They say the past is a different country, and they're right. It's a different world, even, governed by laws and driven by forces beyond the present understanding. What was so vital, so necessary, moments or years before is changed, twisted by absence and reflection. Contorted. The past is the shadow of branches cast on your bedroom wall at night that become the claws of wraiths.
They say the future is a no man's land. A place where anything can happen, filled to bursting with a horrible potential. For Thorin Oakenshield, the future has only two paths. He will take back the mountain, or he will die trying. He knows this, knows in his bones like the ring of a chisel striking a clean vein, that there are only two fates for him. He can feel them each time his boot meets new earth, every step drawing them closer. He's wrong, of course, but truth has never been a deterrent for certainty, and it's a little thing, after all. The truth.
The present is the most incomprehensible of all. A horribly raw, real moment in time. The present is chaotic. The present is tangled and Bilbo Baggins never understood that before. Safe in the Shire, the past stretching monotonously behind and the future neatly aligned to come along, each day was the same as the last. For a Hobbit, the present was a largely vestigial fragment of time. Useless, really, because who could ever want to be alone, tired and sore and cold and bloody, buggering miserable in the middle of nowhere? Who?
Who, indeed. A fool of a Took, that's who. A bloody, blithering idiot who let himself get talked into an adventure by a ridiculous wizard and a bunch of noisy, messy dwarves. The lot of them loud and obnoxious and so completely unrepentant and… and…
Against his will his mind supplies the rest. Because it's true for all of them. Save one.
In the dark, Bilbo's eyes find him, stalking beyond the edge of the firelight. Thorin. Their leader. Their cause. Stronger than the sword at his side and just as honed. Shaped to a fearsome purpose. No wonder he has no time for soft and untried Hobbits.
And because Bilbo is a particularly foolish fool, none of that stops his brain running. How would it feel to have those gray eyes rake over him with something other than derision? Something hot, like iron, melted down until it was nothing but a molten puddle. Or something cold and glittering. Something pitiless, like his mountain. What would Thorin do if hands found in him the dark, seeking purchase on skin instead of fur and mail?
And if hobbit-soft hands happened to be the ones reaching, would they find their counterparts, calloused and rough where first those hands swung a hammer, but for far too long have gripped a sword?
Bilbo's breath hangs in a scattered cloud, hovering like the memory of touch before it's gone in a puff of wind. And, oh. There it is. The smell of leather and musk layered with the acrid tang of metal, heavy on the back of his tongue. So thick he can taste it, like salt and the stench of granite draped over shoulders that hold the hopes of a people. A smell Bilbo knows, can't forget, craves.
Because sometimes, only sometimes, there's a look in Thorin's eye that says he wants Bilbo to prove him wrong. Like Thorin isn't trying to make him quit. Like he's giving him chances to stay, which is so far beyond ridiculous it doesn't bear thinking about. Except, of course, that he is.
What would it mean, if that were true? If those shoulders were weary. If Thorin wasn't a sword but a shield. A cave. A fortress. If he had made himself hard to protect something precious, something locked away. Would he find the ghost of hope in golden brown curls chased with velvet, softer than anything a warrior would have touched in years. Soft as the heart it covers, as the heart that hunts it. Soft as the touch of a clever burglar with a clever mind.
Bilbo watches as he prowls, restless while the others sleep. While Bilbo himself should be sleeping instead of nursing un-Hobbit-like dreams. And it isn't as though it means anything. It's not like it matters. Because hope is only hope, and the world is still the world, and Bilbo Baggins knows he's wrong. He just… wishes he wasn't.
Truth is such a little thing in the face of certainty.