Note: Mixture of book and movie verse.
Dwarves are stubborn. No one argues that fact, not even the dwarves.
When Sauron first gave the seven dwarf lords the rings he had crafted, he had no doubt that they would fall.
The men he had given the rings to fell. Some faster than others, but all eventually came under his sway. The dwarves, though . . .
Well, they were longer lived. It would take them longer to yield to him. He would give it a bit more time.
A bit more. Soon they would fall, surely.
But trying to impress his will upon their minds was like trying to mold a mountain with his bare hands.
Dwarves, it turned out, were more stubborn than he had originally supposed.
The rings did make them greedy, but he was unsure how much of that was due to the rings' magic, and how much of that greed sprang naturally from the riches they used the rings to get.
When he captured Semagol, he learned that even a hobbit could be corrupted if a ring had long enough to work on them.
But the dwarves were stubborn. He would reclaim his gifts, he decided.
Even in his fury, he couldn't help but be the smallest bit impressed.
Thror was warned of the danger of amassing so much gold, but he was stubborn and blinded by his greed and the ring he wore. The dragon came and drove the dwarves out of the mountain.
The survivors were destitute, grieving, and in many cases wounded. They were hardy folk, used to hard work, but it is one thing to mine, and another thing to walk for days with little food and no hope. No one is built for that, no matter how hardy the race.
It was the first time Dis had been out under the burning sun for such a long stretch of time. It was the first time she had gone without food for any length of time. Her muscles burned, her eyes ached, and she kept turning to speak to people who she would never see again this side of Mahal's halls.
A mother beside her stumbled under the weight of her child. Under ordinary circumstances, the two would never have been risked on a journey like this. Children and mothers were far too precious.
Dis offered to carry the child to lighten the mother's load. Even more muscles aching, she trudged forward, eyes on her brother's back as he helped their grandfather along.
He glanced back only once to meet her worried eyes. Their people needed aid, but they both knew how unlikely it was they would get it.
Frerin, on Thror's other side, started to sing. Thorin, glanced at him, startled, before his lips twitched at his brother's antics. Even now, Frerin could make them both smile.
Thorin joined in, Dis only a second behind him. Soon, the song snaked down the line, a companion to their pounding feet.
Dis took another step and then another. If the others could do it, so could she. No dwarf had ever given up yet, and she refused to be the first.
Thror was dead. Frerin was dead. Thrain was missing, presumed dead. Their people had no home, no food, and no hope.
Thorin set his mouth in a grim line and worked beside the least of his people. They would make their home in the Blue Mountains, if they could have no better.
When one of the few children that had been born that year died from the harsh winter and the scarce food, Thorin performed the rites himself.
The first time he had done so had been not two days after Thranduil had refused his people aid. The last time he would do so . . .
If they did not reclaim Erebor, then he would continue to do so until he was laid into the stone himself.
Any other people would have died here long ago, but they were dwarves. They would endure.
At least until he found a way to retake their mountain.
The gold sickness lay strong on the gold, begun by the gold's own nature, cursed by the dragon's long reign, and inflamed by the proximity of the One Ring, little though they knew it. Thorin never stood a chance.
He fell to the gold sickness.
Except. Well. He was a dwarf. One of Durin's line, no less.
So he fell, yes. And then he did the impossible.
With no wizardly magic, with no hits on the head, with no Elvish cleansing, he came back to himself and did what needed doing.
No gold sickness was going to best him. He refused to let it.
Battle wounds he could do less about. He could hold himself together long enough to kill Azog, but he could not heal himself through willpower alone.
He could hold on long enough to say goodbye to a certain hobbit, though. That he could do.
Death was long used to waiting on stubborn dwarves, after all. Thorin wouldn't want to disappoint him.
A thinking person might have assumed that Sauron had learned his lesson about dwarves.
A thinking person could be forgiven for thinking that, but they would be wrong.
He sent a messenger to Dain asking for information on a certain Baggins.
Dain stared at him incredulously for a minute and then told the messenger to let him think about it.
Sauron wanted him to turn over the hobbit that had saved the company that had reclaimed Erebor multiple times, had faced a dragon, helped prevent a war from breaking out between men, elves, and dwarves, and then had walked away with a paltry reward he hadn't really wanted.
Dain had good laugh for a minute. There. He'd thought about it.
Before he'd become king of the Lonely Mountain, he would have shouted a few choice words at the messenger, but he had to be diplomatic now. He kept telling the messenger he'd think about it.
And he did. Dain could use as many laughs as he could get these days.
The promises the messenger made were pretty, but while dwarves liked gold, they prized loyalty higher. When promises turned to threats, he sent a few dwarves to warn Bilbo and sound out what sort of help they could expect from the other peoples of Middle Earth.
After he sent them off, he got one last ultimatum. It was, objectively, very persuasive.
At this point, though, it could have been the most eloquent speech in the history of the world.
Dain was a dwarf. Bilbo was their hobbit.
He wondered if it counted as being diplomatic if the insults you shouted were all in Khuzdul.
When hobbits wrote their histories, they wrote them as accurately as they could, but all historians make mistakes.
The elves left Middle Earth until none remained, they wrote.
True. Probably. Elves were tricky.
The Ents died out.
True. Probably. Without the Entwives it seemed inevitable, but some trees live for a long time, and it's a statement that's rather hard to prove.
The orcs died out.
True. Unless they're amassing underground somewhere.
Trolls, dragons, giant spiders, and assorted nasties, also gone.
. . . No one's seen any in a while, but saying the Balrogs are all gone might be wishful thinking.
But for all of these qualifiers later scholars put in, the truth was, those races had left, faded, or died out, in all probability. The hobbits were still there, certainly, and the men were, but that was it.
The hobbits became more outgoing for a time, but when darkness began to intrude on the land again, they became more insular than ever. When one finally dared venture out, it was to find Rohan and Gondor gone. Whether they had been conquered, merged, or just renamed, the hobbit didn't know. The world was too strange and frightening to stick around and figure it out.
Hobbit scholars looked at what they knew of dwarvish population numbers before that third darkness, considered what their last adventurer had found out, and declared the dwarves extinct.
With falling birthrates and so few women, the dwarves really should have been.
But hobbits weren't the only ones that could shut their doors and wait out the darkness. Hobbits weren't the only ones that could decline in prosperity yet persevere.
Deep in the Lonely Mountain and the Glittering Caves, the dwarves did what they did best.
They looked around at the darkness, saw their odds of survival shrink, and then they gritted their teeth and carried on.
They were too stubborn to do anything else.
Dwarves are stubborn. Death, who was supposed to collect the last of their race centuries ago, knew this better than anyone else.
But the hobbits kept writing very good books that he got caught up in reading, and surely soul collection could wait until he'd read one more chapter.
If anyone questioned why Mahal had declared himself the patron of hobbit literature, they didn't bother to ask.
Apparently it is possible to write angst and crack at the same time. Whether or not one should is, of course, a whole other question.
I'm definitely not the first to think that the One Ring wasn't helping Thorin's gold sickness any, but it didn't seem like the kind of idea that was any one person's property.
Reviews are always lovely, but I'd be equally happy with suggestions for nonslash Hobbit fanfiction - particularly if it has a happy ending.