Believe in Me

Disclaimer: Original work of The Hobbit belongs to Tolkien and we all know to blame PJ for the movie franchise. (What, who said that?)

A/N: Would you believe…I was abducted by aliens? (/slapped) No that's not funny, seriously. School happened, as it does, and being out of the country with very limited wifi happened, and yes my computer and my account both shat themselves temporarily but also my brain kind of shat itself and you know here we are. But I also could have found ways to let everyone know that I was on a temporary hiatus—that word sounded so permanent to me so I was almost afraid to use it—and that's on me. So I'm sorry for that. From now on I'll be keeping the story description updated with schedule changes and also set some kind of schedule for myself in the first place.

Also, a big thank you is in order to everyone who reviewed in the meantime, favorited, alerted, sent me a message, gave me a good kick in the pants (cough)... I see you, and I hope you also see me and that you're willing to stay on and keep giving me and this story a chance. Cheers, remember that I love you all.

SO here we are, let's get on with it so we can move along and get the frickity-frack out of Rivendell! This chapter conveniently kind of provides its own recap of the most recent events, so hopefully you won't have to go back and re-read (unless you'd like to!) and all you should need is this: Eisa has had a nightmare.

Chapter Thirty-Six

In Which Eisa Writes, and Writes, and Writes.

Eisa woke when she tried to roll over and felt a pinch at the nape of her neck. "Mmmnngg," she protested, wriggling to try and free her hair.

"Hhhrrrnn," came an answer from just behind her ear, and she froze before suddenly recalling the events of the night. The morning, too, really. The very. Early. Morning. Sweet Valar.

She groaned and rubbed at her forehead with one hand, swatting at Kíli with the other. "Come on, lazy arse," she slurred, trying desperately to smack away her grogginess along with the dwarf that was sprawled over half the bed. "Sleep like a rock…"

"Go fr'is ribs," grunted Fíli, evidently awake as well and tucked neatly on his side in front of Eisa. She grumbled and wiggled an arm around to poke at Kíli's side, and he snorted before wriggling like a puppy and rolling away.

"Ha," she muttered. Then, "Ow" in surprise. "Ouch! Kíli!"

Fíli hauled himself up on one elbow and got an eye and a half open. "Kee, what in Durin's na—"

"OW! YOU ARSE—"

"AAH! WHA?! Wha…?" Kíli spluttered, finally waking and opening his eyes to Eisa glaring at him and clutching her hair protectively, having just punched him in the shoulder. "Wha whazzat for?"

"You were pulling my hair, you…you rock-sleeper!"

He scrambled upright suddenly, staring at her intently. Or, at least, he tried to. His left eye was still a bit stuck shut, and he scrubbed at it. "I-I'm sorry! I didn't really hurt you, did I?"

She blinked and began running her hands through the locks instead. "O-oh. I mean—no, not really, of course, you just—you, you startled me."

"Well, I—if you're sure…"

"Good Valar. Eisa's finally been startled and Kíli's being apologetic. If anyone needs me I'll be in the washroom wondering what's happened to the world," muttered Fíli, rolling off the bed and trudging across the floor.

Kíli pressed his lips together at his brother's words and stared down at his hands.

Eisa busied herself with searching for her hair tie, which she was certain she'd had earlier to tie off the end of her now undone braid. She flicked the tangled waves behind her shoulders as she hunted around in the sheets, picking up pillow after pillow. "Tsk. Dratted thing must have come out."

Kíli's brows went up in surprise, and he cleared his throat. "Oh. Erm. That was my fault as well." Wound around his left wrist was the leather tie he'd slipped from her braid the night before. "Sorry. I—well. You have such pretty hair," he blurted at the mattress as he unwrapped the cord and shoved it into her hands, "and I—it seemed to calm you down after, uh. After what hap…" He trailed off, because her eyes had gone as round as the risen sun and she was gaping at him and yet not at him. Nervously, he glanced at the handle of her knife protruding from beneath the pillow she'd slept on.

"What happened." It wasn't a question, or even one of her question-statements. She was just finishing his thought. But then what had happened seemed to hit her as a physical force, as she sagged forward and heaved in a huge breath, eyes still wide. "Holy Irmo. Parchment!" she barked suddenly. "I need parchment! And a quill and ink." She leaped off the end of the bed, surprisingly mobile, and began to hunt through the desk against the far wall. When she turned and realized that Kíli hadn't moved, she frantically added, "Now!" Then, "Please!"

"Oh! Um! I don't—I'm not sure we have—" He half fell off the bed and yanked open at random two of the drawers Eisa hadn't gotten to yet. "How's this?"

