Note: I got really, really pressed last night about a post on tumblr and rambled in the tags I reblogged and then almost didn't sleep, but I did and then I woke up and wrote this. So here. My first thing post-BoFA movie. I hope you all enjoy.

Disclaimer: I own nothing but my own little fragile heart lmao.

Dedication: To my Boo, who requested something totally different for Christmas. I will get on that in a second babe, I swear, but in the meantime have this wretched thing that took over my mind and fingers.

Maybe it's a good thing Bilbo is too tired to shout and rave, to throw his hands in the air and holler at all the hobbits gathered around his home when he returns. He's enough of a spectacle as is, he figures, hair tangled and greasy, clothes of a strange cut, lugging a chest still reeking of troll and, tunnels below, he can only imagine the look in his eyes. The whispers will rein for weeks to come and he doesn't need a shouting match with the entire Shire to make them worse.

His toes brush his front door when the hobbit running the auction speaks. If Bilbo had known his name at one point, it isn't nothing but a hole in his memory, too many other names and faces crowding among his thoughts instead. But he calls his name, awkward and distracted, and Bilbo turns, fingers shifting his grip on the chest he holds.

"Mister Bilbo," the hobbit says. "Who's this? The one who employed you? A Mister-"

Don't, Bilbo aches to scream. Don't do this to me. But he cannot stop the seasons changing, he cannot stop the way blood flows through someone's veins (or escapes them), and he cannot stop this portly fellow from saying his name.

"Thorin Oakenshield," the man finishes, obviously confused. Bilbo knows that everyone is staring. He knows it the same way he knows his own name, Bilbo Baggins, but he also knows it in the way he has Took blood in his veins, strong and brave and true.

Some things must be done, he knows this. You must get out of bed in the morning, you must wave the way certain fish cook to keep them from burning in the blink of an eye, and you must, above all else, breathe in and out each day, even when your chest is tight, even when your throat closes over with the heavy weight of grief.

Bilbo Baggins is not a stranger to grief. He had an empty home and a heavy heart before this journey and so will he now. He can move through this, he reminds himself. He must move through this, the same way he had been given other option with the Arkenstone so many months before.

He clears his throat. His fingers fidget at his side and he readjusts the grip he has on the chest. The cloak, red and heavy and once belonging to a creature so imposing and strong that Bilbo still does not wish to believe his fate, brushes his ankle as he twists to face the hobbits staring, seated upon his front lawn like the carrion birds who picked at the corpses upon the battlefield when all was said and done.

"He," Bilbo tries. He could only get this far in front of the mountain as well, choked by all that had been unsaid. But he has traveled for six months and there are more leagues in between that mountain and his empty hobbit hole than he can fathom despite having walked the distance twice now. He clears his throat again, harder, rougher, straightens his back and stands tall and proud. Because the world deserves to hear this, Thorin deserved to hear this, but he could not, not anymore, so in his place Bilbo will tell the world, will finally, finally speak the truth after so many months of lying.

"He was my friend," he tells the grabby handed hobbits so ready to announce him dead and move on with their lives. And then he turns, pushes the door open, the whispers of his friend? licking at his heels as he steps into the musty, empty old hobbit hole. He shoves the door shut behind him, drops the chest on the floor and then, a strange feeling in his chest, he wanders through his home as if he had never been there before in his life.

The ceiling has never felt small before this moment. The walls are close and it is strange, to be able to see the end of the hallway. He moves through the halls like a shade until he comes upon his mother's portrait, knocked from the wall and crooked upon the ground. He bends, fingers curling so carefully around it, his beautiful Took mother, and when he puts her back in her rightful place, next to his Baggins father, with his stern dislike of anything exciting outside of his wife's laugh, Bilbo feels the hollow ache in his chest expanse to swallow his entire being whole.

Tomorrow he will go and fish his belongings out of the hands of his kin and their like. Tomorrow he will raise his voice and fight back and give them a real sight to gawk at, because he fought orcs, killed spiders, rode a barrel down a raging river, tricked a dragon, and survived a war. Hobbits who didn't know well enough to keep their noses out of a man's home while he was away on an adventure were nothing to him. And then, the day after tomorrow, he will set everything to rights, so that he can finally settle down in his armchair that he had missed so much, with his books, and his garden, safe and sound within his own home.

And maybe, on the day after the day after tomorrow, he will go outside and do what must be done to move on with his life. But for now, with the sun warm against his windows and his halls empty, he sits down beside the chest and curls around the little acorn in his pocket, and he lets the grief overtake him. Because six months is not enough time, a lifetime isn't enough time, to properly grief for the two bright boys who would laugh no more or for the man who had been his-

Friend.