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Warnings â ïž: Canon typical violence, author attempts elvish, author attempts khuzdul, suggestive content, alcohol consumption, angst, blood, medical care, feelings of despair, themes of hope, found family, multiverse/time travel, cussing, angst, fluff, eventual smut, weapon use, realities of battle, tolkein monster encounters, fish out of water, injury to main characters, long fic, slowburn x reader.
A/N: Khuzdul used in this Fic comes from: The Darrow Scholar I also experimented a touch with the prose in this.
Part 3 | Part 5 - Coming Soon
Of Crowns & Mountains
C.4: Tounge, Stone and a Panini
The morning had started well, the hills had gentled overnight into something more rolling and open, and the verge ran broad enough that the ponies could walk two abreast without argument, and the sky was a startling pale blue that Balin had explained meant good weather holding and the light was clean and the air smelled of grass and distance.
You were not a confident rider. You would not have described yourself as a rider at all, before this. But Mindy had strong opinions about pace that largely overrode your input, and those opinions tended toward steady and unhurried, which suited the current situation, and you had achieved something your manager would have called a 'good working relationship'. You held the reins loosely the way FĂli had told you toâyou're not steering a cart, let her know what you want and then let her think it was her ideaâand kept your heels down and tried not to grip with your knees when the path dipped.
Bofur had pulled his pony alongside yours at some point in the late morning, with the casual ease of someone who had been working up to something and had decided the time was right.
"Right," he said. "Khuzdul lesson."
You looked at him. "Gandalf told me your language was secret." You teased.
"It is, but since it is in fact our language, we're the ones that can make exceptions." He said it with a wink and complete airiness, as though this were a minor administrative point. "Balin says it's practical. If you're going to be with us, you should know a few phrases. Useful ones."
"Like what?"
"Greetings, first." He held up a finger. "Oytargâthat's hello, more or less."
You tried it. The Y sat wrong in your mouth, somewhere between the sounds you'd normally make, and what came out was approximately in the right region if the right region were a fairly large and loosely defined area.
Bofur's expression did something heroic, in that it didnt move save for a twitch of the left corner, and barely a snort of laughter.
"Close," he said.
"That was terrible," you said.
"It was aâattempt."
"You're doing the thing KĂli does where you say attempt because you can't say good."
Bofur laughed at that, open and genuine, and Dori, riding on your other side, made a sound of agreement that he immediately tried to disguise as a cough when Bofur looked at him.
"Oytarg," Bofur said again, more slowly, breaking it into its components. "The second syllableâyour tongue needs to go here." He pointed, unhelpfully, at the general region of his own mouth.
You tried again.
From behind you, KĂli said something in Khuzdul that made FĂli choke on whatever he was eating.
"What did he say?" you asked.
"Nothing," said Bofur, in the tone of a man deploying the word nothing as a very strategic manoeuvre to avoid warfare.
"It sounded like something."
"He said it sounded like you were trying to sneeze and could not commit," FĂli said, from a diplomatic distance.
"FĂli," Bofur said.
"She asked."
You pulled a face at KĂli, who was grinning with the uncomplicated delight of someone having an excellent morning, and triedâ"Oytarg" again. This time it was better. Not goodâyou could hear the gap between what you were producing and what Bofur had saidâbut the Y had found its place, at least approximately.
Bofur looked genuinely pleased. Not the diplomatic pleased of a teacher managing expectations but the real kind, and it settled something in your chest that had been quietly insecure about the whole exercise. "Nan'ith,"he said. "That one you can tryâit means little sister."
"Nan'ith," you repeated, and this one came out better because the sounds were closer to things you already knew how to make.
Something happened at the edges of the groupâa subtle shift, a slight drawing-in. It would have been impossible to point to any single thing and say there, that is the change, but it was there. Nori, who had been riding a horse-length ahead, dropped back half a pace without any apparent reason. GlĂłin looked over with the quick attention of someone responding to a signal he hadn't consciously noticed. Even Dwalin, who communicated primarily through his physical presence and the weight of his general regard, angled his pony slightly inward.
None of them said anything about it. The lesson continued.
"Khemnar," Bofur said next. "That one meansâwell, roughlyâyou have my thanks. Though its a bit formal. You'd use it for something important."
"Khemnar," you said.
Ori, who had been riding very quietly nearby with his book closedâhe'd stopped trying to read on horseback after the incident on day threeâlooked up and said something quietly in Khuzdul that you didn't catch. Balin, ahead of him, smiled without turning around.
