascinated by matters revolving around craftsmanship, and even more with the craftsmanship of weapons and armor and anything at all to do with fighting.  “It was very good armor.”

Several of the other dwarves that Bilbo hadn’t gotten the chance to speak to yet, including to Bilbo’s surprise, dear old Bombur all demanded with a clamor of voices to know the make and material of the armor in question, and how well it fitted him, how old it was, and when it had been repaired and etcetera. “Oh very well, it was dwarf made armor from before Erebor fell. Mithril armor, and no! I didn’t steal it, it was gifted to me, though it was nearly seventy years later before my nephew was told by Gandalf how much it was worth.” Bilbo spared a quick withering glare for Gandalf at this. “You might have told me! But anyways it fit me better than any other armor probably would, and it was made for some elf prince or another, and Thranduil told me the same later, though he also said I looked foolish in it.” Bilbo shook his head with a tiny smile. “I’ve no idea how old it was or anything else of the sort, though it saved my life on a number of occasions, and even stopped a spear thrust by a cave troll, though that was my nephew and not me.”

Bilbo glanced about for his shirt, if the dwarves chose not to comment on the rest of his tattoos and scars that was their business and he had proved enough to them, he thought. “My nephew isn’t born yet though, and hopefully he’ll not have to use the armor nor encounter stabby trolls of any sort.”

“Mithril!” demanded Thorin incredulously. “How in the world did you get that!”

Bilbo turned back to the dark haired dwarf. “I told you already that it was gifted to me. Honestly you dwarves don’t listen too well when anyone talks unless you have a very good reason to or are utterly out of options by yourselves.

“By who? When? Why?”

Bilbo shrugged. “You gave it to me, though as to why I’d honestly say that in my mind it was always halfway to spite Thranduil for surely it had been made for one of his sons, and you’d rather literally anyone else have it than him. As for when it was just after you’d reclaimed Erebor. A couple of days if I remember correctly.”

The dwarves really were all over the place, because instead of pursuing that line of thought Fili said loudly, “Those scars are like what Amad has! What are they from?”

Bilbo automatically tried to reach back to touch the scars on his back but it was a bit too far back between his shoulder blades for him to really reach them, though there was one where he had a bit of metal in his coat and it had branded his back. Bilbo grabbed his shirt and put it back on. “Ah my young dwarf, I shall say this, never laugh at a live dragon! And for the love of Yavanna certainly do not do it to his face!”

“You…laughed at…Smaug?!” said Fili and Kili in unison.

“A bit. I don’t think he was very amused.” Bilbo snorted. “Really though it took quite a while for the hair on the back of my head to grow back properly. He chased me back up your lovely little tunnel with flames. I’m afraid I lost a great deal of my bravery at that point and sat shaking by the little grassy dell just outside the secret door for a while before I felt well enough to say anything on the matter.”

“You faced a fire breathing dragon and think it unnatural to feel shaken afterwards?!” Said Balin, with as much incredulity as only a person who had themselves faced a dragon could muster.

Bilbo grinned at the old white haired dwarf. “I stole from Smaug too. I think he wanted to roast me alive on the spot when he found out but of course he was a slightly better host than that, though he did do a number of other nasty things so I’d unfortunately not be able to recommend his hospitality.”  Bilbo shook his head slowly.

Thorin turned to Gandalf and demanded, “Is this why you chose this hobbit, for his ability to flabbergast us all? If that is so then, Tharkûn, he is doing a very fine job of it!”

“No really, I think Gandalf picked me the first time around mostly for his own amusement at my utter ineptitude in the world at large. And the Lady Yavanna picked me for maybe the exact opposite reason, for I’m likely the only well traveled hobbit who has the resources to do this thing well in all the hobbits available.” Said Bilbo. He’d set his shirt to rights now and moved forward to look at the map lying on the table. It had been so long since it had lay there and Bilbo had wondered about what it meant and been frightened of the abstract concept of dragons to the extent that he had fainted after Bofur’s descriptions of them.

Thorin turned to Bilbo instead of the Wizard, “You have explained well why that you were sent back, but what do you get out of this? Why travel with us at all? You said that a deal was struck, however unwilling you were to accept it, there must be something that you are gaining.”

Bilbo hummed, and looked up at the handsome dwarf’s face and then looked around to all the faces of his old friends. He felt his expression harden and the look in his eyes darken. His mouth twisted into an ugly shape and Bilbo said in a low voice. “Vengeance. There are other things, but that is first I think.”

“Revenge, on whom, and why?” Said Dwalin at much the same time as Balin said, “What sort of revenge?” And again at much the same time as Gandalf said, “Revenge is a slippery slope Bilbo Baggins, and you would do well to remember it.”

