A/N:

LABTHITH- Adoration That is Fresh and New

"My, what a felicitous meal you have prepared for us!" Balin patted his stomach and carefully excised the the crumbs from his beard.

"But Mister Balin, we haven't even had the meat yet!" exclaimed Gyda with a fruity laugh. Cheese fritters were Gyda's specialty, Freyda had explained, the appetizer to a proper supper. The braised rump roast was Freyda's own recipe, and never having been much for cooking, seemed quite pleased to present her work to the two dwarven brothers at her table.

Balin looked up agreeably at the two dwarrowdams. "Of all the dwarves you could have into your stead this night, you have chosen us, and to that, I am honored," gushed Balin, cutting the first steaming slice of the roast.

"Well, we thought the two of you would be lonely without Thorin, seeing as he is… occupied," Gyda said.

"Lonely? But for my brother's company? Oh no," laughed Balin. "He is company enough for an old dwarf, I do say. But he is not much of a cook."

"Nor is Freyda for that matter. But I've taught her well."

"I'm fine with iron but ye can't very well nosh at that," shrugged Freyda. Gyda nudged her and swiped a quick graze of her eyes over Dwalin, trying to be innocuous but not succeeding entirely; Balin smiled under his beard at the younger dwarrowdam. "Cooking," Gyda expostulated, "I have told Freyda many a time is a practical skill. And an endearing one. To any… guests a lass might have."

Dwalin eyed Freyda briefly as she brought the second round of meat, game hen, from the braziers they were cooking over, swiped off her apron and joined Dwalin and Balin at the table. A white and green embroidered tunic accompanied her favorite skirt, the velvet one, blue, with geometric embroidered panels down the center. No armor this night, not even in her hair. The loose blond braid hung messily down her back, free of its spikes and studs. Dwalin eyed her shape, feminine but wickedly strong still. She lifted the heavy skewer of game hens without so much as a sigh of exertion.

"Do you think he's happy, Thorin?" Gyda queried quietly. She refilled Dwalin's cup with ale across the table.

Balin smiled. "Aye, I think he is. Very happy. And most pleased, I think, to have such a bride as Meisar. Chosen not for him, but by him, and in the darkest of times no less. One needs such comforts, even a king."

"Marriage is a good thing for a dwarf, if he is meant for it," Freyda hastened to add, quietly leaning over Dwalin to pour him another ale, dish another slice of meat onto his plate. "It gives one something… better to be livin' for, than just the next fight, the next pretty jewel to come out of the earth. Something that loves ye in return as much."

Dwalin inhaled clandestinely next to her. She was so close he could smell the simmer of the meat on her clothing, the light soap on her hands. "Yes," Freyda went on. "Marriage is a good thing. Especially for him. The hardest types are the ones who need the love more than the lot of 'em." She nudged the full plate of molasses biscuits quietly between Balin and Dwalin, her eyes in wait.

Balin nudged Dwalin quietly but his brother was stiff and ponderous beside him, picking a string of fat out of his teeth with his pinky finger. He glanced Freyda's smile, small, almost charmed, into her cup of ale. At the wedding she had drank merrily, holding her own against any dwarf, and danced to the fiddles and drums, spinning 'round and 'round arm in arm with Gyda, pink-faced drunk herself. And he had not the courage to ask her then. He took a molasses biscuit and ate it in one sloppy bite.

She had put her mouth on his and teased his moustache with her tongue, but he could not even ask her to dance.

Dwalin briefly let his thoughts drift back to the wedding; the joy and the hunger in Thorin's eyes that he had never seen quite so acutely, or so pure in its form then. Seated at the high table beside him there he had watched Freyda slug ale after ale, her laughter like a great roll of thunder the more she drank. How she twisted her foam green cape around and spun when she danced, all of her long pale hair loose and twisting with her, just the way Thorin's hand was wringing around, clinging into his bride's beside him. She had the look of a dwarrowdam with enough on her mind, wholly nervous even, but what bride wouldn't be? If only he had asked her then, in her joy, the bonny smithy.

Freyda glanced back at him from the dish-tub though, and her eyes were still smiling.

"Compliments to your father, Freyda, for allowing us into your home this evening, though I have not seen him afoot," Balin cleared his throat and smiled kindly at the two dwarrowdams over at the dish-tub, Gyda with her gawky grin.

"He is out for the evening, Balin. And besides, it is my home too. I may invite whom I please," responded Freyda.

