1. My very first gun

In the strangest places.

The early Spring morning was cold, the frigid air seeping through the thick fabric of the uniform and Dwalin rubbed his hands together to get some life back into them. He idly watched his own breath condensate, white against the dull greyness of the London morning. He was waiting with the other lads for Bateman to give them the signal to go in and they all stood silent, ready to leap into action.

It was a standard procedure dawn raid on a squat and the police van was readily waiting for the usual bunch of junkies they were likely to bring down with them to the police station. Thompson yawned beside him, his wrinkling face twisting in a grimace between tiredness and impatience. Dwalin bent his head sideways, trying to get the crick out of his neck, the result of having spent the night on his old armchair instead of lying in his bed. He had fallen asleep watching some reruns on the telly and Barkith had snuggled on his feet, every now and then moving her tail in sleep. When he had awoken it had been already time to brew himself some black coffee and after briefly walking his dog in the eerily silent street below, Dwalin had had to get to the station. He resisted the urge to yawn too and he glared instead at the peeling paint of the door they were waiting to force open.

He idly wondered if he was going to see any familiar faces today. In the two years since he had been transferred from Edinburgh he had cuffed his fair share of people in London - petty offenders mostly, who had been arrested for possession, although every now and then he had got the chance to arrest drug dealers - and since most junkies tended to persist in their ways, Dwalin had cuffed some of them several times over.

A gust of wind sent a wave of unwelcome chills through him and he deepened his glare while he crossed his arms over his chest to keep some body heat. Just then, Bateman gestured them to move and the officers fell into position immediately while Price rammed the door open with a couple of well-aimed hits.

And then the usual organised chaos erupted.

There were shouts and the frantic sound of running steps while the team Dwalin was on strode quickly up the stairs, their boots thudding loudly on the wooden treads. Once they reached the dimly lit landing the officers fanned out and began kicking the doors open. Dwalin, Thompson and McKenzie entered a room just as a very thin wild-eyed woman opened the sash window, trying to get out.

Dwalin leaped forward, grabbing her arm and pulling her off the windowsill. She began shrieking, loudly cursing them all with an array of colourful terms when McKenzie searched her. She found several small nylon wraps of what looked like heroin on the woman and she cuffed her. Thompson gave McKenzie a nod before she pulled the woman, kicking and screaming about police brutality, out of the room and towards the van which had been parked under the building.

Dwalin proceeded along with Thompson through the dingy hallway and the greying ginger-haired officer barged into the next room, leading the way. It could have been a kitchen, Dwalin thought, his eyes taking in the filth-encrusted sink and the equally grimy remnants of cupboards. Several lines of rope had been pulled through the length of the small room and some stained clothes were hanging off them.

Dwalin pushed the musty-smelling fabric away, bowing to pass under the ropes and following Thompson to the far corner of the room where a mattress had been laid on the linoleum which covered the floor. Atop the mattress lay the unmoving form of a man, curled on his side facing the wall and covered with a threadbare blanket. Dwalin could only see a mop of blond hair sticking in all directions and a bony shoulder.

He wondered for a second if the man was still alive - it wouldn't be the first OD'd addict he had stumbled upon. Thompson poked the man tentatively with his boot and the blond head groaned, slowly turning towards them while he peeled his eyelids open.

And Dwalin's breath suddenly jerked to a halt inside his chest.

Impossible.

He felt his eyes instinctively widen as he tried to make sense of the sight before him. Impossible. It was impossible. He shook his head but he was still there.

Sharp-angled nose and halfway open blue eyes with dark circles underneath, which were stark in contrast with the sickly paleness of the gaunt cheeks. Blond stubble covered them, framing a thin-lipped mouth which looked about to protest. Impossible. No, it was impossible.

But when words tumbled out of the man's mouth it was that voice - only slightly higher in pitch than Thorin's had been. The voice which had been burned in Dwalin's mind a long lifetime ago, along with the face which was eyeing them, obviously as high as it came.

Dwalin stood there, frozen to the spot. It was impossible, utterly impossible and yet he was there, gazing at a man who couldn't, truly couldn't be anyone but Frerin. He shook his head again in a bewilderment that ran deep, shaking all which he had thought and believed since he had been reborn in this unexpected human life - in this strange, queer world that didn't function the way Dwalin had been accustomed to. He kept shaking his head to himself, but his eyes barely moved from the sight on front of him.

