#tolkien fandom

Fíli and Kíli, though you had no way of knowing that yet, rode close on either side of the stretcher, close enough that Kíli had taken to resting one forearm across his pony's neck so he could study you properly, the way you might study a puzzle box before deciding which side to open first.

"Look at her clothes," he said, not for the first time. "I've never seen weave like that. So tight and even. Not even elvish work looks like that."

"Maybe she's a merchant's daughter," Fíli offered. "Some far eastern trade route, cloth we've never seen before."

"Merchants' daughters don't fall out of the sky, Fíli."

"No," Fíli conceded. "No, I suppose they don't."

Kíli leaned in slightly, close enough that if you'd been conscious you might have flinched away from him, and studied your face with the frank, unhurried curiosity of someone who had never in his life worried overmuch about being caught staring. "She doesn't look dangerous."

"Óin didn't look dangerous either, and he threw a stew pot at Dwalin's head last winter."

"That's not the same thing."

"I'm only saying, that you can't always tell from a face."

Kíli considered this with the seriousness it apparently deserved, tilting his head. "No. I suppose not." He glanced ahead to where the stretcher's ropes creaked gently against the pony's flank. "Do you think she'll wake soon?"

"Uncle wants her awake before nightfall. Wants answers."

"Uncle wants everything before nightfall."

Fíli made a sound that might have been a laugh, quickly swallowed, and the two of them lapsed into a companionable quiet that stretched on with the rhythm of hooves on packed earth, the creak of leather, the occasional huffed breath from a pony working uphill.

You didn't hear any of it, not properly—it reached you the way sound reaches a diver rising slowly from deep water, muffled and warped and without context, fragments that meant nothing because you had no idea yet that you should be listening.

Consciousness came back in pieces, the smell of grass, and was that horse ?—no it couldn't be, not horse, something adjacent to horse but not quite—woodsmoke, faint, and beneath all of it something green and sharp that you'd later understand was simply what air smelled like when it hadn't been breathed through a city first.

Then the light. Grey-gold, low-slung, the particular colour of late afternoon when the sun has decided its work is mostly done for the day. It came at you sideways, through slats that you slowly realised were your eyelashes, your eyes not quite willing to commit to opening yet.

The swaying continued, and beneath the swaying, an ache in every part of you that made itself known all at once, a full-body throb that told you, quite unambiguously, that you had recently done something your body had not appreciated.

You opened your eyes, directly above and slightly behind you—your head was tipped back at an angle you hadn't chosen—was a pony's tail, swishing with unhurried rhythm, beyond that the broad grey back of an animal you were almost certain wasn't a horse, and above that a figure, tall, robed in something the colour of a stormy sky, a wide-brimmed hat, silver hair catching the light. He rode with his back straight and didn't turn around.

You blinked. Once. Twice.

Okay, said a small, hysterical voice in the back of your mind. Okay. That's. That's a wizard hat. That is objectively a wizard hat, that man is wearing a wizard hat, why is there a—

"—reckon she has to be from some eastern trade cities," a voice was saying, somewhere to your left, low and rolling and unfamiliar. "Never seen a face quite like it."

"Or further," said another. "There's places even Gandalf hasn't mapped."

Gandalf, you thought, faintly, though the name meant absolutely nothing to you beyond sounding vaguely like a word you should recognise and didn't.

"D'you think she's hungry? She should eat something, when she wakes."

"If she wakes."

"She'll wake," said a third voice, gentler than the others, unhurried, carrying the particular calm of someone used to being listened to. "Give her time. The body knows what it needs, even when the mind's still catching up."

You tried, very carefully, to lift your head, the world tilted alarmingly, righted itself, tilted again, and you became aware—with the slow, mounting horror of someone piecing together what felt like a crime scene—that you were on some kind of stretcher, slung between four ponies, in the middle of what appeared to be a genuinely enormous stretch of open countryside, surrounded by a collection of men on ponies.

Some of them were small—smaller than you, smaller than felt entirely possible for fully grown adults, riding with a competence that suggested this was in no way their first time doing so. They had beards. Extravagant beards, braided in places, beads worked into some of them and axes strapped to their backs that looked less like costume pieces and more like they had been recently and to your immediate alarm, enthusiastically used.

One of them—round-faced, dark-haired with a spectacularly warm looking hat, riding just ahead—turned in his saddle and caught you looking.

His face split into a grin so immediate and so entirely without guile that some of the panic in your chest loosened despite yourself.

