A.N: I ship Nori and Dwalin, I ship them hard. I'm also aware there's a real probability that they are very unsuited to one another. This one also goes some way towards explaining his conversation with Dori during that chapter. There was nowhere to put this one, I wanted Nori and Frerin to interact in some way before the quest and that meant that this section had to go.
Nori Muses
Nori knows what he is. Cast in a charitable light he is a dwarf who is very good at getting into places he has no business being and acquiring things of value that, strictly speaking, don't actually belong to him. Put bluntly, he's a thief. He didn't become a thief because it pays particularly well. True, he's one of the more talented ones, which is why he still has all of his limbs, and, if he decided to, he could live a very comfortable life in a settlement outside of Ered Luin. His brothers are in the Blue Mountains, however, and no matter how difficult his relationship with Dori is, he won't abandon his family.
Nori has nimble fingers and an eye for gems. He probably should have ended up as a jeweller or a weaver, perhaps even making and repairing instruments. His mother had been sick, however, when the time came, Dori was apprenticed to a tailor of dubious skill and an inflated sense of his own worth, and Ori had still been too young to be left, especially as he was a sickly pebble in even the warm seasons. Nori had been left watching the dwarfling and the money dwindled more and more as their mother became too sick to go out and work.
Nori began stealing.
It started small, a loaf of bread here and an apple there. Anything to stop Ori from wailing his hunger. Then, one day, he lifted the purse of the wrong dwarf and quickly found himself sucked into the world of thieves and cutthroats and he thrived. He'd get caught sometimes, that was inevitable, but he was good enough to always find his way out before it became a problem. He was one of the best.
So, Nori knows what he is. He's a thief, pure and simple. Even if they take Erebor back, even if he becomes wealthy beyond his wildest dreams and gets that pardon Thorin promised into the bargain (because image is everything and the King can't be seen not to reward a member of his Company, nor can he afford to have that same member arrested for past crimes), Nori will still always be a thief. He will still always see too much, hear too much, and know too much to be anything other than a thief. It comes to him as naturally as breathing these days.
And that is what makes the identity of his One so problematic. Naturally, his One would be Dwalin. That's apparently just the way that his luck goes. Mahal must be laughing himself sick over it. Nori the thief and Dwalin the King's Guard. If ever there was a pair of dwarves less suited for one another it would be them. Yet here they are. Dwalin has to be as aware of it as Nori is, if the vehemence with which he's arguing with Thorin about Nori's uses us anything to go by. Dwalin has always taken more personal offence to Nori's career and existence than any of the rest of the guard. Still, Dwalin can't be completely against him, he knows as well as Thorin does that valuable items aren't the only things that Nori has been able to get his hands on over the years. It's amazing the kind of information people will write down and leave lying around, even these days. It has helped Thorin in the past and hearing Dwalin admit that goes a little way towards smoothing the hurt caused by hearing the larger dwarf call him an "honourless piece of gutter filth."