It has been a week since the battle for Erebor. A week since Thorin, Fíli and Kíli were killed. A week since the hopes of Durin's folk took a crushing blow. They have the mountain, but at the cost of the elder branch of the line of Durin, a line unbroken for generations. Dáin will be a good king, but he is not the king that they want and not the king that they need. Nori hurts, and she likely will for some time. Every part of her aches, bleeds, burns or some combination of the three. Her eyes burn with tears that she does not want to shed, but that bleed from her anyway. Her heart is an open wound that pours with the agony of grief for young lives cut too short and a difficult life stolen in the moment when it stood a chance of getting better. Her muscles scream when she moves after months of travel and fighting and too little food.

The rest of the Company are not faring any better. Dwalin has not left Thorin, Fíli, and Kíli's bodies since they were brought in from the battlefield, standing guard over them past the point of exhaustion until someone, mainly Nori and Balin, bullies him into sleeping for a couple of hours only to return to the same job straight after. She hopes he will stagger in soon, she could use the comfort of his arms even if it is only as he sleeps fitfully. The funeral is not long over, the bodies of their fallen King and friends interred in a crypt below, and she wonders if Dwalin has taken to guarding that door as well. His loyalty to Thorin has always been strong, it was one of the things that made her the most wary about agreeing to court him when he had asked her, and she had suspected that the time would come when his loyalty to her would take second place to his loyalty to his king. Perhaps this is that time. The only reason that the door to the crypt has not yet been blocked with solid stone, and as such would require a guard, is that Dís will want to see them when she arrives. Or will need to see them anyway. Nori very much doubts anyone wants to see the rotting bodies of their brother and children.

Dís is not the only one who has lost everything either, Nori reminds herself as she glances at the still and silent form of Briar Baggins. The hobbit has not eaten since the day of the battle, and the whole Company heard the heartbroken wail when Briar realised that Fíli and Kíli were dead. Briar had been in love and the idiot boy, or boys since Nori is not one to judge either way, had not even been aware of it. In fairness, most of the Company had been entirely unaware of it. Except perhaps Balin, the crafty old goat always did see more than he let on. Briar, however, needs to eat. More than any of the others realise. Nori only knows because she spent some time traipsing in and out of Bree in the years before she started to work for Thorin. Most of the Company are probably entirely unaware that they basically starved the poor girl throughout the quest. Briar was skin and bones when they reached the mountain, there cannot be much more life left in her though Bofur keeps on attempting to get her to eat.

Idly, Nori wonders if Bofur isn't a little bit sweet on their hobbit.

Hours tick slowly by, she lingers with the Company as they get progressively more and more drunk on something that they managed to dig up from one of the lower levels. It's probably vile, at least their expressions every time they take another mouthful tells her that they certainly aren't enjoying it. Nori would join them, except that she's worried about Dwalin, who still has not appeared, and she stopped getting too deeply into her cups when she started working for Thorin. Better to keep her wits about her. It has been a habit for nearly twelve years, and even though her position in the future is uncertain she doesn't want to break it just yet. Regardless of whether she works for Dáin or retires with her vast wealth, Nori wants to keep her head as clear as possible. She has seen what happens to dwarves who drink to drown their pain.

By the time that most of the Company have almost passed out from their alcohol fueled wake, kept separate from the rest of their people purely because the other dwarves who had come to Erebor had not been through the same experiences as the Company, Nori is concerned. Dwalin should have returned by now.

He is on the wall when she finally finds him, staring out over the battlefield at the tents filled with Men and elves who were either injured in the fighting or who have nowhere else to go. Even without the loss of the line of Durin, Nori would be tempted to say that the cost of reclaiming the mountain has been too high. Dwalin looks exhausted, worse than he has looked in the entire time she has been aware of him, and she has been aware of him longer than she has known him. She hesitates, though she never has hesitated to approach him before, even before they were courting and she was simply the thief who tormented him at every turn.

"I failed," Dwalin says, as though he knows she is there. He always has known though, it was part of what drew her to him in the first place.

"You couldn't have known," Nori replies, stepping forward to stand beside him. "None of us could."

"It was our job to know," he snarls. "Yours and mine, and instead we let ourselves get distracted."

"It was an impossible task!" Nori growls back. "If there had been more of us maybe we would have had the time to figure it all out. If everything hadn't gone entirely to shit… If Thorin hadn't done exactly what his grandfather did and fallen to the gold… We can't change it."

"You can't lay this on Thorin," Dwalin snaps in reply. "This is on me. I should have known better. That's two kings I've lost for this cursed mountain. I won't lose a third."

"Are you leaving?" Nori asks, because she knows that she will go with him without a thought.

"No," Dwalin shakes his head. "Dáin has offered me the opportunity to redeem myself."

"You don't need to redeem yourself, not for Thorin, not for Thráin," Nori insists, "and it's orc shit that anyone would insist you have to. Especially someone who refused to come until Smaug was gone." He looks down at her silently. "I wish I could say it wasn't going to change things." He says quietly.

"Two weeks ago you were talking about getting married," Nori says quietly.

"I know," Dwalin bows his head. "And we were going to, but not…" he trails off. "It could be decades, Nori. You shouldn't wait, not for me. I think it might be better that we call it a day."

"And if I don't want to?" Nori challenges. "What if I decide that I want to wait?"

