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Thorin had never been particularly fond of forests.
So far, this one was no different.
The slender trunks had seemed innocuous from the roadside, where he had left his pony and cart, the well-behaved mare loosened from the heavy weight of her burden and safely tethered so she could not bolt. It was quiet, the thick layer of fallen leaves undisturbed by man and perhaps even by beast: there was a strange quality of stillness to the forest from the outside, as if were sleeping, that gave the impression that nothing was moving within it.
No, perhaps not sleeping – waiting. It seemed to watch the narrow road that ran the length of it, guarded and unfriendly, as if it knew the way that the men of the town nearby talked about it, knew that they feared it.
Thorin had never been a suspicious person, but even he had felt a little uncertain of its ominous presence when they had first journeyed past it back in the spring, on their way to the town. He understood why the men so seldom went close to it, and so had felt little concern at leaving his pony and cart, not worrying that any passing person might take a fancy to either. And besides, he had not intended to walk far. He’d just load up the cart with firewood, and then be on his way.
He didn’t believe in the stories he’d heard, but none the less there was something a little off-putting about the breeze that seemed to whisper through the last few leaves still clinging to the twisted branches, to the slow and steady ooze of the heavily saturated moss underneath his boots. The roots of the trees burst up through the ground and hid unpleasant shadows in their hollows, and the tattered rags of abandoned nests dropped the occasional twig to the ground.
A blackbird had been standing nearby when he had first pulled up, but it had fluttered away almost immediately. That had been the only living thing he had seen.
His hair caught in the brambles as he walked along the edge of the forest, his arms straining as he lifted logs into the back of the cart; it was long and heavy work, but the chill in the air stopped him from shedding his heavy coat, for all that it caught occasionally on undergrowth, snagging on the thorns that seemed sharper than ever against the withering remains of blackberries, the husks of the fruit too dry now to stain his clothes.
He’d meant to cut it, his hair, but the thought kept slipping from his mind. He wore it up in the forge, when he and his cousin worked, now that it was down past his nape, so it rarely bothered him: today, however, it was getting in the way.
The wind stirred in the wood, and for a moment he thought he saw some strange movement, flickering across the edge of his vision.
But when he turned to look the breeze blew his hair across his face for a moment, obscuring his view.
He pushed it back, but by then whatever it had been was long gone, and he turned away with a shrug.
A squirrel, perhaps, or a bird, searching for berries or nuts in the undergrowth.
He still could not shake the strange feeling that seemed to have shrugged around him like some heavy robe, could not lose the feeling of eyes on him when he looked away, the hair on the back of his neck pricking uncomfortably.
But there was no one here. No one lived in these woods: they never had, and when he’d collected all the wood that he could from the edge of the forest he pushed past his disquiet, shaking his head at his own foolishness. He was not some easily spooked child, afraid of fairy tales and strange noises in the dark, and he was certainly not afraid of this damn forest, for all that the men of the town seemed to be whenever they spoke of it.
They were uncertain, and a little unsure when the topic arose, their eyes darting to the dark smudge of it in the distance with disquiet, some unhappy thought pulling at their expressions as they seemed to ponder something Thorin did not quite understand, before shaking their heads.
They said little to his family on the subject, even when pressed; even the children didn’t seem to share jokes and ghost stories about it, the way that they did about other scary things, or the wights that were said to live on the Downs. They seemed to shy away from the thought of the place, as if talking would somehow make it more real, might bring it closer.
“Folks round here don’t like to think on it,” one innkeeper had confessed to Fili just a few days before: Thorin had listened, unwilling to join in the conversation but interested none the less.
“Not the forest nor the Downs to the east of them,” another stranger had agreed, from beneath his hood, turning away as if to ward off the thought.
The Downs perhaps he could understand; he had seen the strange, flickering lights of the wights as they made the bones of long-dead men dance in the darkest hours of the night; he had heard the whisper-soft sound of bone against the earth, a sound no living creature should ever have had to hear. It had been many years since he had last made the mistake of camping near a wights home, and it would only have been the most extreme of circumstances that would prompt him to do anything of the sort again.
But the forest was just a forest, no different than the ones surrounding his own hometown, far to the east of here, surely?
“It’s a strange place, that forest,” the man had continued, as if sensing Thorin’s thoughts, wiping the inside of a glass with a rag. “Full of shadows, even at high noon, and voices in the air.”
“Voices?” Fili had asked, his head tilted to one side. The rest of their group around the table stayed silent, Dwalin sharpening the long line of his axe in the firelight; none of them looked but all of them listened. “Whose?”
The innkeeper cleared his throat, and moved a step closer.
“They say the fair folk moved in there, long ago, when they were forced to leave their lands, and haven’t been seen since.”
He glanced around him quickly, and straightened up, a shade of irritation passing over his face that he had been caught into admitting such a fable. When he spoke next it was with a rougher tone.
“Well, I don’t know much about that carry on, but it is an odd place. The only one you ever see going in and out is that old wanderer, with the grey beard, and he’s as strange as they come, anyway.”
Kili had questioned him on those little folk later that evening, when he had curled against his brother’s side and was sleepily watching his Uncle count their coin from the day. Thorin had shaken his head but indulged his younger nephew, though he did not know much of the story. Balin would have been the one to ask, really, but business had drawn him away to the north last season, and he had yet to return.
“You remember the lands we passed through lad, before we crossed the river?”
Kili had frowned a little, and nosed his face a little closer to the crook of Fili’s arm for warmth.
“The empty ones, with the hills?”
Thorin had nodded.
If they had once had a name, those lands, then it was long forgotten: once it had been verdant and pleasant, or so the story went. The people who had lived there were small and peaceful, and had lived among the low hills for generations untold. They had been a quiet folk, until the bad winters had hit, and some unknown attack had forced them from their gentle life. Even now there were scorch marks on walls that must once have marked the boundaries of fields long gone fallow, marks that told of great fires, bloodshed written too in the slash marks that you could sometimes spot on the oldest of the trees, under layers of lichen and moss.
Fanciful nonsense, really: no doubt they had just been men like any other, and they had simply left the land because it was too difficult to defend. Their descendants would be living about the land and hills nearby, going about their day to day lives in complete normalcy, no doubt completely unaware that the fey-folk they murmured about were nothing more than their ancestors.
It would certainly explain why the ending of the tale had always been so vague: no one ever seemed to quite know where they had gone. Some had said that they returned over the great eastern mountains to the place they had first come from; others that they had gone back to the earth, turning into trees, to wait out the hard times. No one really knew, and Thorin had never had any real interest in finding out any more about it.
It was a myth and a story, nothing more, the truth of the matter long lost to the world.
Like so many things.
There had been a strange clarity of light to the day when he had arrived at the forest, quite alone; grey clouds hung heavy overhead and bulged with the threat of rain, though here and there the sun still broke through in copper-coloured bars of light, slanting vertically down across the rolling slopes of the Downs that lay between the town and the forest. They had been greener when he and his kin had first arrived in the spring to work through the year in the empty forge there, the sky brighter and the days longer, but the haunting sense of approaching winter had settled down across the land now, sinking into the very bones of the earth.
It had been a good season, and they had been successful in drumming up business, successful enough to consider returning for the next year: the men there were not the friendliest, but they were willing to pay good coin for good work, and they had not had too much trouble compared to some other places. Soon it would be time to leave, to return to own home before the heavy snows at the end of the year arrived and made the roads impassable, but for now there were still a few months left to get through.
