Because this was what I was expecting to happen at the end of Battle of the Five Armies, to parallel to Fellowship of the Ring if not the scenes they decided not to include in the beginning of An Unexpected Journey.

Remord

~ n., a touch of remorse; v., to remember with regret ~

Chapter 3: Smoke

"Bilbo stood still and watched— he loved smoke-rings— and then he blushed to think how proud he had been yesterday morning of the smoke-rings he had sent up the wind over The Hill." – page sixteen

Gandalf sat down heavily beside him, but Bilbo was too wrapped up in his own emotions to react to the new presence beside him. Grubby fingers wrapped tightly around his knees as he kept his eyes fixed firmly on his woolly feet and the cold, hard stone beneath them.

The Battle was over. He had come out of it alive. Most of the company had, in fact. They were lucky. But not... not all of them.

And the hobbit was trying hard not to think of Thorin's final words to him. Or the hole through Kili's chest. Or the way Fili's body lay broken nearly beyond recognition.

For once he began thinking about such things, he knew that he would not be able to stop the tears from welling up in his tired, aching heart. Even if he was far from the only one grieving and would not be allowed by the healers to do what little a hobbit could to clear the area, he still felt too small and useless already without weeping while others worked.

Blinking, Bilbo realized that there was an odd rasping noise making its way past the murky depths of his brain. Gandalf had produced a long stemmed pipe from somewhere and was now cleaning it out with a scrape scrape scrape.

The hobbit sat with rounded shoulders that eventually straightened as he turned toward the wizard. He had never known a pipe to be so thoroughly in need of a cleaning as this one seemed to be, but long fingers kept moving around the bowl, rounding it until every speck of debris had been cleaned out.

Bilbo watched as Gandalf then reached for a pouch hidden within the folds of his dirty grey robe and opened it up to reveal a store of tobacco that, he realized with a pang, came from the Shire. Gandalf took fingerful after fingerful of the dried leaves and stuffed them methodically into the bottom of his bowl, taking time to press it down with a crunch after each pass. When it had been prepared, he reached for a tinderbox from inside his cloak.

For a moment, Bilbo wondered why a wizard would need to use one when he could simply magic a small flame into being, but he was surprisingly comforted by the routine he knew so well after performing it himself a hundred times.

Something inside him melted a little as Gandalf lit his pipe and puffed until smoke began to wreath around them. Bilbo closed his eyes for a minute and when he opened them again, the world beyond their little shelf of stone had become hazy, shrouded in the aromatic mist. And, even while he curled forward to wrap his arms around himself in an effort to dispel the sense of uselessness, he couldn't find it in himself to be sorry for it. Not when it made him feel just a little bit less lost and unbalanced in such a wide world.

Gandalf's eyes slid over to the little hobbit sitting next to him and he hummed at what he saw. Bilbo didn't look up at the noise, but he did lift his head when Gandalf blew the second smoke ring past his nose.

His eyes fixed on the white circle as it floated past him. Then the next one, that hovered over his feet until it finally fell apart. He watched silently as the wizard continued puffing at his pipe and, when a double ring came next, he softly blew at it until it merged and expanded and turned green before vanishing.

He smiled, then.

And the wizard did too, as he gently blew enough to fill the sails of the ship he sent streaming away into the darkening sky above their heads.