"What did Ori say?" you asked Bofur.
Bofur glanced at Ori, who had gone slightly pink. "He said your accent is charming," Bofur said, which you strongly suspected was a generous translation.
You made it through TĂąhaljâwhich meant friend, and which Bofur delivered with a matter-of-fact warmth that made you want to memorise it immediatelyâand TharĂąkh, which meant something like the road or the path ahead and had a rolled r that took you six tries and a commentary from the peanut gallery, before Bilbo, riding up alongside from where he'd been thoughtfully near the back, offered that your pronunciation was markedly better than his, which was kind and probably somewhat true.
"You speak Khuzdul?" you said.
"AhâNo," said Bilbo. "Not exactly"
"Not a single word," Bofur confirmed. "He tried 'Oytarg' once and his pony bit him."
"She didn't bite me because of the Khuzdulâ" Bilbo sighed.
"We can't be entirely certain," said KĂli with a wink.
"I can be quite certain, Myrtle bit me because Bombur startled her, which had nothing to do withâ" He stopped. Looked at the general run of faces turned toward him with varying degrees of innocent attention. "We're not going to have a reasonable conversation about this, are we."
"No," said FĂli, pleasantly.
Bilbo made a small, undignified sound and looked at the path ahead, and you bit down on a smile and asked Bofur what the Khuzdul word for mountain was.
"'UrĂąd," he said.
"'UrĂąd," you repeated.
"There you go," Bofur said, and there was something in his voice that was not quite sentiment and was very close to it. "You're on your way."
The camp for the evening was set up at the edge of a shallow valley as the light was beginning its long gold lean toward evening, next to some sort of ruin and calling it that was rather generousâa chimney, still standing, in the stubborn way of chimneys, the stones dark with old weathering. Beside it the ghost of a frame, a few cross-beams leaning against each other without the walls that had once supported them. A handful of roof tiles had survived, some scattered in the grass with the randomness of things that had given up being in a specific order. Whatever it had been, it was a long time ago.
Thorin looked at it from his pony, said something to Dwalin that you didn't catch and gestured toward the slight depression of ground beside the ruin's remaining chimney. Good wind shelter. Reasonable sightlines.
The unpacking proceeded in the familiar orchestration of itâpacks down, ponies seen to, Bombur immediately engaging with the question of the fire with his characteristic single-minded focus. You were in the middle of unloading one of the supply packs when you noticed Gandalf.
He was standing at the edge of the campsite, slightly separate from the activity, and his head was turned toward the south with the very specific quality of attention that meant he was listening to something that wasn't a sound. His staff was in his hand. His brows were drawn togetherânot concerned, exactly, but engaged with something you couldn't see.
Then he walked away.
Not we're stopping for the evening and Gandalf has elected to take a walk. Not a gradual increase in distance. He simply turned and walked, with purpose, toward the low ridge to the south, and kept walking until the trees took him, and then he was gone.
You looked at Balin.
Balin was watching the treeline with an expression that communicated, without any words whatsoever, that he had no more information about this than you did. He picked up the pack he'd set down and carried on with the evening.
You looked at the treeline for another moment.
Then picked up your own pack and carried on, because the alternative was standing in the middle of the camp looking at trees, which was not useful and Dwalin was already watching you.
Dinner was Bombur's barley again, with a variation involving something leafy that had been foraging-obtained by Ăin during the afternoon and which he presented with the brief satisfaction of a man who considers self-sufficiency a virtue. It was good. Bombur had a way of making field food taste like something a person would choose, which was a gift you'd developed a serious appreciation for.
You'd taken over the task of distributionâit had happened organically, sometime around day nine, when you'd been closest to the pot and had just started handing bowls along and no one had objected. It suited you as much as the collection and washing of the companies many dishes. It was something concrete to do, a small shape of usefulness in a context where most of your useful skills were stubbornly inapplicable.
KĂli appeared at your elbow while you were filling the second round of bowls, with FĂli a half-step behind him and both of them wearing the specific expression of co-conspirators who had been workshopping something.
"We've got one for you," KĂli said.
"For what?"
"Khuzdul Phrases."
You looked at him. The expression on his face was the wrong kind of helpful. "How suspicious do i need to be ?" you asked.
"Don't be suspicious. It's aâit's a greeting. Respectful. You can use it when you're handing out the bowls."