But the approach of winter had led to an unexpected hurdle, which was why Thorin was out here in the woods at all: the winds had cooled noticeably, the leaves on the trees all but gone by now, and the price of firewood had gone beyond what they were able to afford, if they still intended to take a reasonable profit home with them. Thorin would have been happy enough to just wrap up in his coat and sleep at night without any additional heat, but they needed the wood to start up the forges each morning, and Fili had picked up a rather unpleasant cold and was shivering through the night despite the press of both Kili and Thorin’s body on either side of him on the thin pallets they slept on, in the smoky room above the forge.
So rather than pay the extortionate winter prices for fuel, he’d harnessed up their cart, and taken it the half-day trek to the wood.
“Don't go to far in,” the man at the gate had warned him, casting a queer and unreadable look in the direction of the forest. “And keep your eyes on the sky. People are apt to get lost in there, and when they do, they don’t tend to come back.”
But Thorin had not paid attention.
And now he had been forced to walk further in between the trunks of the trees as he went deeper in to the wood, searching for branches dry enough to be worth dragging back; September had been long and damp, the earth claggy and the moss saturated, and he had to search for longer than he had hoped for wood that was not already rotten. He had his axe to hand, but found himself holding back from chopping as freely as he might have done elsewhere, searching instead for fallen branches to load into the cart: something about the press of trees made him uncomfortable. The trees seemed to whisper about him, and for a moment he thought that he could hear someone talking.
No, singing.
But when he had turned his head to work out where the noise was coming from, it had already disappeared.
The trees closed around him, the way he had come suddenly lost to the strange, unearthly quality of the forest. In every direction the forest appeared to him to be the same, the grey-brown bark of the trees too close to the colour of the earth. The rise and fall of the land seemed suddenly alien to him, and he realised that he could not recall if he had been walking west or south, up or down, or which direction the sun had been facing when he had first stepped between the portals of the great oak trees.
There was more noise in the forest now that he had actually entered it properly, but it was far from comforting. There was an odd, muffled quality to it that put him on edge, reminded him of someone trying to hide noise, as if this whole place was an elaborate trap out to ensnare the foolish visitor.
A robin hopped on the ground nearby, regarding him with cool, black eyes, before flying away again.
The air grew colder, and the shadows grew longer. After a while Thorin dropped the heavy bundle of firewood to the ground, suddenly caring more about getting out of the place than his errand.
It felt unfriendly.
His hand caught in a cobweb, damp and claggy; he brushed it off impatiently, shaking his hair from his face; it felt damp already, though it had yet begun to rain.
The ferns around him had curled back into themselves, as if trying to escape from the winter. The trees looked more like bones than anything else, lean and unhappy in the chill air.
He longed, quite suddenly, for home: not the cramped room above the forge, but for his narrow bed up in the rafters of his family home, the sound of Dis' singing from the kitchen and the rustle of parchment from his desk, lists of tasks he needed to complete and materials he needed to acquire over the winter before he left again to earn a living for his widowed sister and her sons. There was a sadness to the rough stone walls and the straw roof, but there was a familiarity to them as well: he knew every shadow cast by every jut of stone or straw in the flickering candlelight, knew it the same way he could picture his nephew’s smiles when he closed his eyes, the same way he knew the rise and fall of Dis’ voice when she was happy. The longing for familiarity struck him quite suddenly, causing an unexpected panic to burst in his chest, bright and hot and a little painful: he slowed himself, pausing for a moment by a tree, trying to calm him down.
From somewhere in the distance came the raucous noise of crows, cawing eagerly as if they were laughing at him; Thorin scowled even as he closed his eyes. The thought that the crows actually were mocking him passed through his mind bitterly as he tried to distract himself from the fear that he might never see those familiar things again, that he might be stuck in this strange and shifting forest forever.
Deep breaths, he thought to himself. You have been lost before. Dwalin teases you about it all the time, this is no different.
The wood isn’t even that big. All you have to do is walk in one direction, and eventually you will reach the edge: it might take a while to follow around the outside and find the pony again, but you can be patient.
“Are bones are stone and our hearts are strong, lad.” His Grandmother’s voice seemed to come from nowhere, startling him from his unexpected panic. “And we can weather anything.”
It was just a forest.
Just a forest, and a cold autumn day, and the foolish stories of men passed on to strangers. That was all.
The air was heavy with the smell of decay, the slime of bracken under his boots making his steps a little uncertain, but there was a strange freshness to it nonetheless, and Thorin took slow, deep breaths as he turned slowly, trying to work out where he had come from. He could not even see his own footprints in the ooze of leaf and plant, but that was little matter: he sought the sun through the thinner branches overhead, just visible for a moment through the heavy cloud, and set his pace east from it.
All he had to do was walk in a straight line, and stop letting the ridiculous words of drunkards set his nerves on end.
The quality of light had changed, he realised, as he had been walking: it was heavier now, the strange grey-brown of the end of the day, and it seemed to bleed the colour from the forest even more. There was a dampness to the air that spoke of oncoming rain, but he knew despite that that he would push the cart home again, unwilling to spend a night camped between this forest and the ghosts of the Downs.
And that was how Thorin found him, just a few moments later, as he walked through the wood with the fast heartbeat that he had yet to properly calm, his hands in fists by his sides. His eyes had been scanning the sky for another break in the clouds, another chance to catch sight of the sun, and so when he had first walked into the clearing he had barely noticed the other person sat there, watching him; it was only at the irritated noise of a crow that Thorin glanced around, and saw him, for the very first time.
The strange little thing.
The wind picked up for a moment as they regarded each other carefully, the curve of something that wasn’t quite a smile ghosting across the other’s mouth as Thorin frowned.
He was a fair creature, his skin pale and oddly bright, as if kissed by moonlight for all that it was only dusk: he perched on a throne made of the roots from some great tree that fell years ago, bearing the crescent of its underside to the world, half-grown over with moss but looking oddly deliberate, as if the great hand of some God had pulled it up to make a chair.
The tips of his ears were pointed, and Thorin found himself staring at them for a long moment, not sure what he was seeing.
“You-” Thorin’s voice had been rough, harsh and unexpected, breaking the silence between them with a sharp unfriendliness that he regretted almost immediately when he saw how the creature’s eyebrow moved, just a fraction, and his jaw tightened a little.
He stood, unfolding himself from his seat, and it was only then that Thorin realised just how small he was: shorter than Thorin and certainly more slender across the shoulders and chest. The thought that this was some lost child passed through his mind, but there was a gravity to the way he watched Thorin that spoke of experience and wisdom, not youth.
“No, wait,” Thorin found himself saying, making an odd, choked noise as the creature stopped, and looked at him again.
There was holly wound in his hair, and for a moment Thorin found himself distracted, wondering why it didn’t scratch him; surely the prick of the leaves would be painful?
“I’m… lost,” he said again, after a low, slow moment, trying to ignore the twist of irritation in his chest that that admission brought. “Do you know the way out?”
The creature nodded, and then quite suddenly dropped into a short bow.
“Bilbo, at your service,” he said, his voice lilting and a little hoarse, as if he did not often have cause to use it. “It’s going to rain, soon.”
