Mind Games
By The Ring Observer
Summary: Posting on behalf of The Ring Observer. A suspicious dwarf has wandered into the wood-elves' territory. Obviously an opportunity for unprecedented profits is near, and it's up to Thranduil, the wisest and mightiest of all elves in Middle-Earth, to realize it. Bilbo/Thorin Slash. Thilbo. Bagginshield.
Notes from the author The Ring Observer: As the discerning reader will no doubt notice, this story is a blend of the movie verse and the book verse. The characterizations are undoubtedly from the book. It should also be emphasized that the Thranduil described here was not a cruel person. In fact, as normal jailers went, he was shockingly nice.
"Why did you and your folk three times try to attack my people at their merrymaking?"
"We did not attack them. We came to beg because we were starving."
"Where are your friends now, and what are they doing?"
"I don't know, but I expect that they're all starving in the forest."
"What were you doing in the forest?"
"Looking for food and drink, because we were starving."
"And what brought you into the forest at all?"
"We thought highly of elvish mercy and generosity. We were mistaken."
-:-
It had been two frustrating days since the capture of the "beggar dwarf."
Thranduil sighed. Save for bodily harm, he had tried many a thing to break the pitiful creature. But either his subordinates were exceptionally incompetent, or the dwarf was exceptionally uncooperative. After searching him thoroughly (and he meant thoroughly), save for Orcrist, nothing valuable, especially not a word of his mission or even who he truly was had been wrung from him.
Thranduil lovingly caressed the hilt of Orcrist and felt its power. He fondly remembered raising it to the soon-to-be-named dwarf's throat and calling the ungainly creature a thief and a liar, and the outrage that flashed across the thief-liar's face.
That was the closest he ever got to see the prisoner losing control. Maybe when he needed something done, he needed to do it himself.
He announced to the startled guards, "I will interrogate the prisoner."
-:-
He entered the Dungeon of Everlasting Night. It was damp and dark and, according to the guards, the most unpopular dungeon of all his dungeons in his fortress. He descended down the steps, and came face to face of the prisoner dwarf.
Well, back of the prisoner dwarf. Apparently he was writing something on the wall. Could dwarves see in the dark? Because they mined, right?
Suddenly a dark and damp dungeon didn't seem like such a good idea. For all Thranduil knew, the cave-dweller might prefer it.
He pointed his staff's very bright spotlight at the goblin. "Master Dwarf, I trust you do enjoy my hospitality?"
The dwarf turned to him. Light shone on his nauseating features. Dwarves were ugly creatures, with those freakishly large noses, small eyes and coarse, messy hair, but this dwarf was particularly unpleasant. There was something about him – an air of pomposity, self-importance, exaggerated self-worth and also, paradoxically, victim complex – that made it difficult for Thranduil to restrain from his more unsavory torture methods.
To Thranduil's distress, he looked no less at ease in his prisoner's tunic than his dirty armor, only a little more annoyed.
"The elf-king," he said cautiously, "Are you to release me and offer your apology, or are you to continue this talk that bears relevance to nothing?"
Wow. The audacity. "I asked you, and I ask you again: Who are you, and what brought you to my forest?"
The dwarf ignored the second part of his question. On purpose, probably. "I already told you: I'm the King of Beggars. I beg for food and shelter, although the present situation falls quite a bit short. A dry bed would be much appreciated."
"I tire of those games, dwarf. Your real name, now."
The "Beggar King" had the nerve to narrow his eyes. "If you meant my worldly name, all Kings of Beggars gave up their worldly names when they take on the title of King of Beggars," the prisoner declared, "The whole of Middle-Earth is my land, my fellow beggars my people, those who beg before the elves my army."
Thranduil rubbed his temple. Perhaps the wine to steel his nerves had been an ill-conceived idea. "Your name."
"You ask the impossible. I have no name."
"Your name." The very wise, very sassy king had never heard this "Beggar King" nonsense, nor would he anymore.
"Fine," the prisoner snapped, "It was Thranduil. Thranduil the Healthy."
Ew. Thranduil would not contemplate the insult that the dwarf named himself both "Thranduil" and "Beggar King". "You think this a game?"
