" ... the wants of the heart can never truly be denied and silenced no matter how desperately logic and the scars of the body and soul argued against it" 18 +
Curtis, so softly, so gently, taking away all of your choices and agency and making you do whatever he wants (sex, it's sex) because he just knows so much better than you what you actually need. Your tiny little mind will understand, eventually, everything he's done for you.
Sometimes I just want to be gaslit, just a little bit. Is that so wrong?????
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MASTERLIST
MASTERLIST
MASTERLIST (COMPLETED)
In an alternate universe where August Walker survived his clifftop fight with Ethan Hunt. He finds himself in another dangerous battle. This time with a deadly toxin and August learns the hard way that everyone needs love and lust in small doses.
MASTERLIST (ONGOING) (new chapter every fortnight/2 weeks- reducing to every week once wrists allow me to upload regularly)
Please read the Cover Page before reading the story and click here to join the Hold Me taglist.
When disaster strikes during the filming of Netflix’s much-anticipated series ‘Pursued’. Joss Beckett, makes a phone call that changes the lives of all involved in the show and Henry Cavill finds out that destiny is real.
ASK WINTER2112ROSE & HEADCANON MASTERLIST - ALL FANDOMS -Please read the information provided, thank you.
Coming Soon…
Including - Winter2112Rose Songbook multi- fandom story request.
Warnings ⚠️: Canon typical violence, author attempts elvish, author attempts khuzdul, suggestive content, alcohol consumption, angst, blood, medical care, feelings of despair, themes of hope, found family, multiverse/time travel, cussing, angst, fluff, eventual smut, weapon use, realities of battle, tolkein monster encounters, fish out of water, injury to main characters, long fic, slowburn x reader.
A/N: Khuzdul used in this Fic comes from The Dwarrow Scholar The Elvish both Sindarin and Quenya, are authors own attempts, from very old memories.
Part 12 | Part 14 - Coming Soon
Of Crowns & Mountains
C.13: We're Not Spiders
The morning at Beorn's cottage had the quality of mornings that followed days you were glad to have survived—slightly brighter than ordinary, the air a degree more appreciable, the smell of breakfast carrying a significance it wouldn't have had on a morning that hadn't been preceded by warg riders, goblin tunnels and conversations with skin-changers.
You'd woken where you'd fallen asleep, which was against the wall of the hall with Thorin's blanket tucked around you and no memory of how it had gotten there, Thorin himself was already up and about with the efficiency of someone who had never required much sleep and considered extra hours in the morning a gift to be used rather than extended.
The ponies were Beorn's—large, calm, well-fed animals that bore very little resemblance to the nervous, easily-spooked creatures the company had lost in the Warg attack and which regarded the company's arrival in the paddock with the composed, evaluating attention of ponies that had been around enough unusual things to have stopped finding them remarkable.
You were checking the straps on the one you'd been assigned—a broad grey animal with an almost absurdly level gaze that had accepted your presence immediately and with no drama, which you considered the beginning of a meaningful relationship—for what was probably the third time.
"Okay," you said, to the pony, adjusting the girdle one more time and finding it, again, exactly as it had been. "Okay, so—we're going into a forest, and I need you to be very good about this, and I promise when we get to the other side we'll let you go home to your Daddy—"
"Stupid thing to say, I am not their father."
The voice was very large and very close, you turned, Beorn stood approximately six feet away, which at Beorn's dimensions was a proximity you registered physically before you registered it intellectually, his expression carried the air of a man who had a specific relationship with the truth of things and preferred it to be accurately represented.
"I—" You looked at the pony. At Beorn. "Right, no, I know you're—I meant it in a—it's an expression. Where I'm from. People say it about—about animals that—when someone takes care of something it's sort of—" You made a gesture that did not in any way clarify the situation. "I'm sorry. I didn't mean to—they're not literally your children, I understand that—"
"They are ponies," Beorn said, with a finality that covered the subject comprehensively and moved on from it in the same breath. He looked at the grey pony, then at you, with the measuring attention of a man assessing a pairing. "She will carry you well," he said. "She is steady. She does not frighten easily."
"She's been very good so far," you agreed, with the careful diplomacy of someone who was still finding their footing in the conversation.
"She knows the road to Mirkwood," Beorn said. "She has made it before." Something moved in his expression—not subtle, because subtlety was not Beorn's natural register, but complicated, in the way of large things that carried complicated histories. "She did not like it."
You looked at the grey pony. The grey pony looked back at you with what was either agreement or general equine calm, and you couldn't tell which, Beorn had already moved toward Gandalf with the long-strided purposefulness of a man who had said what he needed to say and was moving on.
Gandalf and Beorn stood apart from the company while the packing and mounting up was completed, their voices low enough that you caught only the rhythm of it rather than the words—something serious, from Beorn's end, something measured and receiving from Gandalf's. You watched them from the corner of your attention while you ran your hand once more along the grey pony's neck, feeling the warmth of her under your palm.
"Do not follow anywhere but the path," Beorn's voice, rising enough to carry. "The wood Elves of Mirkwood are not like their kin. They are less wise and more dangerous."
The company, which had been in various stages of mounting and adjusting packs, went quiet in the specific way it went quiet when information of consequence was being delivered.
"Do not," Beorn continued, and his eyes moved across the assembled company with a directness that suggested the warning was not merely advisory, "stray from the path."
Gandalf said something in return, too low to catch, and Beorn looked at him with the expression of a man who had made his point and considered its reception the listener's responsibility.
"We must make haste," Thorin said, from the front of the company, in the measured tone of a man who understood most words as a practical transaction as well as a social one. "The path grows no shorter for the time we spend upon it."
You swung up onto the grey pony with considerably more grace then your first attempt in this world yet somehow still far less grace than you'd have liked, compensated, settled, and found your seat. She didn't move until you asked her to, which was, in your experience of the company's ponies to date, not something you could assume, and you made a mental note to appreciate this about her.
"Ready?" Bofur appeared beside you, already mounted, his hat at its usual angle.
"Probably not," you said.
"Good," he said, cheerfully. "That's the correct way to be. Come on."
The ride to Mirkwood's border was, in the accounting of journeys undertaken since you'd arrived, one of the better ones.
The country between Beorn's and the forest spread out wide and grassy in the warm morning light—the sky overhead had the generous, open quality of sky with enough room in it to be honest about its own size. The grey pony moved with the smooth, even gait of an animal confident in its own competence, and you had relaxed, by the first hour, from the careful attention of someone managing a horse to the easier position of someone being carried by one.
You rode between Balin and Bofur for most of it, the natural configuration that had established itself over the course of the journey—the three of you in a loose triangle that contracted when the track narrowed and expanded in the open stretches, conversation running in the easy, intermittent way of people who had spent enough time together to be comfortable with both.
Balin was doing something with the smallest of his ledger's, having it balanced on his knee with the practiced ease of a dwarf who had apparently spent decades writing while moving. Bofur was whistling, the tuneless contented whistling of someone whose interior state was genuinely pleasant and required expression, which was very Bofur and which you had stopped trying to identify the tune of approximately three months ago.
At the head of the company, Thorin rode with Gandalf alongside, and from this distance you caught the occasional gesture—Thorin's hands, deliberate and precise when he was making a point, Gandalf's staff tracking something on the horizon—but not the words.
At some point Bofur switched and was now teaching you a Khuzdul word that was, as far as you could establish, the word for a specific type of hammer used in a specific type of stonework and had no real equivalent in any language, which made the lesson circular but pleasant. Balin was half-listening while reviewing something in the same ledger.
"He looks like a king when he rides like that," Bofur said, with the observational lightness of someone who was aware he was saying something and watching to see where it landed.