Thorin found himself glancing up at the sky again despite himself, and when he looked back Bilbo had leapt from the tree roots to the ground, though Thorin had not heard a sound. From somewhere nearby came a rustle, and then a fox had appeared from the undergrowth. It wound itself around Bilbo’s legs, baring its teeth at Thorin even as it rubbed the soft fur of his side against Bilbo's skin.
“What are you?” Thorin asked, despite himself, and Bilbo’s blinked at him, the small furrow of a frown pulling between his eyebrows.
“What do you think I am?”
Thorin’s mouth opened, but he had nothing to say. He folded his arms across his chest instead, throwing a rather defensive glare back at Bilbo. He had little patience for riddles.
“Are you going to help me, or not?”
Bilbo reached down, rubbing gently at the ear at the fox with one hand.
He glanced up at Thorin.
“Not if you speak to me like that,” he replied, and then… vanished.
Thorin blinked for a long moment at the place the creature had been, before cursing under his breath.
Hours later and darkness had crept across the shadowed floor of the forest; Thorin had long since lost sight of the sun, and seemed to be no closer to reaching the edge of the wood than he had been before. Worse than that, the clouds that had threatened rain all day had finally broken, and the rain had worked his way under the collar of his coat and down his back, leaving him cold and rather miserable.
He was trying very hard not to think about the man he had met earlier - for it must have been a man. The stories were nothing more than tales muttered around the campfire; pointed ears were not that odd, not really. Just a hunter, out in the forest, perhaps from some isolated farmstead that he had not heard of, light footed and quick: everything else was the result of the strange fear that had been fluttering about his chest from his moment of panic.
It was still stupid of Thorin to have annoyed him, though. It would have been good to get out of the forest, and back home.
A low roll of thunder sounded somewhere in the distance: Thorin shrugged up the collar of his coat, quickening his pace, determined to get out before dark set in properly.
The cold had settled into his body now, winding its way down to his bones, and his exhaustion was growing, blurring his vision. He skidded for a moment on a root, falling to one knee.
When he looked up, after catching his breath, it was to see a lean hare staring at him.
It cocked it’s head to one side, and beat its foot once against a half-covered rock just once, before springing away again.
Another flicker of moment caught his eye.
And there was the man from earlier, sat in the crook of a branch, sheltered from the rain by a cloaked hood now, looking at him with just a hint of amusement.
“If you’re polite,” he called, across the space between them, “Then you can come with me.”
Thorin tried not to feel too relieved.
“Where to?” Thorin asked, and if his voice was perhaps a little childish in its petulance then he didn’t think that anyone would blame him. But Bilbo just smiled, a flash of teeth, a proper smile, and held out his hand, from which a large key was swinging from a length of twine.
“Home, of course.”
He shivered.
“Can’t you get me out of this damned forest?”
Bilbo shook his head.
“You’ve been wandering deeper and deeper: it’ll be long past dark by the time we get to the edge.”
Thorin shrugged at that, but Bilbo shook his head.
“You can’t be out here in the dark.”
He said nothing more, and slid gracefully from the branch to the ground, landing on the balls of his feet, which Thorin had only just noticed were bare. They sank into the earth, and he did not seem to feel the cold, just padded away, not waiting to see if Thorin would follow him or not.
He watched him, for a long slow moment, before chasing after him, scowling as he did.
Thorin watched Bilbo carefully as he followed him through the trees, blinking cold rainwater from his eyes, only shaking a little; Bilbo’s cloak billowed behind him, and Thorin tried his hardest not to notice that the light, grey fabric was not getting any darker with the rainwater.
“Who are you?” he found himself asking, without quite meaning to.
He couldn’t see Bilbo’s face, but he rather got the impression that he was smiling; he didn’t answer, but led Thorin deeper into the forest.
Here the oak trees were even larger, great twisted things whose roots ran into each other’s. The way was harder now: Thorin was forced to climb over great piles roots that were almost as tall as he was on occasion, the bark biting into the skin of his hands, leaving them red and raw, bleeding from one palm. The moss and lichen was slick and unpleasant, but Bilbo did not seem to notice as he made his way ahead of him.
He looked up a little later to see the fox from earlier had joined them, occasionally nudging at Bilbo’s legs with his head, or glancing back suspiciously at Thorin.
If this creature had been leading him to a trap, Thorin would have fallen right into it: as it was, Bilbo actually was taking him home, but Thorin still almost fell over, in relief at the sight of it.
Bilbo lived in a cottage in a small glade deep in the heart of the wood, the old stone tiles of the roof a cacophony of grey and yellow lichen. The door was round, as were the windows, but Thorin caught sight of little else as he hurried inside, determined to get out of the rain a soon as he could. The inside was just one large room, and Thorin made immediately for the fire in the open hearth, warming his hands against the flames, a tingling pain beginning as heat rushed back into his frozen limbs. By the time he turned again Bilbo had pulled off his cloak and had hung it by the door, and now was watching Thorin cautiously, as one might watch an injured wildcat that you were trying to help: with some kind of distant sympathy, but with pressing caution as well, very much aware that at any point soon it might show its claws.
“Thank you,” Thorin mumbled, not sure what else could be said: he pulled out of his own coat, looking away as Bilbo’s gaze raked up and down his body in open curiosity.
The years had not always been their kindest to Thorin- grey streaked through his temple now when he swore that it had not done only five years before; long scars curved around his ribs from a wolf attack some years ago, and his hands and forearms had been burnt from the forges more times than he could remember, leaving a littering of scars old and new underneath his now-soaked clothes.
“Should I-?” he started, indicating the coat with an awkward movement of his hand, and Bilbo started, reaching for it.
His hands grazed Thorin’s as he took the coat; his skin was warm, and Thorin repressed a shudder.
“I…” Bilbo started, as he hung the coat, suddenly shifting awkwardly. “I’m afraid that I am not used to… company.”
The fox curled up on the rug in front of the hearth, woven from grasses, keeping one eye on Thorin.
Bilbo did not seem to feel the chill of the evening air; he padded around his strange little house, pulling an old copper kettle from a hook on the wall and filling it from a jug on the side, his feet still bare against the stone flagged floor. His garb was strange, some kind of grey fabric that looked as soft as cobwebs against his skin, his lower legs and forearms bare. His skin still had that strange gossamer quality, fine and untouched, and Thorin pulled at the hem of his shirt for a moment, almost unwilling to remove it despite the chill of the wet cotton; his own skin so marked and marred from a lifetime of work.
He shook his head to rid himself of that ridiculous thought, and pulled it off anyway, leaving him in just his thin undershirt. He draped it across the hearth, hoping that the fire would warm it, only to move quickly out of the way as Bilbo came across with the kettle, hanging it from the hook above the flames to heat.
His eyes glanced quickly to Thorin, taking in the broad lines of his shoulders, the strong planes of his chest that came from a lifetime of smithing.
Thorin took half a step backwards, his eyes finding something on the wall that he had not expected to see.
“That’s…”
“It’s a harp,” Bilbo replied quietly, and Thorin bit back the urge to tell Bilbo that he knew what it was.
How did a strange creature who lived in the woods come across a harp? It sounded like a question worth asking, but though he had intended to he found that he didn’t, as if he were afraid of the answer.
“It doesn’t have any strings.”