Only partly summoned rose the well worn vision of Azog, grinning and snarling in his own tongue, leaning forward in the saddle of his white wolf, pale eyes startlingly cruel. Thorin running out of the trees to fight Azog even though he stood alone, against a creature that desired to destroy his bloodline. Thorin thrown into the air by the blow of a mace and Thorin between the teeth of a warg. Those long moments when all had hung in the balance and life had shifted into slow motion, and felt as if were being watched more than lived. The moment he knew with certainty that Thorin was going to die, that he was going to die here without ever seeing the Lonely Mountain. It had felt like grief and smelled like smoke and it had seemed written in the stone.

Bilbo could see himself as he had been, the terror that ran through him as he ran in front of his friend to shield him from the knife meant to take off his head. Waving Sting desperately in front of him, not knowing how to use it only that he could not let Thorin die, knowing only that he had somehow fallen in love along the way and it could not end like this, even though it seemed so bleak. He remembered the helplessness, the knowledge that there was really no point in buying more seconds to stay alive, except for the sake of those seconds, for they would surely be overwhelmed in a few moments and destroyed. Bilbo remembered Thorin not waking back up, and then lying limp in the grip of the eagle that bore him away. Fili and Kili crying out for their uncle, but he did not twitch or shift, remaining utterly still.

The long moments stretched before him in memory, waiting to to land and then waiting while Gandalf spoke soft spelled words over the stubborn dwarf king, and woke him up. All the nights of nightmares that had followed, filled with the sharp toothed grin and scarred face of Azog the Defiler whose pursuit of them had lasted the entire Journey.

And Thorin on Ravenhill, gasping and begging forgiveness, fading away, life stolen from him by that twisted sick creature. Bilbo shied away from the agony that memory ripped through him, and turned to Gandalf. His voice was low and nearly shaking, his eyes dark and cold. “Courage is knowing not when to take a life, but when to spare one. And I have not forgot it Gandalf. But perhaps it is that I simply don’t care.” Bilbo scrunched up his face and tilted his head slightly to the side, taking a deep breath. The smell of blood and the faded look in Thorin’s dead eyes swirled all about him. Decades of waking up to realize that the only man he had ever loved was still dead. That he was still more alone than he had ever before that day on that accursed hill imagined. Endless day after day wishing emptily that Thorin could be alive even if and even though he could never and would never have loved Bilbo. The terrible sensation of remembering with jolts at odd moments that he had never reached up and brushed Thorin’s wild hair off his forehead when he was alive and that now he never had the chance to. How the party tree he had planted from Beorn’s acorn could after the conversation he’d had with Thorin about it could never feel like anything other than a gravestone for the dwarf.

“The Green Lady knew what I wanted, Gandalf, or do you now question the will of the Valar?” A bone deep fury rose up in Bilbo suddenly and his fists clenched at his sides. “He killed the man I loved and made me watch him die. And then he died before I could kill him myself.” Bilbo smiled here almost against his will, but it was a nasty stretched thing and it felt like eighty years of anger dark thoughts which had only been twisted and made darker by the whispers of the ring. “But he is not dead yet, and I would like to change that.”

Gandalf looked a bit like he had when Bilbo had said that he didn’t want to give up the ring, like he didn’t know the hobbit and was frankly a bit frightened by what he saw but could not understand.

Bilbo moved a little toward the wizard and switched to Sindarin. “There is no one who would miss that disgusting creature or be anything other than overjoyed when I slit his throat and mangle him up well enough that this time there will be no returns from the dead. And I do not care if you and the rest of middle earth try to stop me I will find him and write his end in blood if I have to bash in his head with a rock!”

Bilbo remembered Gollum holding a stone in his hand with the intent to do much the same sort of thing to Bilbo. “Or if I have stab him through the heart with a letter opener, or if I have to steal back my spoons from Lobelia Sackville-Baggins and use them in whatever creative ways people are always on about when they say they are going to kill someone with a rusty spoon! Or maybe I’ll push him off a cliff,” he remembered the steep fall that had nearly served as several of the dwarf’s ends, and how high and far away everything had felt from the back of the eagle.

“Or perhaps catch him on fire and burn him alive,” The flames from Gandalf’s pine cones came to mind. And while Bilbo spoke he could hear the twisted angry tortured words and slithering promises of the ring again, but he leaned into the sensation and let it color his speech and the way he stood in his hobbit hole spelling out exactly how he would like to see the creature that had taken away so much from him destroyed. “I do not care if he dies at the end of a nameless sword, or has his eyes plucked out by ravens, or if he has his head lopped off the way Bullroarer Took would have done! Believe me when I say I’ll see him so destroyed there is no tomb to hold his rotting body in. I have waited many decades for my revenge and I will see it done. I want him dead, and dead enough that he is very dead.” 

