These seem to get longer and longer every time. Must be all those fortifying reviews you keep sending me (thank you guys!). That or the mounting revision. Thanks to Jedi Ani Anduli for the prompt and inspiration for this – yes, it's her you've got to thank for the one you've apparently all been waiting for…

In which the dwarves finally have a bath, poor Bilbo is terribly shocked by it all, Fíli, Kíli and Ori go to great efforts to shock him more, Dwalin proposes an ill-fated competition, and Thorin is not amused.

Bath-time

He hadn't really thought… Hadn't given it much thought at all really. It wasn't something you really thought about when you set off, because you had the word 'adventure!' resounding in your head. He'd never really considered the practicalities of it before. The books didn't really go into it at all - it was all just filler really, everyday things. I mean, obviously he hadn't just expected that they'd all go on a nice long walk and find a mountain, hopefully one with no dragons in it, it's just that he hadn't really thought about how all the eating and sleeping and so on would happen in between whatever adventures they had (Bilbo was still a little hazy and hesitant about this aspect too) on the way.

To be fair, by the third day or so he was definitely wondering when they would stop and get properly clean. By the end of the week it had been reduced to 'if'. He'd never really considered 'how', just sort of assumed that they'd stop off somewhere, probably an inn, and he could relax in a nice hot bath tub for the evening and get some peace and quiet for once.

But this… this was indecent.

"Come on in! It's fine, really!" Kíli lies, trying not to shiver.

"No it's not! It's cold and wet and-"

"It's a river, Bilbo." Bofur points out helpfully, taking his pipe out of his mouth. "They are supposed to be cold and wet, you know."

"Yes, but-"

"But?"

"But you're all… you're not wearing anything!" Bilbo wishes he had support for this. The dwarves can be insufferable, and Gandalf has disappeared off to goodness knows where - probably to go and conjure up a tub of hot water for himself and some fluffy grey towels.

"That's the way you do it. You wash the clothes, you leave them to dry, and in the meantime you wash yourselves." Bofur feels he might be being over-patient here.

"How can you tell, anyway?" Ori asks bluntly. "You've got your hands over your eyes!"

Gloín and Balin join in the argument. "The water's waist-deep anyway!"

"No one'll mind if you leave your shirt on."

Bilbo pokes a toe into the water, shivering already in just his shirt (he had already been reluctantly persuaded to ditch most of the rest of his clothes so they could be washed with the others). He kept his hand over his eyes, which is why he didn't see the slight nod Fíli gave. "I still don't think I really-"

SPLASH

The dwarves let out a ragged cheer as Dwalin hauled the spluttering hobbit to the surface. Bilbo found his feet and immediately lost them again as Fíli and Kíli plunged back into the river next to him.

"You did that deliberately! And it is not warm!"

"Right on both counts." Fíli leans back and tries to float on the surface of the water, one foot still on the bottom. Bedraggled, miserable and embarrassed Bilbo looks away towards the line of disgustingly cheerful older dwarves all sunning themselves by the bank, waist-deep in cold water, and passing the pipe-weed along. In doing so he gives Kíli just the opportunity he needs to jump on him again.

"That was deliberate too." Fíli comments as Bilbo surfaces.

"I take it hobbits don't go in much for communal bathing, then?" Bofur comments, after giving Bilbo a moment to get his breath back.

"No, it's not really… really seen as…"

"Respectable?"

"Yes. That's the word." Bilbo raises his hands. "I don't mean any harm by it, I just… don't like it much."*

"Well, don't look at it then."

Bilbo tries to glare at the grinning Fíli but turns his gaze away fairly sharpish. "I'm not."

"You were though." Kíli supplies helpfully. "It didn't hurt you, did it?" He attempts to emulate his brother's position and fails.

"He's got one leg on the bottom." Ori confirms, wading out to them. Kíli tries again and, with some splashing, manages to achieve a fairly nonchalant-looking floating position.

"Stop it!"

"Stop what?"

"We're just relaxing. Sunning ourselves on the river."

"Look, I can do it too!"

"Ori!" Bilbo, unable to turn anywhere, decides to close his eyes instead, and immediately gets pounced on again.