Bilbo smiled, an odd and sad sort of smile, and sat down beside the fox, running pale fingers through its fur, its snout nosing against the curve of his knee contentedly.
A small mouse ran out from somewhere behind the hearth, and twitched a nose in Thorin’s direction before disappearing again.
“It has never had any strings, not as long as I have been alive.”
“And how long has that been?”
Bilbo turned to look up him, his mouth opening slightly as if about to answer.
Thorin slid to the floor beside him, on his knees. The stone was cold even through the grass mat, but now he was closer to Bilbo he found that he didn’t really notice; his eyes, he saw now, were the strangest inhuman colour, some shifting combination of grey and brown and green, subaqueous and knowing, threaded through with a gold as rich as autumn leaves before they fall.
Bilbo just smiled at him, and it was a rich and warm thing, before he turned to pour herbs from a jar into the kettle, brewing a tea, the steam from the spout taking on a heady, woodsy smell, curling around them comfortably.
Thorin had never believed in the fey folk, in creatures beyond the mundane.
He watched the autumn colours of Bilbo’s hair change and shift under the firelight.
Bilbo poured a cup of the fragrant tea and passed it to him; the flavour was odd, earthy and a little bitter, but warmth spread outwards from his chest as he drank it, chasing away the chill of the rain.
Dark made its presence known as they sat in silence for some time, the night setting in at last, leaving the room shadowed but for the crackle of the fire and the rain outside; the last of the grey light of the day faded, and Bilbo rose after a while to light candles, the flash of his teeth in a sudden smile when he caught Thorin’s eye making something in his throat tighten so that for a moment it was almost difficult to breathe. When he sat back down it was a shade closer to Thorin, so that when he exhaled the line of his shoulder almost brushed Bilbo’s. He felt oddly aware of the proximity, uncomfortable despite the flush of heat he felt for every brush of his skin against the fabric of Bilbo’s clothes.
There was a long, slow screech of an owl from outside, and then the quavering howl of a wolf: Thorin sat up, his hand going to the axe that was still at his belt, but Bilbo’s hand was warm against his shoulder, pushing him back down against the floor.
The wolves were worse at winter, pressing closer to the towns, slavering and starving, thin as famine; there had not been any incidents this year yet, but Thorin remembered only too well the wolf attack that had taken his younger brother’s life, when they had both been children.
“Hush,” came Bilbo’s voice, gentle and sure. “They will not come in here.”
But Bilbo got to his feet and padded to the window anyway, looking out into the darkness with those strange, staring eyes, shaking his head at the night.
“Wolves were once men, or so the story goes,” Bilbo said quietly. “Men who learnt to change their skin, and then forgot how to change back.”
Thorin would be afraid, living out here in the forest, surrounded by wolves and the echoing silence, but Bilbo didn’t seem to have anything more than a battered old butter knife and the quiet with which he moved to protect himself. A strange fear sparked then, for this strange creature hidden away from the world, though he was certain that he was far better suited to protecting himself than Thorin ever would be.
Bilbo left the window with a small shake of his head, and pulled flat oatcakes and cold, roasted rabbit from the shelf. He passed them wordlessly to Thorin who ate quickly before drinking more tea, Bilbo sliding back to the ground next to him once more. The fox glanced up, and then stood, stretching, before padding over and settling in Bilbo’s lap, his head tucked over his knee, the tip of his snout nosing briefly against Thorin’s thigh.
“Why do you live here, all alone?” Thorin asked, the warmth from the tea still lingering. But Bilbo did not answer, just looked at him with an odd sort of confusion, as if he did not understand the very nature of the question. Perhaps, in fact, he didn’t: this was all that he had ever known, Thorin realised suddenly – perhaps he did not know that there was a world apart from his own, a world outside the confines of the trees and the bracken of his forest.
He glanced down at his hands, almost a little embarrassed, before his eyes caught sight of the harp on the wall again.
“Would you like to hear it play?” Thorin tried again, quietly, as the firelight sent strange, shivering shadows across the planes of Bilbo’s face.
“I would like that,” he said, the ghost of a smile pulling at his mouth again. “I would like that very much.”
A squirrel appeared from the darkness and sat on the windowsill; it watched the scene with interested eyes, before darting back into the rain again.
“Sleep,” Bilbo told him after a while, when Thorin’s eyes began to droop. He guided him up with a hand, and for a moment Thorin felt disproportionate, too tall against Bilbo, whose hair would have barely brushed against the rough scruff of his beard had Bilbo taken just one step closer, and rested against Thorin’s chest. He nodded as he swallowed, banishing that thought from his mind, and let Bilbo lead him to a bower made of rough branches, padded in moss and leaves, layered with blankets that looked like coarse wool, but felt like spider silk.
Bilbo pushed him down on the bed, and smiled, before backing away and blowing out the candles.
The rain outside beat a soothing pattern against the roof; Thorin struggled to keep his eyes open.
“How would I find you, if I were to come back?” Thorin asked as he lay on the thick moss in the dark, his voice so quiet that he thought that Bilbo had not heard him, for he made no response for quite some time.
When he did his voice was soft, and closer than Thorin had expected.
“If you did, just walk: I will find you.”
The noise of the downpour obscured any and all others, but Thorin still slipped away into the arms of sleep without a second thought. He didn’t wake when the wolves began to howl again, when the rain stopped, nor when Bilbo slipped from the house at some point in the night, following the fey call of the moon, visible now that the cool night breeze had blown the clouds away.
The morning had dawned fresh and grey, and Thorin had woken slowly, to find himself alone but for the fox, which had curled itself across his chest in the night. It woke when he stirred and watched him carefully as he stood and dressed in his dry clothes again, wrapping his coat around his shoulders. Before he could even hesitate and wonder what to do, whether or not to wait for Bilbo’s return, the fox was nudging him out of the door and into the morning.
The hoar frost had made brilliant patterns on the bark of the trees, and the early morning was cold enough that it hurt a little to breathe deeply: he cast his gaze from left to right as the fox led him out of the forest, but he caught no sight of his host for the night.
They found the edges of the forest quicker than he had thought; his horse was still there, but someone had thrown blankets over her in the night, and left a rough-cut pail that now stood empty, so she whinnied at Thorin quite contentedly as he appeared.
He looked a little uncertainly down at the fox, who cocked his head in return.
“Thank you,” he said, in the end. “Tell him… thank you.”
The fox seemed to nod, before disappearing into the undergrowth again.
Kili threw his arms around Thorin’s middle when he got back to the forge, his wild hair falling out of its braid, happy enough to see his Uncle return that he didn’t even mind the damp of Thorin’s coat, though he wrinkled his nose a little at it. Fili was a little more reserved in his greetings, being older and a little wiser, and Dwalin just slapped the back of his shoulder, but there was a look of relief in all of their eyes at his safe return.
“What happened t'you?” Dwalin asked later that night, when they were lying down for the night. The boys were already asleep, and Thorin saw with some amusement that they had lain down on either side of him tonight on their sleeping pallets, as if to make sure that he couldn’t leave at any point during the night.
“Got lost in the woods, lost track of time,” Thorin said, his voice low and quiet. The warmth from the forge downstairs lingered through the floorboards and up through the pallet, and he lay down into it and the scratch of their blankets contentedly. “Slept on the cart rather than try and lead the pony back in the dark.”
