The next cycle goes well right until they reach the cliff. Bilbo has no idea how to avoid the falling pine accident. When he hears wargs howl, he wipes his clammy hands on his breeches. There's a patch of dried mud on his left thigh. It stains his palm. With a grimace, Bilbo rubs it off on his jacket. He needs to wash it, anyway.
"Can't you do something?" he asks Gandalf even as the wizard calls out for the Company to move. "Magic up a barrier?"
Gandalf's frown deepens. He purses his lips and spares Bilbo a glance. "It doesn't work like that." Turning to the dwarves, he shouts, "Up to the trees!" Another glance, and seeing Bilbo's dithering, the wizard says, "Bilbo, climb!" He hurries to lead by example, his long beard getting in the way and catching on the bark, much to Gandalf's mounting irritation.
Around Bilbo, the dwarves defy logic and his expectations by jumping and reaching high branches as if propelled by an invisible force, as if their reportedly dense bones are weightless.
The soles of his feet feel the tremor of the earth before he hears a growl. Chiding himself for being distracted, Bilbo turns to the sound. A snarling warg bounds right at him. The warg leaps. Bilbo doesn't know how, but Sting is in his hands, thrust forward as an only defence against the enraged animal.
Their gazes lock. The blade slides into the warg's forehead, gliding through the bone like a heated steak knife through butter. Something vital goes out of the warg's eyes. The momentum forces Bilbo back several steps, even as it drives the dagger deeper. The monster slumps and falls backwards, tugging Sting out of Bilbo's hands.
Mouth slack and eyes wide, Bilbo stares at the impaled animal. His pulse is thundering in his ears. He feels feverish, hot and cold at the same time. A lone thought bounces around in his otherwise empty mind: It shouldn't have worked!
"Bilbo, climb!" Gandalf's shout snaps him out of his shock. He grabs the hilt of the dagger and has to brace a foot on the dead body to pull Sting out.
"They are close!" Thorin says, voice harsh like a week-old bread on a parched tongue.
Bilbo looks around, turning his head so fast that short strands of sweat-soaked hair whip him across the temples. He is the last person on the ground.
A warg pack descends upon him like a tidal wave.
"Damn it!" Bilbo screams, bolting out of bed. He kicks the bed frame, stumbles backwards, and jumps on one foot, clutching the other and cursing through gritted teeth. The ache helps bury the memory of razor-sharp claws and hungry, yawning jaws. It stops the impotent rage. Plopping onto the mattress, Bilbo sighs and says with feeling to the empty room, "I hate wargs."
-[break]-
Next time, he dutifully scales the blasted tree to its middle. The scene repeats with minor variations, and then a milky-white orc arrives astride an enormous white warg with which he bears an uncanny resemblance.
Three branches under Bilbo, Thorin says, "Azog."
The name sounds like an accusation. From what Bilbo can see of the dwarven king, even the fur of his coat bristles with indignation at the unfairness of Thorin's adversary being alive.
"I should have known," Bilbo mutters over the Pale Orc's dramatic exclamations, missing half of them. Not that it matters — he doesn't understand a word of Black Speech.
With a shout and a downswing of an arm, Azog commands his retinue of smaller orcs — still large compared to a hobbit and very ferocious, mind you — to attack. The wargs rush up at the trees, forcing the Company to scramble and jump from pine to pine like a… well, like wood elves, really. What an insult to the dwarves it would be if I said that aloud, Bilbo thinks. There's a distinct flavour of hysteria to this thought.
Once more, they end up on the pine growing at the edge of the cliff. Bilbo clutches the trunk for dear life. His cold, sweat-soaked shirt clings to his skin, and Bilbo moves his shoulders in a vain attempt to unstick it. Gandalf sets pine cones on fire and with a mischievous expression on his face distributes them among the Company. A rain of blazing comets lights up the night. An orange lake blooms on the ground, forcing the wargs away. The heat reaches high, warming Bilbo if only just a little.
This will be a bad death, he thinks, watching the flames devour the forest even as the dwarves cheer their short-lived victory. There's nothing behind them and no way back. As if to drive the point home, their tree decides enough is enough and with an ominous crack extracts half of its root out of the earth. The scaly bark scratches Bilbo's cheek, but he holds on. Only a trowel could pry him off the trunk.
With a deep moan, the roots give up more ground. Ori cries out, barely clinging to Dori's boot as they swing above the chasm.
"Mister Gandalf!" Dori shouts, the branch he is dangling from creaks in his hands.
Fire licks the base of the pine. Sparks fly, framing the wizard's silhouette as he brings his staff around for Dori to hold onto, but… It is too late. Like stone boulders, 'Ri brothers plummet to their death.
Azog's laugh, low and deep, and full of dark, malicious amusement, overlaps Nori's scream of denial.
Bilbo swallows. He knows too well the freedom of a flight cut short by a painful landing.
Azog says something, the Black Speech lending his words a well of gravity, and Thorin gets to his feet and walks down the tree trunk. He stalks along the smouldering carpet in a cloud of sparks, following a path through the sea of fire. His sword glows with pale blue light, a falling star trailing in his wake.
It's all suitably dramatic, Bilbo decides, befitting a king's confrontation with a sworn enemy.
Thorin breaks into a run. With a mighty roar, he swings his sword. Bilbo hears sharp intakes of breath and holds his own. Azog spurs his warg to jump off a stone ledge and hits the dwarf in the chest with a mace, knocking him down.