"He is a king," you said, to the grey pony's ears.
"Aye," Bofur said, and didn't say anything else about it, which was Bofur's version of discretion and was, you reflected, more effective than it looked.
You were working on the hammer word, which required a consonant cluster that your mouth was objecting to, and the road was wide and the light was good and the border of Mirkwood was still hours ahead.
"You're doing it again," said Bofur.
"I'm not doing anything,"
"The word," Bofur said. "You're still putting the g in. Listen." He said it again, clean and precise, and you tried to follow and the g appeared anyway, like an uninvited guest at a party your mouth was throwing without your full consent.
"My mouth does what it wants," you said.
"I wouldn't let that spread lass," said Bofur, with cheerful, entirely affectionate wickedness. "you'll get yourself a reputation."
Balin made a small sound beside you that might have been a cough or might have been the abbreviated beginning of a comment he'd decided not to finish.
"Don't," you said.
"I didn't say anything," Balin said, as he fixed Bofur with a look that served and succeeded in making his cheerful expression deflat into neutrality.
"The sound you made said something."
"The sound was entirely neutral," Balin said, with dignity, and returned to his ledger.
The grey pony tossed her head once, which you chose to interpret as agreement.
Mirkwood appeared on the horizon the way things that have been in the same place for a very long time appear—not gradually, but suddenly present, as though it had been there all along and you'd simply been the wrong angle on it. And then, as the company drew closer and the scale of it resolved, the appearing became something else entirely.
Dark. Not the dark of ordinary forest—not the pleasant, dappled shade of the trees you'd ridden through in the months before, the kind of dark that was simply the absence of direct sunlight. This was a different quality entirely, the canopy was too thick too tangled and far too old, the trees themselves enormous, twisted in a way that had nothing aesthetic about it, their roots upending the ground at the forest's edge in arching ridges of dark earth, the bark of them carrying a colour that was less tree and more something that had absorbed light for so long it had forgotten how to reflect anything back.
The smell reached you before you reached the tree line. Damp, yes, and old wood, yes, but underneath those things something else—an organic density, the smell of things decomposing over very long periods in very little air, the specific humidity of a place where sunlight hadn't reached the ground in decades.
You sat on the grey pony at the edge of the tree line and looked into the dark between the trees, and the grey pony shifted under you, one foot, then another, the first time she'd been unsettled on the whole ride.
"I know," you said to her, quietly. "I know. I don't like it either."
Gandalf said goodbye the way Gandalf did most things—with the quality of a man who had made a decision some time ago and was informing everyone else of it now rather than earlier, which was his general pattern with decisions the company might object to. The conversation he had with Bilbo was quiet and briefly separate from the rest, the two of them standing slightly to one side of the company while the packs were transferred and the ponies were sent back, and you watched from a distance and caught nothing of it except Bilbo's face, which went through several things in quick succession before settling on the particular resigned expression of a hobbit who consider everyone in the company a friend.
You shouldered the pack Beorn had lent you—canvas, large, smelling of hay and something herbal, considerably better quality than the handbag you'd lost in the goblin tunnels and fell into step beside Bilbo as the company moved toward the tree line.
"What did he say?" you asked, quietly.
"Nothing," Bilbo said.
"Bilbo."
"Things of a general nature," Bilbo said, which was the hobbit equivalent of I'm not telling you and you recognised it by now. "He said to stay on the path."
"Beorn said that."
"Gandalf also said it," Bilbo said, fidgeting with his hands. "So—doubly said."
You looked at the trees. Bilbo looked at the trees. The company filed in around you, and the forest closed over the first of them like a fist closing over a mouse, the light changed immediately—the particular, specific change of going from open country to enclosed space, the sky disappearing overhead behind the canopy.
The Humectant nature of the forest hit you like a wall—it was not warm, it was a place where moisture had nowhere to go, where the air had been sitting under the same canopy for so long it had become a kind of liquid itself, each breath carrying more of itself than air was meant to carry. Your clothes felt different within a hundred steps, the fabric heavier against your skin. The sound changed too—the outside world receded completely, not gradually but immediately, like a door closing and what replaced it was the interior sound of Mirkwood, which was very little. An occasional drip. The creak of an old branch. Underneath everything, the specific non-sound of a place where ordinary life had a different set of rules.
Kíli appeared at your elbow approximately two hours in, which was itself a comfort, because Kíli appearing at your elbow usually meant he was about to say something that was either useful or entertaining, frequently both.
"It's not so bad," he said, with the conviction of someone arguing himself into something.
You looked at the trees. At the webbing you could see between them—white and thick and old, not the fresh silk of active construction but the accumulated layering of many years of effort, coating the bark in sheets, stringing between branches in wide, translucent curtains that had gathered the debris of the forest—dead leaves, old wood, things you preferred not to look at to closely.
"Kíli," you said. "It's pretty bad."
"There are plenty of forests that look like this," he said.
"Name one," you said.
A pause. "The point is," he said, redirecting, "we're on the path. We stay on the path. We're fine."
The path was narrow—a single track through the root-upheaved ground, just wide enough for two abreast if you were careful, the company moved along it in the long, loose line that narrow paths dictated. Above and around you, the trees closed in at their own speed, the webbing and leaves thicker as you went further in, the light dimmer and more filtered, taking on a quality that was less light and more the memory of light—present but distant, arriving filtered through so many layers of canopy that it had lost most of what made it light by the time it reached you.
"It'll be fine," Kíli said, with slightly less conviction.
"Mmm," you said, which was a Balin word one you'd clearly absorbed.
The smell deepened as you walked. Whatever it was underneath the damp and the green—organic, thick, the smell of very old rot in still air—it strengthened with every hour, and by the time the first webs appeared linking themselves, like skeletal fingers stretching after slumber down to the forest floor, you were breathing through your mouth without having decided to.
"Stay on the path," Thorin said, from the front, and the words carried back through the company in the flat, clean way his directives always did when he meant them without discussion.
The webs had started small—strands between branches, the normal architecture of forest spiders, the kind of thing you'd walk through on an autumn morning and wipe off your face without particular alarm. Then larger. Then the specific, wrong-scale jump that happened when you registered one that was several feet across, strung between two trees with a thickness and tension that spoke of something considerably larger than anything you'd been comfortable with before.
"Kíli," you hissed.
"I see it," Kíli said, from close beside you. His voice was doing the thing voices did when the person producing them was very deliberately keeping them calm. "It's fine."
"That's enormous,"
"Lots of things are enormous, have you seen Dwalin's head ?" Kíli said with a michevious wink. "We are fine. Keep walking."
You immediately pressed your fist to your mouth to contain the burst of laughter that threatened escape.
"Kíli," Balin's voice, from behind you, with the tone of a dwarf who had noticed that Kíli was attempting to be reassuring and wanted it on record that he appreciated the effort, if not convinced by the content of that effort. "Let her be."
"I'm helping," Kíli said.
"You're chattering," Balin said. "There's a difference."
The river appeared out of the dark like something that had been waiting for you to arrive at it rather than something you'd walked toward.
It was black. Not dark-blue, not deep-green, not any of the colours water was permitted to be when light was involved—black, the colour of something that had been simmering in the undergrowth for a very long time and hadn't yet learnt how to reflect. The surface of it had a stillness that water wasn't supposed to have—cold, and old, and with a quality underneath those things that you couldn't name but that your body registered as something to pay attention to.
The crossing was a series of vines, the bridge long since rotted away, a series of fraying vines strung across the gap at varying heights doing the work the bridge should have done, the vines themselves thick and rope-like and clearly not new—old enough to have absorbed the moisture of the forest, their surfaces dark and slightly slick.