Dwalin frowned a little, as Thorin reached over to pull a strand of hair from Kili’s face, where it had already fallen into his open mouth.
He shook his head as Kili frowned in his sleep, before nuzzling closer to his Uncle again.
“The lads worried about yeh,” Dwalin said, closing his eyes. “I did too, you old bastard, don’t do it again.”
Thorin hid a smile, and looked up at the rafters.
“Aye,” he replied, and after a moment of quiet continued. “Lots of wood down there. I might go back again, fill up the cart properly this time. Keep this place properly warm, so the boys are healthy when we set out for home, so Dis doesn’t skin us both when he get there.”
Dwalin made a low sound of amusement.
“Sell anything we have left, as well,” Thorin added, quieter now. “Bit of extra coin.”
He heard, rather than saw, Dwalin nod, a brush of hair against the blankets.
He dreamt that night of storm clouds and moss, and soft hands stroking the scars on his arms.
He came back again, a week or so later; they’d sold a good pile of the wood for far more than they expected the first time around. The disquiet about the forest meant that firewood was in high demand, and Dwalin had soon made noises about going back for more. He’d suggested that he went this time, but Thorin had quickly stepped in and shot down that idea; the memories of his night in the forest had plagued him since his return, and he could no more stop thinking of the way Bilbo had looked in the firelight than he could stop breathing.
What was he? What strange kind of magic had pulled him into being? It was as if he had come alive from the very desire of the wood, as if some great hand had dug him from the earth to act as a guardian for the forest and its creatures. He wandered between the trunks of the great oaks and caught the colours of the leaves in his eyes, haunting Thorin every time he closed his own. He had heard stories of fey magic before, of the nets they through to ensnare the minds of mortals, but he did not feel trapped.
He felt... he did not know what he felt.
He thought he saw the flicker of russet fur when he tied up the mare, leaving her this time with his own coarse blankets and bag of feed, worrying for a moment at the thought of the lean wolves of the forest. But then a crow landed on the corner of his cart, cocking its head knowingly at him, cawing as if to reassure him.
The forest would watch. The forest looked after its own.
Thorin blinked a little, wondering if he was going insane.
He spent several hours loading up the cart, making sure to keep the cart in his eye line at all times, and was it his imagination, or was the firewood more easily found, this time, always in logs that he could carry with ease, never needing cutting down to size?
A rabbit appeared in front of him, the flashing white of its bobtail catching his eye before it disappeared again.
The cart was loaded within hours, but he did not leave: he’d warned Dwalin and the boys that he would spend the night out there again, so he covered the wood with the oilskin he’d brought, fastening it carefully in place, and left the pony with a gently pat to her neck; she nudged his shoulder as if to push him away, urging him back into the forest.
The birds huddled on the branches against the cold, watching him carefully, but the forest seemed more alive than the last time he had been here, as if it were less careful about what it was keeping hidden from him: soon he felt the prickle of disquiet again, but he did not search the trees for the sight of the creature. Bilbo would come to him.
And then he did: one moment Thorin was alone and then Bilbo was there in front of him, his smile surprised but bright.
“I didn’t think you’d come back,” he said, and his voice carried through the quiet.
There was a sudden and unexpected warmth against his leg; his gaze dropped from the brilliance of Bilbo’s eyes to see the large, lean hare from the previous week, pressed close to him, her ears cocked back against her head. She glanced up at him, and for a moment it almost looked as if she were smiling.
“Come on,” Bilbo said quietly, reaching for his wrist. “Let me show you something.”
And so the weeks passed: once a week or so Thorin would disappear to the forest and collect wood for sale: their bag of coin grew larger than it had been for some years, and the boys remained hardy and hale. Dwalin commented once that it was strange that Thorin was not more ill himself, so often spending nights in the woods, but Thorin just shrugged it off.
“I’m not that old,” he might say, rolling his eyes. “I’m still strong enough to weather a night outside.”
If Dwalin thought it suspicious then he did not say anything, and the boys soon got used to Thorin disappearing. The townspeople thought it very odd that he dared risk the magic of the woods for the sake of a bit of wood, but luckily none of them seemed willing to break years of superstition to make the trip themselves. A young lad was spirited away by the wrights out on the barrow Downs after he was stuck outside the town walls after dark, which put paid to any remaining interest in following Thorin’s lead for everyone apart from Fili and Kili, who asked again and again to be taken one day as well.
“Your mother would flay me alive, lads,” he told them, as gently as he could. “There are wolves out there.”
Luckily they’d seen Thorin’s scars, and knew what had happened to Frerin – they didn’t press after that.
He wondered sometimes if Bilbo was lonely, out there in the woods with no one to talk to: he rather thought he must be, for the more often Thorin came, the more he seemed to come out of his shell, the louder his laughter became. He treated Thorin still like he was some wild animal likely to start away from him, padding slowly around him with endless patience, but really Thorin felt that it might not have been the other way around.
“Tell me about you,” Bilbo would ask, pulling Thorin by the hands through the trees, to oozing brooks and small caves, tiny passageways between great, craggy boulders. He showed Thorin every secret of the woodland, untouched by mortal hands, strangely beautiful in the grey light of late autumn. They followed roe deer tracks in the hazy light of dawn to find to fawns asleep in the tall grasses at the edge of the wood: Bilbo drew them away before its parents saw them, but Thorin could recall with some clarity the way that one of them had stirred, turning its head to them, one dark eye blinking tiredly in the golden light of dawn.
“What do you want to know?” he would reply, watching the way that Bilbo’s toes dipped into the icy waters of the stream, not seeming to notice the cold.
Bilbo would smile then, and wrinkle his nose.
“Everything.”
There were days when his eyes were greyer, like the heavy clouds which still threatened rain; other days they were the dark russet of the leaves. But then again they could be tawny, or else quite, quite green, as if he had looked for too long at the wood that day.
He told Bilbo about his nephews, about his cousins, and his sister; he told him about forging, tempering metal, and brought things to show him, things that he had made, hair clasps and pins and nails. Bilbo would turn them in his hands, watching with wide eyes the way that the metal caught the light. In turn sometimes he would bring out books from his house, the parchment dry and crackled, far older than any book Thorin had ever seen before, and beautifully bound, the leather soft with age and the ink faded.
In the mornings he woke on Bilbo’s bower with frost making patterns on the leaves outside or the rain pressing a beat against the slates, but he never felt cold, even though the blankets he slept under were fine and light. At first he would often wake to find that Bilbo had gone, but the more often he came the more he might open his eyes to find him fussing around the fire, making tea or stirring a battered cauldron of stew.
Occasionally he might wake to the warm press of Bilbo’s body next to him, curled on his side. Those mornings he lay as still as he could for as long as he was able, to put of the moment they would have to rise, and set off for the smoke of the forges and the dirt of the town again.
Bilbo liked to run his hands through Thorin’s hair, soft under his gentle touch, and sometimes he would sing as Thorin lay there with his head in Bilbo’s lap, listening to the odd, half-broken melodies that he struggled to follow.
He would tell Thorin stories too, half-laughing as Thorin watched the curve of his mouth, about the beasts and the birds, the trees and the flowers.
