A/N: Thank you all for your wonderful response to the first chapter, and I hope you continue to enjoy the story! A bit of angst lies ahead, so be warned. Hopefully the adorable small hobbits will make up for it.
"How long is he going to stay here?" Frodo asked nervously. It was midmorning, and he and Bilbo were just washing up after second breakfast. While it was exciting to meet a king, and he was looking forward to telling Merry all about it, Thorin's presence loomed large in Bag End even while he was asleep. Frodo wasn't sure he liked the crowded feeling. But then, it wasn't really his place to complain about visitors. Having only arrived three weeks before, he was little more than a visitor himself.
"I've no idea, really, but it may be for a while," Bilbo said. "It's a long journey from the Lonely Mountain. I suppose I'd better go wake him, though. He'll be in a foul temper if he sleeps all day and doesn't eat anything."
Privately, Frodo wondered if Thorin had any other kind of temper. Although he realized that the dwarf king had been exhausted from travel, he had not seemed like a particularly sunny personality. Perhaps that's just how kings were. One couldn't expect them to make conversation like ordinary folk.
Bilbo had put Thorin in the biggest bedroom in Bag End, the room that had once belonged to his parents. He had never wanted it for himself, preferring to convert one of the many spare bedrooms for his own use, and so it had been empty for many years. However, the room happened to hold a truly massive (by hobbit standards) carved bed. It was a bit of a monstrosity, really, and not in line with the normally impeccable taste of the late Bungo Baggins, but it was the only bed in the hole that was long enough for their guest.
The slumbering king looked quite out of place amid Belladonna Took's knick-knacks and portraits of plump and cheery Baggins ancestors. He lay curled on one side beneath a homey quilt, his face obscured by masses of black and silver hair.
Bilbo tiptoed into the bedroom and placed a hand on Thorin's shoulder. The dwarf snapped into alertness, sitting up bolt upright and grabbing for a weapon beside him that evidently wasn't there. At least, Frodo hoped it wasn't there.
"Breakfast," Bilbo said, untroubled by this display.
A few minutes later, Thorin emerged from the room, wearing only a simple blue tunic and hose. His unbound hair streamed over his back, and he looked quite underdressed without all the armor. Although, with his broad shoulders and muscular frame, he would have looked twice the size of a hobbit even if he hadn't been so tall.
He settled himself at the table while Bilbo brought him six fried eggs, big slices of bread and ham, and a pot of strong black tea. All of this he ate steadily and with great dignity, and without saying a word to either of the hobbits. Frodo was impressed. Hobbits were known as champion eaters, but apparently Thorin had mastered the ability to consume vast quantities of food with mechanical efficiency.
Bilbo seemed unconcerned by Thorin's silence, and after he finished cooking sat down at the table and lit his pipe, apparently lost in thought.
Thorin drained his third cup of tea, and apparently satiated, pushed back his chair and got up from the table. Frodo watched him head down the hall, a little offended on Bilbo's behalf.
"He didn't even thank you," he said.
Bilbo only smiled. "It's not his way. You'll get used to it. But speaking of thanks, if you don't mind finishing the washing up, I'd be very grateful indeed. After that, I promise I won't ask you for a thing else today. Go see your friends." And with that, he followed after his guest.
Thorin was struggling to finish one of the braids in his hair. It looked as if he couldn't raise his left arm above the level of his shoulder, or reach back far enough to plait more than half of the braid. After another moment of straining, he grimaced and let his arm fall.
"Want me to do that?" Bilbo offered. "I'm a bit out of practice, but I can probably manage it."
Thorin gave a half shrug. "Kíli usually does it for me. You can use these." He passed Bilbo a little leather pouch, full of various beads, clasps, and ornaments. Some Bilbo recognized, others he had not seen before.
Deftly, Bilbo finished the braid, slipping in the steel decorations that Thorin had been wearing the night before. Then, he started on the rest of the braids–one beneath the first, and two mirroring them on the other side of Thorin's head. Had it really been decades since he had last done this? His hands seemed to remember what to do. Apparently braiding was a skill you never forgot.
"So what happened to your arm?" he asked, accusation creeping into his voice. "I thought you said you didn't have any new injuries."
