A small hand slips into Fíli's as soon as they reach the treeline and it can only be Bilba's. He grips it tightly, eyes on his uncle as they duck under branches. This is a bad idea. The others have all shared stories about Mirkwood, even Legolas has admitted that his home is not safe for outsiders if they stray off the path. He looks to his side to see how Bilba is doing and almost trips over his own feet when he realises that he can feel her, but he cannot see her.
"Bilba," he hisses, dragging her behind a tree. "I can't see you. How are you doing this?"
"Does it matter?" She demands, and it is jarring to hear her disembodied voice. "We're being chased by orcs."
"I can't protect you if I can't see you," he points out.
"I won't need protecting if they can't see me," she replies. "And protecting me isn't your job."
"I'm the only one here," he snaps, realising that he has lost sight of Thorin and the others. "I won't risk it." There is a pause and her hand slips from his. For a horrible moment he thinks she has slipped away, then she pops into existence in front of him.
"We don't have time for this," she tells him, slipping something into her pocket, "we have to find the others."
He can agree with that and he reaches for her hand without a thought. She grips his tightly, and he notices that they aren't as far into the trees as he would like since they can still see the last remnants of daylight through the trunks that press so tightly behind them. He knows that there are orcs and wargs out there and he has no idea how far in the others have come. Hiding in the trees won't do them much good, ultimately, they left all of their belongings at their campsite, and eventually the wargs will smell them and follow them all in.
"Get down," Bilba tugs his hand and they duck behind a bush to watch as a large warg prowls past, large enough to be seen even from their position.
"Oakenshield!" A voice bellows. Fíli cannot understand the words that follow, but they sound like a challenge or a threat.
If they were in Bree, if Thorin were still Thor, he might resist the urge to rise to it. In Bree, Fíli now knows, Thorin hadn't wanted to be found. This isn't Bree, he isn't Thor, he is Thorin and everyone here knows it. Bilba tugs on his hand and points, Fíli looks away from the pacing warg to see Adra, Dwalin and Ori creeping closer to the treeline.
Stay back with her, Dwalin signs. Keep out of sight. He nods, only to feel Bilba slip from his grasp and he hisses as he moves after her, grabbing her arm and pulling her tight against him as he ducks behind a tree to avoid being seen.
"Stay with me," he hisses, lips so close to her ear that they brush over it and she shudders.
He knows she heard him because she turns so that she can glare up at him with furious eyes. He meets the scowl with one of his own, heart racing in his chest because he knows what the others are planning on doing while he stays in the trees with her. The others are going to attack the orcs and as much as he wants to join them, he is well aware that he cannot. Someone has to stay with Bilba and make sure that she is safe. They have made the mistake of thinking that leaving her to hide on her own is a good idea once, and he refuses to make the same mistake again.
"We can still get closer," she breathes as the others charge forwards with screamed war cries. "In case they need help."
-Or so that we can see if it ends badly enough that we need to escape,- he adds mentally.
They creep forward slowly. This isn't a large pack, hardly more than a scouting party of roughly two dozen warg mounted orcs. The orcs are distracted by the rest of the party in any case, and Fíli doubts they will notice he and Bilba hidden in the treeline. There's a large white orc that catches Fíli's attention, the same one that had been shouting and challenging his uncle. Metal plates seem to sprout from its skin and one arm has been replaced with a cruel steel prosthesis. Something in Fíli's mind shifts, prickles at his consciousness and he can't help but think that if he stares at this creature for long enough the answers might come to him. Then one of the other orcs gets too close to the trees and he has to quickly silence it before it can draw attention to the pair of them hidden in the bushes.
"Thorin!" He hears Dwalin roar and he turns to see his uncle hemmed in by wargs with the large orc advancing on him.
"Go," Bilba insists, "go. I'll stay out of sight." She vanishes in front of his eyes and Fíli curses creatively as he hesitates only long enough to kill another rider less warg before it can sniff her out. Then he rushes to his uncle's side.
This would be easier if they only had to worry about the orcs.
An arrow sprouts from the white orc's arm, followed rapidly by three more to its torso and one which it brushes out of the air impatiently. Fíli focuses on one of the wargs, his heart in his throat as he thinks of his uncle facing the thing that is easily three times his size, while Balin and Bofur handle the other two. Their aid has allowed Thorin to focus on the white orc, and by some blessing of Mahal his uncle has managed to take it down by cutting off the prosthesis and one of its legs above the knee. That doesn't seem to have deterred it all that much, its laugh is dark, cruel, as it shouts out some threat or demand that Fíli has no wish to understand. He focuses, instead, on watching for other foes even though the others seem to have things well enough in hand that he can see Bilba beginning to venture from the trees.
"It should be you, Fíli," Thorin says, stepping back though he watches the orc warily. Fíli has no idea how the foul thing is even still conscious. "For your parents. Azog killed your mother and father, would have murdered you and Kíli had I not prevented it. The killing blow should be yours."
He doesn't know what happened the night that his parents were killed. Thorin has never told him, never explained much of anything, and Fíli has never had the desire to ask. It had always been enough to know that his parents were dead. He has no idea why this orc, Azog, would target his family, though the name of the creature is familiar from the stories. He finds, in this moment, that he doesn't particularly care as red descends over his vision. This orc is the reason he is an orphan, this orc is why he will never know his parents. This orc is the reason they moved to Bree in the first place and so is the reason that Kíli was there during that winter when other orcs attacked. This orc is the reason Fíli doesn't have anyone left. He doesn't have to think about it, he just plunges one of his blades into the things chest where its heart would be, should it have one, putting all of his strength behind the blow before twisting.
