Nori wakes in a room flooded with bright sunlight feeling like someone dropped a mountain on top of her. Her side burns, her stomach feels like it is trying to eat its way out of her abdomen and her mouth feels like it is full of sand. Not to mention the agony that fills her skull. The last time she remembers feeling this wiped it was the morning after the battle at the foot of Erebor and she had managed to come out of that relatively unscathed.

"Awake at last," a light voice says when she croaks out a query. "Your companions will be relieved, particularly your lover and nephew. They have been persistent in their care for you since we arrived a day and a half ago."

"They survived?" She breathes, the words barely more than a whisper and the stranger, an elf with brilliant blond hair, helps her to sit.

"Small sips," he orders as he hands her some water. "They did survive, and in far better condition than yourself and most of your caravan. I chased them outside to get something to eat, my recommendation that they see the sun was met with laughter and more than a little foul language."

"Dwarves don't need the sun," Nori scoffs.

"They do not," the elf agrees, strange golden eyes crinkling at the corners as he smiles, "but there is something hopeful about the warmth of her rays on your face all the same. Master Dwalin, in particular, was starting to look somewhat haggard, your nephew at least has his friends to draw him away for a time."

"He's a good lad," Nori sips at her water.

"Indeed," the elf nods, "by my understanding it was his skill with a bow that felled the Defiler's mount and kept you from being killed before you could finish the orc off. We owe you our gratitude for that, incidentally. Azog has been sniffing around our borders for some time."

"You don't owe me anything," Nori scoffs, "I was just trying to survive."

"And yet you sent the young ones away to us," the elf points out, "as though you believed that you would not survive."

"Is there a point to this interrogation?" Nori tilts her head, keeping her cup of water near her lips so that she can constantly wet them. "Only I would have thought you would be more interested in letting my friends know I'm not dead."

To her surprise, the elf laughs.

"Straight to the point," he observes, "I do enjoy the typical bluntness of your people. Forgive me, I should have introduced myself; Lord Glorfindel, of the House of the Golden Flower, well met, Mistress Dwarf."

"Nori, child of Aari," the thief does not bow, not entirely sure that her wounded side would allow it even if she were inclined to attempt it.

"Ah," the elf, Glorfindel, gives her what must be an apologetic smile. "I see you prefer to go unknown in the world. I was under the impression it was otherwise from my interactions with Masters Dwalin and Cadan."

"Force of habit," Nori tells him, rather than explaining anything else. "Just Nori will be fine."

"Then 'just Nori' you shall be," golden eyes run over her. "There was something that I needed to discuss with you, something that I am rather uniquely qualified to notice." She glares at him. "You are not quite what you appear. I have no doubt that you were most certainly born Nori, child of Aari, and that you are still Nori, child or Aari. At some stage, however, you died and were reborn. You carry the mark of someone twice born."

"Closest I've ever come to dying was the other day," Nori's reply is short, although she actually wants to curl up into a ball at the thought that this elf might have seen what she is trying so hard to keep hidden.

Glorfindel leans back in his chair.

"In his first life, Durin had blue eyes, much the same shade as young Master Fíli's," the elf muses. "I believe he is a direct descendent, is he not?" Nori glares silently. "I did not meet his second or third incarnations, being dead myself you understand, but I became well acquainted with his fourth and fifth incarnations, and never knew his sixth as well as I might have hoped. Their appearance, of course, was almost identical to that of his first life, apart from his eyes which had once been the colour of the summer sky. Instead they glowed with the same silvery blue light as ithilidin, much as mine changed from a pale grey to the colour of the sun. While your people may not question the amethyst of your eyes, I know well the value they place upon gems and those who are fortunate enough to have the colouring of them, if one looks hard enough and knows what they are searching for, one can see the green beneath them."

"According to my brothers, my eyes have always been this colour," Nori shrugs the story off, although internally she is shrieking. "It's a lovely story, though. You told it to anyone else?"

"No," he shakes his head. "I assumed that if your companions were meant to know they would, and that if they did not you would have reasons of your own for keeping it secret. Lord Elrond is aware, but he has his own methods of noticing those touched by great magics. He saw it as well."

"I've never died," Nori repeats with a sigh, looking down at her cup of water and wishing it was something stronger.

"But…" the elf prompts. "It is a heavy burden to carry alone, and a task great enough that power beyond any of our comprehension would touch you for long enough to leave a mark. Will you not share a portion of it?"

"Nothing touched me that I didn't bring on myself," Nori declares with an angry huff, "and I'm working on fixing it. It isn't a burden that needs sharing with anyone, not my blood, not my friends, not a random stranger and least of all an elf. But I would take it as a kindness if you kept your theories to yourself. I don't need the help, and I don't need the suspicion."