"I cant watch, I'll have a heart attack," you said, to no one in particular, watching Bilbo step onto the first vine with the careful, deliberate balance of a small person doing a calculation that involved very much darkness and very cold water directly below.
"He's fine," Fíli said, appearing beside you.
"He nearly slipped just then," you said.
"He recovered immediately."
"I saw him nearly slip—"
"He's a hobbit," Fíli said. "They have excellent feet."
"I'll give you an excellent foot," you muttered "straight into your—" you realized just how close to Balin you where starting to sound, you registered this before making the executive decision not to finish your sentence.
Bilbo made it to the other side with the careful, step-by-step progress of someone for whom falling in the black water was not a theoretical concern but a very specific one. The collective exhale from the company on the bank was audible.
You went close behind Thorin, which was where you'd been positioned when the crossing began, and the vines were not as stable as they'd looked from the bank—they moved with each step, the whole structure swaying in a slow, lateral way that your body did not enjoy, and you kept your eyes on the far bank and your hands tight and your feet careful, one step, the next step, don't look at the water.
You made it, Thorin had already turned to watch the crossing continue and you found yourself excepting his extended hand and standing beside him on the far bank, Bilbo on his other side, the three of you stood close together while the rest of the company made the crossing in ones and twos, the vines swaying, and nobody spoke, because the forest had a quality now that made speech feel like an intrusion.
You saw it before you registered what you were seeing—a shape, luminous in the way that white things in dark places were luminous, at the treeline across a clearing to your left, standing perfectly still. A Deer. Large, white, the kind of white that seemed to generate its own light rather than reflecting anyone else's, the antlers spreading above its head in a wide, branching arc that had something formal about it, something that suggested this particular animal and this particular space had an existing relationship you weren't party to.
Thorin's hand moved in slow motion, you watched his bow come up with the smooth, unhurried motion of a man whose hands knew what they were doing without requiring his thoughts to be involved, and the arrow was nocked before you'd processed what was happening, and your mouth was already open—you could feel the words forming, slow and strange, like speaking through something thicker than air.
"What're you—" you started, and the words came out slurred, wrong, the shape of them correct in your head but arriving in your mouth with the wrong weight. "Don't—" you managed.
"—Bad luck," Bilbo said, from beside you, and his voice had the same quality, the same slow strangeness of someone speaking from underwater. "It's bad luck—"
"I don't believe in luck," Thorin slurred as he loosed the arrow. "We make our own luck."
It missed. A clean miss, the white deer startled into motion the instant before impact, and in three strides it was gone, the white of it dissolving into the dark between the trees, and the clearing was empty, and the company stood at the edge of it in silence.
"Pretty deer," you heard yourself say, somewhere in the slow, thick quality of your own consciousness, the words arriving without your full participation in them.
Thorin turned to look at you. You looked at him. Something was wrong with the looking—with the quality of your attention on his face, which kept slipping sideways from the thing you were trying to look at, like trying to read in a dream.
"We keep moving," Thorin said, and his voice had the same quality yours did, the same thickness at the edges, and you watched his face saying it and felt the words arrive a half-second after his lips had finished forming them.
You walked in circles. You became aware of this at some point after it had been true, which was itself the most accurate description of what Mirkwood was doing to all of you—the awareness arriving late, always late, the processing of information delayed by whatever quality the forest air had that was making everything slow and thick and strange.
Arguments broke out. Not the sharp, particular arguments of people with clear positions—more the unfocused, low-grade friction of people who were too slow to properly manage their own irritation, voices rising and falling without fully arriving at anything. Glóin said something about the path. Someone—Nori, maybe—disagreed. Thorin's voice, trying to maintain the precision he brought to everything and not quite getting there.
"We've gone past that tree," you said, pointing at a tree with a root formation that had registered with you once already.
"All the trees look the same," Bofur said, but without his usual ease, the words heavy.
"Not this one," you said. "I saw it before. We've been here."
"She's right," Balin said, from beside you—he'd been beside you for most of this, you realised, without knowing when he'd got there, keeping pace with the steady, deliberate intention of someone who had decided to be there.
"We have not been going in circles," Thorin said.
"I think we have," Bilbo said.
"We haven't," Thorin said, and the certainty of it was real, the same flat conviction he brought to everything, but underneath it was the same slow blur that everything had now, and you watched his face saying it and weren't sure if the certainty was genuine or if it was the forest.
"I'm very tired," Ori said, from somewhere behind you, with the straightforward simplicity of someone too slow to be self-conscious about it.
"We keep moving," Thorin said.
"We should—" Balin's voice, from somewhere behind you, the usual precision of it softened at the edges. "We should—I believe we should—"
"Which way," someone said.
"The path," Thorin said, and his voice was the clearest thing in the forest, the consonants still landing where they were supposed to, though the sentences were coming slightly further apart than usual. "We stay on the—"
"Which path ?" Dwalin replied.
The subsequent conversation happened around you and through you and mostly without your participation, because you were looking at the trees on the left side of the path with the patient, slow attention of someone trying to establish whether they were the same trees you'd been looking at ten minutes ago or different trees, and the trees were not offering a clear answer on this.
"We're going in circles," Nori said, flatly.
"We're not—"
"We are too," Nori said.
Balin was beside you still, his hand on your arm with the steady, warm pressure of someone keeping a tether. "It's alright," he said, the words arrived clearly but from a slight distance. "Just keep walking lassie."
"I'm—" you started, and the end of the sentence didn't arrive. You had started it and it had been a complete thought and then it wasn't, and you looked at Balin's hand on your arm and thought very carefully about what you'd been going to say, and couldn't find it.
You kept moving. Or you started to. And then — time did something, or you did something to time, the step you took blurred at the edges and the blink you took to reset your vision was very long, and on the other side of the blink the company was still walking and you were walking with them, and then another long blink, and then—
You'd blinked a perfectly normal blink. The kind of blink that happened between one second and the next without requiring any management.
But the light was different. The quality of it—darker, greener, the particular green-black of night in a forest without stars—was not the light that had been there when you'd blinked in.
You blinked again, something was wrong with— your —with.
The wrongness arrived before the understanding of it—a specific wrongness of restricted movement, of trying to reach forward and finding that the effort produced nothing, the arms not responding with the clean, immediate translation of intention to motion that you'd been operating with.
You were lying down—why where you lying down ?
You were lying down and your arms were—there was something on them, over them—and your legs—and your—you were covered in webs.
This arrived all at once and too fast, it took everything you had not to make a sound, because sounds were information and information was currently a resource you were very short of. You were lying on your side, webbed, in the dark, and you were moving—not walking, being dragged, the ground underneath you shifting in the jolting, irregular way of something being pulled over uneven terrain, and the something being pulled was you.
Somewhere behind you, not far, there were other shapes. Bundled, irregular, the size and shape of—dwarves. Wrapped in the same stuff, the same yellow-grey webbing, lying on the ground in a row that was being systematically reduced as something moved methodically along it.
The company. That was the company. They were in those bundles.
The thing pulling you was enormous, you saw it when it passed through a gap in the canopy where a fragment of moonlight came through—eight legs, each section of leg longer than you were tall, moving with the horrible fluid efficiency of something built for exactly this, the body overhead massive and dark and moving with a certainty that made your stomach drop so far you lost track of where it went.
You moved your hands, carefully. Very carefully. The webbing was thick but it wasn't, you found, rigid — it gave under pressure, the way something does when it's strong but not inflexible, your hands were small next to it, your wrists were smaller still and the thing pulling you from your feet was not paying attention to your hands, as you worked them. One against the other, the friction and the slow, patient rotation of your wrists, pressing into the web and pulling back, feeling for the places where it gave more than others.
