"Marry Me."

Nori's world seems to come to a crashing halt. She likes to pretend that there is very little in the world that can surprise her. A thief that is surprised too often is normally a dead one, but this seems to have come from nowhere. She knows how Dwalin feels about her. This Dwalin shows her that he loves her in much the same way that the other Dwalin often had, although with far more regularity. To hear him make this request, the one thing that the other Dwalin had stumbled around and kept on hold every time the topic had come up, makes such a jumbled tangle of emotions fill her that she has no hope of sorting them out.

Distantly she hears Hela telling the lads that it is time for them to leave and part of her wants to demand that they all stay. She has to give Dwalin some sort of answer, but her tongue and mind have deserted her. If they stay she can put the answer off, she can defer and deflect and do all of the things that she has always done when taken by surprise and perhaps it is the blood loss that is leaving her so slow. A big part of her wants to accept, of course, losing this possibility was precisely what had sent her into the tomb which housed Fíli, Kíli, and Thorin's corpses to rage and rant. It was what had made her so furious that she had inadvertently destroyed the Arkenstone. The smaller part of her is angry that he would do this now when she is injured and has just woken from what was apparently a life-threatening wound, when she cannot quite enjoy the moment that she has spent so many years both avoiding and longing for. Yet, she knows that if she rages at him for it, the moment will be gone and there will be no coming back to it. She would lose Dwalin again and this time it would be on her.

This thought process takes less than a moment, and even as Hela is telling the boys to leave Nori feels a single word slip thoughtlessly from her lips.

"What?"

It is small. Stunned. And that must show on her face because instead of being angry Dwalin relaxes back, his hands falling away, and bows his head with a slight shake as the ghost of a sigh huffs past his lips.

"I almost lost you," he tells her. "The fact that you're still here isn't due to any great prowess on my part, you're still here because of the elves. You were the one who trusted them enough to send the lads their way for safety. And you're still here because I was so frightened of losing you not even my pride and a stupid old promise that Thorin and I made could get me to tell that elf to take a hike. I've never been afraid like that before and I've spent the last couple of days coming to terms with the fact that I…" he falls abruptly silent.

"That you love me?" Nori finishes in a small voice.

"No," Dwalin looks up, face intent. "No, I've loved you for a long time, years. I'm bad at this, lass, I never thought I would… I never thought I would find someone who I would want to tie myself to. Then I met you and everything I ever thought I knew about myself was gone." Nori tilts her head with a confused frown.

"I don't understand," she admits. In her eyes he is very much the same as the other Dwalin she knew, if a little more trusting of her and open to the things she has to do as part of her job.

"If you asked me to choose between you and my loyalty to Thorin," he breathes, "I'd choose you. If that orc had killed you… if that orc had killed you I would have taken those boys home and then turned my back on everything. Thorin, Dís, my brother… loyalty to them wouldn't have been worth anything if it meant losing you."

Quite suddenly, Nori understands what might have been going through Dwalin's head and heart on the ramparts of Erebor on the morning he told her that things between them would have to end. That moment of understanding makes all her lingering anger at him melt away. He had not just felt guilty at having failed Thorin and the lads, although she knows that he must have carried more than his share as she still does, he must have been feeling guilty about being relieved that she had lived. The guilt at being happy that he had not lost her as well, even though his king and the two boys that were almost like sons to him lay slain by their enemies. Guilty that he was not good enough to save them, guilty that he was relieved he had not been forced to face the white orc and fail. Relieved she had lived and come out relatively unscathed, guilty that he was happy to see and hold her. It was not their failure in spotting what was coming that had caused him to push her away, no matter his words on the wall. It was his guilt that he had, without really knowing it, chosen her above Thorin, Fíli, Kíli and his brother. Guilt because he had chosen her without ever making it clear to anyone that he had and without understanding that he was not the only one who felt such guilt at their relief to find another alive while having failed their king. Mahal, she had not even been at their side during the battle, separated from them by armies of orcs and elves and dwarves and unaware of the danger the four of them had been in. Too unaware of the danger they had been in when it had been her business to find Azog and investigate that tower. The boys should never have been near it, no matter how much they might have excelled with their weapons.