"Hmmm. Well." Thorin sounded almost embarrassed. "It's an old one, actually. I broke it in three places, about six months after you left Erebor. It never really healed all the way."
"Six months?" Bilbo buried his face in his hands. "For goodness' sake, how did you do that?"
"In battle."
Bilbo wondered if it was the way he had broken his arm that was embarrassing, or just the fact that he had gotten himself smashed to bits so soon after rising from his sickbed. Probably the former. Maybe some day Bilbo would get the chance to find out what had happened, but the story was obviously not forthcoming right now. He gave the braids an experimental tug to see if they would hold, a little harder than was necessary.
"At least it's your shield arm. Small mercies. But please tell me that's all you've done to yourself."
Thorin pulled his head out of Bilbo's reach. "In four decades? Hardly. You cluck like an old woman. But nothing else serious. At this rate, I'll be the first member of my family to die a natural death in about a thousand years."
To a dwarf, an injury that was "nothing serious" could mean anything from a stubbed toe to a stab wound that had missed the vital organs, so Bilbo wasn't terribly reassured.
Sometimes when he looked at Thorin, he could still see him as he had looked after the Battle of Five Armies, surrounded by a solemn circle of mourners. It had without question been the worst moment of Bilbo's life, the worst thing he had seen up until that point.
Thorin had been twisted at some unnatural angle, like a discarded scrap of metal from the forge, and there was so much blood. Surely one person couldn't contain so much blood. In fact, a lot of it had been Fíli's, which Bilbo didn't realize until he saw the body they had dragged off to the side. Kíli was clinging to his brother's corpse, wildly fighting off every attempt at medical attention. The left side of his face was a bloody mess, and he was drenched in Fíli and Thorin's blood too, so much of it that they couldn't tell if he was injured anywhere else. They thought he must be all right, because he was struggling so much, but there was no way of knowing, because he wouldn't let anyone get close enough to check.
And Thorin…the utterly sick feeling in Bilbo's stomach when he looked at that crumpled body, the layers of flesh sliced open, and the gleam of exposed bone even underneath all that armor and skin and muscle. Thorin's eyes were wide open, and he was gasping for breath, but little rivulets of blood were coming out of his mouth, and there was a horrible rattling noise every time his chest rose and fell. This was not going to be a clean death in battle, but one of those nasty lingering ones that everyone remembered and nobody talked about. The kind that got edited down in the songs to "And then he fell beneath the blades of many foes." If he had been a lesser warrior, someone would have taken a knife to his throat and ended it quickly, but because he was King Under the Mountain they were going to stand around helplessly and watch the gory show until its inevitable conclusion.
Bilbo knelt by him, tried to shift him to a more comfortable position, because he was clearly in agony, but Balin pulled him back. "There's nothing to be done, Master Baggins. Better not move him now." So Bilbo took Thorin's big hand in his two little ones, and tried not to scream. As awful as this scene of dying was, as much grief as he felt, more terrible still was the acceptance in the eyes of the Company. They had lost fathers and brothers and comrades in this way before, and knew that they would again. Bilbo had seen death enough, in his life, but never like this. So he clung to Thorin's hand, which seemed to be the only uninjured part of him. "Don't do this," he pleaded. "Don't die."
Thorin's bloody lips quirked, sending another trickle of blood from the corner of his mouth. "Believe me…it's not…intentional."
"Nonsense," Bilbo snapped, quite angry now despite the flood of tears threatening to appear at any moment. "Out of all the dwarves I know, you're the most stiff-necked, foolhardy, idiotic, bloody-minded…" He broke off, choked by a sob. "Don't you dare tell me that you aren't doing this to us on purpose. You're far too stubborn to die otherwise. And we need you. You think you just get to do the glorious fighting bit, and then dump the actual work onto someone else? Well, think again. You are not allowed to die!"
Thorin broke into a long fit of coughing that wracked his entire body, punctuated only by occasional desperate gasps for air. At last, his eyes closed, and he lay still. The Company bowed their heads in silent respect. Only Bilbo was close enough to hear him murmur. "All right. I won't. "
And he didn't. It was days, perhaps weeks, before the others would dare to hope that he was going to live, but Bilbo trusted Thorin's word. He knew that somehow, it would be all right. And as bad as things got, he held fast to that assurance.
