A/N: Izrukh- The Longing

Sun wrinkles ringed her eyes in the morning light. She blinked and woke suddenly seeing it was past dawn, before the touch of a coarse beard on her cheek startled her fully and she sprung nearly to her feet in one harsh movement. They had lain there, on the edge of the camp, bedrolls pushed together, her mantle draped over both of their bodies, and they were close. She thought it had been a dream, just like all the others.

"Dunininh?" Thorin rolled over sleepily. "They cannot see us like this!" she gasped, scrambling up all her blankets and cloak. He reached and set his hand over hers firmly. "Meisar…" "My king, last night…" she interjected in a half-gasp. The very thought of it was staining the already ruddy cheeks a little more crimson in color. Her skin began to tighten around the neck and jaw-line, prickly with heat.

"Last night I was glad for your company, Meisar." Laying on his back there he looked almost innocent, peaceful. And though it warmed her, it frightened her too. Had grief softened his heart, or driven him mad, she did not know. She searched his face for a bloom of regret, for confusion, for a dark prickle of lust. She found his eyes unreadable though, always two states, melancholy pools of royal blue or harsh altogether, like holes punched in a winter's lake. But there was something deeper now that she could see clear as day, something he was trying to tell her with his eyes as if such things were foreign to his tongue. There were no words, anyway, none more than had already been said, or could be, before they dwarves would be stirring.

"We must wake now." She wanted to be in his arms but they couldn't remain, not now. Mayhap not ever again. The door had been opened and her instinct told her to slam it shut again. She glanced about skittishly for Dwalin, imagining him to be near and if he saw what then?

She was no longer made of such sturdy stuff, it seemed. "We must wake. The road is long," she repeated in a whisper. Still she took her jerkin, her mantle, and right up to the undyed wool travelling cloak she so detested for the itch and heaviness of it, and layered them all on like armor. "We must wake. We must wake…"

.

Meisar tended the morning tasks with a set determination to put the previous night out of her memory. Thorin his name still thumped in her head, the taste of his kiss lingering in her mouth. As if he were cut from the marble, he was hard yet exquisite to her, and not in the way that important and powerful folk were charming or charismatic. Thorin Oakenshield was none of these, and yet…

Perhaps it was a more animal attraction after all, she thought then, ashamed of herself. Primal and inexplicable. Thorin gave off a commanding presence in his coat of furs and unassuming journeyman's attire, though clad in rings and a belt of silver and mithril there seemed some stubborn and quiet dignity about him. A king surely, and one that his people eagerly awaited and proudly bent their knee to, but a king who for the time lodged 'round the fires and sopped up the earth in his skin at night with the rest of them.

He had kissed her. None had ever done that before.

There then, Thorin was at the morning-fire with Dwalin, Donbur, Balin, and Bofur, for the moment finishing off bread and warmed over stew. He studied her with a strange reverence, brow furrowed against the sun straining to catch her eye in the morning light. Meisar bowed her head lightly at a distance, studying him, every facet of his being. How he had a shorter beard than most dwarves, and a nose like the prow of a warship. And magnificently sad blue eyes that caught hers just for a moment.

A king was a king, and she was… she knew not what she was. An orphan. A refugee. A nobody. Thorin himself was two of these things. Perhaps he saw in her what he saw in himself.

.

The moved early. For the greater part of the day, none of the dwarves seemed to sense a pattern out of the ordinary, and their path settled. The road was clear and unhindered, the sky pristine. So did the sun come after the storm and the darkness, indeed, indeed. She did not treat with Thorin that night or the next except at meals, and there was an uncanny silence between them. Was he thinking about that night? They had exchanged glances, supping on goat jerky and cheese rolls, and she knew he was. Another's desire was a rare and mysterious thing to her, as foreign as the un-traveled lands of Mordor or the Northern Wastes. Men had tried to have their way with her, in villages and roadside inns over the years. It was lewd and primal and she should have understood its nature, but it only frightened her then, and she had guarded the honor of her body from them most ardently. The way men looked at her, whispered about her. Even the rare elf seemed fascinated to see her alone. If elves were cold and distant, men were not. Their heat was a sweaty, sticky one that made her skin feel dirty. She was so small and mysterious. Oh what would it be like to have a woman like that? A dwarf. Their male-folk give them no satisfaction, men would whisper. They prefer cold metal to a woman's warmth. How heart-sick she must be, a woman and a dwarf alone.

.

When they had gone to water their animals, Minty the Second and Jenny were rubbing flanks as they drank, as if an unseen hand of the greater universe had reached itself down and made it so. Had Emli, long married and well-wizened to such things, not said that herself? The Creator shall make it known and it will be as clear as day. They were stationed stiffly at the heads of their ponies, facing each other, the blue of his eyes threatening to drown her. It seemed, for the moment, all of the other dwarves had been shuttled out of their small temporary universe. A world that was a straight line and it led into his eyes…

The meeting of their eyes went on for a long moment, shutting out the other dwarves. If only they could see how she was drowning and he was burning. Fire and ice eliminating each other, or the same, consuming each other whole, making something anew from their joining.

(A Great Flood)

.

She watched him braid his hair that night. At a safe distance she lowered but clandestinely tilted her head, looking all too busy fixing Freyda's ax handle for her while her fingers were still swelled. The dwarves around them were readying for bed and paid neither of them much mind.