"A respectful greeting," you said.
"Very respectful," FĂli confirmed, with a completely straight face.
You should have trusted your instincts, you would reflect on this later. "Abanjabl," KĂli said, carefully, with the conscientious pronunciation of a teacher who wants their student to get it right. "Abanjabl. Try it."
"Abanjabl," you repeated.
"Perfect," said KĂli, with a delight that should have been your second warning.
You picked up the bowls and moved around the fire, handing them out in the order you'd fallen intoâBalin first, then Dori and Ori, then the cluster of GlĂłin and Ăin, then Bifur and Bombur. You murmured 'Abanjabl' as you went, partly because you were genuinely trying to practise and partly because the camp was loud enough that you were mostly saying it to yourself, a quiet repetition to cement the sounds.
Ori made a sound when you handed him his bowl. Something short and sharp and immediately suppressed. You glanced at him. He was looking fixedly at his dinner.
GlĂłin cleared his throat. Pointedly. In a direction that was not toward you.
You kept going, filing it in the back of your mind, and reached Thorin.
Thorin was seated slightly apart, where he often sat in the evenings, looking at something in the middle distance that might have been the view or might have been a thought he was working through.
You held out the bowl and said, automatically, "Abanjabl, Be careful its hot." because you'd been saying it for the last two minutes and it was already in your mouth.
Thorin's eyes came to you, they were sharp in the specific way that meant he'd heard something he had not expected, and the sharpness was not warm.
You held the bowl out. "Dinner?" you repeated, because the silence had taken on a quality you didn't understand but were fairly certain meant you'd done something wrong.
Thorin took the bowl without a word. His gaze tracked past you to where KĂli was sitting by the fire, and the look he sent across the camp made KĂli become very interested in his own soup with an immediacy that was its own form of confession.
You turned around.
"What does Abanjabl mean?" you said as you straightened.
KĂli had found something fascinating in his soup. FĂli had his hand over his mouth.
"KĂli, Son of VĂli" you said firmly, as you gave him a pointed look and what you hoped was the dwarven equivalent of his full government name.
"It'sâit's affectionate," KĂli said. "In context."
"Which context makes it is affectionate?"
"A very specific context," he said. "That doesn'tâthat isn't this context, actually, now that I think about itâ"
"What does it mean?"
Bofur, across the fire, made a helpless gesture. "Roughly," he said, with the expression of a man watching a situation unfold from what he hopes is a safe distance, "your brain is made of stones."
A silence.
"Your braiâoh shit." you repeated.
"The stone comparison isâit's not complimentary, exactlyâ"
"I've been saying it to everyone."
"You have, yes."
"I said it to Balin." Your stomach dropped and did a small summersault.
"Balin's a forgiving sort," Bofur offered.
You looked at KĂli. KĂli had the expression of a person who had calculated that the outcome was going to be worse than anticipated and was now processing this in real time. "It seemed funnier in planning," he said. "In my defenceâ"
"There is no defence for that," Thorin said, low and precise, "Neither of you will teach any maiden or member of this company words to use against another for your own amusement. You will apologise."
Across the camp, you heardâvery distinctlyâBalin make a sound that was absolutely a laugh that had been converted, at great personal effort, into a cough.
You turned back to Thorin, who was looking at you with an expression that you could not fully read but which had, possibly, a very faint suggestion at the edges of it that was not entirely severe.
"I'm sorry," you said. "I didn't know what it meant."
Thorin looked at you for a moment. Then he looked passed you at KĂli, and whatever the look contained made KĂli sit significantly straighter. Then he finally took his dinner, his expression shifted It wasn't warm, exactly. But it wasn't cold or dismissive either and there was something underneath itânot quite amusement, but adjacent to it, the faint suggestion of a thing he was actively declining to let his face show. "You'll know better next time."
You went back to the pot, picked up your own bowl, and sat down with deliberate calm.
"You said it to Dwalin as well," FĂli said, from what he had decided was a safe distance.
"I know," you said.
"Justâfor completeness."
"I know, FĂliâcould you please. Stop. Talking. About it."
The camp had wound down in its usual wayâfire lower, voices quieter, the company finding its evening rhythms. You were sitting with your back against the ruined chimney stones, which retained traces of the day's warmth in a way that was very welcome as the night air sharpened, you had a book from Balin's saddlebagâborrowed, with permissionâopen in your lap, though you were spending more time looking at the stars than reading in the dim light.