Whenever Bilbo talked about that day and the days that followed, he would say "And then, after we won the Battle of Five Armies, peace was restored and Thorin Oakenshield took up his throne and rebuilt Erebor." This made him quite as bad an editor as all the bards and chroniclers of old, but apparently some things you just couldn't talk about. It was something he had noticed often when Balin or one of the others was telling him some story of a battle, at Moria or elsewhere. They would be in the middle of describing with great relish the gruesomeness deeds of a vicious orc, or some bit of dwarvish derring-do, when suddenly they would break into a flat narration, their eyes growing distant. Bilbo would understand that they were remembering some old horror, too private and too terrible for recounting.
Maybe now that Thorin was here in the Shire, Bilbo would be able to stop remembering. Even though the images were so vivid, even after all this time. Maybe he could replace them with memories of Thorin eating at his table, sitting in front of his fire, walking through the green and rolling hills of Hobbiton and Michel Delving.
"What are you staring at?" Thorin rumbled, breaking his reverie.
"Just remembering what it looked like when your guts were all on the outside," Bilbo said, aiming for flippancy. It worked. Thorin let out a very un-kinglike snort.
"Thank you for that, Master Baggins."
But he wondered if Thorin, who had seen many more terrible things in his time, understood how he felt. He thought about an old king, beheaded and defiled in Moria, and imagined that Thorin probably understood as well as any dwarf ever would.
"I should have mentioned it earlier, but I'm very glad you've come," Bilbo said, and this time he was able to look at Thorin directly without seeing the blood and gore and the path of every scar on his body.
"Didn't I tell you I would? You should know by now that I keep my word. But come, I've brought a few things from the Mountain for you. In fact," Thorin said, very gravely, "I doubt I would have been able to carry everything they wanted to send you. I imagine you'll have to come to Erebor to collect the rest of the lot."
Bilbo laughed at the image of eleven dwarves crowding around Thorin trying to get him to pack their gift.
"Well, no hobbit can resist a present. Let us proceed, my liege!"
Merry Brandybuck's attempts to boost Frodo up into one of the Twofoot's apple trees weren't going very well. The branches were too high, and the hobbits were too short.
"Maybe we should get a ladder," Frodo said dubiously.
"It'll be fine," Merry said. "Here, stand up on my shoulders, and then I'll lift you up. Ow!" Frodo had managed to grab onto of one of the lower branches, and was now dangling wildly from it, but had accidentally kicked his friend in the face while attempting to strengthen his hold.
At last, Frodo was securely in the tree and filling his pockets with the Twofoots' apples, which were beautifully red and crisp and sold for very high prices at market.
"Aren't you going to tell me about your guest?" Merry called up. "Or at least toss me down an apple after all the work I did getting you up there."
Frodo shushed him. "I'll tell you later. Do you want the whole neighborhood to hear you?"
It was too late. Clematis Twofoot emerged from her house shaking her mop in the air and threatening to give the young rascals a good thrashing. Frodo scrambled down from the tree, sending apples flying, and he and Merry made a break for it.
"Please tell me you at least saved me an apple," Merry panted a good while later, when they had reached relative safety.
Frodo pulled four from his pockets. They were a little battered, but still delicious.
Merry inspected the loot. "This is what our bruises are going to look like, if Mistress Twofoot ever gets hold of us."
"Great warriors we are," said Frodo. "Fleeing in the face of the mighty mop."
"Show some respect, Frodo. Many a young hobbit has quavered and quaked in the face of that mop. Did we hesitate? No! We ran away as quickly as we could, and lived to scrump another day."
When the apples were gone, and Frodo's stomach was pleasantly full, he finally told Merry who had arrived at Bag End the night before.
Merry listened attentively to the whole story, a rarity for him, and when Frodo was done he let out a long whistle. "Royalty in the guest bedroom! Well, they always did say old Bilbo was strange. So, are you going to introduce me to Thorin Oakenshield?"
"Are you mad?" Frodo demanded. "He's hardly said two words to me. He has Bilbo running around like a servant. To be honest, he's not really what I expected from Bilbo's stories."
"Can't you be a little more excited? How often do famous dwarf warriors come to the Shire? Anyway, here's what we're going to do: if you're determined to be stubborn about it, we don't even have to go inside. Just let me get a good look through the window. He won't even know we're there."
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