A/N: Hello naughty children it's angst time. Sherlock transcripts taken from a livejournal that I can't link to because .

Bilbo found Thorin standing on a shadowed ledge overlooking the treasure hoard. It was still in the process of being sorted and counted and stowed away and so the whole thing was under guard every second of every day, but Laketown and Thranduil's wereguilds had been paid. They were all at peace.

For now.

The hobbit came up next to Thorin, and then saw what had caught and kept the dwarf's attention. Smaug was stretched out on the gold, completely asleep, and the way he knew that was that Bain, Sigrid, and Tilda were walking around on top of him under the watchful eye of their father. There were a number of other children, human and dwarf, sliding down his stretched-out wing and giggling all the while, unaware of the hobbit and dwarf king watching them.

Bilbo glanced at the dwarf, then looked back to his dragon. In more than a few ways, they were a lot alike, so he knew that all he had to do was wait.

"Every time I look at him, I see the fall of Erebor," Thorin murmured, "Dale destroyed and burning… the gate breaking and dragonfire, my men dying around me, cooked inside their armor… My people starving and wandering in the wilderness…" His nose wrinkled, lips curling and eyes sparking. "Dragonfire and ruin… Laketown burning…

"But then I remember the wall of flame protecting the ruins of Dale, the wereworm tunnels filled with fire… The draught from his wings and Azog being knocked free… The roar that made the world shake, and Fíli living…" He rubbed a hand over his face, then he looked to the hobbit. "How do you reconcile it? Who he was then, in your Old World, with what he's done here and now?"

"I try not to think about it, to be honest," the hobbit answered, watching as Tilda went sliding down the dragon's wing into Bard's arms, "It is important to remember the past and learn from it, but what's done is done. He can't take back attacking Dale and Erebor, any more than you can take back your own brush with gold-sickness."

Below them, Smaug woke and snorted sharply, making the children scream and scramble off him. Bard remained where he was as all of them ran to hide behind him, but the dragon just snorted again, circled around so he was lying the opposite direction, stretched out his other wing same as the first one, and settled back down.

Tilda was the first to climb back onto him, and she fearlessly met his golden gaze as he peered at her. Smaug just let out a hissing growl-sigh, and relaxed, blinking slowly under heavy lids. The other children took that as a sign and resumed climbing all over him, much to the amusement and consternation of their other minders, aka the hoard guards. Bard just shook his head, smiling.

"It's hard not to see him as a dragon, one of the Great Fire-drakes, the most terrifying generals and weapons of war bred by Morgoth," Thorin said, "He destroyed us once – he could do so again, and so easily. All he has to do is wait. And he is ageless, deathless. He can wait long indeed."

"He won't."

"But how do you know?" the king pressed, "He is no longer the Man you knew – the whole world is changed."

"Yeah, that's fairly obvious," Bilbo said bluntly, then softened his tone, "and yes, it has. And so it's unreasonable to expect him to be exactly the same as he was then. We've been apart, and shaped but different experiences – our lives, our cultures, our bodies are completely different, and he definitely drew the short straw on that one."

"'The short straw?'"

"Ah, uh – the short end of the stick, the worst side of the deal." Bilbo frowned, slightly sad. "I can tell you from my experience that being a hobbit is very like being a Man, just… smaller.

"But going from Man to dragon… I imagine it's like being thrown into the deepest part of a lake without knowing how to swim. You find something to hold onto or you drown. And for the longest time, he's been drowning." Bilbo felt tears sting at his eyes, thinking about all the years Smaug spent alone – an eternity compared to his mere fifty years. Even Thranduil had had Tauriel, for a while at least, but Smaug had been alone, entirely alone in the grip of the Darkness.

"Now he has something to hold onto," said Thorin, "but do you think he will?"

Bilbo exhaled, then said, "I think he'll try, and really I think that's all we can ask of him. Because of the body he was born into, he can't… fight off the Darkness the way we can. All he can do is… hold it at bay. But he's quite stubborn, quite willful. Perhaps he will surprise us both."