That, Bilbo thinks, could have gone better.
Thorin stands up only to face another hit. The warg clamps its jaws around his torso, and Thorin screams. Bilbo shudders, his body aching with an emphatic pain. A branch cracks. Familiar voices shout words in Khuzdul. Another member of the Company plummets into the misty abyss. The warg tosses Thorin's body aside like a used chew-toy. Something in Bilbo rebels. In a fit of insanity, he finds himself running to the fallen king's side.
He tackles the orc who is about to cut off Thorin's head. Quickly, before he loses the advantage, Bilbo stabs the orc, piercing him between the ribs. Panting, he gets up. Blood rushes in his ears; black liquid drips off Sting's blade. It looks like tar and not quite real in its glow.
Bilbo turns.
Azog smiles. The deep, crisscrossing scars gauged into his cheeks contort, marring an almost pleasant expression, inasmuch as an orc can look pleasant. In the corner of his mind paying attention to such things, Bilbo is distantly surprised that this particular orc managed it at all. The rest of his thinking capacity is overcome with chanting, "Oh, damn, damn, damn!" all thirty seconds left before an enormous mace crashes into the side of his head.
Waking up, he swears to never engage in such foolishness again but does it anyway this very try: without Thorin, the quest will fall apart.
He considers warning the Company or, at least, Gandalf about their pursuers but, in the end, doesn't see the point. There's no way to hurry up their departure from Rivendell. He can't very well just come out with the message written in moon-letters he has no right to know about. Trying to sell it as 'premonition' will deplete even Gandalf's not inconsiderable credit of trust. At the same time, Bilbo can do nothing to avoid their involuntary visit to Goblin-town. He needs the ring — he must destroy it. He hopes that some small difference will allow the events to play out to a better outcome.
Some things change. Dori catches Gandalf's staff, but his boot slips out of Ori's hands. It takes Bifur, Balin and Dwalin to hold crying without restraint Dori back while Nori talks him down from jumping after their youngest sibling.
Others stay the same. As Thorin lies prostrate before Azog, Bilbo finds himself in the same hopeless position: alone against a horde of snarling enemies. He swings his blade with clumsy, untrained hands without finesse or even a hint of technique, his tired muscles aching with the effort. Two orcs jump back, avoiding the enchanted steel, but their leader laughs with honest amusement. The sound ties Bilbo's guts in knots. Straining his ears, he hears Thorin's breath, raspy and stilted.
With a bellow of rage and heartbreak, Dori charges into the scene, crashing a warg's skull with a flail and slashing its rider's chest open with a sword. Dwalin follows not far behind, his axes a whirlpool of death leaving only corpses in his wake.
Licking his lips with sandpaper-dry tongue, Bilbo stands guard over the dwarven king for another moment. For when he stops toying with his prey, the mace of the Pale Orc is swift and without mercy.
Bilbo wakes with an angry, wordless shout on his lips, his heart lodged in his throat, and hands and feet cold despite the summer heat. Blindly, he finds the pretty green vase with painted grapevines sitting on his nightstand and hurls it at the far wall. Shards sprinkle the floor, exposing the white ceramic innards and the jagged, sharp edges. Bluebells and daisies lie in a puddle, their delicate stems broken on the impact. The fragrant aroma is overpowering and almost sickening in its intensity.
Shoving the blanket off, Bilbo stumbles to the open window and gulps clean, untainted air.
"I shouldn't be so foolish. I'm not a Took!" he berates himself. Except, of course, he is.
From the portrait, Belladonna gazes with fond amusement. You aren't fooling anyone, my dandelion, her eyes say. The painting blurs, familiar faces gain life going out of focus. Bilbo blinks the sheen of tears away and drowns in a fierce longing. He would have gone a hundred, thousand, a hundred thousand repeated lives only for a handful of moments with her, alive and vibrant and full of laughter and light and endless courage. Bilbo wants to hug her so much, his hands shake. He bites his lower lip until it bleeds.
He is, indeed, a Took, but also, as Bungo's voice reminds him with gentle firmness, he is a practical, sensible Baggins. This evening, as soon as Dwalin introduces himself, Bilbo asks the former Guard Captain for sword fighting lessons and isn't surprised when the dwarf just stares at him, stalling in the doorway.
"Bilbo Baggins, your host for the night and, hopefully, a burglar for the duration of the Quest. Come in, the food is ready," he adds, which prompts the dwarf to finally step into the smial.
"I'm not at all familiar with a sword, but as I understand it— leave your boots here, please," Bilbo says, gesturing at a rag beside the door. "The journey to the Lonely Mountain is long and perilous, what with the orcs, goblins, and wargs, and all sorts of other unpleasantness we will surely meet along the way." His speech starts brightly and ends up in a mutter as his gaze clouds. What else will the Valar throw at their path? "Oh! And you can place your axes on the rack by the window. I put it there for this very purpose."
"All right," Dwalin says, wide-eyed; his eyebrows have climbed far up his forehead and risk encroaching on his head's territory. He looks Bilbo up and down, evaluating his stature and lingering on the evident roundness of his middle. "We do have a little time before we reach the Lone-lands."
"Don't worry —" a smile stretches Bilbo's lips, awkward and ill-fitting like an old, stretched-out shirt that has been passed down from older siblings until it reached the youngest child in a typical Shire family of ten "— I'm a fast learner."