Balin’s eyes got very wide. “My dear hobbit!” He was almost cautious and placating. “That is rather violent.”

Bilbo looked at the old dwarf. “I didn’t know you could speak elvish.” He said in Westron.

Balin nodded faintly.

Bilbo huffed and scowled, arms crossed over his chest defiantly. “Well I mean every word of it.”

Thorin was looking between his cousin and the wizard and the hobbit. “What did he say?”

Balin raised his white eyebrows. “I think our host would be well suited by the title Baggins Grudgebearer.”

Bilbo blinked, a little surprised by this, until a memory pushed it’s way up and he huffed an amused breath. “They used to call me Mad Baggins.”

“It fits.” Said Balin. Dwalin walked around and shifted so that he was standing (looming) behind his brother. He glared down at the hobbit with a look of distrust.

“Who do you want to kill?” Said Thorin to the little hobbit, looking down at him with those gray eyes of his.

Thorin, blessedly alive and not yet worn by the long days and pain of the journey and being rained on and not eating and the fear for his kin and the fighting and sleeping outside, was a sight that Bilbo would not soon forget and could relish easily. “You’ll find out eventually I suspect. Don’t worry, I think you’d approve if you knew who. But I’m not inclined to share any information with those who may wish to stand in my way or else decide for themselves what the future should.

Gandalf’s voice boomed then through the smial. “Hobbits are peaceful creatures even in the worst of times Bilbo Baggins.”

“Are we indeed? Well I am not. I’m no warrior but I am willing to do what needs to be done.”

“Is that the only reason? The only thing that you were given to come back, death?” Thorin’s voice was odd, in a way that Bilbo had never heard.

Bilbo looked at his hands that were now smooth instead of wrinkled, but still marked with scars. “No, there were several other things. And I said that he killed the man I love, but he has not done it yet, and I intend to keep it that way! But I think the rest of my deal is not very relevant to the dwarves.”

“Then you have nothing else to tell us?” Thorin said.

Bilbo hummed and the fury was slowly leaving him, and instead lay back in it’s little cradle inside the protected walls of Bilbo’s heart. Bilbo tilted his head a little to the side and huffed, suddenly feeling more hobbitish and less like whatever he had been a few moments ago. “I’m sorry. Your father is dead, I feel as though you should know that. He died in the dungeons of the Necromancer.”

Several of the dwarves gasped and Thorin stepped forward as though to shake the hobbit and demand answers, but with a sharp memory of being held over the side of the ramparts Bilbo deftly stepped away, standing halfway behind Dwalin who still stood behind Balin. Dwalin snorted. “I won’t protect you laddie.”

“You won’t hurt me either.”

Thorin stopped. “And I would?!”

Bilbo shrugged, and then glanced at Gandalf out of the side of his eyes so that he didn’t have to fully look away from Thorin even if he didn’t make any move to close the space between them. “The Necromancer is Sauron and he has gathered the Nine to him, sorry but it’s the truth. And it was the coming of the Dark Lord gathering his power once more that woke he Balrog, and what brought Smaug, for all that’s worth in hindsight. A war is coming that will change the face of the world.”

“And you were sent back to change the way things went,” breathed Thorin softly.

“Yes.”

Balin turned back to look at the tiny hobbit hiding behind his much larger brother. “What could a hobbit possibly do against the dark lord even if this were true?”

“I could give you a long answer, but again I think I will not. I will say only this: Enough. I can do enough.”

Balin raised his eyebrows in his distinctly Balin way. "So you want to kill a man with a rusty spoon and you laughed at a firebreathing dragon. Right then Mad Baggins, are you ready to read the contract of your employment?"

Chapter Text

The world was muddled and dusty with blood and whispers, cradling him in a darkness that ached and burned. Shadow shapes moved in the mists and the dead fell and lay as though floating in the water, sprawled out more clearly on the ground, hair flowing all about them and armor gleaming dully with light and the slick deep red. Bilbo himself felt barely there like a ghost that was more haunted by the world than could haunt it himself. 

Every time he tried to move forward it seemed that he couldn’t get anywhere, but the landscape about him twisted and snarled and drifted so that he could see more of the dead. Voices far away whispered words that he knew but could barely remember. Above wheeled great shrieking shadows in the heavens. “The Eagles! The Eagles are coming!” said someone, but it was so quiet that it was almost a suggestion of a thought rather than a sound. 