The orc's sneer slides off its face and its eyes go dull, utterly lifeless as it falls backwards, dragging Fíli's sword from his suddenly numb fingers. He doesn't hear anything, doesn't feel Thorin clap him on the shoulder or the satisfied words that follow. He doesn't hear the orders for them to find somewhere to make a new camp and tend their injuries. He simply staggers along with them, the ponies lost in the chaos, and he stays unseeing and unhearing until they make camp a short while later and he feels cool water on his hands. He comes back to himself with a jerk, only to see Bilba looking at him in concern clutching a cloth as she wipes orc blood from his hands and face, fussing over him in that peculiar little way she has when she doesn't have any reason to fight with him or argue over something.
"You told me they were dead," he mumbles when he realises that Thorin is next to him, thick bandages around his bare torso and he should ask what happened, but his mind is on other things.
"I did."
"You didn't tell me it was orcs," Fíli accuses.
"I didn't. you had reason enough to hate them," Thorin sighs. "I feared what you might become if you knew all."
"He killed my parents," he whispers, still staring at his hands. They're clean, now, and Bilba has done a good job of it for all his skin still itches and his muscles ache. "Didn't I have a right to know it? To know how? Or why?"
"I do not know why," Thorin says stiffly, "I never worked out if Azog had been searching for me and found them, or if he had been looking for them regardless of my presence."
"Why would he?" Fíli demands. "What could my family have possibly been to him?"
"We are straying very close to those things I cannot tell you, lad," Thorin mutters. "It could have been as simple as Azog desiring a way to draw me out. I always believed his motivations for that were clear enough, I was the one who took his arm," a story Fíli knows all too well. "I was the one who led the final charge which drove the orc filth from Khazad-dûm. It was a simple assumption, there was no other reason he should have been aware of, but with all that has happened over the last decade I do begin to wonder."
"Uncle," Fíli cuts in. "Tell me what happened." He's not even sure why he wants to know so badly, just feels that he has to. He's dreamt of it off and on since he was young, though less as he got older. Dreams of fire and fear and a foul laugh. Until today he had brushed it off as a child's fear. Now he wonders if it was always an almost forgotten memory because he could not have imagined the laughter of that orc so clearly.
"Kíli would have been eight, maybe nine months old," Thorin says softly. The others, Fíli notes, have all moved away, though he can feel Bilba's concerned gaze from where she sits out of earshot. "Your mother's carrying had been difficult, her birthing even more so, and we had less money saved than we would have liked for winter. We were in a remote village near Ered Luin, not an affluent place but a friendly enough one and I felt safe leaving you and your family alone. I foolishly believed that none would look for us there, too far removed from the world to be of any real interest. Your parents paid for that error.
"I have no idea how he tracked us down," Thorin looks at his hands as Fíli's gaze turns back on him. His uncle's bandages are a stark white in the firelight and even now Fíli can see the scars that litter a chest coated with thick hair. At this moment he looks more like Thor the blacksmith and less like Thorin, son of Durin, than he has since this journey started. It's oddly comforting and a sign that not everything about their time in Bree had been an act. "I returned early, by chance I had heard of an orc pack in the area while in a small Mannish town and it made me fear, correctly it seems, that we had been discovered, or soon would be. When I arrived, the village was in flames. Our friends and neighbours were dead, though they had taken most of the orcs with them and the few that remained were quickly dispatched. I feel no shame in admitting my terror, madtubirzul, as I hurried to our home. In truth I feared the worst. The house was already burning when I reached it, and your mother," he pauses and takes a deep breath. It makes Fíli realise why Thorin has never truly spoken of her. His grief is as raw now as it was then. "Your mother had already fallen, curled around your brother, shielding him from Azog's notice and the flames that consumed the building even as she lay dying. You were also near your mother, but it was your father I saw first as he desperately tried to keep Azog from you. He told me to take you both and protect you with my life. Had he not asked it then I suspect we would all have died that day. Your father was never the most gifted of warriors, but that day he was greater than even the best of us."
"You left him to die," Fíli breathes, ignoring the tears he can feel on his cheeks.
"I followed his wishes. I wanted to stay, just as I wanted to track Azog down and carve your parent's lives from his flesh, but with both of them dead you had no one else to care for you and the journey to Khazad-dûm was too long for such young dwarflings. Even the journey to Bree was longer than I really wished to attempt. More than once I feared either you or Kíli would perish before we got there. I would have spared you all of this, if I could. I would have died a thousand times if I thought it would keep Víli and Dís safe to raise you. If you believe nothing else, believe that."
Fíli thought he had cried his tears for his parents long ago. He had never truly known them and how can he mourn that which he does not know? Except there is some memory, locked away by a terrified child, of fire and a cruel laugh and a pained scream. A voice shouting, or begging, and so much fear. It's jumbled, he couldn't say what is real and what is the result of childish nightmares, but there is a truth there and he had a little over five years with his parents. Whether he has forgotten as a result of his age or deliberately locked it away he knows not and cares even less. There is grief, fresh and yet so old, and he leans into his uncle who welcomes him into a familiar embrace. For just tonight Fíli doesn't care that this is a sign of weakness or what the others might think of it. For just tonight he allows himself to be overwhelmed by it all and Thorin, by some miracle, understands. Fíli only hopes that somewhere in Mahal's halls his parents know that he has avenged them and are proud.
A.N: So, I may be about to slow down in the writing department. The chromebook I use during the day has just pitched the most epic of hissy fits which is only going to make life more awkward for a while. Still, I have up to chapter 38 of this ready to go so I won't fall behind on this one too badly. I hope