Gandalf had not come back. This fact had been sitting in the back of your mind since before dinner and had not diminished with time. You'd asked Balin about it during the meal and he'd said, he'll be back when he's back, which was true and helpful in the way that things were sometimes true and not helpful at all. FĂli had said, he does this, which told you something about frequency but nothing about what this was. Thorin had said nothing, which told you, on this evidence, that this was a known and not entirely welcome pattern.
As the fire burned low, most of the company was in various stages of sleepâBombur definitively, Ăin with the medically useful ability to be immediately unconscious and immediately alert, Dori with what appeared to be sincere dedication to the concept of unconsciousness.
KĂli and FĂli were on watch at the northern edge of camp, a shape in the dark outside the firelight.
The southern treeline where Gandalf had disappeared was black and still.
You heard FĂli before you saw himâthat sound of someone going running at speed, which was distinct enough to pull you upright before the fire had registered the movement, and then he was at the centre of camp and his voice was carrying the specific tight quality of someone delivering urgent information in as few words as possible.
"Trolls," he panted, sucking in breath from the sprint. "They've got Bilbo."
It happened almost faster than you could trackâweapons were up, voices low and clipped with the particular efficiency of dwarves who had done this kind of thing before, Dwalin already moving toward the trees with his axes drawn, Thorin's voice cutting through the chaos with short, sharp instructions that the rest of the company fell into without question.
You were on your feet too, moving on pure instinct and half-formed thoughts propelling you toward the treeline with the rest of them.
"Bilbo, oh gods, Bilbo"
You made it fifteen steps before something closed around your armânot rough, but absolute, the kind of grip that had no interest in your momentumâand you turned to find Thorin.
"Stay," he barked.
"What? No â I'm coming, I can't justâ" you started.
"Stay at camp." he said, and there was nothing in it now of the warmth that had briefly flickered earlier in the eveningâthis was flat, immovable, the voice of someone who did not have time to argue and was not going to indulge you. "You cannot fight. You will be a body to protect in a fight that needs none. Stay here."
The word hit somewhere in the chest that it was clearly aimed at. You opened your mouth.
"Stay, please." He offered not waiting for your nod before he was gone, following the company into the dark between the trees, the sound of them diminishing quickly into the silence of a forest that has absorbed a group of armed people and given nothing back.
You stood at the edge of the camp in the firelight with your heart slamming against your ribs and absolutely no idea what to do with any part of yourself.
Okay, you thought. Okay. He's right. You'd be a liability. You know you'd be a liability. Thorin has physically corrected your grip on a sword, multiple times. You have absolutely no businessâ
From the direction the company had gone, you heard shouting. A clash of metal, brief. Then voicesânot battle voices, something different.
Then nothing.
You paced twelve step from the fire to the edge of the camp, then turned worrying your nail with your teeth.
The fire was dying and you didn't feed it because the light felt conspicuous, and you paced the width of the camp in the dark with your thoughts
They're fine, they're thirteen dwarves and they've done this beforeâcenturies collectively and they're fine.
You turned and paced back the length of the camp.
Bilbo is not a dwarf and hasn't done this before, shit, and they said the trolls had himâwait, trolls are a real thing ? which is honestly a lot, I wonder if they live under bridges ?âugh, focus, the point is trolls are real and Bilbo isâ and the company isâ
No sound came from the trees. What if something has happened and I'm here pacing like an idiot I'll never forgive myself.
You turned, if I go in there and make it worse I will also never forgive myself.
Shit, shit ok ummm at what point do those two options change places, because right now I've been pacing for what feels like forty minutesâ
You checked your wrist for a watch that wasn't there. You'd stopped doing this, mostly. It happened still, sometimes, when the disorientation peaked.
You were so deep inside the spiral of itâso thoroughly lost in the increasingly unhinged internal argument between stay and goâthat you didn't hear Gandalf arrive until his hand landed on your shoulder.
You very nearly screamedâthe sound that came out was closer to a strangled yelp, your entire body flinching sideways hard enough that you nearly went down, your heart slamming up into your throat with a violence that left you genuinely lightheaded.
"Where did youâGandalf?âyou can't justâ" you breathed, pressing a hand to your throat. "Where did you come from?"