He observed with a strange detachment Thompson go through the standard procedure. The handcuffs clicked closed and Dwalin still stood there, eyebrows furrowed in a deep frown while he watched the older officer pull the tall thin man - Frerin - towards the door.

"Murray!" Thompson barked when he passed him.

"Get a move." he ordered and Dwalin swallowed down the shock which had taken hold of him and he nodded stiffly, forcing his feet to move with a glare for himself.

He followed Thompson and the handcuffed hunched figure of Frerin - Frerin, how... but how..? He didn't understand. - who was being taken downstairs.

The rest of the raid had passed like a cloud of smoke through Dwalin's mind, his body going through the motions on autopilot while his thoughts still sped, trying to bring some semblance of sense. Was he imagining things? Seeing ghosts from the past? It would be the easiest explanation, he mused while he nursed a scorchingly hot cup of coffee in the police station - to believe it was just wishful thinking from his part.

But no, Dwalin grimaced. He had no doubt about what his eyes had seen. No, that man - Charles Collins - was Frerin. Dwalin could know his face anywhere, even if it had been a very long lifetime since the last time he had gazed at him - and his face had been white under the trail of blood, blue eyes widened in silent horror. Dead eyes.

He downed the coffee and it burned a trail down his throat. He ached for something stronger than coffee, like the scotch he had in his kitchen cupboard. Or any drink really, as long as it was strong enough to smash his chain of thoughts for a moment and let the memories dwell in peace, like those Dwalin had lost.

He closed his eyes for a moment, feeling the familiar weight he had been carrying for what seemed like forever.

His whole existence, since his first birth, had been shrouded in grief and Dwalin carried it silently on his shoulders. Everyone died and he kept living. That's how it went, that's how it had always been. Everyone had died while Dwalin had just grown older, outliving grief and solitude.

And when he had at last felt life abandon him it had only been to throw him back to a new life. Another life where people kept dying and Dwalin lived on.

But Frerin did not rest in peace either, did he? He was there, back, the same way Dwalin was. In the over two and a half decades of this unwanted second life he had never imagined there could be someone else who shared his plight, but Frerin was back too and it was undeniable.

Frerin. He swallowed, shaking his head. He was back, but to what? The erstwhile prince was a shell of his former self. He had looked at Dwalin without seeing, pale as a wraith with his filthy hair sticking in every direction and the reek of sickness about him. Dwalin arrested his sort, over and over until the day he didn't because they got found OD'd somewhere or simply disappeared.

Frerin was back, yes, but he was a dead man walking.

The rain was drizzling when he stepped out of the station, the glass door closing behind him. He pulled the hood of his shirt over his head to ward off the chilly droplets. His head was pounding viciously and he felt extremely twitchy.

The cops had detained him for the usual amount of time and he had been blessedly high when they had arrested him, but he had already crossed that limbo of bearable lucidity - of sobriety - and his body physically protested as withdrawal began to kick in, followed hand in hand - like a pair of giggling schoolgirls only their eyes were wrong - by his mind and he wanted to rip his thoughts out of his skull, burn them in acid and pour, pour the corrosion until nothing but white, snow white bone remained. And he would be free.

His thoughts were a noose tightening around his Adam's apple as it bobbed when he swallowed the dryness of his mouth. He needed a fix. And soon.

He walked down the street and the wet fabric of his clothes stuck to his skin, hindering his movements and he felt like he was wading through something thick - like clotted blood - but perhaps it was just his mind, that horrible cornucopia of foulness and rotten things, which plagued his lucidity.

No. He needed to get a fix, or anything really, just as long as it took the edge off his thoughts, as it smothered the voices that echoed in his ears. He needed to hear the music, the soft plucking of strings, not the screams, the shouts, the biting scratching piercing of his words - his father's, no, not his father, he was no longer his son. Words which dug under his feet until there was nowhere to stand - the same way other words had been shoved deeply in his guts. But that voice was different, more distant as the aeons had wedged themselves between then and now, and it was not one but many, and yet they all spoke the same - the same his father did - and he wanted to rip his ears out, deafen himself to their sound. But they were inside his mind, echoed inside his flesh. And he needed a fix, needed to silence them. He needed peace.

