The trip down from their landing place is difficult. Every member of the Company is battered and bruised, though Thorin is easily the worst off even with the healing used by Gandalf, Oin and Fili. After some debate it is agreed that Kili, who they all know can at least lift things with his gift, will use it to carefully carry Thorin to the bottom. Billana, they decide, will be passed down from one dwarf to the next. If she weren't still so exhausted she would object to the thought of being passed about like some sort of doll, but she doesn't have the energy.

The trip is not one she wants to repeat. If Billana had thought the expressions of the Company after she had healed the pony were awed, they were nothing to what she sees on their faces now. They handle her gently, though not in the way one might handle a fragile thing. It is almost reverent, the way one might handle something that is precious beyond all measure. It makes her uncomfortable.

Upon reaching the bottom attention immediately turns to the question of supplies. Most of the Company's belongings are gone, almost the only things that they have are the weapons that they could recover and whatever they managed to keep in their pockets. Billana is the only one who managed to recover much of anything in the way of food and water and even that had been all that she could carry, minimal as it is. The sense of a family of otters nearby tells her that there is a large stream or small river close to their location and that it must have fish. She passes the information on in an exhausted haze. Seeing this, and noting that the rest of them are as bad off, Balin firmly suggests that they make camp nearby, close enough to the stream she has suggested so that they can fish, wash and get water to drink, but not so close that those bathing can't have a little privacy.

Thorin, to her surprise, doesn't even try to argue and they all stop as soon as a suitable location can be found. Billana is asleep almost as soon as she has sat down.

She wakes with her blankets wrapped around her and her head pressed against Gandalf's side. The wizard is silently puffing his pipe, creating smoke rings which dart around the camp. Thorin is propped against a nearby boulder, his expression speaking volumes about the fact that someone, likely Fili, has ordered him to stay in that spot. His face softens, however, when he sees that she has woken. The others bustle around them, fish cook over the fire, and coats hang from tree limbs having obviously been hastily scrubbed.

"Awake at last," Gandalf observes.

"How long was I asleep?" She asks, stretching and wincing at the pill of strained muscles and the crackle of dried blood on her skin.

"Several hours," the wizard replies. "You exhausted yourself." She hums, waiting for the inevitable and cringing when it comes. "You promised me you would never take that form again."

"I couldn't let them kill Thorin," she objects. "I had to do something."

"You were given those instructions for good reason, Billana," Gandalf reminds her. "Even the best of intentions could not have prevented a less than favourable outcome."

I was fine, Gandalf!" She cries. "I was completely myself."

"You will forgive me if I find that difficult to believe, young hobbit," the wizard replies coldly, "after all, I just witnessed you use your teeth to rip out an orc's throat." She hears some mutters from the others, though they mostly sound impressed as opposed to angry or disgusted.

"I used what I had available to me at the time," she mutters. "It wasn't the wolf."

"And, perhaps, that is worse," Gandalf sighs. "You were a gentle child, Billana."

"You don't ask a 'gentle child' to undertake a quest like this," she says. "You don't send them into a dragon's den. The Fell Winter and the wolf robbed me of nearly all the gentleness I had. Camellia finished the job after you left me with her. If I'm not 'gentle' anymore, Gandalf, perhaps it's because you abandoned me!"

Maybe the wolf has had an affect on her. Maybe it's still there, in the back of her mind, she doesn't even feel the nerves that would usually come from such a statement. or the fear of being rejected for speaking her own mind. She is too tired for it, too drained from lack of food and sleep, from fighting and running and changing at least one more time than she would usually dare to attempt in so short a time. If Gandalf had waited until morning, if he had waited until she had eaten and some of her magic had been replenished, Billana knows that she would not have dared to respond like this. She knows that if Gandalf had waited she would never have decided to air the grievance that has festered in the years since that winter.

"You needed to remember who you were," Gandalf tells her, "and you needed your people to do that. You almost lost yourself, Billana."

"Well, maybe you should have let me stay that way!" She shouts with a half sob. "I would have been better off."

"Enough," Balin says, easing between them and putting an arm about Billana's shoulders. "I think, perhaps, it would be helpful if one of you explained why the wolf was a bad choice. For our part, we believed it the perfect option."