Your right hand came free, the relief of it was so intense it was almost physical, a loosening in your chest that made your next breath come in faster than you intended, and you pressed your free hand flat to the webbing and used it to lever the other free, and then you had both hands and the thing's attention was still forward, still pulling, and you reached down and found the edge of the webbing at your legs and started working at it.
You did not think about what you were doing. Thought was slow and thinking about it would make it slower. You rolled sideways, to your back, got your feet under you, stayed low, and moved.
Screaming started from somewhere to your left, not far—the sounds of dwarves coming out of something confused and finding themselves in circumstances considerably worse than confused. A fight, several fights perhaps, the specific chaotic volume of the company in a situation.
A spider came for you from the right. They were spiders, you could see that now, the leg that had come across your field of vision when you'd managed to tilt your head was a spider's leg and the spider was the size of a truck.
It was fast—the legs moving in the horrible fluid pattern of something with too many joints in the wrong places, covering ground in a way your brain kept refusing to track properly because the movement pattern didn't fit any template you had for large things moving quickly.
You reached into your pocket, fumbling with Ori's sprase spare piece of charcoal, before reaching deeper.
The oil. Your oil was there, it was always there, you'd checked every morning and your fingers found it and you got the cork out and got a quantity of it onto your fingers and the cork back in in the frantic, adrenaline-fast sequence of someone doing something they'd practiced but never done under conditions like this.
The spider reached you, you got your hand up and snapped and the flame came off your fingers in the arc Elrond had described it landed and the spider's front legs reared back, it made a sound that had no equivalent in anything you'd ever heard, a sound that bypassed the reasoning parts of your brain entirely and landed somewhere more fundamental, you stepped back hard and nearly went over a root and caught yourself.
The spider recovered faster than you, its leg came around in a sweep that you were too slow to entirely avoid—you went left and it caught the right, a line of fire across your shoulder that was not the fire you'd been making, a different kind, the specific burning of a cut from something sharp, and you went down on one knee from the force of it.
The spider was over you before you'd gotten back up, you snapped again—the motion not quite right, the angle wrong, the flame producing but not throwing, burning in your palm, and you were holding fire in your hand and not accomplishing anything useful with it and the spider was very close and very large and you were on one knee with your shoulder against a tree root.
Something hit the spider from the left at speed—the spider moving sideways with the force of it, several of its legs losing their placement, Kíli was there, his blade in his hand, the specific focused expression he had when he was fighting, and you had never been more relieved to see another person in your life.
"You found me," you said, getting your feet under you, and your voice came out slightly higher than you'd care to admit.
"I was looking," Kíli said, ducking under a leg sweep with the economical movement of someone who had been doing this for the better part of his life. "You're hard to find in the dark." He drove the blade in and the spider recoiled. "Can you run?"
"Yes," you said.
"Then run. I'm right behind you."
You moved as fast as the terrain, your shoulder and the dark allowed, which was not running in any clean sense but was faster than standing still, Kíli was behind you and making enough noise that you could track him by sound, the sounds of him fighting and moving and occasionally saying things in Khuzdul that were definitively not, from their tone, polite.
"Left," he said, from behind you. "There's another one on the left."
You turned.
"Not that way—LEFT!"
You course corrected, dodging the tree that had materialised in your path, a spider to the left swept past in your peripheral vision and Kíli's blade was there to meet it and you kept moving.
"You're doing great," Kíli said, from somewhere in the dark behind you. His voice held the particular lightness, the specific Kíli quality of keeping things from becoming their worst possible version. "Honestly, impressive. The fire thing was—"
"A disaster," you said, between breaths.
"A creative disaster," he said. "Very innovative." A sound of impact. "Keep going."
"I cannot fight like you," you said.
"You're fighting fine—"
"I'm running," you said.
"Running is a time-honoured combat strategy," Kíli said, entirely seriously. "Don't let anyone tell you otherwise."
A spider came from above—you didn't see it until you walked through the first trailing thread of web and then looked up and the body of it was overhead, the legs were coming down and you snapped your fingers without thinking, the wrong angle again, the flame in your palm, and you threw your hand upward more by instinct than technique the flame went—somewhere, not on the spider, but near enough that the legs recoiled upward and Kíli's blade was there and the spider retreated.
"Better," Kíli said.
"That was an accident"
"Accidents count," he said. "We have to find the others" He was scanning the dark now, the fighting-sharpened attention spreading outward, looking for the sounds of the rest of the company.
You stopped. Listened.
You could hear fighting, somewhere ahead and to the right—the sounds of it, blades, spider-sounds and voices. Thorin's voice, Balin's voice, Fíli's voice—your shared look even in the dim light showed the relief on both Kíli and your own face.
Then the company went quiet, not gradually. All at once, the way sound goes when the thing making it stops rather than the way it goes when it moves away, the silence that came in to replace it had a quality that your body responded to before your brain did, the sudden terrible stillness of a forest that had been loud and then was not.
You and Kíli stared at each other in the dark, then without concious decision you both ran toward the silence.
The arrows came from every direction and from nowhere visible, which was the most frightening thing about them—not the sight of them but the sound, the specific whisper-hiss of something moving fast through air, then the thud of them finding wood, and then more, surrounding you, and more, you stopped because stopping was the only instinct available when an unknown number of arrows had just appeared in the trees at exactly the height of your heads.
Kíli stopped before you, his hand stretched across you in an attempt to keep you from moving forward, from your position at his back.
Elves stepped out of the dark, they were tall—the height of them visible even in the dark, the particular lean, upright height of something built without excess, they had arrows nocked, drawn and pointed at you with the composed, unhurried certainty of people who could hold a bowstring under tension for far longer than you wanted to test.
Their eyes, in the dark, were the kind of clear that didn't quite make sense.
"Who are you?" The voice was flat and precise, carrying the specific quality of a accent that had been shaped over a very long time by people who considered precision a courtesy. The Elvish accent was different from Lindir's, different from Elrond's—harder at the edges, less smoothed. "What business have you in Mirkwood?"
You looked at the arrows. At the Elves. Back at the arrows.
"We're—we're not spiders," you said and your voice came out smaller than you'd intended. "We're not — we're not here to cause trouble, I promise, we were on a path and then we weren't and then—"
"You are of the race of men," One Elf said with a specific flatness that communicated a complete sentence's worth of opinion in seven words. "Yet you travel in the company of dwarves."
"Y-yes," you said. "They're my—My—" The word stuck for a second. "My friends."
The Elves looked at Kíli. Kíli looked at the Elves with the specific defiance of a dwarf who was not going to show the Elves that he was breathing slightly harder than usual from the fighting and was not quite succeeding.
Beyond them, through the trees, you could see the company. The company was surrounded, ringed, with more arrows trained on them, their weapons taken or in the process of being taken, and Thorin's face among them was the face of a man in a situation he'd assessed and found no current solution to.
The Elf at your left said something, in a liquid, fluid language, assuming neither of you would understand, which was a correct assumption.
"Elvish," Kíli said, under his breath, in a tone that was of no relief upon hearing it.
You looked at the arrowhead. Very close. Very precise.
One fo the other elves answered the speaker, also in Elvish, and the particular quality of the observation—the note in it, the thing that sat underneath the word—made you want to take a step back.
Through the trees ahead, you could see a clearing— or the edge of one, the tree density thinning enough to let in a fraction more of what passed for light in Mirkwood—in that clearing, arranged in the specific configuration of people who were still being disarmed and are being held at arrowpoint, you could see the rest of the company.