As Bilbo trudged along through the darkness and pain and emptiness all around, mud began to squish under his toes and creep up to his ankles. When he looked down, he saw that that the trampled ground had churned up and was turning to mush as it drank up the blood of orcs, men, elves, wargs, trolls, and one hobbit. For as the mist cleared away in a little tunnel shape of path for Bilbo to walk down, he saw a strange sight. 

Laying on the ground, eyes unseeing, head burst open, and blood splashed everywhere, mithril mail peeled away so that his heart could be torn out with a great gaping hole into his chest, was Bilbo. Above him stood another Bilbo, but grimmer, more pained looking, not older, but darker perhaps. There was an acorn clutched between his fingers so tightly his knuckles had gone white. He was staring down at the other Bilbo in the mud. “If you return you will not be the same,” said the standing Bilbo in a disembodied voice, and he glanced up as Bilbo approached through the blood mud. “There is no grave, I just leave him here,” he gestured down to the Bilbo in the mud. “You left him here, and now so will I.” His voice tightened with guilt and grief, but it still retained the unattached quality that made it sound as though it were coming from everywhere all at once. “He does not return, but we are not the same. But go on, it’s not us you’re here for. You’re here for him. Too late though, always too late, but you keep coming back, don’t you? You loved him. Loved him so much and there was nothing you could do. Too little too late but you’ll do your too little every day until you’ve gone far away and there is nothing left of your memories but confessions in secret notebooks, and subtext in long tattered and lost letters. Go, I will not keep you here.” 

Bilbo did not know how or why he kept walking, but he did, and he left the two figures far behind and again all around him turned to mist and shapes and the clarity of all, but blood and darkness faded. He was searching for something, but what it was he did not know. Ever upward he toiled, until he happened across a sprawled dwarf at the foot of a great tall structure of stone. Bilbo knelt in the mud, getting black and red blood all over his shins and up over his knees. With a gentle hand he turned the dwarf over, and saw it was Fili, streaked and stained all over with the mud blood, save for a slice in his chest that was bubbling and oozing with fresh red.  

The young dwarf’s eyes were staring, staring, staring, but he was dead, and there was nothing to be done. Tears stung in the back of Bilbo’s throat and he reached out to cover the stark red of the wound, though the sticky oozy stuff squished through his fingers and up under his finger nails, and even where it was thin over his hands it made it so every line of his skin seemed covered by the blood of the young dwarf. 

Suddenly about the dead dwarf and around him, beginning to be soaked in mud was scraps of parchment, and then full pages and hundreds of ripped open envelopes and pieces of little wax seal torn so that their sigils could not be seen any longer and many of them appeared on the body of the dwarf himself, so that their edges began to be soaked in blood. But the pages themselves seemed to be coated in laughter, and the air was amuck with it, laugher that slowly changed and echoed until it was dark and angry, almost gleeful, reaching into Bilbo with claws and when he turned his head aside from them he could see dimly like a specter a vision the inside of his hobbit hole, and he himself sitting at his writing desk, composing letters. 

For a long moment he was tempted to try go off into the mist and see if the hobbit hole was real, but then he saw a thing hovering by the door to the room where he wrote in, and as he watched he saw that it was his mother, hair askew and dress ripped, her body more covered in blood and torn skin and exposed white bone than the battlefield all around him, and Bilbo jerked away from Fili then, and ran. He ran and ran and ran, up and up and up he went, until time seemed just a slippery bit of laughter the Valar were having at the world. Weary and cold and so so empty by turns, Bilbo went ever onward. 

Far too quickly he found him. Azog stood on the ice howling with laughter, standing over the limp body of Thorin Oakenshield. Azog’s bright pale blue eyes were glittering and there was blood dripping from his mouth and staining his teeth, and more blood oozed from his nose. Occasionally a bout of his laughter would be licked by wet coughs, but it never seemed to bother him. The tall orc was far too preoccupied using his arm which was cut off and turned thusly into a sword from the elbow down, to stab through the chest of the dwarf, again and again, a great booted foot on Thorin’s chest so that he could yank the blade cruelly out and stab down again. 

When Bilbo approached, Azog freed his blade once more and walked around the body of the fallen dwarf to meet him. If an orc ever could have a genuine smile not marked by malice or pain or evil glee, then Azog smiled. He crouched down before the hobbit and tilted his head to the side, eyes darting over his face, and with his one hand he absently wiped away some of the blood from his nose. His eyes flickered down to look at it briefly, but then they went back to Bilbo. There was blood spattered all over one boot and splayed across one pale skinned leg, and Azog gave a little questioning hum. His blue eyes were quite close as the orc leaned in to get a better look at the hobbit. For some time they stayed this way, neither moving.  