"I will explain as best I can-" Gandalf begins.

"No," Billana cuts him off. "I will tell it. There is plenty you don't know, because you never did ask." She looks at the gathered dwarves and then turns her eyes onto her hands. This story has to affect how they look at her from this point on and it is one she had hoped never to tell. "It was four winters ago," she begins into the silence.

Flashback: 2936 The Fell Winter

Winter had come early to the Shire after a short, wet summer. Billana's animal friends had warned her of it's approach, able to sense that it would be upon them sooner than usual. Billana had passed her friends' warning onto her mother and step-father, aware that she was not the only one who would need to make preparations. Belladonna had used the warning to begin to gather more of the herbs she used when healing and to make more preserves. Bungo had sniffed and retired to his study to look over his accounts. It had always been a relief to Billana when he spent his days there rather than elsewhere in the smial.

True to her predictions winter had been upon them before October was through, starting with an early frost and thick ice. The first snowfall came before the harvest festival, though it was light, and the hobbits had scrambled to salvage what remaining crops they could. Inside Bag End Bungo had turned to her mother with a grim smile.

"Your daughter has her uses," he had said. "We would be in a much worse position had she not thought to warn us."

She had always been 'Belladonna's daughter' to Bungo, no matter that he had as much of a hand in raising her as a natural father might have done. The rest of the Shire had taken their cues from him in how to treat her and so she had never been fully accepted as a Baggins. Billana had tried, once, to call Bungo 'Papa', she had been four and hadn't known better. Bungo had struck her, hard enough to knock her into one of the side tables. She had never attempted to address him so again, and there had been no affection from Bungo to encourage it. Like the rest, he treated her with contempt and distaste and Billana had accepted it. She wanted little to do with the rest of the hobbits anyway.

Her mother had coughed at the statement, a wet and hacking thing that would grow gradually worse as winter continued its inexorable march. The first light snows quickly gave way to frequent heavy storms. Belladonna began to spend longer and longer trudging through snow, wind and ice to visit patients. Often she would return late at night, exhausted and pale with hollow eyes and sunken cheeks. The rationing of their food, which had begun as November turned to December and the necessity of it became apparent, didn't help much. Her cough worsened until Billana had begun to find blood stained rags among the washing when there should have been none. She had begged her mother to stop going out, begged her to rest, but Belladonna had refused. If not her, there would be no one, her apprentice had long moved on to live in Michel Delving and he would be as busy as she.

Billana had always liked Edelard Bolger, he was a cheerful lad who had shown her more understanding and kindness than any of the others. Often she found herself wishing that he had never left and that winter she had wished it all the harder, particularly when, three days before Yule, she had returned from a successful hunting trip to find Bungo waiting for her. His face had been grim and his eyes glittered with some dark emotion that Billana had never been able to identify.

"Your mother is dead," he had told her from the door, no emotion to his tone, no sign that he even really cared.

At first, Billana hadn't believed it. She had tried, with increasing desperation, to get into the smial, calling and screaming for her mother. Eventually, Edelard had appeared, summoned by her cries, with his sleeves still rolled to his elbows and his grief clear. He had forced Bungo to let her past, had taken her to see her mother's corpse, withered by lack of food and long illness. He had, at least, arranged her so that she appeared at peace.

"How?" She had whispered. "Why?"

"Your mother always gave too much," Edelard told her. "She kept giving without rest until there was only her own life force to draw from."

Her mother had always been like that, using just that little bit too much of her gift to heal an injury or illness. She had said that it was her way of making up for the pain her actions had caused her parents. Billana had never understood that. All she understood now was that her mother had gone too far and given too much, and on top of her illness it had cost her life. Edelard had stayed for a short time, helped to prepare the body and informed the town of Belladonna's passing. For those few days Billana had remained in her childhood home in relative safety, even the arrival of Longo, Camellia and Otho Sackville-Baggins had done little to affect her as long as Edelard was there. They had come, they said, to help Bungo in his grief, though it was clear to any who cared to look that Bungo was not grieving at all. As long as Edelard was in the smial, however, Camellia had been civli no matter how many whispered conversations with Bungo Billana had interrupted.