"You wound me. My father was partial to elvish names. You're giving him ill cause to think so."
Thranduil rolled his eyes. The liar was obviously misleading him with frivolous, nay, fake information.
Basically, he was shitting him. But Thranduil was so many steps ahead, he decided to mislead the charlatan with a false sense of security. "Very well. Tell me about your father."
The dwarf masked his obvious fear with irritation and even more insolence. "By Durin's Beard, the arrogance! You have no respect for the traditions of other folks, do you? If it pleases you, my previous family hailed from the Iron Hills. I lost all of them in a fire. I departed from my home, seeking to mend my broken heart and build another home, only to find myself scattered and begging in the streets of man in Eriador," he paused, then added reluctantly, "I wandered into the Blue Mountains for a while, smithing, but left because I must answer my calling of begging."
It was an insultingly improbable story. "Why did you not smith for man?"
The dwarf huffed. "Their ores were inferior, and they refused to pay the proper compensation for my work."
"So you'd rather beg."
"Yes. I joined the Beggar Society and begged on behalf of those less likely to invite pity. I begged because my society needed me, and it was the most profitable and therefore the right way to feed the less fortunate. Anything,be it lies, murder or betrayal, is permissible, so long it is for one's people," he snorted contemptuously, "As you no doubt believe."
He was getting nowhere. The dwarf would continue to blatantly insult him while pretending not to, he without any leverage. He would need better evidence, or at least better traps. His elves were searching for the dwarf's friends, who would doubtlessly offer far more information than he did. When he brought incontrovertible evidence before the liar, "Thranduil the Healthy" would definitely cave in and offer all that he knew.
"Then I will find them," he promised him, "And you will talk when they're tortured because of your silence and lies."
He most definitely did not imagine the fear on the dwarf's face.
-:-
It happened. It finally happened!
The dwarves had been captured. Threateningly he interrogated them, but they offered, like the liar dwarf, only insults and refused to say anything useful at all. So he locked them up separately and tortured them by bringing them tortuously bland food (including steamed vegetables without sauce and bread without garlic) and water (instead of wine). The dwarves actually burst into tears when they bit into the deer sausages, eerily similar to when the liar dwarf had gorged himself on surely what was a disgusting meal.
"Does this sate your appetite?" he taunted, "More of this will be served if you remain silent."
"We are so dreadfully sorry that you feel so slighted," one of the dwarves said tearfully; they all looked the same to him, "But all the same your case is so poorly argued that it does not warrant our compliance."
Thus they sat in their cells, useless in his campaign against the liar dwarf and gorging on his food (which he began to suspect appealed to them). However, the fact that a large group of dwarves begging before him did stir a certain memory.
It had been a much larger crowd. And they had been even more self-righteous.
"O great Elvenking," their leader had cried, "You turned away in our moment of need; now our home stands in smoke and ruin, stolen and demolished by the dragon Smaug. Yet, we've come before you again to beg for shelter and supplies and aid in reclaiming our homeland. You cannot abandon us twice!"
Thranduil looked at Thror gleefully, the greedy snob brought low by the all-equalizing winged blaze. He said, "Thror, as your fastest and only friend, I will offer you my help, if you but give up ninety percent of your treasures."
"That is the very definition of ransom!" the younger (he guessed from his higher-pitched, girlier voice, not the face hidden by his mass of hair) dwarf beside him shouted, who was so ugly that Thranduil could not distinguish him from apparently his grandfather, "That is no fair price for your help, which clearly excludes any aid against the dragon himself."
Thranduil shrugged. "The fair market price, if you agree to it."
"If we do, we set a destructive precedent for all future encounters," he glowered.
Thror sighed. "Quiet, Thorin."
Thorin, his name was Thorin.
The arrogant, smart-ass face surfaced to Thranduil's memory. Then it was the same bored, bullshitting face that stared at him from behind his bars.
Suddenly it all made sense. Thranduil called his guards, then marched triumphantly into the dungeon, which he had renamed the Dungeon of Everlasting Daylight to potentially torture the cave-dweller.