He took out the temple plaits and the silver-and-sapphire beads that clasped them, always glinting nobly at his shoulders. He put them into a small bowl that seemed especially for that purpose, a wide and a smaller-toothed comb laid out before him along with it. He undid another plait that had been lost on her, in the thick mane of hair that trailed down over his shoulders. It was clasped with a large gold ring. She watched him wince with the larger comb and then the smaller against the snarls left by the day's travels to that particular plait. He lifted a handful that seemed a bramble's nest in one hand and grunted as he untangled it one hair at a time it would seem. Never tearing it and raking through it the way she did her own. To see him treat his person with such reverence warmed her in ways she had never known. Perhaps it was the thickness of his fingers and how delicate they were in the re-doing of the temple plaits. He braided them slowly but efficiently, with knowing hands. He didn't make use of a mirror.

If only he could have treated his own heart with such reverence. It made her sad when he had finished.

She turned at the sound of Gimli issuing a feeble grunting protest, which his mother quickly snuffed. Emli was seated daintily on a rock with Gimli seated slumping and sour-faced before her, his hair across her lap being combed. She put it in one plait, stopping every third of the way down to clasp it in rings of burnished gold. If she saw that the clasps were unevenly spaced when she finished, she took her son by the scruff of his neck, proud and ornery as the lad was in protest, and took the whole braid out and started again.

In contrast there was the softer sound of Brynja and Bofur, her wrapping the boar-tooth-and-twine in a tiny pouch after he'd combed out her undone hair and she his, and they climbed into their wagon for the night. It would be rocking on its wheels soon enough and Urdlaug, Emli and probably Dori (the old fusspot) with them would be throwing stones at its sides to hush them, grousing about the impropriety of it all. Some things were made to be between two and two alone after all, if that was the old-fangled but ever steady code of conduct amongst dwarves. (This flock was something else to be reckoned with in this case).

She had not for a moment stood to stretch her weary limbs than Thorin entered her space and muttered to her a quiet goodnight in passing. He stopped though, closer than he had been since that night, and his lips moved but again made no sound. She could see Balin and Dwalin looking between them at a distance and it was of no care to her, not anymore. Thorin's eyes seemed fixed and distant the longer he lingered, wordless and tense, in her midst, and all she longed to do was pull his arm in hers, comfort him, take all the cruel things in his head away, whatever they were this night, or any night before. Take up his comb and braid his hair for him. Her fingertips tingled at the very notion, that she might someday do for him in that manner as none had done for her, and none for him in that way before, mayhap. (A Firebeard lass, alas, alas).

.

Eda checked her bruised ribs before bed, in the warm light of her wagon, cluttered as it was with her potions in their little bottles and clusters of herbs and roots. A harsh tumble on the river-rocks had given her a lingering ache. Soft nurturing hands on her skin squeezing here and there to check for fractures, internal bleeding, did their work carefully. Eda had given her a tingly, medicine-y paste to rub onto her chest and breathe in to avoid a fever and the filling of the lungs. "Should heal up in a few days," the medicine woman assured gently, wrapping her midsection below the heavy sheaves of her bosom. The sensitive ends of her there had curled into harsh points against the night air, the way they had done that night inside her tunic, the familiar weakening sensation of it taking hold and she willed the flush and prickling of her skin to lay low in Eda's presence. Never had she wanted to be out of the healer's sight so quickly, imagining she could tell. Read in her body that newness. Eda had never married and had grown old a maid by now; what would she know? She had delivered babes alas; a dwarrowdam's body would be no mystery to an old medicine-woman. Meisar slumped a bit, keeping her wits on the outside anyway. She signed, resigning herself to a hawkish self-consciousness. It certainly couldn't hurt.

"No more crossing rivers and blowing bridges," chuckled Eda kindly at last. "No more orcs," she added, a bit of lightheartedness shining through that Eda seemed to take a notice of. "Between you and the king we are in good hands. Good hands." "Yes, yes we are." She pulled back on her tunic and the heavy leather vest, and wrapped herself tight in her mantle and its fur, and stepped out into the night air to make a final circle of the perimeter with her dogs.

Hurmul. The word had come back at her but it was different now. To protect him. To treat his heart with the reverence he seemed unable to. And they would all be in good hands then, not the least herself. Thorin had already drifted off, flanked in bedrolls by Dwalin and Balin. He slept alone some nights; others, more often than not it seemed, the overbearing brothers kept close to him. And why shouldn't they? They had lost him once, maybe more.

If only he would come to her again. Her own dwarvish covetousness had risen in her, against her fear of his purpose. If Dwalin, and now Balin too it would seem, were onto her, perhaps they saw it in her, and would close ranks, aggressively if necessary, around their king. The way they could read him, one supposed, would make it so and understandable. (Balin had always been kind to her though). Thorin's primal purpose and desires had been laid bare for them to see in all its rawness, for gold, for glory, for vengeance, and now, for all the ghosts.

He had turned to her in the night and sought what he couldn't from them alas, whether in a moment of weakness or no, and she wanted him back. To come to her again and seek her comfort, and take her in his arms and kiss her. Clasp her hands in his hair and hers in his and feel his beard slip against her tongue in their clumsy ministrations, clumsy but raw, and raw was pure after all.