Balin, a step back from Thorin and to the right, with his hands at his sides and the expression of a man who was not going to give anyone the satisfaction of seeing what it cost him to stand like that.
Fíli. The others.
"Kíli," you said, very quietly.
"I see them," he said. The lightness had gone from his voice now—not because he'd decided the situation was frightening, but because the situation had become specific enough to require a different register. He looked at the arrows pointed at you and at the company in the clearing, and his jaw set. "I see them."
The Elf with the first arrow took a step toward you.
"Come," the elf said as he guided you by the upper arm. Not kindly. With the specific, neutral authority of someone who had decided what was going to happen and was informing you rather than asking.
Warnings ⚠️: Canon typical violence, author attempts elvish, author attempts khuzdul, suggestive content, alcohol consumption, angst, blood, medical care, feelings of despair, themes of hope, found family, multiverse/time travel, cussing, angst, fluff, eventual smut, weapon use, realities of battle, tolkein monster encounters, fish out of water, injury to main characters, long fic, slowburn x reader.
A/N: Khuzdul used in this Fic comes from: The Dwarrow Scholar The Elvish both Sindarin and Quenya, are authors own attempts, from very old memories.
Part 11 | Part 13 - Coming Soon
Of Crowns & Mountains
C.12: Do You Call Three a Group ?
The morning arrived at Beorn's house the way mornings arrived at large, animal-occupied spaces—gradually yet with considerable noise and well before you were ready for it.
You had been walked on by the smaller of the two dogs and were sitting up, blinking, Gandalf was up. This was observable from the fact that his bedroll was already rolled and he was standing near the main door with his staff, looking out through the gap into the morning with the quality of a man doing advance reconnaissance on the day.
when Gandalf's voice cut across the cottage with the particular carrying quality he used when he intended to be heard by everyone and didn't want to repeat himself, the quality of a speech that Gandalf had prepared and was delivering with care, which meant he was concerned about the reception.
"Our host," he said, surveying the assembled and somewhat bleary company—those who were upright, anyway, Bombur having achieved a seated position that implied neither sleep nor full wakefulness, Kíli leaning against Fíli with his eyes mostly open—"Is in the yard presently."
"Is he big?" said Kíli.
"He is large," Gandalf said. "Very large."
"How large is very large?" said Kíli.
"Large enough that I would ask you not to stare," Gandalf said, with the pointed emphasis of someone who had already decided that asking Kíli not to stare was probably optimistic. "You will have noted the scale of this house, and the—proportions of the furniture."
The company had noted in the wordless collective way of a group that had shared an experience and assigned it to the same internal category without discussing it.
"He is not," Gandalf continued, "fond of dwarves."
A silence.
"How not fond?" Dwalin said.
"Significantly," Gandalf said. "Which is why we will approach him carefully. We will—introduce the company gradually. A few at a time." He glanced around the group. "Only come out in pairs. And only when I give the signal." He looked at the company. Then at Bilbo. Then at you. "Bilbo. And—you dear lady. You'll both come with me."
Bilbo straightened with the expression of a hobbit who had been told he'd been voluntold for something and was going to be mature about it.
"Why us?" Bilbo asked.
"Because," Gandalf said, "he is not overly fond of dwarves. He has no particular position on hobbits or—" He picked up his staff from where it had been leaning against the wall with a vauge gesture to you. "Our young lady here—are less likely to produce the immediate negative response that thirteen dwarves arriving collectively would produce."
"That's—that is—practical" you blinked.
The yard outside was wide and open, the morning light falling across it in clear sheets, the grass still holding the silver of dew, the animals moving through it with the same domestic composure they'd shown the night before. The bees were already busy. Two enormous Ponies stood at the fence and watched your approach with the patient, knowing attention of animals that had been here longer than most things.
Beorn was chopping wood.
You processed this piece of information in the same way you'd processed the Wargs and the trolls and the Great Goblin—in stages, beginning with the size. The axe he was using was not an axe you could have lifted with both hands. The wood he was splitting was not wood you would have had any idea how to approach. The man himself—
The man. You kept the word man in play because it was the available word, the word that corresponded to the general shape of things, even though the application of it required some adjustments. He was taller than Gandalf. You registered this because Gandalf was the tallest person in your immediate experience of this world, outside of elves, they both served as a baseline against which everything above-average-height was measured and Beorn exceeded it considerably. His arms, swinging the axe with the loose, rhythmic ease of someone for whom this effort was roughly equivalent to stirring a cup of tea, were the kind of arms that made you quietly reconsider what the word arm could mean.
You and Bilbo had fallen half a step behind Gandalf. You were not proud of this. You were also not in the mood to attempt changing it.
"Good morning!" Gandalf called, from what you would later call a strategic distance.
Beorn stopped. The axe came to rest. He straightened to his full, considerable height and turned, and the face that turned toward you had spent a great deal of time outdoors over a very long period of time, deeply lined, dark-eyed, with a beard and hair that had organised themselves without much outside intervention.
He looked at Gandalf. Then at Bilbo. Then at you.
You smiled and waved faintly. The smile of a person covering their instincts with social convention, the wave of someone unsure if there name was the one called, stuttered and awkward.
"I'm Gandalf," Gandalf said.
"I know who you are." Beorn's voice was deep in the way of things that generated their sound from somewhere considerably below the chest, and the words had a quality of weight to them that was not quite an accent and not quite a pace but was both of those things together. He set the axe down against the block and turned, he looked at Bilbo. "Who is this little fellow?"
"This would be Mr. Baggins," Gandalf said. "He is a hobbit."
Beorn looked at Bilbo with the interested, direct attention of someone examining something they hadn't encountered before. "A halfling." He bent, slightly, which was still considerable. Bilbo held his ground with the particular dignity of a hobbit who had survived enough by this point to have developed a very good poker face.
"And what is she?" You became aware that this question was directed at you.
"She is our companion," Gandalf said.
"I asked what she is," Beorn said, still looking at you. His gaze had the quality of something assessing rather than threatening, the specific focus of a creature who was used to reading the nature of things and found you a less-than-straightforward example.
"I'm—" you started. "I'm just—a person—a human. From very far away." You paused. "Very, very far away."
Beorn looked at you for another moment. Then at Gandalf. "Hmm," he said, which seemed to function as an adequate response, and stood back.
It was at this precise moment that Dwalin and Balin appeared in the doorway.
Gandalf's expression did not dramatically change, but something in the quality of his composure shifted in the particular way of a man who was not surprised by something and wished he were.
"Ah," he said. "And these are two of our companions. Dwalin. And Balin." He gestured, with the resigned elegance of a man making the best of the hand he'd been dealt. "At your service."
Beorn looked at the two dwarves. Then at Gandalf. "You said you were three."
"I did," Gandalf agreed. "Three."
"You brought two dwarves," Beorn said, with the flat, specific tone of a man checking arithmetic.
"I—" Gandalf glanced at Dwalin and Balin with the expression of a man recalibrating in real time. "Well. I may have—slightly understated the situation."
"Do you call three," Beorn said, indicating the dwarves, "a group?"
"Well. When you put it that way—"
Another pair appeared in the doorway. Fíli and Kíli, arriving in the specific, immediate, energetic way of Fíli and Kíli appearing anywhere, and the fact that they'd clearly been told to wait for a signal and had apparently received an extremely different interpretation of what that signal was was visible in the slight sheepish quality of the pause at the threshold.
Beorn looked at them. Looked at Gandalf. Looked at the original number—three—that was now, very clearly, not three.
"And who are these?" he said.