She had known that it would not last.

Within an hour of Edelard's departure she had been cast from the smial with only the clothes on her back. Billana had been, almost perversely, glad of it. That night was the night the wolves came to their part of the Shire for the first time. That night she joined her mind with that of the pack-leader in order to save her own life. That night she took the form that she would wear for nearly five weeks.

At first the wolves were content to take what livestock they could and Billana hunted with them. She learnt quickly, the animal instincts which came with the form helping her to adapt. She became part of the pack, living and sleeping among them. She learnt their ways and used the intelligence that came from having been a hobbit to earn her place. The hobbits, however, quickly realised that if the wolves continued to take their livestock they would starve. They began to bring their animals into their smials and the wolves began to become desperate. They started attacking dwellings.

More than one hobbit was killed during the attacks. The wolves, now desperate enough, would eat the hobbit dead as surely as they would any chicken, sheep, cow or even cat that they could kill. Billana balked, at first, and ate only the chickens or her share of the larger kills. Gradually, however, she forgot what it was to be a hobbit and while she never joined the others in devouring the corpses of her people, she was far from the gentle creature who had been turned out into the night with nothing.

Eventually, a month after she had lost her home and more days that she could recall after losing herself, the wolves had made it to Bag End. Billana had not been the one to end Bungo's life, a fact that she would later be relieved about, but she had been close enough for the blood that had sprayed from his neck to hit her in the face. Seeing her step-father die had, for a moment, made her remember herself enough to prevent the rest of the pack from killing the other occupants of the smial. She had imposed her will upon them for long enough to get the pack out of Bag End and make certain that they stayed away. Bungo was dead, but she had saved the rest of his family.

She would regret it in later days.

The wolves moved towards Buckland after that, deciding to move east having come up from the south, at Billana's urging. Hobbiton was becoming too dangerous for them and it was time to move on to where it might be easier to find unguarded livestock. Billana had gone with them as one of them, and it was there that they had encountered Gandalf. The wizard had known her instantly, even as the pack had attacked the rangers that had come with him, and his eyes had been on her as she had circled him.

"Call them off, Billana," the wizard had ordered. She snarled, her belly empty and the threat before her clear. "My dear girl," he continued, "has it truly become as bad as this?" Yelps sounded from behind her, pain flooded her mind where the feeling of the pack had once been. "This isn't you, child. Call off your pack and come back to yourself."

She leapt, her aim the wizard's throat, to end the threat to her and to her pack. Pain flared in her head and body, her bones and muscles screamed. She shrieked, her voice as much of a surprise as the sudden cold air on her skin and the bite of the snow when she landed on it.

"Sleep now," Gandalf ordered as he placed a warm hand on her brow. "Sleep, dear Billana, and remember yourself."

She had slept for five days, a sleep filled with dreams of her time as a wolf and her life as a hobbit. A sleep of memories. Billana woke to find herself in her bed in Bag End with Gandalf sat beside her. His ancient face seemed to have aged decades in the time that he had waited for her to awaken, waited to discover whether he had brought back a hobbit, or a wolf who wore the skin of one.

"You were lucky, Billana," he said when he had been satisfied as to her state of mind. "Had I arrived even a day later there would not have been enough of you left to save. Should you take that form again, I do not know if you would ever be able to change back. The pack did terrible things, Billana, and you did them as well, or caused them in your grief. I have concealed how you survived after fleeing this place upon the passing of your mother from the other hobbits. It would be unwise of you to allow them to discover the truth." She nodded, her gaze fixed on her hands. "You must promise me never to take that shape again, Billana," he said firmly. "I will not be able to bring you out of it should you lose yourself a second time."

She had given her word, terrified of what he might do if she did not and worried about what she might turn in to should she ever take wolf form again. Gandalf had left not long after and Billana had remained in Camellia's care until being forced to flee to her grandfather a matter of weeks later.

End flashback.

"I didn't think on the cliff," she says quietly, not daring to look at the Company who have gathered in front of her. "I needed something powerful and the wolf was the first thing that came to mind."

There is silence for a long moment.

A.N: So, I hope everyone had a good festive period. I'm still a bit snowed under so it will be a while until I get back to my usual posting schedule.