They watched as a dwarf girl nearly bounded over to stand before Smaug's massive maw, and then growled at him, curling her fingers into claws. She squealed in delight when he growled back.

"Were you lovers?" Thorin asked finally, "I can't really imagine… mere friendship being enough for him to… tolerate all of this."

"Lovers, no, but we did love each other," Bilbo admitted, "From the moment we met, we spent… pretty much the whole rest of our lives together. Lived together, raised a child, retired to the country to raise bees." The hobbit nodded a little and sighed. "He saved my life. And I'd like to think that, at least a little, I saved his."

"How? You mentioned your meeting before, but how?"

"I was a doctor, a war doctor, I treated soldiers on the battlefield, right in the thick of things. It-it was a rush. I liked it, I was good at it.

"And then… I got hurt. In those days, there were a lot more people in the world then, like a lot. Over seven billion people, like hundred, thousand, million, billion, seven billion people. So there was another waiting to take my place, and I was sent home.

"Civilian life was so different then, so different. There were people who didn't even know there was fighting going on, because their part of the world was peaceful. It was – hard to adjust, almost impossible, because there was no one who really understood what it was like, there was no one close to me who had experienced the same things I had. I have no doubt that eventually I would have taken my own life because I didn't know how to cope with the change.

"But by chance I met up with an old friend of mine, who was in the same group of students as me when we were studying medicine. I mentioned that I was looking for someone to, uh, share a house with, to cut the cost, because living where we all were at the time was very expensive, more than I could afford.

"He told me that I was the second person to say that to him that day.

"So we went, and he introduced me to Sherlock." He smiled down at the dragon, but his mind was far away. "His mind was keener than a razor's edge – he figured out quite a bit of my history and why I was there without ever speaking a word to me. I wish you could have met him at his height." The hobbit chuckled. "He probably would have knocked you on your ass with how much he knew just by looking at you!

"God, how did he put it when he told me what he saw about me? 'Your haircut, the way you hold yourself, says military. But your conversation as you entered the room - bit different from my day - said trained at Bart's,' the school of medicine, 'so Army doctor – obvious. Your face is tanned but no tan above the wrists. You've been abroad, but not sunbathing. Your limp's really bad when you walk but you don't ask for a chair when you stand, like you've forgotten about it, so it's at least partly psychosomatic' – that is, it was all in my head. 'That says the original circumstances of the injury were traumatic. Wounded in action, then. Wounded in action, suntan – Afghanistan or Iraq.' Two of the nations were the fighting was happening.'

"Then he started talking about my phone. It's a, um, long-distance communication device, kind of like a Palantír. You know what those are?"

"I know the legends of them."

"Well, it's kind of like that. You couldn't see through it, but you could stand here in Erebor and talk to someone in the Blue Mountains like they were right in front of you. I could send short letters through it the same way as the talking, it could play music, it was expensive, but as he said, 'you're looking for a flatshare – you wouldn't waste money on this. It's a gift, then. Scratches. Not one, many over time. It's been in the same pocket as keys and coins. The man sitting next to me wouldn't treat his one luxury item like this, so it's had a previous owner.'

"There was an engraving on the back of it – 'Harry Watson, From Clara' with three kisses in shorthand. He said, 'Clearly a family member who's given you his old phone. Not your father, this is a young man's gadget. Could be a cousin, but you're a war hero who can't find a place to live. Unlikely you've got an extended family, certainly not one you're close to, so brother it is.

"'Now, Clara. Who's Clara? Three kisses says it's a romantic attachment. The expense of the phone says wife, not girlfriend. She must have given it to him recently – this model's only six months old. Marriage in trouble then – six months on he's just given it away. If she'd left him, he would have kept it. People do – sentiment. But no, he wanted rid of it. He left her. He gave the phone to you: that says he wants you to stay in touch. You're looking for cheap accommodation, but you're not going to your brother for help? That says you've got problems with him. Maybe you liked his wife; maybe you don't like his drinking.'

"When I asked how he could possibly know about the drinking, he said, 'Shot in the dark. Good one, though. Power connection' – because like a fire not given new fuel, it too would die with time– 'tiny little scuff marks around the edge of it. Every night he goes to plug it in' to fuel it up again 'but his hands are shaking. You never see those marks on a sober man's phone; never see a drunk's without them.'"