"Anything." Eisa seized the ink pot and aging quill without hardly looking at them, and slid into one of the chairs. She'd already flung a packet of parchment at the table, and she freed a sheaf, uncapped the ink pot, and began to write like her life depended on it.

Pulling on his gray tunic, Kíli peered over her shoulder as she stabbed the quill back into the ink and left three blots on the table. "You know, it won't be of any use at all if you go and break it."

"Yes, but this—" she quickly tapped at her forehead with the feathered end— "won't be of any use either unless I can get it written down to remember later."

"Erm. Your…head."

"The dream, you big dolt, my memory of the dream! Dreams? More than one? Well, no matter. Now hush and let me write."

"Alright, alright. Your Highness."

Fíli returned from the washroom a moment later, frowned, and opened his mouth, but his brother just shook his head. "She wants to make sure she remembers the dream. Nightmare. Thing. Whatever it was."

Eisa's head snapped up suddenly. "Now the question is, was that the past…or the future?" she murmured, bending down again to scribble at the parchment an inch from her nose.

"Well, look, now. What if you do—" Fíli stopped at Kíli's finger-across-throat motion. "Oh. Well, what if she does have the gift of foresight?" he went on in a whisper.

"Don't you two go around telling people I'm having visions or anything," Eisa threatened without looking up. "It's just one more thing on the signs-that-Eisa's-bonkers list."

Kíli huffed. "As if. And I thought you said to—"

"SSHHHH."

"Right, that," he grumbled, hopping back onto the bed to flop over and groan.

Eisa wrote for half of the hour. Then the full hour. The lines traveling across the pages were straight and even, but the phrases read like gibberish. Occasionally the sentences would be interrupted by hasty diagrams of miniature landscapes, or arrows pointing to stick-people and buildings. Half-formed thoughts surrounded the pictures: scribbled notes that probably only Eisa would be able to later understand. She knew how to write so that the key words would trigger her memory, getting everything out on paper quickly so there was less risk of her forgetting bits and pieces. It still took forever, at first agitating the watching brothers as she just kept writing, and writing, and writing, and then making them settle into a state of resignation as they waited it out.

"I don't think the order's right," she had muttered after forty-five minutes, pausing. "But it felt like I was falling forever… Fireworks!" She proclaimed in a near shout, diving back towards the parchment and beginning to scribble furiously again.

Who were those children? They certainly hadn't been running around a hall in Belegost; she knew that settlement well and there was no great hall quite like the one from her dream. Perhaps she was just conjuring up spaces in her mind? There wasn't a Longbeard alive who hadn't built a mental picture of Erebor to visit when the loneliness got the coldest. And yet, she had seen glimpses of her memories. It must have been a combination of her past experiences and imagination, as was the way with dreams, of course. But those children. Whose were they? They seemed familiar, in a way, and yet she'd never seen such golden hair on a dwarf as—

Wait. "Sunshine," she murmured. Yes she had. But the child had been a girl. Could the dwarf children have simply been projections of others in her life who had similar traits? She had heard that the mind could do that in sleep; show solutions to problems or give the dreamer a sign through a situation that wasn't identical to but shared properties with waking life. The children might have been a boy and a girl, but they had been blonde and dark-haired like Fíli and Kíli. A reflection on their friendship, maybe? And then there had been the sight of Mhoire, younger than Eisa remembered her ever appearing, framed in the doorway of the Salty Keel Tavern and Inn as it began to rain and a stranger came knock—

All the wind left her chest, and she sucked it back in to sit bolt upright before sinking back in the chair. "My mother," she whispered.

Kíli looked up curiously from his seat on the floor. "Sorry?"

"Are you finished with remembering it all, then?" asked Fíli, tossing a few pillows back onto the bed.

"…I saw my mother," she repeated, hushed, her gaze sinking into the stray blot of ink she'd made in her surprise. "I think. No; I'm sure of it."

Fíli frowned and Kíli sat up straight. "Come again?" asked the elder.

The ink spot continued to grow, fingers soaking into the parchment fibers and clawing outwards. "That's who that was," Eisa murmured, scanning the pages of parchment and finally scratching out the words 'stranger- dwarf? dwarf woman, pregnant- complications?' and replacing it with 'dwarf woman- pregnant, alone & about to deliver.' "Yes, she—sorry—" She stuck the heel of her hand in the ink spot by accident and printed it all over the page as she quickly penned in details. "At first all I remembered was that there was a dwarf woman who came to the Salty Keel—the inn where I was born, you know—and Mhoire—you remember, the innkeeper's wife, she raised me in part—she opened the door. She was younger than I ever remember seeing her. It all sort of blacked out and turned into another scene then. The, uh," she ran a finger down the page, "the other…person…" Her shoulder seemed to twinge in imagined pain, and she touched it absently, frowning. "Well, never mind. Anyhow, thinking about it, it must have been my mother. She was pregnant, very pregnant, and she'd just gone into labor, I think. From what Mhoire told me when I was old enough, she'd seemed…scared. And alone, definitely alone. She had tried to seek shelter and a midwife other places in town but no one would help her once they realized—well, what she was, and that she had no man." Her mouth twisted. "Thank Yavanna it was a fairly easy childbirth, as those go. Neither Mhoire nor Greta were very learned in midwifery. Her hair was a bit like mine, I think" she recalled suddenly. "Her voice…it was low, lower than mine, and she was shorter too… That's to be expected, of course, I'm a giant frea—the KEY!" she practically shouted, slamming her free hand down on the table, and both brothers jumped.