The black boar was sleeping – poorly, no doubt. His guards clanged the bars with their swords until he slowly looked up and blinked at the torches and magical lights that surrounded him every single hour. For one instant he looked weary and anxious, but the next moment he was suddenly defiant and wakeful again.
"Thorin, son of Thrain," the Elvenking announced, watching for his reaction. He would remain silent on the subject of his companions and wait for the most devastating and thus optimal moment to reveal.
The wretch stared at him blankly, apparently still too miserable to function.
"That is your name," Thranduil said with a flourish of Orcrist and pointed the magnificent dwarf-cleaver at the fool's nose for maximum theatrical effect, "Confess!"
It took a moment for the exposed liar to understand him, then he sighed.
"I did confess: I was Thranduil the Healthy. Do all dwarves look the same to you in your elvish ignorance?" he said, offended and weirdly sincere, "My royalty is self-made. I received no land or wealth from my father or grandfather. We Kings of Beggars –"
"You're no Beggar King," Thranduil smirked, "You're King Under the Mountain – a most ill-fitting title if you refuse to divulge your secrets."
"I have no secrets now," He Who Probably Was Thorin said, bitterly, "Thanks to your guards."
Despite his classy sense of humor Thranduil grinned. Then remembered. "Then why are you hiding who you are?"
"I'm not hiding anything. Nothing about me has induced the slightest interest in you, so why do you detain me?" Master Liar snarled, patronizingly, "Does it hurt your pride that this endeavor is utterly meaningless? Are you so afraid for your competence that you refuse to admit failure? You need not fear, Thranduil; after all, your incompetence is known to all your subjects anyway."
Thranduil distorted his face in cold rage despite the mad fool's slip of tongue and therefore Thranduil's victory. "And yet, you do recognize me. No dwarf can claim the same, except that spoiled little princeling."
Despite the messy, greyed hair and clear signs of age this was certainly the same angry dwarf brandishing his giant misshapen fists at him on their Day of Reckoning. Thranduil had almost entirely forgotten him, except his relevance in the vast wealth the greedy dwarves had amassed. Thranduil was no fool; if Thorin was here, then the dragon's reign must be at an end, otherwise the Choosy Beggar, even the mad fool as he was, would not have attempted such a hopeless quest. The doors Thranduil had stared longingly at for over a hundred years would finally open, all its secrets and gold bore to his deserving eyes.
The black boar's fists clenched, Thranduil noticed. "How many times must I tell you? I'm not –"
"You are. You know me as Thranduil."
To his irritation he heard his guards' nervous shuffling. Thorin looked very much unimpressed. With an insipid gesture he motioned at the sign in the hallway, considerately written in the common tongue: Please Behave Yourselves in King Thranduil's Dungeons.
Well, damn. There went another of his leverages, though Thranduil was nothing but determined.
"So you've forgotten who you are. Very well; this will refresh your memory." Thranduil stood for the dramatic revelation. "Bring forth…the Anguish Device!"
The beggar looked. A large contraption covered in silk was wheeled in front of the cell bars, and Thranduil himself did the honor of pulling off the veil.
It was the Choosy Beggar of a dwarf's giant tapestry of a family portrait that Thror had presumptuously insisted on sending Thranduil every Five Durin's Days when they had been on talking terms. It would now be used against the heir of his heir. Such brilliant irony! Such ironic brilliance!
"This was you," Thranduil pointed at a sullen, troublingly hairless toddler seated in a hideous male-female's lap, whom he guessed was Thorin. Huh. Apparently he and Thror had stopped being friends when Thorin was still too young to look like the hairy boar he was now.
The aforementioned hairy boar stared at Thranduil, then turned to gaze at the clever bait. Thranduil did not miss that his beady, watery eyes lingered on the crown – adorned with so many precious gems! – on Thror's head.
Then he burst out laughing, suddenly energetic. "For Durin's sake, you still think I'm royalty? What on earth does this, this 'Thorin,' a dwarvish prince, matter to the elf-king? What purpose does this serve?"
"Don't be coy; I know why you are really here."
"Of course you do, yet you refuse to release me."