After a minute of silence, Thorin said, "That's amazing."

"That's what I said!" Bilbo grinned.

"All that from so little… Was he right?"

"On almost all of it."

"'Almost?'"

"Harry was short for Harriet. My sister, not brother, but it was an easy mistake to make; other people had, too. But other than that, every word." He kept grinning. "And that pretty much set up the rest of our lives together. Living with him was never boring."

Below them, some of the company had arrived, drawn by the delighted cries of the children. Fíli and Kíli walked up to the dragon, and the elder brother said something that made Smaug huff out a small cloud of black smoke. Both coughed and waved their arms to clear the air, then Fíli punched his nose and Kíli kicked him.

Almost immediately, both of them staggered away, clutching their injured limbs, their cursing in Khuzdul just audible over Smaug's deep chuckles and Dwaling and Bofur's roars of laughter.

"You said you raised a child together?"

"Ah, yes. Sherlock… worked with the town guard to help lock up criminals, and so he made quite a few enemies. One of them forced him to fake his death and leave me behind for a time. I tried to move on, met a woman named Mary – but Sherlock returned, and Mary's past came back to haunt her. He killed someone in cold blood to protect her, because she mattered to me.

"She gave birth to a baby girl, Rosamund… but Mary was killed, and eventually Sherlock and I raised Rosamund together." A smile tweaked his lips as he remembered coming home from the clinic to find a hovering consulting detective helping their tiny little girl take her first toddling steps, and how after that he panicked and voluntarily – voluntarily – moved all of his equipment and experiments up and away from where Rosamund could have reached them.

"You said you raised bees?"

"That was afterwards, after Rosamund grew up, got married, and had a child of her own. There was a lot that went on, too much to tell in one conversation, or possibly even many."

"And at the end? How did you both die?"

The hobbit was silent.

"Bilbo? Is – did I – are you all right?"

"It's – it's fine. It's just… as far as I know I died in my sleep. My last memory is climbing into bed.

"But Sherlock…" Tears stung at his eyes again, blurring the sight of the dragon below. "… he started to forget things. Just little things, in the beginning, easy to pass off as just another sign of aging.

"But then he got worse… and worse, and worse. There was no cure, not even then, and so I watched as the man I knew – the man I loved… faded away, and inch at a time, until the day came when he didn't even know who I was."

And that day, that day, was the most painful in John Watson's life, worse even than the day of the Reichenbach Fall. Sherlock had been looking at him such earnestness and confusion, and later alarm, and John knew that he was crying but he couldn't stop.

Bilbo knew that he, too, was crying, but he couldn't stop. He took a shuddering breath.

"Sherlock Homes died long before he ever stopped breathing."

The hobbit swallowed thickly. "It was a horrible, horrible way to die, for anyone, but especially for him. Especially for him. And it was horrible to watch him die that way. He was so scared and confused – he didn't know what was going on or where he was – all I could do was sit by his bedside and try to reassure him." He wiped his eyes on his sleeve, but his tears just started falling faster. "That was the only time I told him I loved him," he choked on a sob.

"Why? Why didn't you before then?" Thorin demanded, his own eyes glassy.

"I was afraid," Bilbo admitted, "The world was different then, and two men loving each other was not looked well upon. My sister endured so much… garbage from our father about loving other women that I didn't want to suffer the same. I didn't want Sherlock to suffer the same, because he was very much in the public eye and – "coming out," as it was, was very dangerous. I only realized later that he was what mattered to me, not what people thought of us… but by then, it was too late."

A second later, he was pulled into the dwarf king's embrace, and he clutched at the fine furs and cloth of his clothing, crying softly into his shoulder. When at last he calmed, Thorin laid his hands on Bilbo's shoulders, looked him in the eye, and said, "Whatever I may feel about him, you have my word as a Son of Durin that if war is to resume between him and me, it will fall to him to strike the first blow."

Bilbo managed a tremulous smile. "Thank you."