"Later," Gandalf said, and his voice had a quality to it that was different from usualânot alarmed, Gandalf did not alarm, but focused, in a way that its usual mild layers were not there. He was already looking toward the trees. "The companyâ"
"I know, I know, FĂli said trolls â they went, Thorin told me to stayâ"
"Good." He was moving. "Come."
"But Thorin saidâ"
"Do you listen to every instruction given to you by dwarves ?"
"Well no, b-but that's because until 15 days agoâ"
"Good, follow me." Gandalf said, which was not the same instruction but had the quality of finality, and you went.
He moved fast for a person with a staff, and you had to keep up rather than keep pace, and you did it without making more noise than necessary because the dark between the trees was thick and the quality of quiet ahead of you made every additional sound feel like an error.
Gandalf made no sound at all, which wasâreally quite strange, for someone his size and you were adding it to the growing list of things about him that you were going to think about more carefully when, or if you ever found the capacity.
The clearing appeared through the trees like something out of a dreamânot a pleasant one. Firelight flickering orange between the trunks, the low rumbling murmur of enormous voices, a smell of woodsmoke and something else underneath it that you didn't want to examine too closely.
You registered the size of them first, the size and then the shape, and your brain did a brief, absolute shutdown and then rebooted with the information that these were real.
These were trolls, and they were real.
Gandalf drew you down behind a fallen log at the edge of the small clearing, and you peered over the top of it with your heart still lodged in your throat.
Three trolls. Enormous, grey-skinned, lumbering things, easily the size of a house, gathered around a roaring fire with the slack-jawed stupidity of creatures who had clearly never been mistaken for clever. And there, strung on a long spit positioned over the fire, were several of the companyâDwalin's extraordinary head, Dori, GlĂłin, others you couldn't immediately identify in the firelight, all of them tied at wrist and ankle to a turning pole, equally helpless and furious. The rest were crammed into a pile of burlap sacks lined up nearby, only their heads visible above the rough fabric, an assortment of expressions ranging from outrage to grim resignation.
And in the middle of it all, at the base of three enormous sets of troll feet with the desperate, improvisational energy of someone whose plan was being made up in real time, was Bilbo.
"âthe secret," he was saying, breathlessly, to the nearest troll, "to cooking dwarfâproperly, I mean, if you want to do it rightâis in the preparation. You can't justâyou can't just throw them straight on, that'sâthat's sort of errr amateur franklyâ"
"What's wrong with how we do it?" rumbled one of the trolls, a vast hulking thing with a particularly unfortunate nose, pausing with a hand halfway to grabbing for the spit.
"Well, for one thing," Bilbo said, edging backward as the troll's attention swung toward him, "they're not âthey're not seasoned. At all. You want toâyou should rub them down first, get under the skin a bit, otherwise you're justâyou're just going to be chewing on smelly boot leather, frankly, and who wants thatâ"
"He's lyin'!" came a furious, muffled voice from one of the bound dwarvesâKĂli, you thought, twisting against his ropes with limited success. "Don't you dare give them ideasâ"
"I'm trying to buy us time," Bilbo hissed back, with the particular strained whisper of a person whose deception is rapidly becoming common knowledge to the very people he's trying to save.
"Skin off, is it," said the second troll, considering this with the slow, grinding deliberation of something that did not think quickly under the best of circumstances. He reached for Bombur with one enormous hand.
"NOâno, notâdon't take the skin off, I mean you season through it, with herbs, likeâ" Bilbo's voice climbed in pitch, increasingly desperate. "Like, sage, perhaps, orâdo you have any sage?"
The third troll, who had said nothing up to this point and had instead been peering with deep suspicion at the row of sacks, gave one of them an experimental, contemplative poke. "What about this lot," he said. "Could just eat 'em raw."
"Raw," Bilbo said, in the strangled tone of someone watching their entire improvised strategy collapse. "No, you absolutely don't want âthat'sâthat's how you get parasites, actually, this lot is riddled with them, you'd be sickâhonestly I wouldnt risk itâ"
Beside you, behind the log, Gandalf had gone very still, his eyes fixed on the eastern horizon with a focus that had nothing to do with the chaos unfolding in front of you.
"Stay here," Gandalf said, very low.
"What? No, you can't justâ"
"Stay here," Gandalf reiterated, firmly and quietly and with a look that communicated that this was not negotiable in the way that Thorin's instructions hadn't been negotiable.