That Dwalin of the future had been one who had never really come to terms with the fact that Nori had come to mean more to him than his king, even as he had challenged a gold-addled Thorin to act like one. It was a Dwalin who had loved her and spoken of marrying her but had never put more than a passing thought into what that might mean for his place with Thorin. It was a Dwalin who had never realised that loving her and protecting her would put him at odds with protecting his king. It was a Dwalin who had never considered what it would mean if Thorin were to fall in battle and they had both lived. It was a Dwalin who had never set aside something that Thorin had wanted of him in favour of her.

Not like this Dwalin, who has apparently spent the last two days considering as much of this as possible. This Dwalin who is explaining that the promise had been to never accept aid, from an elf, never to ask an elf for aid and never, ever, to give any sort of trust to an elf. This Dwalin who is softly telling her that he knows the time may come when he has to choose between protecting Thorin and the boys or her and that he will choose her every time, because he already has.

"I love you," she hears him say, dragging her from her thoughts. "And I realised that you might die and never have heard me say it. I know I've skipped a lot of steps, but I want to marry you and you deserve to see all the cards I'm holding. I want to be your husband and, when you're ready, the father of your children."

Children.

Nori has never thought about children before. Not really. They were an abstract thing that would probably come along after she and Dwalin had married. If they ever did at all. Nori has never been one to think too hard about what might come in the next few weeks, let alone months and years in advance. That is not the way that her mind, the mind of a thief and spy, really works. She lives in the here and now, in the time between the purse she has picked being full and the coin she has stolen being gone. Thinking about children means thinking years and even decades in advance. Not something she has ever been all that good at, even given recent evidence to the contrary.

"If you'll have me," Dwalin mumbles, as though noticing the way that her thoughts are not entirely on him, and Nori turns her normally sharp gaze in his direction.

"Yes," she says without thinking, she hardly needs to at this point because the answer is obvious already.

His face lights up, heartfelt joy rendering it far more youthful than she has ever seen and he leans in to kiss her once more. She welcomes it, although her side is screaming and exhaustion is already clawing at her, and she winces when the stitches in her side pull as the kiss becomes more heated.

"Sleep," he tells her, obviously noticing her discomfort. "We can work everything out later. You need rest."

She wants to argue with him, but a wide yawn steals her response and she grumbles quietly for a moment.

"I just woke up," she objects.

"And you'll wake up again in the morning, refreshed and a little more healed," Dwalin assures her. "And you'll get to suffer like I did after Audhild stabbed me."

"As long as you take as good care of me as I did you," she huffs, lying down at his urging. "The rest of Sela's caravan?"

"It can wait," he replies and she shakes her head stubbornly. "Sela was killed," he grumbles finally, "along with eighteen other guards. One of the carts was destroyed but the elves have promised to loan us one to take the rest of the goods with us when we leave for Ered Luin. The remaining six guards are keeping an eye on things, and Lord Elrond has promised to send a message to Thorinuldum to advise Thorin of what happened on the road."

She nods.

"Soon as I can we'll get on the road again," the thief yawns again, feeling Dwalin's fingers curl into her hair. "I don't want to be here too long. I still need to see Briar."

"You're still going to go there?" Dwalin sounds surprised, hand stilling for a moment.

"I need to check up on her," Nori tells him. "Regardless of whether the lad thinks she'll be safe or not, I need to see it for myself." She grins at him sleepily. "Besides, the lass would probably track me down and kill me with her own bare hands if I told her that we're engaged in a letter. And I taught her how to fight so she knows my weak spots."

Dwalin chuckles and as she drifts off with his hand running through her hair she thinks nothing of telling him that she loves him. With her eyes closed she missed his smile and the peace that comes across his face as he looks at her.

A.N: Did we really think that she would say no? Really? Dwalin had a lot he wanted to say on the matter and I decided to just let him get it all out. It's a bit shorter as a chapter, but I'm not sure that it really suffers due to that honestly.