“The robin was a girl once,” Bilbo said quietly, stroking the feathers of one such bird, down its back. It preened under his touch, balanced happily on the curve of Bilbo’s hand. They were both sat on a ledge of rock overhanging a stream, but Bilbo's feet were tucked up this time, his knees against his chest, as if he were cold, though it was becoming very obvious that Bilbo did not feel the temperature at all.
“She loved a man and he loved her, so much that when he died she grew wings to chase his spirit.”
His eyes were bright, and the bird trilled a strange sound, beautiful but melancholy. Bilbo held the bird a little closer, and Thorin reached out tentatively, to stroke her too.
“But she was too slow, so she was left behind, but before he could leave she ripped her heart out of her chest and threw it to him, to take with him. That’s why her breast is red.”
The date for them to leave the town crept ever closer, but Thorin pushed it as far from his mind as he could. Dwalin started to look at him a little oddly when his mind wandered, and even Fili and Kili seemed to notice that there was something different about him, but he managed to put it off, saying he was tired, and looking forward to going home.
For the first time, that wasn’t entirely true.
The more he thought about it, the more he became certain that he didn’t want to leave the forest, didn’t want to leave Bilbo.
The fair creature appeared every time he lay his head down to rest, every time his mind wandered: thoughts of his smile and his eyes, the laughing timbre of his voice. Bilbo’s hands were clever, teasing the fur of his animals until they relaxed against him, running carefully along Thorin’s own hands, tracing grazes or burns received that week at the forge. Sometimes his fingers brushed delicately across the frost and blurred theirs lines, and other times he dug them deep into the earth, searching for something.
“Feel,” he would tell Thorin, taking his hand and pressing it into the dirt. “Can’t you feel it?”
He would shake his head, not sure what Bilbo meant, and unwilling to say anything in case he took his hand from Thorin’s.
“The earth is sleeping,” Bilbo said, looking up at Thorin, their faces so close that he could feel his breath against his skin. “The long, slow sleep of winter. But the warmth is still there, deep down below the fallen leaves and the frost.”
He couldn’t feel it, but Bilbo never seemed to mind.
“I have to go soon,” he whispered to the crown of Bilbo’s head when Thorin woke one morning to find him pressed against his front. “Back to my home town, for the winter.”
Bilbo didn’t say anything, but his body tensed, and after that he seemed to move closer to Thorin whenever he got the opportunity, as if trying to make the most of the time that they had left.
“Do you know why we have winter?” Bilbo asked once, as he lay on the ground, propped up against a tree, pulling acorns from the undergrowth and passing them to a red squirrel sitting intently nearby.
Thorin moved just a little closer, and wondered for a moment what it meant to be in love.
“I don’t,” he said quietly, his forehead pulled into something close to a frown.
“The goddess of growth and the Lord of Death are in love,” Bilbo told him, leaning close and whispering as if they were sharing some conspiracy, some secret just for the two of them. The thrill of it sent a shiver down Thorin’s spine, and he had to bite the inside of his mouth to stop himself doing something that he might regret.
“They have to stay apart in the spring and summer to let the world grow bright and fair again; but when the summer solstice passes they run to each other again, and damn the rest of the world.”
“Do they indeed?” Thorin replied, quietly, as a breath of wind moved Bilbo’s curls across his forehead. He raised a hand to brush them back, looking up at the sky, through the chill air of the day. The clouds looked bruised above them, purpling and brown in places, unhealthy and sick.
The corner of his mouth must have been quirked, because when Bilbo glanced back at him he frowned a little.
“You’re laughing at me,” he said, quietly, before rubbing at the back of his head in discomfort. It was such an oddly human gesture from a creature so other that Thorin really did laugh then, a low and brief sound that carried strangely through the clearing.
“Not at you,” he told him, and his tone was gentle, coaxing.
Bilbo’s hand ran along a bramble, lifting a leaf to reveal a cluster of blackberries that had somehow survived the frost, and he picked them gently one-by-one from it, placing them in his hand, clearly trying to avoid looking up to meet Thorin’s eyes.
He popped one in his mouth; his cheeks sucked in briefly at the tartness, and Thorin found his eyes drawn to the dark stain on his lower lip that the fruit had left behind.
“Here,” Bilbo said, quietly, lifting a berry to Thorin’s mouth. He took it with his teeth, grazing Bilbo’s fingertips, his mouth dragging against Bilbo’s skin for a long, slow moment.
The fruit was tart, and cool; the taste rolled around his mouth, and with a small smile Bilbo pushed another berry into Thorin's mouth, his fingers stained with the juice. Bilbo glanced up at him again, and then a pain in Thorin’s chest flared, sudden and impossible to ignore.
Thorin reached to cup Bilbo’s cheek, but before he could think of what he was doing his hand scratched against the holly wound through Bilbo’s hair: he pulled back with a hiss of surprise, but almost immediately Bilbo had hold of his hand, where a fine line of blood was already welling, vivid and vibrant in the grey light.
He stared at it for a long moment, a little shocked by the colour, by the brightness against the sullen monochrome of the woods.
Bilbo wiped it away gently, his fingers soothing.
He looked once more up at Thorin, and his eyes were bright, more gold than they had ever been before. He leant down, bringing Thorin’s hand to his face, and pressed his mouth to the knuckles and then to the palm, in something so gentle that Thorin thought to call it a kiss was a disservice.
It was suddenly very difficult to breathe.
He feared for a moment that he might join the robin; his heart seemed to beat so violently against his ribs that he was sure that his chest would burst from the strain of it.
“They say that’s how the holly got its berries,” Bilbo said, and his voice was a whisper against Thorin’s skin. “A woman thought the plant very fine, so foolish man came to pull it up for her. But the forest did not want to let the holly go, so the leaves grew points to protect themselves, and when they cut his hands, his blood fell in berries to the ground.”
He glanced up, then, and Thorin found his gaze caught in the strange depths of Bilbo’s eyes, the shifting colours of the wood within them.
He had been lost in the wood, and now he was lost again.
Bilbo’s cheek was soft as ash underneath his hands; his mouth were tart with the taste of blackberries.
Thorin made no noise when the holly cut his hands again, too intent on pulling Bilbo’s face closer, to press desperate, searching kisses against his mouth.
“Come back,” Bilbo mumbled breathlessly against the kiss, as he arched into Thorin’s body. “Don’t stop coming to see me, don’t.”
Thorin held him closer, and kissed him deeper, and swore with every aching bone in his body that he wouldn’t.
Bilbo pressed his back down against the bower, the moss soft against Thorin’s skin as he pulled the shirt from his back. He felt that same moment of embarrassment again as Bilbo took in the sight of him, so far removed from what Bilbo was, but then Bilbo’s mouth was tracing the line of his collarbone, kissing a reverential path up to the column of his throat.
The moonlight shone in through the open window, the shadows as dark as pitch, but Thorin found himself unable to be afraid at the thought of the wolves outside, the passing time, dangers of the night. All that mattered was the touch of Bilbo’s skin, the heat of his mouth, the way his hands skimmed across Thorin’s body with a surety that he was not convinced that he could match.
Thorin’s head fell back against the moss as sharp, clever teeth bit against his throat, a good sting that had him rolling his hips up against Bilbo’s.
“I want to see you,” Bilbo mumbled against his skin, “All of you.”
