Could you share more about Silver, Spilled 👀?
Hi Petra! Thanks for the ask 💛
This one is me in my cringe era for sure. It's a Bagginshield fic about dragon sickness cause I don't think the world will ever have enough of those. I probably won't ever finish this one but it's fun to write in this prose so sometimes I still poke at it
His head is pounding by the time he's given leave of the budgetary committee, though it is not yet even midday. The tedium, he thinks, nothing more. There's not a one among Durin's folk who would enjoy a morning of long-winded old men at abacuses, divvying and tallying until their eyes crossed. It's not necessarily the coins themselves, he tells himself. Doesn't have to be -. Somewhere, in the king's rooms, Thorin is willing to bet a certain burglar is settling down for elevensies and suddenly, Thorin finds he has a Hobbit's appetite, fueling him through the great labyrinth of Erabor - down, down, deep into the keep, where the mountain settles so heavily overhead it swallows even the sound of his footsteps, iron tips of his boots drumming dully off the malachite, and the throbbing of his own pulse is rendered silent. He could sleep here forever; might have done if -. Bilbo had told him once that he felt a flower in a cloche, being so far down. He'd said the air had a quality about it, still and suppressing and silent, as if just waiting to be disturbed. He'd said he just knew that if some great, terrible finger were to come along and drum upon the bell, that the noise of it would be so immense it would be like to shake the whole keep apart, and that he felt as if his ears were constantly straining for that pulse. Thorin hadn't told him how right he was because he'd come to know his burglar quite well, and he took no joy in seeing the man's face fall in remorse and regret anymore. ('You've changed, Thorin Oakenshield.' He hoped so, but melancholy had been harder to shed than pride, especially after the loss of Fili, and so he'd reminded the Hobbit that preserved flowers were like to be the only kind he would enjoy for a long while, if he stayed. The sadness was obvious in the Hobbit's eyes at that, but - Mahal bless him - he'd only twitched his nose as he was wont to do when he was about to do something daring, and told Thorin that was okay, so long as he were kept, too. That was the first time Thorin knew, dragon sickness, miner's lung - they do not get better, simply hide within one's body, restive and biding, until one stumbles back into their old habits, is thrust back into the source of the sickness, lets their mind spiral down the same path that brought them back, and back, and back, before.) Thorin is covetous. He always has been, he sees that now. He could couch it in all the nobility and the selflessness Orí could fit on the page in his retelling of their adventure, but the truth was still the truth. Thorin had always felt cheated of his birthright, of his family, of the greatest amassment of wealth in all of Middle-Earth - his kingdom and his throne and the jewel set within it. And then he'd had it, and it still wasn't enough. Though Mahal had seen fit to send him a Hobbit, a simple creature with simple tastes - if abundant - with courage and strength enough for both of them and so he'd had it, and then he hadn't. A throne he sits upon in figure alone, depending on the wisdom of his advisors in all things; a vault set tight with dwarven locks he will never be able to open; and a tomb already commissioned and waiting for him, with a gem set upon the lid which slithers and gleams, pearlescent and lustrous, in the dark halls of the dead kings. But he is still covetous.
WIP tag game :)