"May I at least know your task?" The elf asks although Nori gets the distinct impression that he will not let the matter drop until he gets some sort of answer. "Enough, at least, to reassure Lord Elrond and myself."

"You don't need the reassurance because it doesn't affect you," Nori snarls, although she is too tired and sore to really put any aggression behind it. He gives her a level stare. "Keeping those boys alive," she says finally, not able to compete with the glare for long after just waking up. "That's my task. Keeping Cadan and Fíli alive."

Glorfindel's face creases in obvious confusion.

"I am afraid I do not understand. Why them?"

"They're important to me," Nori tells him, "so I'll be keeping them alive. That's my task. There isn't another and your theories are all orc shit that I suggest you keep to yourself. Now I want to see my friends."

"Of course," he sighs. "We had thought you would be reticent on the matter, and the stubbornness of the children of Aulë is well known. I will send your friends to you once your bandages have been changed and you have eaten." He gets to his feet. "A healer will be in shortly and your companions will be sent to you as soon as I locate them."

Nori nods, her attention already on keeping her rioting emotions from showing on her face. She had known that someone would eventually notice that she seemed to be too aware of how things around her were developing, she had just thought that it would be Kíli or Briar, not some elf. She should have known that it would be an elf to see it, she had even feared that Elrond will spot it when she is finally forced to come here when the quest rolls around. In some ways, she is relieved that it has been seen and discussed. It will no longer be a hammer over her head and she relaxes a little as a female elf comes in and silently begins to remove the bandages that are wound tightly about her abdomen.

Nori looks down when the elf turns to place the bandages to one side. The wound has been sewn shut as neatly as possible, but the edges are jagged and it is larger than the minor flash of pain that she had experienced during the heat of battle had made her think it was. Little wonder she had passed out, then, once the deed had been done. It is more impressive that she did not fall before she had brought Azog to his end.

Azog is gone.

She can hardly believe it but she knows that she removed his head and that is one of the things that there is no coming back from. It is not the end of it, she knows that there was another great white orc on the battlefield, but it is one thing off the list of concerns and she almost wants to weep from the relief of knowing that she will not have to contend with that particular problem in the future. One less thing to worry about is always welcomed. And it is something she would never have risked attempting, if not for seeing Dwalin engaged with the great creature and the rush of emotion which she had forced to one side at the time that she is now forcing herself to examine.

She loves him, she has known for a long time that she never stopped loving the Dwalin she came to know in her first life. This Dwalin and that Dwalin are not all that different, although there are some changes in the way he acts and accepts her work. Perhaps because instead of working with him because she had to as she had in her past life, she has worked with him this time because she wanted to show him how poorly suited to him that she would be. She has shown this Dwalin far more of who she is when working as both thief and Wolf than she had ever shown the other version of him in the honest belief that it would drive him away. She would have spent the rest of her life mourning him and avoiding him as much as possible once his interest had waned, but she had every intention of driving him from her to protect her heart from being shattered once again.

As it is, she thinks she might love this version of Dwalin far more than she did the other one. She does not fear this Dwalin ever seeing beneath her mask because he has seen it so many times and never turned from her. She could not have left him to face Azog alone, not just because she loves him, of course, but it is an inconvenient realisation all the same. She has been running from it for so long, convinced that Dwalin will hurt her again, that accepting it now will take time and she knows herself well enough to know that she will very likely run from it all the same.

Because that is what she does; she ferrets out secrets and runs from her own heart.

Lost in her thoughts she hardly notices when the elf leaves, or the bowl of thick meaty broth that is placed in front of her, though she devours it mechanically. Her mind is too full, her heart too conflicted. There is too much to put together and consider, she has left herself far more vulnerable in this life than she did in her other and look how that has worked out for her.

The door slams open and she startles from her thoughts to see Dwalin, Kíli, Fíli and Hela rushing into the room. Seeing them all alive and well, though she had already been assured of it, makes the breath leave her lungs in a rush as relief dizzies her. The boys are obviously overjoyed, and Hela looks pleased if hesitant given she hardly knows the thief at all, but it is Dwalin's expression that makes her heart race and she can hardly catch her breath from the intensity of it. Not that he gives her a chance as he strides across the room and takes her face in his hands, eyes running over her as though looking for something. Then he pulls her into a kiss and even if she had wanted to catch her breath she cannot. The kiss consumes her, desperate and relieved and full of all the same emotions that Nori has just found herself struggling to come to terms with.

"If I had known it would get me a greeting like that…" she gasps, trying to push down the intensity of feeling that the kiss has brought rushing back.

"Marry me," Dwalin says.

A.N: Grumbles at Dwalin. At length. He keeps screwing up my timeline. Git.