Time still seemed to dance and skitter past, ignoring Bilbo. At last, Azog leaned back and nodded, his hand swiping at the blood under his nose again. He coughed wetly and spoke as though he hadn’t noticed the cough at all. “You know it. You know it, even now, don’t you, but you will hide from it until you cannot any longer.” 

Bilbo shivered and wrapped his arms around himself. Azog’s face stretched further into his almost kind smile. “You’re afraid of what it means, what you’ll do if it’s true, which it is. You don’t want to think about it, because it’s easier to just pretend like you see nothing.” The accent of the orc was thick and lilted rather than harsh as most orcs sounded when they spoke Westron. However, it was still an orcish accent, and it was still angular and gruff, but it was not angry or cutting. 

Azog reached up to his own chest, where a long line of red lay, and he smeared his fingers across it, and then his palm, and when he held back up his hand it was smeared with blood. He put his giant hand over Bilbo’s face and then he drew it away. In the pale reflection of Azog’s eyes Bilbo could see a red handprint over his face; the fingers of it went up into his hair. 

Azog leaned in a little closer. “Do you know where I come from little one?” A cold wind blew over the hill and ruffled Bilbo’s hair. Azog’s voice went softer although his accent seemed thicker. “I come from Khazad-dûm. My children sleep in the realm of the fire demon. But you know there is a Balrog that dwells there in Moria, deep beneath the halls of the dwarves. You have known for a long time, ever since your friends told you about Battle of Azanulbizar.” His sword arm reached up slowly then, and he traced the very tip of it, still dripping in blood over Bilbo’s cheek. It was a sort of tickling sensation. Azog looked faintly amused, his eyes following the movements of the blade. “You remember, and you remember too much, things they told you at the council in Imladris. You try to forget them, but they just won’t stop haunting you. It would be so easy if you could just wash all the blood away, but you,” he swirled a curl of Bilbo’s hair with his blade. “You can never wash away this much blood.” 

Bilbo stepped back and made to walk around the orc and make for the fallen figure of his dwarf. Azog stood up and swiftly stepped into the hobbit’s path. Bilbo went to go around him, but Azog stopped him, and again, and again. Bilbo eventually stopped trying and stood still. 

“Oh, don’t be like that, halfling, I’m just letting you bring him flowers! Yavanna knows he’d never let you.” Azog said in a very reasonable tone. The orc reached into a pouch on the side of his belt and drew out four little wilting blooms that were so destroyed that it was impossible to name what sort of flower they had been, not covered in blood and battered as they were. He pressed these into Bilbo’s hands with a smug little look. 

Then Azog turned and walked away and made his way back down the hill until he disappeared into the gray mists and swirling battle below them. The flowers were sticky between his fingers. 

Bilbo slowly walked up to Thorin. The dwarf lay on the ice and his eyes were staring out into the sky. Bilbo looked up and he could see distant eagles catching glimpses of light that shot through clouds. When he looked back down, he saw Thorin’s hair was pooled around him on the ice, and his dwarf was wearing thick robes but no eradicable armor fool dwarf! All those days wearing armor, and when it counts you go without. Curse the pride of dwarves. There were dozens of little slashes in the cloth, precise cuts like the slot marks that forks made when they were used to pick up cheese and then were taken back out again. 

When Bilbo reached out to brush away a strand of hair from Thorin’s handsome and utterly still face, the dwarf opened his gray eyes and lurched to his feet, grabbing a handful of the hobbit’s tunic. There was a snarl on Thorin’s face and a wild look in his still death-glazed eyes. He ignored the hobbit’s struggling and dragged Bilbo behind him as he went laboriously to the far edge, up to the cliff where Erebor could be seen peeking out of the gray faceless mist. He pulled Bilbo around in front of him and his expression was unreadable and distressingly blank as he seemed more to stare through the hobbit than to see him. Then he kept walking forward to the edge of the cliff. 

Bilbo renewed his efforts to get away, but this was in vain for Thorin had always been far stronger than him. Bilbo’s bare heels began to scrabble the edge of the icy cliff. Thorin held Bilbo with one hand to grab at the broken bloody flowers in his fingers and push them behind Bilbo’s ear so that they poked out from his curly hair. For a moment all the stillness stretched out and it felt like nothing and everything existed at the same time. Then Thorin took another two steps forward. “Dream, dream Master Baggins, of wolves and gold and serpents and winter. Dream and do not wake again.” Then he let go and Bilbo was falling, falling, falling. Above him against the patchy sky and the eagles a gust of wind picked up Thorin’s hair. 

An unfamiliar voice began to chant lowly. 

Haunted and hunted and walking on ice 

Slowly by the light of your eyes 

I see red all of the time 

Haunted by specters of darkness and fire 

Sword and sleep and cold and quiet 

Songs for the dead and tombs still alive 

Winter is coming so run with the wights 

Haunting you, hunting you, walking on ice. 