Thranduil ignored the petty comment. "You are – my apologies, were – armored and armed and organized, which implied meditation and a clear purpose. You were in my forest, which implied you were pressed for time and thus your objective was time-bound. Combined the fact that you are dwarves – greedy, selfish and ruthlessly practical – it could only imply a quest for your homeland and your people's treasure hoard."
"The invalidity of that argument is astounding," Thorin exclaimed, "There could be any number of time-bound reasons for an organized group of dwarves, most of them had none to do with a lost homeland. It could be an investigation into Moria, enlargement of trade routes in Dunland, connections with Rohan. Furthermore, a dragon seemed to guard the treasures, and he cannot be defeated without an army. Will any of those other explanations not be far more reasonable, given that I could very well hail from anywhere since you have not the vaguest notion of our origins?"
He could be telling the truth, but the logic was so suddenly air-tight that Thranduil was far more suspicious now. "That is why it matters that you are Thorin," he said, "Only Thorin, son of Thrain, son of Thror, would be mad enough to attempt such a futile feat."
The dwarf rolled his eyes. "Or your own greed has blinded your judgment. Your leap of logic implied as much. Think, Thranduil, even though it may cause you distress. What if you're wrong, after all? This is such a fantastic notion that its falsehood won't surprise you. Do you really have nothing better to do than chasing after unlikely hypotheses?"
For a moment Thranduil did fear he had been wasting his time, then he steeled himself against the liar's manipulation. It was indeed disconcerting that the black boar had acquired such resistance to Thranduil's taunting. Had he unclogged toilets or shined shoes for men for one hundred and seventy years, which finally managed to extinguish his pride?
He took time to appreciate the mental image of Thorin covered in excrement and shoe grease and profusely thanking a pitying man for the coin he had flung at his head. Then a realization hit him.
"Your manner of speech betrays you," he shouted, victorious, "For a beggar or even a blacksmith has no use for faculties of debate."
The exiled King Under the Bullshit Mountain paled, finally caught in the incoherent web of lies he had made. Then he muttered grimly, "I wrote labor contracts in the Iron Hills, before the fire, but I was not familiar with any local legislation to practice my craft recently. The hobbit – the old habits die hard."
It was an unconvincing lie. "Thorin, you're only succeeding in making yourself look foolish," he said, mimicking Thorin's own patronizing tone, "I know who you are. Nothing that you can say or do will change my mind. Are you not honorable? Is lying not unbecoming? Will it not be easier for all of us, if you but tell me who you really are and what your birthright is, so I might help you achieve it?"
The goblin mutant sighed. "I do so hate repeating myself, but your prattling really means nothing to me. Enough foolhardy foolishness to-day, for me, anyway!" Then the prisoner – who was in HIS detainment! – stalked into the back of the cell and lay down. His snoring was immediately audible.
Thranduil was so angry, that he forgot to order his guards to wake this insolent piece of shit up.
"I will return," Thranduil said to the "sleeping" abomination, with certainty that his next visit would be the very last.
-:-
Although he had planned his next visit to be more dramatic, the actual timing was actually quite accidental. There had been some disturbing developments ever since the other dwarves' arrival. The guards had reported, with alarm, that the palace had become haunted. Foods had randomly disappeared from the table in ghostly pranks. Soft footsteps were heard when no being could be seen.
Yet Thranduil was not a gullible or paranoid person, so he suspected foul play by the bad liar.
Speaking of him, since Thranduil had left the horrid creature to his own devices last week, he had apparently progressed from gluttony to anorexia. He drank only water and, according to the guards, found it difficult to gulp down his meals, to Thranduil's intense satisfaction. The fact that he refused the abomination sleep by ordering his guards to rouse him whenever he was close to nodding off might have something to do with it. However, the farther and longer Thranduil was away from the abomination, the more he suspected him of telling the truth. No dwarf, certainly no "noble" dwarf (in the loosest sense of the term) could tolerate torture of this magnitude and still hold his tongue. He might have nothing to tell, after all. He might simply be of some relation to Thorin, in very limited capacity.
He tried again, mostly for the sanity of his scared guards. He would shake him so badly that he would give up all his tricks. At the sound of his approach, the beggar jumped out of fright, which soothed Thranduil's mood. He was much thinner now, his misery palpable. So Thranduil started his visit by pronouncing, "Your quest has failed. I have captured all your companions."