He rummaged through his pockets and found his package of cigarettes. Fumbling with the lighter he managed to light one and he inhaled the smoke greedily while he sheltered from the rain under a balcony. The cigarette was struggling to burn, half damp as it was, but it gave him a small measure of calm while he tried to make his thoughts useful.

He needed to get a fix somewhere. Liz had been arrested and he needed to figure out where to find one of the other usual pushers. He cursed the cops under his breath, not even angry - anger had been flushed out of him by disgust, a disgust which could very well be his own, or was it theirs?

Things had been so good lately - too good. Sharing the same place with one of his pushers and only having to leave the squat to get some cash. It had been too good to last. He took a drag of his cigarette.

He needed to find somewhere to stay too. Somewhere dry. The rain began falling in earnest and it splashed on the tarmac, soaking his trainers while he tried to weigh his options in spite of the nearly overwhelming physical need to get a fix. He finished smoking while he turned his unhelpful thoughts.

"Frerin!" a deep voice bellowed through the pitter-patter of the rain and he turned his head sharply.

What... how... He frowned, blinking away the pressure of his thoughts. A tall man was standing on the other side of the street, the rain falling on his shaven head and soaking through his brown beard and heavy brows. He... he looked familiar.

"Frerin." the man said again, crossing the street with a purposeful stride and he realised it hadn't been a voice inside his head. The man had called him Frerin. How could he possibly know that name?

The pounding headache grew worse as he tried to make some sense. And the man was coming closer. His dark jacket was as soaked as his beard and his face was wearing the strangest expression. He gazed in the man's direction and shook his head, his eyebrows knitting. His mind, that wretched thing which made him see phantoms, faces lost in the grinding of time and death. No. He shook his head. No.

"Frerin?" there was a tinge of concern in that deep, rasping voice and Frerin - no, he wasn't Frerin, Frerin was dead and Charlie was dead to the world, he was nobody - and he averted his eyes, his head still shaking, just like his hands which clenched and unclenched on his sides. He needed a fix. Now.

"Go away." he croaked "I know you're not real. You're not really here, no one ever is. Just leave me alone, will you."

His own voice sounded tired to him and he made to move but his body weighted too much and his head was a thousand nails being hammered into his skull.

"I'll leave you alone if you want." the man said in a rough northern accent and the more he heard that voice, the more he wanted to rip his own brain out of his skull. It was cruel, utterly cruel for his mind to torture him so.

The man extended a muscular arm, grabbing his shoulder and he - Frerin, Charlie, nobody - looked up into the man's stormy sharp blue eyes, his own wide in a bemusement which pounded in rhythm with his headache.

"I'm really here, though." that voice, his voice finished and its tone was no-nonsense.

"It... it can't be." he rasped, but the man was levelling him a steely look which was familiar, which was his - he had always worn that expression, balanced between a stare and a glare with his heavy brows slightly furrowed, he had worn it even when he had been just a dwarfling with a few wisps of beard on his cheeks and those two decades of difference had made Frerin feel old and wise, until he had grown even taller than him, a scowling mountain of a dwarf.

"Dwalin." he said and those steely eyes relaxed a notch, the grip on his shoulder growing less bruising before he removed his hand altogether.

The rain was pouring viciously over both of them and Dwalin watched the man who had once been his kin, his Prince. Frerin was shivering but didn't seem to realise it, his eyes haunted and his mouth twisted in a grimace. His hands were twitching on his sides and Dwalin had no idea what he was doing. It had been a spur of the moment decision. Once his shift had been over he has gone to see Frerin only to be told they had already released him. McKenzie had eyed him strangely, but he had simply stridden off and out of the station, looking for him.

And now he had found him and it was truly Frerin, if any doubt had been left within him, but he was something broken, more broken now that he was lucid than he had seemed that morning.

Frerin was fumbling with a cigarette, the orange of the lighter's flame illuminating his hollow-cheeked face in the twilight. He couldn't leave him like that, that much he knew. If nothing for the sense of duty which had been ingrained in him.

"Are you hungry?" he asked him and the blond lifted his eyes, frowning slightly as if the thought hadn't even occurred to him.

"I suppose." he answered slowly, exhaling a cloud of smoke and eyeing him questioningly, while his hands shook and his fingers closed tighter around the cigarette when it nearly slipped off.

"Come then." he told him and turned, striding off. He cast a glance behind his shoulder and saw Frerin frown again, before he hunched his head and followed him.