"These are—yes," Gandalf said. "They are Fíli and Kíli. Also our companions. I should perhaps have mentioned—the group is somewhat larger than I initially—"
More dwarves in the doorway. Dori and Ori, then Nori, appearing with the same universal quality of people who had been told to wait for a signal and had decided, independently or collectively, that something they'd seen from inside the house probably qualified as one.
"Dori and Ori," Gandalf said, pushing through the rising tide of his own miscalculation with the magnificent composure of a wizard who had been in worse situations and intended to keep that framing at the forefront of his mind.
"And Nori. Yes." He smiled at Beorn. "You see there were—several. More than—the fact is—"
"How many?" Beorn said. He had crossed his arms. This produced an effect.
"Thirteen," Gandalf said. He had the particular tone of a man saying a number that has more digits than he'd prefer it to have. "In total. Including myself and Mr. Baggins, fifteen. And—" he glanced at you, "—sixteen."
The silence that followed was the silence of a very large man looking at a growing line of dwarves filing out of his house with the expression of someone reassessing a series of decisions that had culminated in this.
"Stupid thing to do," he said, which was directed at Gandalf but encompassed the entire enterprise, "coming to my house with a company of thirteen dwarves and not saying so."
"You are absolutely right," Gandalf said, with the serene, unruffled acknowledgement of a man who had no intention of apologising but was prepared to agree that one might. "It was perhaps—poorly introduced."
Beorn's gaze moved across the assembled company, which had now achieved its full complement on the grass outside, all of them doing their level best to look unalarming, with varying degrees of success. Bombur had ended up at the front of the group and was possibly not helping the cause of presenting the company as a lean, unimposing travelling party.
His gaze arrived at Thorin and Beorn looked at him for a long moment. Then looked away, back toward the house, and the matter of the company's size appeared to settle into the category of things that had already happened and could not be changed.
"Come inside," he said. "Then."
You caught Bilbo's eye. He caught yours. Neither of you said anything, and both of you thought a great deal.
Breakfast, at Beorn's table, was an occasion of scale. The bread came in loaves you could have used as structural elements. The honey arrived in pots of a size that Bombur regarded with the almost worshipful reverence of a dwarf who had just confirmed his belief that some places were fundamentally better than others. The cream was cold and deep in its bowl and had the quality of something that had been produced by animals who had never known anxiety, which, looking around the yard, seemed entirely plausible.
The company ate. This was not a surprise. What was a surprise—or perhaps not, given recent evidence— was how quickly the scale of the breakfast achieved something like comfortable normalcy, the dwarves redistributing themselves around the enormous table with the adaptive ease of people who had slept in goblin tunnels and emerged from mountain passes and for whom sitting at an overlarge table was honestly quite manageable by comparison.
Beorn ate too, at the head of the table, with the unhurried economy of someone for whom food was provision rather than occasion. He talked as he ate, in a direct, unadorned manner you'd noted from outside—no social scaffolding, no rhetorical setup, just the words themselves.
"These lands are crawling with orcs," he said, and the table went quiet with the specific attention that had become the company's default response to threat-relevant information. "Their numbers are growing." He looked at the company, at Thorin. "And you are on foot. You will never reach the forest alive. Not through open country." He paused. "I chased you through the night. And I am one thing not many."
"We are aware of that, yes," Gandalf said.
"You run fast for a company this size," Beorn said, with what you thought might be the closest he came to a compliment, which landed with a weight that suggested it was the closest he came to a compliment.
A mouse came from somewhere—a gap in the wall, the edge of the table, somewhere along the route of a mouse who lived in this house and had made its peace with the various enormous things that also lived in it. It appeared on Bofur's arm, which was resting on the table edge, and Bofur, deep in conversation with Óin on his other side, didn't notice it immediately and without interrupting the conversation made the automatic, slightly distracted motion of a person removing something from their arm that hadn't been invited there.
The mouse went sideways. Off the arm, toward the edge of the table.
You caught it.
It was reflex, completely—your hand moving before your brain had done anything, cupped to intercept the small, startled creature before it completed its trajectory toward the floor. You sat there with a mouse in your palms, and looked at it, and it looked at you with the wide, clear-eyed alarm of something that had been having quite a morning already.
"Hello there," you said.
It didn't immediately flee, which you chose to interpret as a good sign. You opened your hands slightly, giving it room without releasing it, and ran one finger very lightly along its back, the way you'd done with Sebastian, and something in the set of its small shoulders shifted from alarm toward a more provisional arrangement.
"Bofur,"
"Mm?" He turned.
"That was rude," you told him.
"I barely—"
"It was rude," you said, with the gentle, certainty of a person who had strong opinions about this and was not going to be talked out of them. You looked at the mouse. "You frightened them."
"I—" He looked around at the table, at several of the company who had tuned in to this exchange. "That's—the mouse appeared on my arm."
"And you startled them," you said. "You have to be— they're small, Bofur, they startle easily—"
"I barely touched it—"
"You flicked it—"
"I moved it aside, there's a difference—"
You looked at the mouse in your palms, who was now sitting with the composed, bright-eyed attention of a creature that had made an assessment and decided the current arrangement was acceptable. "You're alright, little guy" you told them, which was directed at the mouse and not at Bofur, which Bofur noticed.
"Am I being asked to apologise to a mouse?," Bofur said, with the affectionate, slightly aggrieved tone of a dwarf.
"They live here," you said. "You're a guest."
Across the table, Beorn had been watching this. His expression had the quality of someone reassessing something.
He reached over—a long reach, scaled to the reach of someone built to these proportions and held out one enormous hand, flat, palm up, near yours. An offer.
You looked at the hand. At the mouse. Transferred the small creature, carefully, into the cup of his enormous palm, where it sat and looked around with the same composure it had shown in yours, and Beorn looked at it with an expression that was the quietest, most private version of expression you'd been watching on Balin for months.
He carried the mouse to a small shelf near the wall, set it down, and came back to the table.
"I don't like dwarves," he said, without particular hostility—more as a stated position, a documented preference. "They're greedy and blind. Blind to the lives of those they deem lesser than their own." He paused, and the pause had the quality of a man considering the actions present in his home. "But orcs I hate more." He looked at Thorin. "What do you need?"
Thorin, who had received the assessment of his people with the contained stillness of a man who was not going to argue with a being this size on philosophical grounds replied. "Ponies. To reach the forest."
"Ponies," Beorn said. "You'll have ponies. Good ones." He stood from the table with the movement of something that had decided the matter was closed. "You leave at first light."
And that, in the way of most things Beorn said, was the end of it.
The afternoon had settled into the comfortable looseness of a day that had been accounted for— everyone knowing they were leaving at first light, nobody needing to do anything particular in the hours between, the company distributing itself through the cottage and yard with the happy, scattered freedom of people who'd been given unscheduled time and had all made different decisions about what to do with it.
You found Beorn at the far edge of the yard.
He was doing something to the fence—a repair, or an adjustment, the kind of task that looked small from a distance and resolved into considerable complexity up close. You came to stand nearby, which he acknowledged without looking up, the awareness of another presence registered and filed without requiring comment.
"May I ask—what is it like?" you said, after a while.
He looked at you.
"Being a skin-changer," you said. "Being—both man and bear both of those things at once. Or—not at once, but—you know what I mean."
He was quiet for a moment, the length of a man deciding whether this was a question he was going to answer. "You ask strange questions," he said.
"I've been told that," you agreed, rocking back on your heels. "Quite a bit actually."
He returned to the fence. "It is not both things at once. It is one thing and then another. The shape changes. The—what is inside does not." He set down whatever tool he was using and considered the fence. "The bear knows what the man knows. The man knows what the bear has seen." He paused. "It is not comfortable, always. But it is what I am."