Gyda left the table to help Freyda with the washing. When the two had finished with the supper dishes they commiserated silently out of the eyes of Dwalin and Balin and reached for their cloaks, hanging on hooks over the partition between the dining and kitchen sections.

"Where ye off to?" Dwalin inquired.

Freyda fastened her cloak with nonchalant half-smile. "Gyda and I are keen to take a wee stroll down onto the lower levels, watch the fights down at the pits."

"The pits!" Dwalin rapidly backed his seat away from the table and stood at attention.

"We go often," said Gyda, as if it were nothing at all.

"I knew it. I knew The Pits would be the first space reclaimed should this mountain ever come back to our custody. Good gracious…" Balin shook his head. The white-haired dwarf looked quickly between Freyda and Gyda and back at Dwalin, the hairs on the back of his brother's neck still stiff.

"Nay, I say," Dwalin finally pronounced. "Not a place for two upstanding lasses to be. Never know what could happen to ye there."

"Says who?" Gyda protested, hands on her hips. "Of course we will go to the pits this evening. We've already placed our bets!"

"Yer bets?" repeated Dwalin with disbelief.

"Aye, got me money on a fine brawler. There's a match tonight. Prize fight, in honor of the wedding festivities," Freyda informed him, her eyes sparkling again something fierce.

"Just as they were in the days of old. Indeed, indeed," Balin expressed, a tone that was supposed to be lamenting but was edged in some amusement. He remembered. The days of old seemed only yesterday. He could almost smell the sweat and the spilled mead.

Freyda fluffed her beard in the mirror by the door, never letting her eye wander back to Dwalin, who was staring at the back of her head with some intensity. "The one I've put me bet on is dear to me beyond measure I should have ye know, and I shall not be ordered about."

"A fighter? Dear to ye?" Dwalin repeated, thick eyebrows wiggling impetuously.

"Aye. Much beloved of me."

"Not a place for young ladies at all, not alone anyway," Balin concluded finally, gathering a sense of deflation in Dwalin's stance. He drew his own cloak and handed Dwalin his. "Come then," hastened the old dwarf. "Let us escort you if you wish to visit that uncouth haven." Balin quickly took Gyda's arm on his own, leaving Freyda to wait for Dwalin to fumble his cloak on.

"Well…" Dwalin offered quietly, his arm raised toward Freyda at last, begging her take it. "A mighty loutish place yer strollin' route, but 'spose I am an honorable dwarf, and would escort a lass, honorably."

"Aye," the dwarrowdam smiled, satisfied. She rested hand on Dwalin's forearm, watching the hairs stand up, the tautening of his sinews beneath the scarred skin. "I would like that."

.

Thorin was still asleep when Meisar woke around the middle of the morning. Surrounded by those who have lost so much, haunted in their dreams each night by it; to watch him sleep was a so peaceable a thing she would have watched him for the whole of the day and the night. To watch though felt inadequate to the sudden impatience in her fingers, her lips, to touch. To absorb every element of his essence into her and meld with him, again and again. She arched upward and leaned forward to kiss the sleeping lips of her husband. Lightly parted in their rest he grasped for her with his slim mouth entirely without waking.

She ran the tips of her fingers over his clavicle, up the side of his neck and traced the bristled seam of his jaw. The exhalation of serene breath from his nose tickled her face with its warmth. Still he slept. Hooded eyes took note of all of his features, his proud jawline, the prominent nose with its weirdly elegant shape for his dwarven heritage, heavy brow in his rest for the first time un-creased by worry. She nuzzled his neck, his beard, kissed the spot where his jaw met the underside of his chin and the hollow at the base of his throat, the tip of her nose following his sternum in a line of indulgent kisses. She palmed his ribcage, the muscled flank, sinking into his chest with her weight.

He started awake and seemed to swiftly spring up his head from the pillow. She eased him down gently to lay against the pillow, humming a gentle tuneless assurance toward him, thinking him sprung in some panic or another. He relaxed instantly to see it was only her, head dipped downward looking upon him, her hair hanging in a veil to one side of his head. "Good day to you, my husband," she hummed, stroking her thumb across his bottom lip. "Did you sleep well?"

"I can only sleep so well if I know you are beside me." Thorin swung his legs to the side of the bed and stood, trailing the sheet behind him onto the floor.

"You would leave me here alone?" she purred.

"But to answer a natural calling, indeed," he chuckled. She relented with an amused grin, watched the muscles in his bottom ripple against the firelight as he strode naked across the room to the bath chamber. Waiting for him to complete his urge and return felt like an eternity. Smiling, she stretched her limbs in bed, her hair laid around her, hooded eyes peeking out at him from under their sleepy lids when he re-emerged.

