Short Rest's Over

Soft shaking would definitely not be enough.

Natalie had already stayed over at her best friend's place dozens, if not hundreds of times, therefore knew her sleep behaviour in and out. For instance, she knew that Sandra would only snore when she'd got a runny nose, which, strangely enough, happened to be the case quite often to always, or that if one woke her in the middle of the night and even had a conversation with her, she wouldn't remember the next morning, not in the slightest. And another Sandra's-sleep-fun-facts was that she was incredibly hard to wake, all the more if she'd been awake for so long like last night.

So Natalie, who'd gotten up already an hour ago, bent down to her companion now, watched her slumbering peacefully with a smile for one more moment and then covered both her nose and mouth with her hands. Suddenly, Sandra gave a light jerk, clumsily waving her arms, as she was struggling for air, whereupon Natalie removed her hands once again.

"Wake up.", she whispered in a soft tone, while her friend slowly lifted her lids. "We gotta go soon."

Bleary-eyed she looked at the smaller one. Question upon question rushed through her mind - What time was it? Why did they have to go already? Where could she do her morning business? - but at the moment she was still so tired, she wasn't able to utter a single one of them.

As soon as Natalie saw her counterpart's nod, she stood up and, again, attended to packing. Since she had expected her friend to forget about several items they had left here - not like her, Sandra was absolutely no early-morning person - she had collected her things at first, filling her backpack with it. Now she came to her own, which spread all across the bedroom that had been allocated to them, but were still easy to find due to Natalie's good memory. At home she'd constantly had to explain to her mother that she couldn't tidy her room, since she had her own system within that chaos and she wouldn't be able to find anything if nothing was in its usual place, but, as is so often the case, she didn't find understanding with that. All the more comfortable she'd felt here with the dwarves, who didn't give a damn about what she left where. However, they had to pursue their plan, had to go.

When Sandra gave her a nod, signifying to be ready for leaving, she handed the backpack to her friend, slipped into the diagonal belts of her own and quietly opened the door. Anxious for not making a sound while walking, Natalie led the two of them through this maze of corridors - Sandra was happy to have someone, who remembered ways perfectly after one inspection only, because without she would've been stranded in this damn labyrinth - to this vast hall at Erebor's entrance, through which they could see the hazy blue sky that wasn't touched by any sunlight yet.

"It's not even daytime!", Sandra complained croaking, especially as these were her first words of this morning. "Why are we leaving already?"

"Because I don't want to have to tell the dwarves where we're going exactly. You know why."

Yes, she did. She had taken care to not mention that the elvish woodland realm was their place of destination to Dwalin and the others as well.

"Besides...", Natalie continued in an embarrassed tone. "... it'd be totally awkward to see them now after how I behaved yesterday..."

The taller one giggled. "Oh yes, you were sooo drunk! Gotta say, though, that it actually wasn't too different from your usual behaviour."

Her friend pressed her lips together in an attempt to not grin, stubbornly staring straight ahead.

"But I can understand that you don't want to face Bofur after what you two did under the table." Sandra poked her companion into the side, smiling widely, letting her dark brows jump.

The small woman just took a deep breath, avoiding eye contact with the other one. "Weeee just made out a bit, that's all!"

"Yeah, yeah, sure."

Now, though, she did give her a look, a look of complete horror. "No, no, absolutely NO, don't give me that 'Yeah, yeah'-crap, you got that?!"

Sandra laughed. "Sorry, couldn't resist."

For one more moment, Natalie's eyes, narrowed to slits, kept fixing on Sandra's, before the brown-haired one turned forward again with her head held high. "Anyway, I would like to have reached the forest boundary at about noon. There we can have a really fat lunch at first, before heading for the Elvenking." Quickly she took out a piece of parchment, shortly inspected the lines on it and pocketed it again. "I just hope this map is at least halfway up to date. I mean, the archive there's certainly seen better days..."

Sandra frowned. "Where do you have this map from? I thought Balin didn't give you any yesterday."

"He didn't. I got this right after getting up today."

"You snitched it, right?"

"It's borrowed. But don't worry, I left a thank you note, in which I also wrote that Balin's so cute, I'd like to squeeze him into a gunnysack, so that he can't escape my hugs."

"A classic 'Natalie'." She smirked. "By the way, I'm surprised you were able to get up that early and think of all of that. Aren't you unwell from yesterday?"

Natalie let a laugh come out of her throat, which sounded nothing like mirth but despair. "Oh, I am completely wasted! I'm simply trying to suppress it, so that we can proceed. But, actually, EVERY DAMN MOVE hurts, my throat aches, my head aches, my whole body is half-dead, thanks for asking. You know how I feel? Like back then, after this feast where we were dancing like crazy, remember?"

"Oh, yes, awful!" Her words were compassionate, though, her voice and her face were not, rather seemed amused, so that Natalie gave her one last faked angry look. "Sorry, but you've been so stupid to drink that many beers and now let me have a fun with it!"

Stepping through this vast hole called gate, the fresh air came towards them instantly, let the skin on their faces tingle in a pleasant way.

"If I wasn't that dead, I'd certainly deliver a really epic speech about our final departure into the unknown now." The two friends exchanged a look, then Natalie sighed and, murmuring the words "Oh, screw it, let's just go...", marched off.