* * * 

Bilbo woke with a scream. He was twisted up tightly in the bedclothes and trembling badly. His attempts to remove the sheets and blankets from his person forcibly only led to panic as he couldn’t get out. They felt choking and enclosing and the shadows of the rooms seemed mocking and menacing. He heard a sound and suddenly fell utterly still. After a moment of listening, he managed to work his way free now that he wasn’t struggling quite so franticly. 

“Light, I need a little light,” he muttered, glancing about the room until he found his little candle. He snatched it up, but not seeing any matches lying out directly he opted instead to shrug on his patchwork robe and make for the kitchen, unlit candle clutched tightly in his hands. His feet went silently across the cold floors. The halls were dark, and all the doors were shut along the way. It was still night-time, and morning was hours away yet, so there was only dark creeping in through the windows. 

Bilbo shuddered at the memory of mist and darkness in dreams and wished ardently for his candle wick to already be lit. Quickly he ducked into the kitchen and dug out a box of matches from a drawer and took several attempts at striking it with trembling hands. The match broke in half, and he groaned in distress. 

He heard the thud of footsteps before he saw anything. Instinct acted for Bilbo before anything else did. There was a metallic clatter as Bilbo one handedly rooted through another drawer and came up with a long thin curved knife meant for cutting up tiny pieces of garlic and thick slabs of meat. He held it out in front of him, but it was too dark for him to even see a gleam off the blade. For a moment there was nothing, and then the steps moved closer while Bilbo franticly scanned the darkness. Then there was a rustling right next to him and Bilbo jumped and swiveled to face the sound. Then a little spark jumped a match lit. In its little drop of light Bilbo could see Thorin light the candle and then shake the match until it went dark.   

Bilbo stared at Thorin. He didn’t lower the knife. Light gleamed off of its silver blade, wobbling back and forth with Bilbo’s shaking hands. Thorin looked wary, framed by darkness, and dressed down in a simple tunic and trousers, hair loose and sleep mussed. His voice was rough with sleep and thus deeper than usual. “I heard you cry out; I came to see if you were alright.” His eyes flicked down to the blade. “I don’t think you’ll be needing that, master hobbit.” 

Shakily Bilbo set aside the knife on the counter, though he put it more behind him than between himself and Thorin. Bilbo darted forward and scooped up the now lit candle and then stepped back, holding it by the metal handle as close to his chest as he could safely do without setting himself alight. “Thank you.” 

Thorin looked less wary now and more mildly amused. “Dreams?” 

Bilbo huffed and walked around the massive dwarf who was large and looming even without layers upon layers make him seem even broader and taller. Although with a flick of his eyes downward Bilbo saw that Thorin had managed to slip back on his boots before he came to find him. In the next room was the long table, and in the light of the candle he could see the contract lying across it, still partly opened, with all the proper signatures on it. “No Thorin. Nightmares. Not dreams.” Bilbo walked up to study it and leaned heavily on the wood surface of the table with one hand.  

Thorin was following him; Bilbo could tell by the unsubtle clomp of his booted feet. The night before, Bilbo had managed to shut down the questioning of the dwarves eventually, though it took a while. They were all too curious with only a little bit of knowledge. 

Balin raised his eyebrows in his distinctly Balin way. "So, you want to kill a man with a rusty spoon, and you laughed at a fire breathing dragon. Right then Mad Baggins, are you ready to read the contract of your employment?"  

“You’re going to just move on like that and not ask any more questions!?” Said Thorin incredulously. 

Balin shrugged with a huff and patted his long white beard. “He has too much to tell and unless we mean to divert our entire purpose here, we must move on from this. Also, I don’t think I’m wrong in assuming that he won’t tell us anything more at present.” 

“You would be right,” said Gandalf. “I tried to get answers out of him for an entire afternoon and he gave far more to you just now than he gave to me in all of that time. I think it would be best to get back to the business at hand and merely accept that Mr. Baggins has a unique…insight on the matter.” 

Bilbo nodded firmly. “Thank you, Gandalf.” And crossed his arms over his chest and put on his best business face, the sort of firm expression he took on when he was dealing with people who wanted to borrow money off of him. 

Of course, the dwarves could not settle on that one idea right away at once, and it took several minutes of discussion and loud voices before they all managed to calm down and decide that it was more important to discuss their business with Erebor than to worry over what the Hobbit knew or had seen. Balin produced the contract which Bilbo handled with gentle hands and an amused eye, leaving the throng of dwarves to read in a slightly less crowded part of the entryway to the adjacent room. He huffed a tiny laugh as he looked over the words. 