Nori has never been the sort to open herself to love. As far as she has always been concerned so long as she gets more than a toy between her legs on occasion she will be happy with her lot in life. Dwalin snuck in and through every defense that she had before she even realised he was doing it, but this is exactly the sort of situation that she had feared would come up between them. She has always feared that Dwalin's loyalty to Thorin would come between them. She was loyal to Thorin, she would not have followed him across Middle Earth regardless of who was with him had she not been. Dwalin's loyalty to Thorin was stronger, but they were cousins and close friends as well as everything else, and perhaps he needs someone to follow or perhaps he just feels his failures too keenly. Nori has failed too many things in her life, has messed up too many times and lost too many friends to want to follow anymore. Being with Dwalin changed that, being with Dwalin made her want to be better than Thorin's hired spy and thief. Being with Dwalin made her look to the future for the first time rather than live in the moment.

"Then you can wait," Dwalin tells her, "but I won't be coming to you. You deserve better than a failure to his king."

"I think I get to decide what I deserve," she says firmly, "and what I don't deserve is to come second place to the king neither of us knows."

She can feel tears threatening again and she refuses to let them come. She refuses to shed anymore tears regardless of the reason that she is doing so. She did not come on this quest so that she could be pushed aside because Dwalin has decided that he is inadequate and nor is it fair of him to take away something she had started to hope and long for because he is grieving. They are all grieving, this is not the outcome that any of them wanted, but it is not fair of Dwalin to lash at her this way. Not when she is hurting too.

"I know," he admits, and there are tears shining in his eyes. A vicious part of her is glad about that. "I need… I cannot be what you need, Nori, not like this. It isn't right of me to ask you to wait with me."

"If you were anyone else," Nori tells him, turning to leave, "I would have put a knife in you a dozen times by now."

"As is your right," Dwalin agrees and she marches away.

She has gone soft, she thinks as she storms through the mountain. It is sparsely populated, but that does not mean that no one gets in her way as she marches with no thought about where she is marching to. Any dwarf that crosses her path and does not move rapidly enough meets with her fist, often with a knife in her other hand for good measure. By the time she reaches her destination she is deep into the mountain and being stared at by a young lad as he stands guard on the door to the room which holds Thorin, Fíli, and Kíli's corpses. He has probably been told that he has been given a great honour, but really Nori suspects that he was given the job because everyone else wanted to get drunk on whatever rat's piss they had brought with them on the supply wagons from the Iron Hills. Either way, he cannot possibly be older than Kíli is… was.

"Move," she orders, her voice harsh even to her ears.

"I was told to…" he trails off when he sees the knife in her hand catch in the torch light. Those torches will not be put out until Dís has seen the bodies.

"I said move," she growls. "I was of the Company, will you deny me a moment to grieve alone?"

"But the…"

"What do you think I'm going to do?" She snaps. "Stab a corpse. Fat lot of fucking good that will do me. Should have stabbed the bastard a few times while he was alive, probably wouldn't be in this mess now if I had." She isn't actually sure which of them she is talking about now. One of the lads so that they would not have been permitted to come, Thorin so that he never could have come up with the ridiculous plan, or Dwalin when he had offered her a courtship in the first place. She had known that he would turn on her in the end. The guard steps aside. "My thanks, lad." She goes to step through the door.

"I will have to tell Lord Dáin," he stammers.

"Fine," Nori says, "you do that. So long as you fuck off while you're doing so."

He runs and she should probably feel a bit bad about the position she has just put him in, but she is hurting and she wants to be alone with it. Where better to do so than with the corpses of her dead king and his heirs? She walks around them in silence for a while. It is cold this deep in the mountain and were it not for the bloodless pallor of them she would think them sleeping while on the road. They were cleaned for the funeral, but it was a poor job.

"This is your fault you know," she says almost conversationally to Thorin. "If you hadn't let him make that stupid oath to follow and protect you even if it meant his death," because she knows that Dwalin thinks he should have died before allowing Thorin to meet his end. "If you hadn't brought those boys with you." She crosses to stand between Fíli and Kíli. "You've taken everything from Briar, you know. I wager she won't see the end of another week. Foolish idiot couldn't see what was right in front of your face." Of course, hindsight allows for many things, including seeing all the little clues that Briar gave out. "And now you've taken everything from me too. I wanted to grow old with him, which is stupid given this whole thing was basially a suicide run. And all to grab a stupid fucking rock! What was wrong with Ered Luin anyway? It was nice there. We had jobs and homes, we weren't rich but we were all doing alright. What's so special about this place? It's a mess? It's in ruins and it stinks of dragon!" Her eyes fall on the Arkenstone which glows eerily on Thorin's chest. She picks it up, surprised to find that it is not as heavy as it appears. "What's so special about this thing?" She mutters. "All this, coming here so that you could get your hands on this." She shakes her head. "Well you've been buried with it, shows what it was worth really. I've lost the only dwarf I'll ever dare to love for a worthless rock." She whirls as she says it, hurling the Arkenstone across the room.

It shatters with what would have been a very satisfactory crash, were it not for the blast that comes out of it that knocks her unconscious.

A.N: So, I started a new fic. I am utterly incapable of focussing on one at a time these days. More Girl Nori, because she's become my favourite thing. I do have a pairing in mind for my Bilbo (Briar) but let's face it, that didn't work out properly when I was writing Wild Magic so why would it work out now?

The bit about Thrain is book canon, he left to try and get into Erebor about 100 years before Thorin managed it. He vanished while camping on the boarders of Mirkwood. Dwalin and Balin were both part of that quest. This will be a mix of book and movie canon, with a very healthy dose of "what the fuck is canon?" thrown in there. Fair warning, the rating may go up, because it's Nori and the last Nori fic I did got out of hand.