And as he pulled the rest of his clothes from Thorin’s body, so he reciprocated with Bilbo’s own, until they were naked against each other, and their kisses reached a deeper, more fevered pitch. He pulled back, for just a moment, looking down at Thorin with a look of such disarming passion that his own breath caught at the sight of it; he didn’t know what to do with a look as strong as that, a look so powerful.
“I love you,” he thought he said as Bilbo sank down onto him, Thorin pressing into the warm heat of the fair creature’s body, tight and almost too good, but then he might just have thought it. He bit the inside of his mouth and was flooded suddenly with the copper-bright taste of blood, enough of a distraction from the way that Bilbo felt clenched tight around him that he managed to get himself back under control.
When he opened his eyes again Bilbo was still watching him, and it felt to Thorin like that gaze was pulling him apart, seeing beyond the body he wore and the scars that graced it, so something that he had never even known about himself.
Bilbo was leant down, and was kissing him again, and he could still taste the lingering tang of the blackberries.
Thorin’s hands stroked their way up Bilbo’s chest, folding around the curve of his hips as they moved together, quietly, the wind blowing outside.
And then the moonlight pooled on them, and Bilbo’s skin began to glow with the silver of it, the gold of his eyes almost luminous in the darkness.
“You’re beautiful,” he mumbled, against Bilbo’s mouth.
Bilbo just laughed as Thorin thrust up, hard and sure; he buried his hands in Thorin’s hair, and kissed him again.
Now when he came to the forest Bilbo appeared almost immediately, and Thorin never hesitated in pulling him into his arms and kissing him, pressing his back against the nearest tree. Anyone else would have been scraped by the rough bark, would have been left with long marks cut into their back, but Bilbo’s skin remained untouched and unflawed, the pale fineness of it never letting Thorin forget that, whatever Bilbo was, he was not the same as Thorin.
The earth lost that smell of decay, and in the mornings now it was the hardness of the chill that assaulted the senses when you woke. Thorin tried not to think of the approaching winter, practically upon them now, and just did the best he could to come out as often as possible to the forest.
He would miss Bilbo when he was gone, and not in the way that you miss a person or a view or an object: he knew already that the loss would be as keen as if Thorin had lost a limb, that he would be physically reminded of it every time he turned his eyes to the trees that bordered their town, so mundane and normal compared to the magic of this place.
The hare seemed to have taken him in under her proverbial wing: she was often sat waiting for him when he first pulled up with the cart, her head cocked to one side, and she nudged at his knees whenever these kinds of thoughts weighed too heavily on his mind, as if to try and cheer him up.
The fox still regarded him with suspicion, and the crows still laughed when he walked past, but he supposed that you couldn't win every fight.
Bilbo fed him manna from the ash trees that he’d collected over the summer and stored in old, discoloured jars; it was a strange sweetness the consistency of honey that he dipped his fingers into, and he fed it to the animals that pressed against his windows whenever one was ill. He fed it to Thorin, too, when he lay propped up on his back across the bower, with Bilbo straddling his middle and looking down on him. He chased Bilbo’s mouth for kisses, and the drips of the nectar down the narrow line of his wrists with his own mouth, it, his teeth grazing the sensitive skin of his inner arm until Bilbo shuddered, and his breaths came fast and hard, his thighs tightening around Thorin’s middle.
They were long and happy moments, but there was a melancholy to those days as well, a certain bitter sweetness.
Bilbo asked him more and more often about the town that hecame from, the woods around them, the way the land looked and the plants that grew there. He regretted now not knowing more, regretted not listening when Balin had tried to teach him, for all he could say were the colour of the petals, the shapes of the leaves: he couldn’t remember when or how they grew, or what they were used for, let alone their names.
Bilbo didn’t seem to mind though, apparently content enough with the knowledge that Thorin could give him.
“And your sister, she lives there?”
He nodded, the hard just of his nose buried in the softness of Bilbo’s hair, carefully avoiding the stinging holly.
“She does. She’s a fine and fierce woman, she scares even Dwalin.”
Bilbo laughed a little against Thorin’s throat, where his face was buried.
“She sounds wonderful.”
He hummed in agreement, and Bilbo’s hands tightened around Thorin’s forearms.
“I should have liked to have a family, I think,” he said, quietly. “They seem like people who would love you, very much.”
He made another non-committal noise, too afraid to speak in case he said the wrong thing.
My family could be your family, too.
Bilbo must have felt Thorin swallow, because his grip on Thorin’s arms loosened, and began to stroke soothingly, instead.
“I’ve never known anyone like you,” he said, quietly, and Thorin laughed.
“You’ve not met many people, from what you’ve said.”
Bilbo shrugged, a half-hearted motion, and he ran his fingers over the scars across Thorin’s ribcage, light enough that they almost tickled. They were still thick and angry, those scars, and for a moment he tensed at having someone touch them, as he always did, before relaxing into the gentle motions again.
“The wolves are leaner where I’m from,” he said, quietly, trying to break the awkward silence that had appeared between them now. “More desperate. They come down from the mountains in larger packs, and we have less livestock for them to take.”
Bilbo nodded, reaching up to press a kiss to the corner of Thorin’s mouth, as if to comfort him.
“We went out with axes, but sometimes they are quicker than we can catch.”
Bilbo made a low noise of agreement.
“My brother was killed by wolves,” he said after a low, slow moment of silence. “When we were just children.”
Bilbo continued to watch him, as it waiting for him to confess more, but Thorin just shrugged, and remained silent, so Bilbo pressed a number of kisses to his forehead instead, as if he could sense his disquiet.
“You’re beautiful,” Bilbo told him, his voice low in the dim light of the fire. “They’re beautiful.”
Thorin’s forehead creased a little in confusion, and Bilbo shrugged again.
“Mortals,” he continued, quietly. “You’re beauty is in your endurance. I could not survive half the hurts to the heart than you men do.”
A shadow passed across his face, and he turned away from Thorin then, curling into a ball, and said no more that night.
“What are you?”
It was a question he had not dared to ask since their first meeting, had not even really thought about that much since then, but it had lept once more into his mind.
Bilbo just laughed, startling the hare that had been nuzzling her ears against Thorin’s hand, which he’d burnt the day before.
“Does it matter what I am?” he replied.
After a long, slow moment, Thorin shook his head.
It really didn’t, not anymore.
It was the last night they would have together. Thorin and his family were due to leave the next week, and there would be no time between then and now to sneak back to say his final farewells, not without arousing suspicion from his family. But he came not just with words and the sorrow that was building in his heart, but with a gift.
Bilbo turned them over in his hands, carefully.
There was a slight furrow between his eyebrows: he clearly didn’t know what they were.
“They’re strings,” Thorin offered, eventually. “For the harp, on your wall.”
Bilbo’s eyes were bright with shock when he looked up, and a sudden, blooming joy.
Thorin was satisfied: it had taken weeks to get hold of them – they were not exactly the most commonly traded commodity, let alone in a backwater place like this town, but find them he had. Bilbo passed him the harp and he strung it deftly, whilst Bilbo watched him, a little curiously.
“You know how to use it?” he said, after a moment of silence, less of a question and more of a statement.
Thorin just nodded in reply.
“My mother had one, when I was young,” he admitted, as he struck a chord, high and sweet and clear.
Bilbo’s head turned to one side almost at the exact moment that the fox’s did, both of them intrigued by the sound.
“Then you know how to play?”