“What’s funny, Mr. Baggins?” Said Kili, who had come up behind the hobbit and sort of leaned over his shoulder to read it too. 

“I’ve read this thing countless times and have it memorized, except for one or two bits about how one might die by dragon fire which must have torn away before I got this thing back home, but I feel as though I ought to read a contract, any contract, before I sign it, despite that I probably understand it better than the author of it.” 

Balin made a sound of protest from across the room. Bilbo glanced up just slightly and saw that Thorin was watching him with more brooding and dark silence. “Balin you cannot expect to know more about the matter than I do, I’ve had eighty years to get familiar with it. If it makes you feel any better, I fainted the first time round when I attempted to read this unwieldy thing.” A smile tugged on Bilbo’s lips. “Also, Bofur,” he said raising his voice a bit louder so that it would be sure to carry over the general din of the dwarves talking, “You did a perfectly wonderful job of explaining what a dragon does to a person when murdering them.” Bilbo nodded his head decisively. The kindly dwarf in his odd hat sat up more quickly and all the dwarves leaned in a bit, hoping to hear whatever it was that Bilbo had to say about the past—future? Present? Whatever. 

“Airborne fire-breather, teeth like razors, claws like meat-hooks, extremely fond of precious metals–” Bilbo said in his best impression of Bofur’s lighthearted offhand tone and his accent. 

Bilbo’s eyes glittered with mischief as he said, in his own best impression of himself when annoyed and feeling patronized, “Yes, I know what a dragon is.” 

Cutting his gaze over to Balin, he said “You all right, laddie?” in what Bilbo thought was a fairly decent Balin voice. Balin was after all the dwarf that he’d known better than any of the others, as Balin had come to visit him more than once over the decades. 

Balin’s eyes widened a bit, for he clearly recognized the tone of voice and also that it was in fact something that Balin would have said. “That bit was me?” The old dwarf said a bit off balanced. 

“Yes, and then Bofur was right back on it with, ‘Think furnace, with wings. Flash of light, searing pain, then poof, you're nothing more than a pile of ash.” 

Thorin was leaning forward in his seat, listening intently. Bilbo shrugged at the dwarf king. “That was it, there’s no more, I fainted then, and refused to go on the quest.” 

“You refused!” Said Thorin in astonishment, actually standing up and going to join his nephew in standing beside the hobbit. Fortunately, Bilbo didn’t feel the creeping dread reappear at the dwarf’s closeness. “You, after everything you’ve told us that you know, you saying things about dwarf secrets and terrible portents then say you didn’t even go on the journey?!” 

Kili was noticeably quiet at Bilbo’s elbow. Bilbo shrugged. “No, I refused to go, but the next morning after you were all gone, I jumped up and signed the contract and ran out the door, barely getting to there in time to meet with all of you.” Bilbo looked cheerfully at Gandalf. “I do believe you won a good bit of money, my dear wizard, for you had all placed bets on whether or not I’d be coming. And you, in your words, never doubted me for a second. Though you gave a dramatic pause so someone could toss you your winnings before you bothered to say it.” 

Thorin coughed, almost as though trying to cover a laugh or something, which was unlikely as Thorin didn’t much like to laugh. “What of me, did I win or lose money?” 

Bilbo looked up at him. “Eh? You didn’t bet anything, but I would be willing to bet all of Bag End, (that’s this house here) that you’d have lost every bit of anything you bet on account of me had you bet anything. I don’t think you even wanted me to come, much less thought that I’d do so when thinking without the influence of anybody else. Although I must say even if I hadn’t gone, I rather think Gandalf would have doubled back to run me out my door, so it’s just as well. I think fate is a bunch of rubbish made up by very old folk to justify all kinds of things and explain away things without having to explain them at all, but I was meant to travel with you lot of dwarves.” 

Thorin was quiet and then said a small, “ah”. 

Bilbo held up the contract in Balin’s direction. “I’ve read it all before though so, I’m ready to sign, I think.” And he pushed lightly around the two dark haired dwarves and went over to Balin and signed the contract under his watchful eye. 

“You are a very singular creature, Master Hobbit.” Said Thorin. 

Bilbo hummed and looked back at the dwarf. “Me? No, not really. More just old. Not as old as you are of course, but a great deal older than any other hobbit you’re likely to meet in these parts, or anywhere really.” But then Bilbo clapped his hands and looked over all the dwarves and said brightly, “And well, don't’ you know, I think we have talked long enough for one night, if you see what I mean. What about bed, and an early start, and all that? I will give you a good breakfast before you go.” 

“Before we go,” corrected Fili. 