The ice clinked in the glass and Dwalin leaned with his back against the wall. The clock on the wall showed it was nearly midnight. He was working the morning shift again and he really needed to get some sleep, but the events of the day kept replaying in his head and he had ached for a glass of scotch for most of it.

He took a gulp of the amber liquid, closing his eyes for a moment. When he opened them his living room was still there, unchanged. Barkith slept on the rug near his armchair, moving her legs in her sleep, clearly dreaming. The coffee table was empty save from the remote control which had been placed haphazardly on the edge of it. And on the sofa, covered by one of Dwalin's spare blankets, Frerin slept.

He truly had no idea what he was doing, but after fixing supper for the two of them and watching Frerin try to push down some food, it had simply been natural to offer him his a place to sleep. After all, he had nowhere to go - Dwalin and his colleagues had made sure of that with that morning's raid.

And it was Frerin, the dwarven prince whose ashes had been scattered in the wind after Azanulbizar and Dwalin had not forgotten how it had hurt to find him, slashed from neck to gut amongst piles of bodies, dwarven and orcish alike - it had been as painful as seeing his father's body, eyes mercifully closed and blood washed away.

Frerin who had been his friend in a way. They had never sparred or wrestled on Dunland's dry ground - like Dwalin had done with Thorin - and he had always been too rough on the edges for the likes of the younger prince who had been all music and wide-eyed marvelling at the world around them. Unlike Dwalin he had been born under the Mountain, and yet instead of longing for its fabled halls, Frerin had admired the wilderness they had been forced to cross, gaping at the sight of the Misty Mountains, looming in the distance or the black shaft of the Orthanc in the Wizard's Vale. Their interactions had always been few and far in between, but the precious times he had spent with the golden haired prince who had played his lute, smiling brightly while Dwalin played his viol, had wedged a place for Frerin in his soul.

And seeing him broken on the battlefield had been one of the wrongest sights Dwalin had witnessed in his long days. He had never been a warrior, he should have never fought at Azanulbizar. Dwalin gulped down the rest of the scotch, feeling it burn away the old pain. He shouldn't have fought, but he had and he had died.

He was alive now, though. Sleeping fitfully on Dwalin's sofa and he knew he was likely going through withdrawal, he was an addict, than much had been made plain obvious, even if Dwalin hadn't already realised it before, when the blond had removed his soaked hoodie and the T-shirt he had been wearing underneath had done little to cover his yellowed, bruised skin, marked with a constellation of needle holes. It had made Dwalin feel an anger which still simmered in the pit of his stomach. It was wrong. Frerin was made to gape at the beauty of the world, not to rot from within.

Dwalin glared at the ice which melted on the bottom of his empty glass and he walked back to the kitchen, slamming it in the sink too loudly, but only Barkith stirred, getting back to sleep after she yawned widely. He needed to get some sleep. Anger did him no good.

He needed a fix. He opened his eyes to a foreign ceiling and his fragmented mind sluggishly supplied him with the necessary knowledge and Frerin remembered the evening before, food and a clean sofa, faintly smelling of dog. Dwalin. It was Dwalin's home. Dwalin, who was truly there.

But he wasn't. He shook his pounding head. The house was silent, except for the sounds the black dog who was sitting at the feet of the sofa was making. It had a name, but Frerin couldn't remember. He needed a fix. He needed it with a sharp painful desperation. His mind was a maelstrom of sickness and the only fixed point was a black hole of need.

He peeled himself off the sofa, feeling his legs somehow manage to carry the infinite weight that was his emaciated mind which pressed, suffocated him. He needed to get his hands on something. He needed a fix.

The dog had gotten to its feet and it looked at him with its large brown beady eyes. It barked lightly, but Frerin had one only thought in his mind. He found his still wet trainers in the hallway and he managed to put them on, his hands shaking horribly while he fumbled with the strings. The black dog had followed him and it licked his hand while he tried to lace his shoes, leaning on the coat-rack. He needed a fix.

"Go away. " he told the dog, but his words seemed to be filtered by molasses and he didn't even know if he had truly pronounced them. He needed that fix. Now.

He managed to unlock the door, fumbling with the lock and the dog barked again, but he walked out and closed the door.

He needed a fix.

Chapter title taken from "White foxes" by Susanne Sundfør.