He nodded, his eyes softening as Bilbo sat down quietly next to him, pressing the line of their bodies together.
“Will you play for me?”
Thorin’s mouth quirked upwards in a smile, but rather than answering, he just struck another chord, testing the sound of it for a long, slow moment until he began to play, hesitant at first but growing more confident as he remembered the sweet moments in his youth where he had played, his mother clapping and laughing in approval.
The lullabies of his childhood sounded a little odd in the deep pitch of his voice, but Bilbo was staring at him, his eyes wide and almost a little afraid.
He didn’t ask why: he just tore his eyes away from Bilbo and back to the harp, to the floor, to the grey patterns in the bark of the trees around them. He sang for what felt like hours in the dying light, singing several songs on multiple occasions when he ran out of inspiration, until his voice was hoarse and his fingers hurt from playing, and he could perform no more.
When he put the harp aside he ended up with a lapful of Bilbo instead, who kissed him like he was drowning, and Thorin was his air.
They made love that evening with a slower pace than they ever had before; Thorin ran his mouth over every inch of skin that he could, determined to commit it all to memory, and Bilbo’s fingers stroked the planes of Thorin’s face over and over again.
They curled together in the darkness when they were done, talking softly, until one by one the candles burnt out and Thorin could no longer made out Bilbo’s face.
The night outside was still and quiet: not even the wolves were disturbing their rest for this one, long night, as if they sensed that it was something that they should not interrupt. They shared long, slow kisses until they began to tire.
“Have you ever thought of leaving the forest?” Thorin asked eventually, quietly, when he wasn’t sure if Bilbo was asleep or not: mostly because he wasn’t sure if he was ready to hear what the answer might be.
Bilbo didn’t reply, but he did still in Thorin’s arms.
Thorin kissed his hair, and tried to calm the pain in his chest.
“D’you think we’ll come back here again, Uncle?” Kili asked, from beside him on the cart, and Thorin just shrugged. They passed through the town walls and he kept his eyes on the road, avoiding looking at the dark smudge of the forest.
“We did well here,” Thorin said, neutrally, not willing to commit to any possibility. Kili didn’t seem to mind: he just bounced up and down on the seat beside him, grinning as he looked out over the landscape.
“D’you think Ma will have missed us?” he asked, his tone still bright. From the road, Dwalin rolled his eyes and reached up, smacking Kili gently about the back of the head.
“Nah, she was glad to be rid of ye’ the first time,” he drawled, as Kili pouted. “It’ll be y’Uncle and I that get told off for bothering to bring you home.”
Kili realised it was a joke, then, and stuck his tongue out at Dwalin.
It took a little over two weeks to make it back to their own town, two weeks in which he tried his hardest not to think about anything at all, in particular the forest that he’d left behind. It was hard – in fact it was near impossible. On more than one occasion he thought he’d felt the warmth of fox fur under his fingers as he slept, or the cool press of the hare’s nose against his cheek, only for him to wake up to find that there was nothing there at all.
Dis met them on the other side of the forest, grinning and impatient; she swept her sons of their feet with her embrace, pressing kisses to their heads despite their protests that they were too old for that kind of treatment, now.
She looked at Thorin with something of a frown.
“What’s happened?” she asked, but he just shook his head; he saw her cast a confused look at Dwalin then, in turn, and he just made a low noise, as if to say, I don’t know, either.
“How is everything?” he asked instead, to change the subject, and she smiled.
“Well,” she replied, tossing the long, dark braid of her hair over her shoulder. “Balin returned just two days ago, and Gloin and his lad the day before that. It is good to get everyone home once more.”
Thorin nodded, a little absentmindedly, and drove the cart forward, into the forest.
“Only it is a little strange,” she said with a queer sort of laugh. “Gimli said to me just last night, and now I can’t get it out of my head- about the forest.”
Thorin looked around him, at the gossamer-fine cobwebs decorated with the hoar frost, at the grey-gold light slanting through the trees, at the strange stillness of a forest in the winter months, when the plants curl in on themselves and return to the earth to wait for the warmer times to come.
Dwalin was nodding.
“It doesn’t feel quite the same,” he agreed, and Fili and Kili made similar noises.
Thorin glanced around.
Could it…?
“Look!”
From the undergrowth, in one great spring of its hindquarters, came a lean hare, it’s eyes bright; Dis already had an arrow knocked on her bow by the time Thorin reached over to still her, and she looked at him curiously, though he missed it. His eyes were on the hare, as they silently regarded each other.
After a long, slow moment she nodded at Thorin, and then disappeared again.
There was a flash of russet fur somewhere to his right.
In the distance, far away, he thought he could hear someone singing.
And then Thorin smiled, and for the first time since he had last seen Bilbo, the pain in his chest eased.
Many years later, when time had carved its weary mark into the town, making it larger and more prosperous than it had ever been, a man lay dying in the attic room of a house. The stone was smoother and the wattle better applied now than it had been in the past, and the rooms were warmer, but that didn’t stop him going in the end.
His hair had once been dark, but now was almost entirely silver: a strong jaw and the sharp edge of his nose still remained attractive on his lined and worn face.
His nephews sat at his bedside, and their children too; the old man looked at the ceiling, and smiled a little.
“Do me a favour, lad,” he said to the nearest of his great-nephews, “And open the window, for me? I’d like to see the forest, if I can.”
The boy nodded, and ran to open the window wide.
It was autumn, the bright and dry part of autumn where the leaves are a myriad of gold and red, before the cold and the wet come to seep the colour from the earth, and it is just before dawn, when the light is grey and beautiful, a haze from the grass giving a strange quality to the view from the window.
“The trees look beautiful, don’t they Uncle?”
That’s one of his grand-nieces, the oldest, and she’s blinking back her tears. He takes hold of her hand and presses a dry kiss to the back of it, smiling the best that he can.
“I know a person,” he said, quietly, his eyes growing a little distant as the haze of memory took him. “With eyes that look like every colour in a wood.”
She stroked his cheek, and Fili watched her proudly as she held back her tears a little longer.
“They sound beautiful, Uncle,” she said, and he smiled.
“Aye,” he replied, his voice hoarse now as he closed his eyes.
He shuddered out a long, gentle sound, the trace of a smile still pulling at the corner of his mouth.
From somewhere outside the window, from deep in the wood, came the high pitched noise of a fox in pain; several of them glanced to the window, and it was only when they looked back that they realised that the old man had passed away from this world. His nephews stood and ushered their children from the room; they placed a coin on each eye to stop him seeing the Devil, and tucked the blankets tighter around him for now.
They didn’t look outside the window; if they had they’d have seen a bird winging its way over the forest, perhaps still a little uncertain of how to use its wings, making hopeful trills in the peculiar light of dawn.
It seems to want to fly on, for a moment, but it stills, perches on a branch and waits.
It cocks its head, eyes dark, and calls again, a note of impatience in the air now.
And then another bird appears from the foliage, a little smaller than the first, and it makes a contented noise in return.
They are strange birds, this pair. They look a little like robins, but without the red breasts, and they fly very close together, as if afraid of losing one another.
No, the old man’s nephews did not look out of the window, and that doesn’t really matter, because all they would have seen would have been a pair of birds and the first light of the sunrise, their hopeful chorus clear and sweet, flying on swift wing to the distant horizon, to the golden sunlight, to the promise of a new day.