"I love doing that." Kíli says happily. "Bilbo! Close your eyes again!"

"No!" Bilbo tries desperately to get out of this. "Where's Thorin?"

"Being kingly." Comes the cryptic answer. Bofur is never much help.

Fíli is slightly more informative. "He decided he didn't want to bathe with the rest of us. He's downstream somewhere." An amused look settles on his face. "Why, did you want to-"

"NO!"

SPLASH

"Hah! You looked away again." Both Kíli and Ori have ridiculous grins plastered across their faces.

A warning flies in from the watching audience. "Lads! Be careful! The water gets deeper in the middle."

"We can swim!" Fíli boasts confidently.

Ori joins in proudly. "I can swim too. Can you swim, Bilbo?"

"No one's letting me keep my feet long enough to try!"

"What? You can't? You can't swim?"

"Not r- STOP doing that! STOP trying to push me under!"

"Course you can swim. Everyone can swim." Kíli seems very sure of this.

"Why don't you swim somewhere else then?" Oín grumbles. He's getting splashed far more than is to his liking.

Dwalin proposes an idea. "Race to the other side and back. First one to return to me gets…"

"… To not have to do it again!" Bofur concludes with a grin.

Fíli just shrugs. "Where are we starting from?"

"Ah – that large rock there."

Bilbo finds himself suddenly being towed out beyond his depth. "Wh-? No!"

"Come on, it's fine."

"No it's not!"

"Look, I told you, everyone can swim. It's just… natural."

"It's just like walking." Ori adds, trying not to lose his footing on the slimy stones of the river bed. "Only in water."

Bilbo clings on to the rock tightly, already unsure as to how he's going to get back onto dry land. "No it's not." He has a strong inkling that his words are falling on deaf ears – or ones that are full of water, at any rate. "Have any of you actually swum before?"

Fíli shrugs non-committedly and strikes out into the deeper water. Kíli follows almost instantly, pushing off hard from the rock into the middle of the river, followed by a wildly splashing Ori.

Bilbo waits for them to resurface, fingers growing numb as he clings to the rock. He's not an expert, but he's fairly sure that this is not how swimming is meant to look.

"HELP! Dwalin! Balin! Anyone! HELP!"

Thorin was somewhat surprised to find a portion of his company being carried downstream past him, but willingly joined in the rescue attempt, and between them he and Dwalin dredged up the three younger dwarves to lie coughing on the shore. The other dwarves joined them shortly, having regained their clothes and the hobbit, whom Bofur had had to prise from the rock.

"What happened?"

Dwalin has to explain, since the dwarves the question is aimed at are still coughing up river water. "I challenged them to see who could swim to the other side of the river and back fastest."

"Did you not think about the current? Did none of you think about the current?"

"To be fair," Dori breaks in, "it wasn't so much the current that was the problem so much as the fact that none of them could swim."

"Did they not say that they could not swim?"

"On the contrary, they all assured us that they could."

"I didn't." Bilbo points out starkly. "I told you all I couldn't."

"I can swim." Kíli pants. "I was definitely… swimming at… at the end."

"Me too."

"You were drowning at the end."

Ori shakes his rat-tails in denial at this. "I can swim. I couldn't before, but I can now."

"Anyway, we didn't drown." Fíli says reasonably. "Moving through water without drowning is swimming, isn't it?"

"The only reason you didn't drown is because we dragged your sorry hides out of there before you could!"

Kíli stretches out in the sunlight in a way Thorin is sure is designed to be deliberately annoying, an opinion confirmed when he makes his final comment.

"It was fun though. Shall we go and try it again?"**

A.N.

*Obviously, the hobbits all have baths together at Crickhollow in The Fellowship of the Ring, but Bilbo is a very respectable hobbit, and baths tend to have more soap-suds than rivers anyway. Just thought I'd put that in there before anyone picked me up on it.

** For the occasion upon this happening, see Tolkien.

Oh dear, this is the second chapter I've put up today that involves me being mean to the boys. I do love them really.

And for those interested, yes I do accept requests for short stories, though whether I have the time to write them or not is another matter entirely. But it's worth a try! Though saying that I'm already raring to write up my next idea…

Drat. In all the confusion I forgot to hand them a bar of soap.