"Does it get easier?" you said. "Being—being the thing you don't always choose to be?"
He looked at you again, and the look this time had a different quality—the assessment of a creature that was used to reading things that didn't say what they meant directly.
"You learn to live inside with what you have," he said, eventually. "Not because the other is gone. But because the one you are in is the one that is real, right now." He picked up his tool. "That is the only answer there is, for most things."
You looked at the fence, at the enormous, capable hands working on it, at the yard behind you where the company was variously occupying itself, and thought that this was probably the most useful piece of advice you'd received in some time.
Thorin was standing against the doorway with his arms crossed and his expression doing something he hadn't assigned a category to yet, his eyes on you and Beorn with a quality that was not the flat, kingly attention he brought to most things but something slightly different—tighter, more contained, the specific quality of someone performing neutrality rather than actually feeling it.
Dwalin materialised at Thorin's shoulder with the directness that was Dwalin's primary social mode. He looked at Thorin. Then at you. Then back at Thorin, with the expression of a man who had served his king for a very long time and had developed a very accurate internal read of him.
"You're looking at him," Dwalin said, "like you intend to kill him."
"I'm watching the perimeter," Thorin said, flatly.
"You're watching the lass," Dwalin said, with the blunt, affectionate lack of ceremony that only Dwalin could direct at Thorin and survive.
"I said I'm watching the perimeter."
Dwalin looked at the perimeter. Then at you, Beorn. Then back at Thorin. "Mmm," he said, which somehow managed to contain the equivalent of a very detailed paragraph. Thorin didn't say anything, but turned his head very slowly to perice Dwalin with a gaze he was not often the receiver of.
"Right," Dwalin said. He uncrossed his arms and recrossed them. "Only asking."
"You weren't asking," Thorin said.
"No," Dwalin agreed. He looked one more time in your direction, at the easy conversation by the fence, at the fact that Beorn had said more words to you in the last ten minutes than he'd voluntarily said to any dwarf in the entirety of their acquaintance. "No, I wasn't."
He walked away with the satisfied economy of a man who had said everything he'd come to say.
That evening the company organised itself for sleep in the main hall with the familiar efficiency of people who had done this enough times to have developed strong opinions about bedroll placement.
You made your way through the arranged shapes of sleeping dwarves—some already asleep, some still talking, Ori with his book, Bofur with his flute but playing nothing, just holding it and caught Thorin's eye as you passed the space where he'd settled himself with his pipe, the bowl of it glowing faintly orange in the dimness.
You smiled at him. Small, honest, the smile of someone who saw the person behind the thing they were managing and wasn't going to make a production of it.
He looked at you for a moment, and something in his face loosened, fractionally, and he nodded once—the nod that was more than a nod, the version of it that he used when the thing he was acknowledging was something he couldn't otherwise acknowledge in company.
You found your place beside Balin, who had the ledger open but had stopped writing and was watching the fire with the contemplative air of a dwarf at the end of a long day that had contained more Beorn than anticipated. You settled beside him, helped him close the ledger, and didn't say anything, and he didn't say anything, and the fire did the rest.
The hall was deep in sleep when you woke, with no particular reason—nothing alarming, no sound from outside, just the inexplicable middle-of-the-night consciousness that arrived sometimes for no reason and with no intention of leaving quickly. You lay still for a moment, looking at the ceiling, listening to Dwalin's snoring and the steady breath of fifteen other people and the fire, which had burned down to a deep, quiet red.
You lay on your back and looked at the rafters of Beorn's cottage and did the thing you'd been doing since the goblin caves, which was going back through the sequence of events with the specific, involuntary thoroughness of a brain that had not finished processing and had decided the middle of the night was the right time to work through the backlog. The tunnels. The sound of things in the dark. The weight of the company running around you. The feeling of coming out into sunlight and finding your hand bleeding and not knowing when it had started.
You rolled onto your side. Pulled the blanket up. Looked at the dim shape of the interior in the dark, the single candle burning in a holder on a rough shelf across the way, the shapes of sleeping dwarves in various attitudes of unconsciousness.
Thorin was sitting against the far wall, in that pool of candlelight, with his back straight and his legs crossed and something in his hands. You lay and watched him for a moment before your eyes adjusted enough to make out what he was doing.
One of the braids near his face—the thin ones that hung loose on either side, the ones you'd noticed from the beginning without ever thinking much about them—was unravelled, the dark hair loose and slightly crimped where the plait had been, and he was working at it with the focused, practiced care of someone doing something that required attention.
His fingers moved through the strands with a methodical patience, separating, smoothing, working out something near the end of the length, and the silver bead that usually sat at the bottom of that braid was resting on the straw beside him, catching the candlelight in small, warm glints.
You watched him for a minute without moving or speaking, which you'd have felt stranger about if he hadn't looked so entirely unselfconscious about it—not performing solitude, not projecting do not approach, just doing a thing that needed doing with the quiet focus of someone who did this when they needed to and wasn't concerned about an audience.
You sat up. He didn't look over, but the quality of his stillness changed slightly, which meant he'd heard you.
You moved across the barn toward him, stepping around Bofur's outstretched legs, avoiding the end of Nori's blanket, arriving at the edge of the candlelight and sitting down in it with your legs crossed, mirroring his position without planning to.
In the warmer light, you could see what was near him. Both beads—there were two of them, you realised now, one for each braid, and in the candlelight the markings on them were visible, small and precise, a pattern worked into the metal that had a deliberateness about it that spoke of meaning rather than decoration.
You picked one up.
He watched you do it from the side of his eyes and didn't object.
The bead was heavier than it looked—solid silver, real silver, not plated, with the particular weight of quality. The markings ran around it in a band a pattern of lines and shapes that had structure, a grammar you couldn't read but could recognise as having one.
"What do they mean?" you asked, keeping your voice low enough not to carry.
Thorin looked at the bead in your fingers for a moment. "The bottom line is the line of Durin," he said, and his voice was at the same register as yours —not a whisper exactly, but calibrated for the space between two people rather than a room. "The pattern is a record. Lineage, on this face." His finger, without quite touching the bead, indicated the section. "And here—the founding of Erebor. The symbols of Durin's craft."
You turned the bead carefully, looking at the different sections he indicated, and thought about how much had been compressed into something small enough to sit at the end of a braid. History made portable. Memory you could carry in your hair.
"They're beautiful," you said.
"They're old," he said. "My grandfather's, long before they became mine."
You set the bead down gently on the straw between you, with the care you gave things that were old and had carried several lives before arriving at this one, and looked at the loose hair in his hands. He'd gotten most of it undone—the length of it, separated from the braid, was longer than you'd thought and he was working at a small tangle near the end with the methodical patience of someone who had done this many times and knew that patience was the only approach.
"Braids mean things," you said. Not a question, working it out as you said it. "Not just yours. But all of them generally speaking. Don't they?"
He looked at you. Something in the look registered that you'd been paying attention, which was the kind of thing Thorin noticed and rarely commented on directly. "Yes," he said. "Achievement, among our people, is worn. A battle survived, a craft mastered, a rank held—there are braids for all of it. And beads that mark the lineage of the one wearing them." He paused. "Our beards as well, though that is more complex."
"And the specific ones—these ones," you said, gesturing at the braids beside his face. "Are those different from the others?"
He was quiet for a moment. His fingers worked at the tangle, gently, unhurried. "Some braids are given," he said, carefully, "rather than earned. By specific people, in specific contexts." He didn't elaborate further, and the careful quality of the not-elaborating suggested there was more there that he wasn't going to say tonight, and you filed it away with the other things you were used to filing now.