"This is the second time tonight that someone hasâ"
But he was already goneâsimply gone, the space beside you empty, his shape vanishing into the dark trees with no more explanation than that, and you sat there behind the log with your mouth still open around the protest you hadn't gotten to finish and the very distinct, very uncharitable thoughts.
"âyou've got to be kidding me right now."
You sat there for several long, agonising minutes, watching Bilbo's improvised culinary lecture grow increasingly strained, watching the trolls' patience visibly fraying, watching Dwalin strain uselessly against the ropes binding him to the spit, and the fear in your chest curdled, slowly, into something with a harder edge to it.
"I'm not just going to sit here."
You looked at the row of sacks. At the dwarves bound nearest youâand there, at the end of the row, unmistakable even in the dim firelight, was Thorin, jaw set, eyes scanning the clearing with the sharp, contained fury of someone calculating every possible angle of escape and finding none of them currently viable.
You feet moved, well before your brain caught up.
You stayed low, your heart hammering, every snapped twig underfoot sounding to your own ears like a gunshot, and you made your slow, careful way around the edge of the clearing, behind the cover of the trees, until you reached the back of the row of sacks where Thorin lay bound.
His head turned the instant you got close, and his eyes, when they found you, went wide with something that was not relief.
"What are you doing," he hissed, the words barely audible, furious in their quietness. "Go back. Go back to the camp."
"I'm not leaving you here," you whispered back, already working at the rope binding the sack closed at his neck, your fingers clumsy and shaking against a knot that had been tied by hands considerably larger and stronger than yours.
"This is not a place for you. You cannot fight three trollsâ"
"I'm not fighting them, I'm untying youâ"
"You should be back at the camp, where it is safeâ"
"Shh," you breathed.
Thorin's expression had done something complicated in response to that. "You were told to stay at camp," he repeated, at a volume that was mostly breath and ferocious exasperation.
"I know," you whispered, working the knot, which was tight and your hands were not entirely steady. "I was."
"You should not be here."
"Also something I know."
"If they see youâ"
"Thenâwellâguess I'd stop being here," you breathed, and got one loop of the knot free, which was progress. "How are you?"
"How am Iâ" He stopped, as though the question was too absurd to navigate in current conditions. "I am in a sack."
"Yeah, I see that. Sorryâ" the knot had tightened when you pulled the wrong end â "one secâ"
"You should be at camp."
"You want me to go ? Leave you hereâlet you get squashed like a dwarven panini," you hissed, with the quiet intensity of someone making an important point while also committing a small act of heroism. "I am not going to leave you."
A breif pause. Thorin looked at you and his expression had changed again, though you couldn't spare enough attention from the knot to read the change. "What is a panini?"
"It'sâ" The second loop came free. "It's aâit's like a sandwich. That's been pressed flat. By something very heavy."
"A sandwich."
"Likeâbread with things in itâyou know flour waterâ"
"I know what bread is."
"I know you know what bread is, that wasn'tâ" The knot came loose. You felt it go and let out a breath that you'd been holding since you left the log. "Can youâ"
Thorin was already working the sack open from inside with the efficiency of a person who had been waiting for this exact moment and had his strategy entirely ready. He came out of it in a controlled movement that barely made a sound, which was impressive given the circumstances, and crouched beside you in the shadow.
He looked at you. Close, and dark, and with an expression that had several things in it that would have been very interesting to examine if you were not currently beside a troll fire trying not to be noticed.
"Go back to the treeline," he said.
"I can help with the othersâ"
"Treeline." And because you were about to argue, he added, quietly "I'll get the others. You've done what you came to do. Go."
Thorin flexed his hands and looked at youâproperly looked at you, in the dim light, with an expression that had shed most of its fury and left something else underneath it, something you didn't have time to examine because at that exact moment, a voiceâenormous, booming, entirely unexpectedâcut across the clearing, making you flinch at the suddenness of it.
"The dawn will take you all!"
Gandalf. Standing atop a boulder, his staff raised, his grey robes catching the luminous pale edge of the waking sunrise as it began breaking over the hills. He brought the staff down with tremendous force, splitting the boulder beneath his feet clean in two, and the light came pouring through the gap and across the clearing in a single decisive wave.
The trolls turned. Saw the light and froze.
You watched, with your hand still wrapped around the edge of Thorin's burlap sack, as three enormous grey shapes stiffened, mid-motion, mid-argument, mid-everythingâand then, with a series of low groaning cracks that seemed to come from somewhere deep inside the rock itself, turned, entirely and completely, to stone.