Bilbo snorted and a tiny bit of his nasty smile from before came back, but it only flickered into existence for a moment before it was gone again, replaced by a more hobbitish smile. “Fili, I don’t think any of you could stop me going with you.” He put his little hands on his hips. “I know to all of you, I’m someone new and even a bit strange that you’ve just met, but you must remember that I’ve known you all for a great deal longer, and if I don’t think of the lot of you as family then my name is Lobelia Sackville-Baggins! (And it most certainly is not, mind you.)” 

“There’s nothing else to discuss that we can’t do on the road, and anything we needed to acquire before the road I’ve been sure to get and see to it that it’s been all packed up neatly and ready to go. You’ll all have to shuffle about a bit to fit in all the rooms I’m afraid, but a good night’s rest before a long journey can only ever improve things for everyone.” 

And Bilbo had said more things, but they’d all managed to sort themselves out into all the rooms, Thorin going into the second-best room in the house, which happened to be right next to Bilbo’s own room. As he wasn’t sure on how to feel about it, he decided firmly not to form an opinion on it at all. 

Thorin cut into his memories, deep voice echoing a bit in the hobbit hole. “You seem frightened of me, last night and now both. You think me less safe than even Dwalin, though you’ve the audacity to backtalk a wizard. I don’t understand. What have I done to make you fear me?” 

Bilbo blinked balefully back at the dwarf, who huffed out a breath of exasperation at his expression. “Surely you are less afraid of me than of a fickle old man who can turn you into a frog.” 

Bilbo tilted his head in a shrug. “I’m not properly afraid of you…exactly. Just…there’s things, you know, and well, you wouldn’t understand even if I explained them to you.” 

Thorin frowned at this and crossed his arms over his chest in the way he did anytime he was annoyed or confused. If Thorin was confused he tended to be annoyed, so it was often both. Bilbo felt a twinge of fond amusement creep up. “Also, Gandalf won’t turn me into a frog.” With a raised eyebrow he added. “He won’t even turn you into a frog, though Yavanna knows you may deserve it.” 

Thorin made an affronted sound in his throat. After a moment of silence Thorin said, “What did you dream of then?” 

“Nightmares, not dreams.” 

“Eh, well what were they?” It was odd, hearing Thorin’s firm deep tones of voice after so long without them, though he’d described them in his books and his notes well enough. 

“A battle from long ago,” He tried to think of anything he could tell the dwarf without saying too much, but he could hardly describe the battle, nor tell the dwarf of the death of his nephew without some serious explanations. Nor was it really wise to give away so much information and control over the future this early. His mind flashed to Azog. “And orcs.” 

A flash of sympathy crossed the dwarf’s face. “I also dream of battles from long ago and the orcs we slew there.” Thorin stepped forward and picked up another candle off the table and then put the wick of it up to Bilbo’s candle to light it. “You should go back to sleep.” 

“Oh, I’m afraid not. The entire night is ruined for me now. No point in going back to sleep.” 

“Don’t be ridiculous hobbit,” Thorin really was quite fetching dressed like this, inside a comfortable and safe hobbit hole, hair and eyes illuminated by candlelight. Alive, without madness anywhere hereabouts. “We have a long journey tomorrow and don’t expect that we will slow down for you.” 

Bilbo snorted and gave the dwarf a level look. “If you told me you would slow down on my account, I’d rightly accuse you of being a liar. And that goes for most dwarves, but you are more like that in the first place. Please, a baker’s dozen of dwarves slow down for a hobbit? Not while your maker still draws breath.” 

Thorin looked like he didn’t know whether to be offended or just incredulous. “Did you just…invoke the name of Mahal?” 

“No, though you did.” Remarked the hobbit mildly. Bilbo waved his hand, “Go on now, get some sleep, tomorrow is a long journey.” 

They had a couple minute long staring contest before Thorin finally turned away and stomped off back to his room. 

Dwarves. I love dwarves. He made a face. You love a particular dwarf, Bilbo Baggins, and you’re rather silly with it. 

However, the thought was more soothing than anything, for it had been a terribly long time since Bilbo’d had any cause to chastise himself for being in love with an unattainable and infuriating dwarf king. Nobody could much fault you for secretly pining after a dead person for nearly a century, but make them alive again and poof it all became rather above his station. There was nothing for it though, Bilbo was just going to go on as he always had. Desperately, hopelessly gone for that one particular dwarf. 

He shook himself free from the last strains of his nightmare, and tried to put away the rest of what couldn’t be cleared away. Sleep was out of the question, but there was nothing wrong with a spot of double checking everything he needed to have packed for the journey. Nodding firmly to himself he carried his little candle away and headed off to the little storeroom he’d put his things in.