"Tell me I am the only one who will ever behold you like this," he breathed, half-growled.

She brushed the back of a hand over her breast, the nipple turning dusky. "You have the eyes of a dragon when you look at me like that, Thorin."

"I see something that I desire, and I hunger for it. I burn for it. I fear I may never desist in that habit." He smiled self-deprecatingly, the fire in his gaze mellowing but for a moment's time. "I do not share my treasure."

"But my love... the bottom-most cellar is empty of its hoard." The hard metallic eyes were suddenly sultry, as if that wanting gaze had come naturally to her all of this time. He leaned forward and pressed his palms flat over the bed, raising a knee quietly onto it to return to her side.

"That," he hauled himself eagerly back under the blanket beside her, "was merely gold." Intimacy that had once been innocent, or at least chaste in its immediacy, was wholly new in its marital form. His bed-warmed musculature relaxing beneath his skin when she touched. His thigh brushed against the back of her own, corded muscles taut beneath her stroking hand that drew him closer.

"Might I have you again, mizimel?"

She agreed huskily to his request. Rolling off from where he had laid atop her, he turned her so her back pressed flush to his chest. The pelt of hair on his chest was a wonderful feeling against her bare skin. When he held her in the spooned position, she could feel the friction of it on her spine. A separate friction entirely seemed to press at her lower.

"Thorin?"

Thorin kissed down her neck reassuringly at the confused waver of her voice, her body stiff, uncertain of what to do with itself. "There is another way... they say. Many ways. But this is... more pleasing for the female the first few times. Might we try?"

"They say? Who says?" She stroked the hair on his forearm that was holding her steady to him, against the grain. All of the hairs stood and made her grin. He had brought about this playfulness in her, this once-grim king.

He turned her head back toward his, callused thumb on her cheek moving back and forth, bumping her nose to the tip of his. He kissed the little scar between her eyes. "Bofur's lips never stopped moving about the matter after he was wed," Thorin shrugged into her. "There is nothing he will not share with a crowd. Fortunately I had no choice but to pay attention."

"Oh Bofur. Always a helpful soul, isn't he?" She remembered the look of bliss upon Brynja's face in the forest, Bofur on his side lying behind her, the frenzied oscillation of her hips into him, and she let hers then bump close to Thorin's and adjust, blindly as ever. His hand coming to grasp at her hip guided, with almost as much uncertainty. Meisar bent her knee and lifted it toward her chest as if compelled by some natural force to do so, with the sensation of his searching maleness. He parted one globe apart from the other to seek her with himself, touched the slick exposed channel with the tip of it and groaned. She was so very small and he was so thick and large, and yet when he breached the slender opening, found her heat had left her malleable. He swelled again touching the soft, warm wetness between her thighs.

"You shall tire of me at this rate," Meisar sighed, low and half-jesting.

"A dwarf never tires of his one," Thorin insisted in turn. The dwarf's thick, muscled thigh draped itself possessively over her own from behind, and she could feel then the heavy sac brush at her over the spot between her openings. The engorged lips widening the heated rift between them for the sensation, he found that wonderful cleft, and slowly eased himself between those plump, wanting lips. "How is that, athune?"

"I... I like it." His hand fumbling at first from her torso drew downward from behind and caressed the base of her stomach in a little arch that made her shiver from the tips of her fingers down to the coil of heat burning just below his touch.

"Do you want me all the way in?"

"Yes!" she insisted, breathily, a thin keening wail that send another rush of blood to his extremity, with her pumpkin bottom pressed into his belly and the hard heat of his manhood flinching across her entrance.

She reached behind and dragged blunt fingernails up and down the roped muscles of his thighs, strong limbs that she made to quiver with need. She navigated the shape of him upward, nails becoming at once a single playful, if fumbling, fingertip across the outer edge of his sac. He turned her head swiftly to kiss her with the surprising rush of stimulation that electrified every nerve in his body. His heavy heat twitching re-entered in a long ardent thrust, his mouth still plastered to hers, deepening strokes filled her once and then again. A palm on her forehead raked her back, and on the outer rim of her ear she felt his beard and then his mouth, following it with his tongue from peak to lobe and taking the latter to play with between his teeth, giving it a small bite with every thrust. She felt as if she would burst from the fullness and her own want of his closeness. To feel his strong body behind hers thrusting in and out, her throat in his hand then again, cradled all too delicately for the eagerness with which he was plundering at her depths. His thumb at the underside of her jawline made molding strokes like tiny massages.