The sad piece of goblin-refuse looked weary and unsurprised. "All twelve of them?"
"All twelve of them."
"Then detain us as you must," the horrid wretch sighed, "Though I cannot imagine why. I have told you all that I could. Why can you not contend yourself with the uninspired yet simple truth and leave us be?"
"Thorin, son of Thrain," Thranduil said, hoping that repetitive usage of this name would break him. "Why would I let you go, given my knowledge and expectations? Imagine that you were me –"
"That would be very difficult."
"–Imagine that you were me," Thranduil would not let the flippant comment interrupt his brilliant logic, "since you possess value to me if and only if I do not let you go, whenever there's the slightest possibility that you possess enormous value, why will I release you? The anticipated values of the two options are clear."
The "illiterate" "blacksmith" instantly countered, "Only true under alternative circumstances. This holding is not costless. It gnaws at your mind, feeds you fantasies, compounds your perceived losses until you are finally convinced of what has been apparent to everyone around you."
That was so badly stated Thranduil decided to ignore it altogether and pursued a different route. He lowered his voice and smiled his very own intimate-and-cruel smile, "Why do you deny your birth name, Thorin, son of Thrain?"
"Because repetition doesn't make it true?"
"No, I think you are ashamed of yourself."
The dwarf attempted confusion, but Thranduil pressed on, "For your inability to defend your people. After you led your people to me, starving and begging for shelter, no one but you could have paid the price for my help, yet you yielded to your pride. Shortly before the dragon demolished your homeland and exiled your people, no one but you could have strengthened the walls, yet you yielded to your foolishness. While your grandfather hoarded treasure, no one but you, the heir of his heir, could have stopped his greed, yet you yielded to your own madness. Who is to blame? Whose shame is this? You could blame no one. The blood of your people is on your stumpy hands."
Underneath his coarse greyed hair the dwarf darkened with rage. For a moment Thranduil thought he had him, but the captive barked out shrilly, "How dare you, you, you…ignorant, selfish, short-sighted, greedy…worm?" then in a choked voice, "How dare you speak ill of the dead?"
Thranduil was actually confused. "The dead?"
"The dead," the dwarf cried, "Prince Thorin is dead! That was why I left the Blue Mountains behind, because of my grief at the passing of the only dwarf worthy of…managing a kingdom as important and satisfactory as the Blue Mountains!"
Then he began to weep uncontrollably. All attempts to probe further were met with angry tears and riotous wailing, as if the Beggar was wholeheartedly swallowed up by the abyss of unwarranted sadness and refused any contact with the world of the living.
Thranduil himself was somewhat shaken. He had no idea that the Choosy Beggar of a dwarf was dead and thus no longer of instrumental value – it spoke ill of both Thranduil's cross-Middle-Earth intelligence and the prospect of getting through Smaug. To think – the untold hoards of treasures, rotting alone forever, without adoring eyes so much sparing a glance at them! It was a travesty, this fundamentally wrong disrespect of money. Thorin the Bad Negotiator was amongst the last surviving dwarves who had actually been to Erebor and therefore had any chance of defeating the dragon.
And now he was dead. And Thranduil's occasional longing and dreams of gold had all been for nothing. And, try as he might, Thranduil simply could not reconcile Thorin, son of Thrain, arrogant Forkedtongued, with "Thranduil the Healthy", the good-for-nothing, inarticulate, weepy wretch.
His guard came to spare him the awkward situation. He bowed and said in a hushed voice, "My Lord, the festival is about to start."
Thranduil nodded and left.
He gave his speech to roaring applauses from his people per his kingly duties. As he enthusiastically drank to his sorrows, an uncharacteristically nervous Legolas approached him.
"Father."
"Must you always interrupt?"
Normally Legolas would retort like the two-thousand-agers that he was, but this time he bit his tongue, which worried Thranduil. "Well, spit it out."
"The dwarves are gone."
He bolted from his seat. He led his army to hunt them down, and finally found them washing down the river in his people's barrels and wielding his people's weapons.