"Well now," he said, in the same rolling voice from before, "look who's decided to rejoin us."

Cosplay, you thought, with the particular desperate logic of a mind trying very hard to make the world make sense. This is—this has to be some kind of, of Renaissance fair, or a movie set, or—

"You gave us a fright, falling out of the sky like that," the man continued, entirely unbothered by your silence, guiding his pony alongside your stretcher with easy familiarity. "Bofur, at your service. Well—Bofur's my name. The service part's more of a formality, if I'm honest, but Balin insists on it."

You opened your mouth. Nothing came out except a small, cracked noise that didn't remotely qualify as a word.

"Easy," Bofur said, not unkindly, his grin softening into something more careful. "No rush. You've had a fair old tumble, by the look of things."

Beside him, another figure had drawn nearer—broader, white-bearded, a face weathered into deep, kindly lines, eyes sharp despite the gentleness of his expression. "Can you tell us your name, lass?" he asked, in the same measured voice you'd heard a moment ago. "Or where you've come from? We mean you no harm, but you gave us quite the puzzle, appearing the way you did."

"I—" Your voice came out a rasp, and you tried again, throat working. "I don't—where—"

"Where are we?" supplied a third voice, gruffer, from somewhere on your other side, and you turned your head—slowly, everything still swimming—to find a broad, heavily-tattooed figure regarding you with an expression that fell somewhere between suspicion and grudging concern. "Or where are you from. Might help to start with which question you're actually asking."

"Dwalin," said the white-bearded one, with a note of mild reproach, though he didn't look particularly surprised. "The lass has just woken. Give her a moment before you interrogate her."

"I'm asking politely," Dwalin said, in a tone that suggested his understanding of politely was fairly elastic at the best of times.

You closed your eyes briefly, waiting for the world to stop tilting, and when you opened them again, the nausea that had been building somewhere beneath your ribs finally won its argument with the rest of you.

You made it half over the side of the stretcher before you were violently, thoroughly sick.

"Whoa—there she goes—" Bofur's voice, scrambling slightly, someone's hand steadying the stretcher's edge so you didn't tip yourself entirely off it.

"That's good," said the white-bearded one—Balin, you'd apparently missed his name the first time—with the placid tone of someone who had clearly seen worse and been considerably less bothered by it. "Better out than in. It's the fall, most like, or whatever manner of magic put you im the sky to begin with. The body doesn't take kindly to that sort of thing."

Magic, your brain echoed faintly, and declined, for the moment, to process the word any further.

You hung there, mortified, spitting to clear your mouth, dimly aware of the fact that you had just thrown up in front of a dozen strangers in medieval cosplay while on a stretcher between ponies, you became painfully aware that this was, objectively, one of the worst mornings—afternoons?—of your entire life.

"Here." A new voice, smaller, closer to your own vague height though you were still lying down so it was hard to judge, apologetic in a way that made you look toward it despite yourself. A face swam into view—round, kind, faintly harried, curling hair beneath a battered waistcoat. He was holding out a waterskin with both hands, like an offering. "You should—here, drink something. Small sips. That's what they always say, isn't it, small sips—"

"Thank you," you managed, and your voice cracked embarrassingly on the second word, but he only smiled, a small, nervous, genuine thing, and helped guide the waterskin to your mouth when your own hands proved too unsteady to manage it.

The water was cool and clean and tasted, faintly, of leather, and you drank like you'd never drunk anything in your life.

"There now," he said. "Better?"

You nodded, throat easing, and it was only as you shifted slightly, trying to find some dignity to reclaim, that your gaze dropped—entirely without your permission—to his feet.

His bare feet.

Which were, you registered with a rising and entirely involuntary horror, covered in curling hair, and resting with complete unselfconsciousness on the pony's flank as though this were the most normal thing in the world, as though feet were simply meant to exist in public like that, uncovered, hairy, unbothered.

Oh, said the small hysterical voice in your head, oh, absolutely not, do not look at that again, do not—

You looked at it again.

"—are you quite alright?" the curly-haired one was asking, his brow furrowing with fresh concern at whatever expression had apparently crossed your face.

"Fine," you said, faintly, dragging your eyes back up to somewhere safely around his collarbone. "Totally fine. Just. Great. Awesome, even."

He looked, if anything, more concerned by this answer than he had by your silence.

The company made camp as the light finally gave out entirely, and you watched it happen from a bedroll someone had set for you near the fire, still too wrung out to do much beyond watch, wrapped in a blanket that smelled of horse and woodsmoke and had clearly seen a great many miles.