He reached the second braid—the matching one on the other side, which he'd been leaving for last and began the process of unwinding it, approximately halfway through the unwinding he ran into a tangle that was considerably more stubborn than the first one, and made a small sound that was specifically not a curse but was adjacent to one, and you looked at his expression and laughed.
A quiet laugh, muffled in deference to the sleeping company, but genuine—the laugh of someone caught off guard by something endearing in a context where endearing was not the expected register.
He looked at you with the expression he used when he was pretending something wasn't funny, which you'd learned to distinguish from the expression he used when something actually wasn't funny, mainly because one of them involved a slight tension at the corner of his mouth that the other didn't.
"Do you want me to—"
"No," he said.
"It's just that you've been at that particular section for a while."
"I'm aware," he said.
"Its just, I can see from here that the—"
"Fine, if you would like to be useful," Thorin said, with the precise dignity of a man conceding a point without calling it a concession, "you may."
•●•●•●•●•●•●•●•●•●•●•●•●•●•●•●•
You moved closer—shifting on the straw until the distance between you was working distance, the kind of distance at which hands could reach without stretching. The candlelight from the shelf above put you both in the same warm circle of light, and you reached across Thorin tilted his head slightly in acknowledgement, and your fingers found the tangle in his unbound hair.
It was—softer than you'd expected, though you hadn't thought about Thorin's hair enough to have an expectation for it. Clean, still, despite the goblin tunnels and the running and everything that had come before—he'd clearly bathed and the dark strands ran through your fingers with a smoothness that made the tangle more obvious by contrast, a small, tight knot near the end where the braid had been fixed and the binding had worked itself into the hair.
You worked at it the way you worked at things that required patience—carefully, without pulling, finding the individual threads of the knot and encouraging them apart rather than forcing them.
He went still, in the way he went still when he was paying attention to something. Not tense—just present. His hands had lowered to his knees, the work of smoothing the first section already done, and he sat with the candlelight on his face and talked, keeping his voice low.
"When I was young," he said, "my mother braided my hair herself. Every morning. She was particular about it." A pause in which you felt, rather than saw, a small and private quality of memory. "She said that a dwarf's braid told his story before he opened his mouth, and that a poorly kept braid told it badly, and that she would not have her son tell his story badly."
"Sounds like she was formidable," you said, gently separating another thread from the knot.
"She was," he said. "In every way."
You worked in quiet for a moment. The tangle was loosening—gradually, one layer at a time.
"My mother couldn't braid," you said, because the silence had the quality of something that could hold exchange as well as simply rest. "She tried, when I was small. It always came out—sort of sideways. There's a photograph somewhere—"
You stopped, because photograph was the wrong word and you were about to trip over the explanation, and instead said "A picture. Of me at about six years old with the most chaotic plait you have ever seen. She was so pleased with herself."
The thread you were following—came loose after a moment. "She sounds kind," he said.
•●•●•●•●•●•●•●•●•●•●•●•●•●•●•●•
"She was," you said. "She is." You pressed your lips together briefly, looking at the work in your hands. "She is," you said again, the present tense landing deliberately.
The tangle came free. You felt it give, the hair running smooth again under your fingers, and you separated the section carefully and looked at the length of it—unbraided, loose, falling over your hand in the candlelight.
"Right," you said. "So now you can just—"
"Three sections," he said, and his voice was close, because he had turned his head slightly to speak to you and the turning had reduced the distance between you, and the candlelight did things to the planes of his face from this angle that you noticed and then looked back at the hair in your hands. "Over, under, over. Keep the tension even."
You divided the section into three with careful fingers. Started the plait. It went wrong almost immediately—one strand crossing in the wrong direction, the whole thing losing its coherence after five moves, the tension uneven in exactly the way he'd said not to let it be.
"Are you sure you want me to—"
"A Lady who finds herself in the company of dwarves, may find herself with reasons to braid." Thorin stated, almost softly, with an expression you could not read by the warmth of candlelight.
"Over, under," he said again, patient, watching you attentively.
"I am going over, under—"
"Your left hand isn't holding tension. You're letting the outside strand go slack every second move."
"I am not—" you started, and looked at your hands, and were going slack every second move, and pressed your lips together. "Fine," you said. "Fine, yes, okay." Adjusted. Tried again.
It went better. Not perfectly, but better—the plait forming with a coherence that was at least recognisable as intentional, the three strands staying in their relationship with each other instead of migrating.
You reached the end and stopped, because the end was where the bead went, and the bead was on the straw, and threading the fine end of a plait through a small silver bead in candlelight was a different order of task from the plaiting itself.
You picked up the bead. Held it between your fingers. Looked at the small opening of it, and at the end of the plait, and at the gap between the two. Tried once—the end of the braid fraying slightly, then completely while refusing to cooperate.
"You're trying to push it," Thorin said.
"I'm aware of that, yes."
"Hold the braid tight and bring the bead onto it rather than pushing through. The hair stays, the bead moves, not the other way."
You tried. The bead slid a little and caught.
Tried again. "It's—I can't get the angle—"
His hands came up beside yours, and two fingers took the bead from you with the particular assurance of someone who had done this specific thing many, many times, and in three moves that you watched with a focus that made you feel slightly as if you were studying for an exam, the bead was threaded, and sitting at the end of the braid, and the plait was done.
"Oh," you said.
He lowered his hands. Looked at the finished braid, checking it with the brief critical attention of someone who had standards ingrained.
"The tension's a little uneven in the middle section," he said.
"You're welcome," you said.
The corner of his mouth tweaked upward in a quick pull, before he schooled it. "Yes," he said. "I—Thank you."
He straightened, settling back against the wall, the braid finished, the bead in place, and picked up the second bead from the straw—turned it in his fingers, and looked at it, and then looked at you.
"Would you like one?" he said.
The question arrived without quite announcing itself, and you blinked—the specific blink of someone who heard something and needed a moment to confirm what they'd heard.
"I—" You looked at the bead in his hand. At him. "I haven't done anything to earn one," you said. "That's—you said they're earned, or given for specific things, and I haven't—done anything specifically."
Thorin looked at you, steady and direct, the candlelight warm on his face, and the expression in it was—the quality of something kept carefully below the surface and held there with considerable effort. His fingers turned the bead once more, and then stilled.
"You may yet," he said.
Three words. Quiet, in the low register he used when he meant things without wanting to account for them, and he held your gaze for one more moment—one moment in which you were aware of exactly how close you were, of the candlelight, of the sleeping company around you, of the silver bead in his hand catching the light in small, warm points— and then looked away, his eyes going to the rafters above, and the moment settled into the straw between you and neither of you named it.
"You should sleep," he said. Still quiet.
"So should you," you said.
"I will," he said, and looked back at the rafters, and you sat for another moment in the candlelight before weight came to your eyelids, slowly and all at once they slid closed, as sleep encompassed you.
For fuck's sake! You are killing me with this one! I'm feral for this Curtis! (Any Curtis, but please I'm trying to be on my goodest behavior here). 🫠🥹
Innocence and cuteness meets hot enforcer Steve, aka Cherry's phone gallery 🤭
I considered adding a more spicy picture too, but after some thought I decided that Steve has his phone filled with all the naughty photos. Cherry is too shy to take pictures of the debauchery (she just happily lets him defile her).
Alice talked about Cole. I’m thinking small mountain town Steve.
Lives in a cabin he renovated himself (maybe with Bucky’s help). Friendly, but likes his quiet solitude. Has a dog and a stray cat that comes over only for food and to sleep over the winter. Drives a pickup truck and a motorbike. Has three odd jobs - handyman, part-time bartender, search/rescue team. No rush or overworking himself, just appreciating the slow life.
