#shipwright au

But this was not for always. Sometimes he woke up breathing hard and sweating in the chill of his room, with a fear-ache now fading in his memory of wild fires in pine forests and the snap of burning wood. The smell of singed fur and warg breath. The feel of a soft throat under hands that were his, vainly struggling to take in air. There would be a moment immediately after he would wake when he would scramble for a memory, upending all the carefully-submerged lives he’d lived the way a frantic owner turns his rooms upside down to search for a lost ring. 

How will you know him when you find him, Balín had asked him once, in one of the lives where he followed a Merchant from Venice down a long road that traversed continents, carrying his bags. He had recognized his old friend deep in the too-old eyes of a scrawny catamite they had taken in after a raid. 

I will know, he had replied, but could not hide the unease it caused him. I knew you, when I saw you defending the pasha’s palanquin, still a warrior despite this frankly ridiculous vessel you’ve picked. You knew me. 

Balín stared at him for a long time, heavy with the calculated judgement he was known for. Then he said, We are children of Mahal, and the copper in our blood was melted from the veins of Our Father Himself. He solders His language into our very tongue. This is how we find one another. We know our kind, Thorin Oakenshield. 

Then Balin unsheathed the thin curved dagger he hung from a bony hip, and to an outsider watching them, it seemed farcical to see a weather-beaten man assume a student’s respectful attention to a younger eunuch. He flicked the flat wide end of the blade hard, and watched the vibration travel up to where he held it behind the hilt, singing in the clear desert night. 

Like motion through metal, and it is the Him in me that recognizes the Him in you. He sheathed the blade then, and a knowing sadness crossed his features, and the Balin of exiled Erebor was so apparent in his features that Thorin resisted the urge to grasp his forearm in solidarity. But the Hobbit is a creature of wood and leaf. 

His gut had grown cold at that, and it was only Balin’s hand gently coming to rest on his own that Thorin realized he was digging his nails deep into his knee enough to bruise. What mean you, he grit out. 

His answer was a one-shoulder shrug. We build Arda alongside Mahal the Maker, but we cannot hope to understand the mysteries of His plans as He discusses them with the Valar Gods. But, Balin amended, his small grip tightening, that is not to say we cannot work with what we already know.

Somebody—one of the scribes, he had forgotten to ask (idiot, IDIOT, thousand times an idiot, he often scolded himself) had drawn their Burglar in ink and sturdy cloth paper somewhere during their approach to Erebor. He had tried to replicate it in all his lives as much as he could, to ensure that the face he remembered remained the same. 

That the one memory he had ever fought to keep would not be washed away from him by time. 

Today, as in all days, the pre-dawn foghorn bellowed lowly in the slick autumn chill, rousing half the inhabitants of the harbor town to murky wakefulness. Thorin himself would be slowly settling in back to a body of aching bones and tense muscles, knotted with cold. There would be rain sheeting softly against the window, or the sound of waves curling in his ear. 

Today was a Sunday, and within the hour, some church bells up the town square would start to peal in response.

But Thorin had not slept a wink since the night before, and knew that this would be another of Those Days. He was out of his tiny one-room loft before the four thirty informal revile, and was sitting in first bus up the country well after the sun had risen. 

There was a copse of woods up above the highlands that was open for registered hunting groups when the season began. It was well beyond the roads that the public country buses stopped at, but the uphill hike took Thorin further away from the village at the end of the route, and higher up the craggy foothills. There was a river he followed, the tracks well-worn where other solitary hikers sought thinner air and a wider sky. 

Not for a moment did he stop. When river rocks and small pebbles made way for twigs and the reddening leaves fallen underfoot, when the trail tapered between hedges and the tall trees began their silent sentry, Thorin paused, breathed. He felt the tension that had been mounting in his chest since the week had started beginning to expand and feel less a solid weight that made him anxious, to a snug sensation encompassing all of his being. 

There had been a forest too, back in that time, and he had hated every step of it, darkening and dampening the Company’s mood even as Bilbo had sought to uplift it. Even now he instinctively disliked wooded areas, where Manwë and his elven children had made their preference known, but it was here he remembered  the things that the one he remembered loved. Mushrooms in large patches skirting the base of trees. A few flowering hedges that grew wild and crowned the forest with the season. The dappling of weak sunlight through the leaves. The feel of live wood, growing slow as time but wilder than rocks beneath his hand. 

Bilbo had loved the things that grew on soft earth. Thorin had despised that, but these where exactly what he sought when he simply needed to remember things beyond the dear face he never wanted to lose. What had the Halfling’s nape smelled like? (sage and starch) What had Bilbo leave the woodland path to gather? (berries and dandelion root) What had been the feel of his smaller Hobbit hand pressed against his knuckle, with only a thin barrier of crushed weeds keeping them apart (athelas). 

Today, a Sunday, groups were still prohibited from hunting game, but nature trekkers were welcome to do rounds. Autumn had settled fully between the branches, kinder and more beautiful in its manifestation up in the foothills than down by the sea. The hard flatcakes he had purchased at a pitstop were stale and poorly made, but their disc-like shape was roughly the size of the muffins in Bag-End. Thorin chewed on them thoughtfully, even as he walked, and the sensation of time that had threatened to wear him away entirely began to displace itself in the woodland. Here, he could pretend there was no time; here he could pretend he was a dwarrow prince again, sometimes walking towards the perimeter of Hobbiton for a meeting, sometimes walking away from the deep forests of Mirkwood with is Company complete. 

Sometimes he pretended that the rustling of leaves or a bird taking wing overhead was the sound of quick feet trying to keep up with him. Sometimes the light rippling on water was to him a small figure gingerly avoiding the banks of the stream. 

In those times, Thorin never looked back, or turned his head. That would be like refusing  a gift, he thought. Mahal knew he had refused enough gifts put under his nose enough to last him several long lifetimes. 

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One knows trees by the lines of their leaves, Balin had said. By that which they leave behind. That is, at least, what the Hobbit always told me. You cannot take a tree with you where you go, but you can take a leaf and by that, recognize the tree again when you meet it in your way.