It happened fast. That was the thing that struck you most, once the initial fog of nausea and disorientation had thinned enough to let you actually observe—there was no discussion, no delegation, no meeting to decide who did what. Ponies were led and tethered and rubbed down by hands that clearly knew the exact rhythm of it.

A fire sprang up with an efficiency that suggested it had been built a thousand times before by the same handful of people. Pots appeared. Someone was already peeling something. Bedrolls unfurled themselves into rows with the precision of a routine so old it had stopped requiring conscious thought.

Well oiled machine, you thought, hazily, watching a small, rounder gentleman stir something in a pot while somewhere behind him two more were arguing cheerfully about whether the last of the salted pork should go in now or later.

It wasn't long before smoke of a different, sharper sort began drifting through the camp, and you wrinkled your nose despite yourself as several of the dwarves produced long-stemmed pipes, packing them with unhurried care and lighting them from the fire, the smell thick and cloying and entirely unlike any smoke you'd encountered before—sweeter, somehow, and heavier, settling low over the camp like a blanket you hadn't asked for.

"Not to your taste?" Bofur asked, dropping down beside you with his own pipe already lit, apparently having clocked your expression from several feet away.

"It's a lot," you admitted, waving a hand vaguely in front of your face.

"Pipeweed. Old Toby, this batch—good stuff, mind, best you'll find east of the Shire." He said this with the pride of a connoisseur, exhaling a slow curl of smoke that drifted up toward the darkening sky. "You'll get used to it. Or you won't, and you'll just have to sit downwind of us. Either's fine."

You managed something that was almost a laugh, and it seemed to please him, because his grin widened and he settled in a little more comfortably, evidently deciding you were now his particular responsibility for the evening.

"Since you're awake and not casting up your accounts anymore," he said, "might as well get you acquainted properly. Save you having to work it all out on your own." He nodded toward the fire, where the two who'd been riding closest to your stretcher earlier were now engaged in what looked like a minor disagreement over the last of something in a bowl. "That particular hooligan there is Kíli and his brother Fíli. Sister-sons to our esteemed leader, though you'd be forgiven for not seeing the resemblance in temperament."

"They fight like that a lot?"

"No, truth be told, they arent usually far from each other." He considered. "Don't fret, no one's ever actually lost an eye."

He went around the fire with the easy, familiar rhythm of someone who'd clearly done introductions like this before, pointing with the stem of his pipe.

"That's Óin, and that's his brother Glóin—between the two of them they've more opinions on fire-safety than any dwarf has strictly earned the right to. Bifur you'll want to watch for hand-signs, he doesn't speak the common tongue on account of an old injury, but he'll make himself understood, don't you worry. That's my cousin Bombur, doing the cooking, best in the company and don't let him tell you otherwise out of false modesty." He winked before continuing.

"Dori, Nori, Ori—brothers, though good luck telling which is which some days. Balin and Dwalin you've already had the pleasure of." He paused.

"And Thorin—" a slight shift in his tone, something more careful, more respectful "—leads us. Wherever we happen to be going."

"And where," you said, slowly, "are you going?"

"Ah." Bofur tapped the side of his nose. "That's rather the question, isn't it. All in good time." He took another pull on his pipe. "You're a fair sight more curious than I expected, for someone that fell out of a clear sky into a field full of dwarves. I'll give you that."

"I think I'm still catching up on the frightened part," you admitted.

"Also—" you hesitated, because it felt strange to correct someone who had been nothing but kind to you, but the word had been nagging at something uncomfortable in the back of your mind since he'd said it. "I don't think you're supposed to call yourselves that. Where I'm from, anyway. It's not really a—a nice word."

Bofur blinked at you, genuinely startled, pipe halting halfway to his mouth. "Dwarves?"

"Well, yeah."

"It's what we are, lass." He said it slowly, like he was checking whether you were having him on. "Been dwarves a good deal longer than you've been wherever it is you're from, I'd wager."

"I just—" You floundered, aware you'd wandered into a conversation you had no good way of finishing. "Never mind. Forget I said anything."

Bofur studied you for a long moment, something thoughtful working behind his easy expression, and then, mercifully, let it go with a small shrug, apparently filing it away under the same category as your clothes and your fall from the sky—strange, unexplained, and not worth pressing on an already exhausted stranger.

"Eat something, when Bombur's stew is ready," he said instead, rising with a grunt and a hand on his knee. "You'll feel more yourself for it. Whatever that turns out to be."