The escaped prisoners dodged arrows, threw spears and avoided the river banks. They were fast approaching the border of his kingdom, and Thranduil wisely had no wish to cross it and invite needless danger.
Then the Liar Dwarf looked at him. Their eyes met for a second, and suddenly Thranduil knew the truth.
He was so furious that he burst out laughing. "So all along you have been telling the truth, Thorin, son of Thrain, son of Thror…because you are the Beggar King! You were exiled, so you begged and begged and begged…of everyone, of every race imaginable!"
During the Ugly Wretch's captivity and at the worst of his tortures, for his silence Thranduil had fleetingly thought that Thorin had changed his temperament. He was wrong, for Thorin was as ill-tempered and foul-mouthed as before; the only thing extinguished was his shame. The dwarf screamed, "And so what if that's true? I'm not ashamed of what I must do for my people, but you…you gullible, senile, forgetful, stubborn, old, mad fool, I dreamed of throttling you every night since our exile while you failed to even recognize me! This insult will not go unremarked!"
Thranduil bellowed, "You mock, cousin of goblins, but only because I trusted you! You betrayed my trust in dwarvish honesty!"
"Trust and malice are not mutually exclusive, and I was honest! I did tell you everything after a fashion, did I not? But you were so foolish and so ineffectual at interrogation that you failed to divine the truth – or to even find this!"
He held up some metal thing that gleamed in the sun. An unsettlingly unfamiliar hairless dwarf mutant clinging to his barrel asked in awe, "Where did you hide it?"
"A very safe place," he said solemnly, while Thranduil forced down the vomit in his throat.
"The river is too fast! We won't capture them!" yelled his traumatized son, whose life would never be the same.
The Swine had the galls to continue his tirade, "You bastard descendent of dragons! You are covetous and cowardly, yet you lack the low cunning of your trueborn brethren!" Before they left Thranduil's earshot Thorin shouted one last insult. "And your 'Anguish Device' caused me no anguish at all! I bear no love for that old, ineptly-crafted, unflattering tapestry!"
Some other dwarf squeaked, "The old portraits? The ones you said you used as blankets when you hadn't real blankets?"
"Silence, or I will write to your mother."
Then they could hear them no more.
Thranduil sulked back to his palace, brooding over ways to exact revenge. After a thorough round of finger-pointing and blame-pinning, and the various proposed punishment and appeals and actual punishments that were debated and delivered, he finally sank into his throne, annoyed at the treasures that had fled his grasp at the very last second.
Or did they? They were indeed heading for Erebor, an "army" of fourteen. The key indicated there was a method to Thorin's madness, after all. They might navigate the walls of Erebor better than anyone, but could his rag-tag band of dwarves, surely exhausted after their battle with the dragon, withstand the onslaught of well-rested, well-trained, very pissed-off elvish warriors?
He smiled and stood up. Another war was at hand.
For not only dwarves loved their killing. Wood-elves loved it, too, and they were better at it.
-:-
"That was enough of a bath to last me a lifetime," Gloin declared when they climbed onto the bank.
Ori and Bilbo practically dragged Thorin out of his barrel and helped him to his feet. Weakened by his prolonged lack of appetite and proper sleep (he had been forced to sleep with his eyes open), he had to lean onto the surprisingly hardy Burglar for support.
Yet he rejoiced in his weak constitution. It spoke of the magnitude of their feat. He lovingly squeezed Bilbo's hand at his waist and surveyed the Company approvingly. They, especially Mr. Invisible Baggins, did it. They really did escape from the clutches of Thranduil the Unlearned and the Unworthy! What was more, he finally insulted the elf and vented just how much he despised him!
He was so overjoyed that he kissed Bilbo. When they parted, the overly polite hobbit beamed even as he let out an embarrassed chuckle.
"What was remarkable," Balin said, pointedly ignoring the display, "Was that you denied him the truth only until the very last second. A most sound strategic choice."
"And you stuck by it," Oin marveled.
Thorin almost smiled, until he heard Bofur say rapidly, "Of course, it would have been better if you even denied his last accusation, then he wouldn't be forging arms and getting ready to march on us until perhaps after we cause a commotion at the mountain."
Oh. Oh shit.
The End
-:-