It wasâvery strange, actually. Watching something that large and loud and present simply stop. Three shapes in the early light, arms mid-gesture, frozen in their argument, grey and still and permanent.
Bilbo sat down in the grass, you understood the impulse.
âąââąââąââąââąââąââąââąââąââąââąââąââą
The walk back to camp had the feeling that walks sometimes have after the worst of something is overâthe particular loose quality of limbs that were ready for something to happen and are now standing down, the brain trying to resettle itself into normal operations and finding the transition slightly uneven. Dwarves talked. Bilbo described his strategy in a tone of continued mild disbelief at himself. Dwalin, emerging from the clearing, had looked at you with an expression that acknowledged what he'd seen you do without commenting on it, and had moved on, which from Dwalin was a form of approval.
You sat at the fire that Bofur rebuilt without being asked, and held a cup of water that Balin pressed into your hands, and let the light grow around you, and were very quiet.
You felt, rather than saw, someone settle beside you. Close enough that your shoulder registered his proximity, not close enough to touch, facing the fire the same direction you were, one knee bent and his arm resting atop it. He said nothing for a moment. You said nothing back. The fire crackled. Bilbo somewhere behind you was still talking.
"Abanjabl," Thorin said.
You turned and looked at him.
His expression wasânot warm, exactly. Thorin's expressions had their own vocabulary and you were still learning it, but there was something at the edge of his eyes that was different from his normal registered settings. "You said it to me at dinner," he said.
"I know. I'm sorry. I didn't know what itâ"
"You also said it to Dwalin." There was something in the delivery that was not quite a smile but occupied the space in his voice where a smile might have been if Thorin were a different kind of person. "Dwalin has not had his brain compared to stone in living memory."
"That'sâthat's notâI'm very sorry about that."
"Don't be," Thorin said. "The expression on his face wasâ" He huffed the begins of a laugh at the memory before he stopped himself with a cough. "In any case." He shifted slightly, and his weight settled into a different posture, still but deliberate, a person choosing to stay rather than preparing to leave. "You want to learn Khuzdul."
"I want to stop accidentally insulting people."
"The goals are related." He looked at the fire. "Then we'll begin properly." His eyes came back to you with the focused directness that was simply the way he looked at things, and you had learned by now to hold it rather than glancing away. "Not from FĂli or KĂli. From the beginning." A pause. "If you want."
You looked at him. The light was fully morning now, gold and clean across the hills, and the camp was alive around you with the low movement of dwarves doing practical things, and Gandalf was somewhere producing tea, and Mindy was visible at the edge of the tether line with her blaze catching the light.
"Yes," you said, fiddling with the edge of your sleeve. "Yes, please."
Thorin nodded once. Looked at the fire. And then, with the careful, deliberate quality of someone who does not do things carelessly and is choosing to give you something that is genuinely valued. "Khuzdul begins with address," he said. "How you speak to something tells you what you think of it. In our language, this is not incidental. It is the first thing." He looked at you. "Our word for joke is GamĂąk. Say it."
"GamĂąk," you said.
He was quiet for a moment, hearing it. "Your vowels are short," he said. "Khuzdul holds them longer." He said it again. You said it again. "Better," he said, and it was specific rather than diplomatic, which meant it was true, and the small, precise warmth of that settled somewhere it was needed.
You held the word in your mouth. GamĂąk. Felt the shape of it.
"GamĂąk," you said again.
Thorin's expression did something at its edges. Not quite what you'd seen from anyone else, not KĂli's open grin or Bofur's easy warmth. Something quieter and less practised.
"Again," he said.
The morning moved on around you. The camp woke into itself. Bilbo finally stopped talking. Somewhere Bombur began the quest of beginning breakfast.
And Thorin sat beside you in the early light, and taught you the first words of a language that was the oldest and most protected thing his people owned, while three trolls stood in the trees like monuments to the night that hadn't managed to win, and the day came in gold and clean and entirely, improbably fine.
I need to scream at you! I'm running errands and traveling and I'm grining like a loon and people watch me like I lost my mind and they are right!
This fic is everything at this point. You are a magician and a poet and I love you!
Please don't kill them, please, please, pretty please with a second breakfest on the top!
I watched the movies 2 times and never recovered fully from the tragedy.



