The two had been watching her with expressions that would inch toward comprehension only to be replaced by more puzzlement over and over as Eisa rambled through her explanations. Kíli had slid into the chair opposite her, and Fíli was hovering over her left shoulder and raised his hands in surrender now.

"That's it," declared the blonde. "I am done. I am entirely done trying to understand this until you've sorted it all out in your head and are ready to sound like a sane dwarf."

"Just how many pages have you gone through?" muttered Kíli, poking at the nearest sheaf of parchment. His brother sighed and began to pace slowly, hands on hips.

"Don't get them out of order!" Eisa flapped a hand at him while hunting for the page with the—ah yes, the books, the flying books with the shelves and the endless library and the rings and the key. Yes, the key. "Ah, here—now what did it look like, I knew I was forgetting something, um…let's see, the head was hexagonal…ish." She sketched in a rough outline of the house-sized key in the margin.

"Wait a moment," Kíli said slowly, leaning forward to stare at the drawing.

Fíli came back to Eisa's shoulder and blinked. "That's not…"

"Great Mahal, how do you know about the key?!" Kíli burst out.

"Well, there it is," muttered Fíli. "Very subtle."

Eisa looked up, delighted. "Is this it, then? Hah! I was right."

Kíli was slowly melting onto the table, and fisted his hand in his hair. "Why," he moaned. "Why do you always have to know…"

"I don't know, Kee, you just went right ahead and gave it away, it's not as if we'll be dead meat for that or anything. But." Fíli was still staring at her sketch. It was a nearly perfect rendering of Thorin's key to the hidden door. The design was so distinct that he attributed the imperfections to Eisa's recollection of her dream; there was no chance it was any other. "This is too much. You shouldn't…even know the key exists."

"Hah!" Eisa barked another laugh, then lowered her voice to mimic his, planting her hands on her hips. "'You shouldn't even know the key exists.' You know, your uncle is just not nearly as sneaky as he thinks he is."

They were both still watching her, waiting for an explanation. "You know what? I'm not even surprised anymore," declared Kíli. He propped his chin on one hand. "Go on, out with it, then."

"Indeed," Eisa gloated. "Well, it's as simple as that, really. You're all just…not sneaky. I have probably heard the phrase "hidden door" at least eight or nine times, most within the past week and most when I wasn't even trying to eavesdrop, and if everyone's going on about this "hidden door" and Durin's Day, well, obviously we're on a deadline and now it makes a bit more sense why your uncle's so dratted antsy, and if there's a door it sort of follows that there might be a key, which I also may have overheard a few times and probably would make more sense now…oh, and also something about moon runes, which I definitely read about somewhere but there are hardly any who can read them anymore much less recognize the signs of them being hidden and much less actually write them, which of course explains Lord Elrond and why your uncle's been treating him as an odd sort of necessary evil. With the map and all. Anyhow." She grinned fiendishly. "Am I wrong?"

Fíli sighed a very long sigh.

"I'm just not even surprised. I'm not. Mahal's hammer," Kíli groaned, then stopped and frowned. "Wait. Trying to eavesdrop?"

Eisa's stomach let out a petulant growl and she looked down at it mildly. "Well, that's not very polite at all."

Fíli's stomach responded feebly and Kíli clutched his own with a grimace. "You know, come to think of it," suggested Fíli, "why don't I go and fetch us all some breakfast. I'll bring it back here, so just sit tight."

"Oh, that would be excellent, thanks. Really," said Eisa, shuffling all her parchment back into one orderly stack.

"Don't mention it, we could all use some down time. I'll be back in a jiff." He pulled on a fresh tunic and started hopping into his boots.

"Oh, so Her Highness gets breakfast in bed now, does she?" Kíli sniffed, but couldn't keep a straight face.

"I am sitting in a chair, princeling," Eisa shot back, prompting Kíli to feign being stabbed through the heart, "and don't you tell me you aren't hungry enough to eat a Warg right now."

"Let's hope it doesn't come to that," muttered Fíli as he left the room.