She cried out into the fur-lined pillow as the swollen length convulsed and send the shockwave through his hips, and spilled. The subsequent heat was a different heat than it had been the first time; on the night of their wedding it had been the most unfamiliar sensation of all. Now, the way it clung and settled to her inner walls made her feel alive inside, virile and longed-for, and she wanted to possess every drop of him within herself. He leaned and collapsed over her, pressing her into the pillows on her stomach, the press of his weight wholly welcomed by her. He was warm and his skin lightly misted in a fragrant perspiration that was not at all unpleasant to that sense.

When he had recovered himself, she rolled heavily onto her back with him and stared at the carven ceiling above their bed, an arched line of runes. "What does that say?"

"A platitude, composed for my grandmother, by my grandfather."

"Can you read it?" She squinted her eyes at it uselessly.

"It says 'herein beats the heart of the mountain, not a cold hard stone but a beloved queen.'" Thorin rolled over to face her. "My grandmother lived for only a year after the finding of the Arkenstone. When it was called the King's Jewel, my grandfather had these runes written above their bed, to remind her that there was only one heart of the mountain. She didn't live long enough to see it possess him. I do not pity her for that."

Hovering at his sternum, she traced the part of his ribs, the slope and curve of his bones beneath the sinew, and the quickening heart. "I can feel your heart," she grinned. "It beats like a hummingbird's wings, my blessing." She studied the small inked rune on the right-side of his chest, so far deftly concealed by the thick layer of hair on his chest.

"And what does this mean?" she circled it with her forefinger.

"A mark of a warrior's first fight. I was younger than Master Gimli when my father and I set after a troop of orcs that had come near to Dale. We led a contingent of dwarves and men and slaughtered them before they reached the gates of the city, no more than a skirmish really. But Fundin put the mark on me that night. Dwalin and I together received ours. I nearly passed out from the pain, and Dwalin had tears rolling out of his eyes but his face never flinched, not once. It is done with a sharpened bone and an ink from a sea-beast that burns like fire."

"Sounds dreadful, but my husband is courageous," she sighed, kissed the inked section over the coarse hair and then his grinning, wistful lips. "Skirmish or war, you have seen the bloodiest of all things. And I pray now you shall see not another. It is too much sorrow for one life." Meisar kissed the rune in a silent prayer, and laid her head on him there again. She stopped herself just short of wondering aloud whether two other young dwarves had earned their marks for some skirmish or another (orcs in the Blue Mountains were rare but not unheard of entirely). Before Mahal took them back into his Halls. She thought better of it though, and twisted onto her side toward Thorin, bidding him do the same and face her. She kissed his mouth gently, wrapping her arms around him, touching his beard with her fingertips, running the opposite hand through his hair.

"You may adorn these chambers better to your liking," he told her quietly.

"I need for little, husband. Anyway, I'm not much a decorator. Cozy hovels and tawdry roadside inns are more familiar to me than stone."

"This is our home now, Meisar. Our own kingdom. And you are a queen, my queen. Whatever you desire, you may have."

She rolled, contemplatively, to stretch her aching limbs. "I desire to see our people prosperous again and at peace, to be with you until I am stone again. That is all."

"If you desire a new dress once in awhile, or a string of jewels, you may ask though," he nuzzled her with a charmed smile. She would always be his Meisar, his dunininh, the shabby redhead and her dogs that had captured his heart.

She sighed, her hot breath pluming into his skin, relaxing every muscle in his body for her closeness. "When this respite of ours ends, there will be much to attend to. A whole kingdom. Many duties. How shall I be sure of all of them?" Thorin mused quietly.

"We will undertake it together," Meisar avowed, drawing out and kissing the hand that was ponderously clenching and un-clenching at his side beneath the blanket.

"I am quite loath to leave this bed though," he murmured happily into her. The weight of him pressed her comfortably into the warmth and softness of the pillows and the stuffed mattress beneath the twisted bedclothes around them.

"A king," she asserted quietly. "Oakenshield. King of Carven Stone. Son of Thrain son of Thror. Yes, all of those things you are. But here, you are who you are in true, and there is no mask to wear, and your duty is quite clear I think."

"And who is that dwarf?" he asked with a slow, languid chuckle.

"Thorin. My Thorin. My heart."

"And my duty?"

She rolled quietly onto her back and snaked both hands around his hips, pulling him down on top of her. "I think you know what it is."