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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.
Part 2 | Part 3
Of Crowns & Mountains
C.1: What Falls From the Sky
The city moved around you the way cities always did—indifferent, relentless, and slightly too loud. You'd long since stopped noticing any of it. The pigeons on the window ledges, the bus that groaned past every twelve minutes, the particular smell of warmed pavement mixing with coffee cart exhaust—it was all furniture now, backdrop, the unremarkable texture of an average workday.
Your lunch break had gifted you exactly forty-five minutes of escape from your desk, and you were spending it the way you spent most things, slightly distracted by thoughts you couldn't quite pin down.
You had a paper bag folded under one arm sandwich, crisps, something chocolate and entirely one third melted—your handbag hitched up on your shoulder, and your eyes were fixed somewhere in the middle distance in that unfocused way you had when you were thinking without really meaning to, whether you'd remembered to reply to your manager's email, and whether it was worth stopping for coffee on the way back even though it would probably keep you up until two in the morning again.
You could always do decaf ? You thought idly before a full body shudder rolled through you, Ugh—Decaf—what you really needed was a holiday.
The crosswalk signal counted down in red ahead of you. Around you, the pavement thrummed with the low vibration of underground trains and human footsteps, and the air tasted faintly of exhaust and the approaching edge of autumn.
The signal changed, you stepped off the kerb and the ground was simply—not there.
There was no real warning. No trembling, no dramatic crack of sound, no sensation that anything at all was wrong with the world until the world gave way entirely beneath your foot. One moment you were stepping forward with the easy confidence of someone who had never once considered that concrete might fail them, and the next the pavement split open in a line—impossibly clean, like a seam being unpicked from the inside—and your foot found nothing, and then your other foot found nothing, and then you were—
What the—?
Falling.
The city vanished. Not faded, not blurred at the edges, simply—gone. One half-second you were surrounded by glass and steel and the smell of someone's distinct lack of deodorant and the next you were falling through something that was neither manhole nor tunnel, something that had no colour and no logic whatsoever, and the only coherent thought you managed was a very sincere, very heartfelt
What the actual—
Then there was sky again. Real sky, enormous and heartbreakingly wide, rushing up to meet you at a speed that made your stomach leave your body and hover somewhere three seconds behind you.
You hit the ground with a sound that scattered every bird within a hundred yards, you bounced—somehow, impossibly, grotesquely—once.
Then lay very, very still in the tall grass of a field that smelled of clover and cold earth and absolutely nothing like the city, while the world swam and went quietly dark around the edges and then darker still, and then dark all the way through.
The company heard it before they saw it. A sound like something dropped from a very great height—which, as it turned out, was precisely what it was—coming from the scrubby field to their left, followed by a second impact, and then silence. Several ponies shied. Bofur's hat slid sideways. Dori, who had been in the middle of saying something to Nori, forgot entirely what it was.
They had just been caught up to by Bilbo, who had arrived breathless and clutching a contract and looking rather more determined than anyone had expected from a hobbit who'd fainted reading that same contract the evening before, and who now stood blinking at the treeline with the particular expression of someone wondering if perhaps he should have stayed in bed afterall?
"Was that—" he started.
"Something fell," said Fíli.
"Out of the sky," said Kíli, already twisting in his saddle with the barely-contained delight of someone for whom unexpected events were generally improvements on expected ones.
"Aye," said Glóin flatly. "I have eyes."
Thorin said nothing. He had pulled his pony to a halt and was looking toward the disturbance with an expression that gave nothing away, which was, admittedly, most of his expressions. His eyes tracked the stillness in the grass—there, the flattened circle where something had struck, and there the shape of it, visible even from here.
The shape of a person.
They dismounted in short order, hands moving to weapons with the automatic ease of long habit. Gandalf, who had said nothing yet, stepped forward at an unhurried pace that kept him ahead of everyone else regardless.
You lay on your back in the flattened grass. Your blazer had ridden up on one side. Your handbag strap was still looped over your shoulder with the dedication of a bag that had been through worse, which it hadn't. Your paper lunch bag was nowhere to be found, lost somewhere in whatever seam of the universe you'd fallen through. Your hair spread out around you in the grass, and you looked—inexplicably, maddeningly—like you were simply asleep.
Gandalf looked down at you with one enormous eyebrow raised to a truly impressive altitude.
"Well," he said, after a long moment. "That is unusual."
"She fell," said Kíli, arriving at his elbow with Fíli half a step behind. "Out of literally nowhere. We all saw it. There was nothing there and then there was—her."
"An astute summary," Gandalf agreed, in a tone that indicated he was already thinking six things simultaneously and sharing approximately none of them.
Balin pushed through to the front, took one look at you, and felt something in his chest shift with the instinctive concern of a person constitutionally incapable of being unmoved by someone clearly in distress. "Barely a scratch on her." he said, relieved, watching the visible rise and fall of your breathing. "How she survived that fall I cannot—" He shook his head. "She should not have survived that fall."
"She bounced," said Kíli.
"People don't bounce, Kíli," said Fíli, though he looked rather uncertain about this as a universal law.
"This one did."
Thorin had not spoken again. He stood slightly behind the cluster of his company, one hand loose at his side, and looked at you the way he looked at things he did not yet have a category for—with a long, measuring sort of attention that he would not have called interest and therefore did not have to examine.
You were tall, he noted. Taller than he'd have expected this close to the Shire. Taller than he was, certainly. Not a Dwarven woman. Not a Elf. Thorin took in the improbable situation and the softness of your face in its unconsciousness, from the race of Man then he concluded.
"Where did she come from?" he said. Not to anyone in particular.
"I rather think that is the question," Gandalf replied.
"Could be a trap," Dwalin said, not moving his hand from his axe.
"Trap," repeated Bofur, pushing his hat back on his head and squinting at your crumpled form in the grass. "Set by what, exactly? I've not heard of Orcs using—whatever that was—as bait."
Fíli and Kíli, satisfied that you were breathing and therefore not immediately a tragedy, had found a stick.
Long enough to be useful, thin enough to be precise. Kíli crouched beside you with the focused expression of a person conducting a scientific inquiry of the highest order and prodded your shoulder gently.
You didn't move.
He prodded again.
"Kíli," said Balin, from behind him.
"Just checking," Kíli said, without looking up. He lifted your arm a small way and dropped it. Your hand shifted slightly in the grass and then went still. Fíli crouched beside him and they exchanged a glance of the specific, wordless variety that only worked between people who'd grown up sleeping in the same delving.
"She fell from the sky," said Ori, in a very small voice from somewhere near the back. "She just—fell. From nowhere."
"I have eyes, Ori," said Dori, though his own voice wasn't entirely steady.
Fíli and Kíli had exchanged a single glance—that rapid, wordless communication unique to brothers —and within approximately four seconds had returned to proding you with the same stick applying it with purpose.
"Oi!, don't," said Balin.
"We're just checking if she—" Kíli began.
"She's breathing, leave her be—"
"Aye, but is she—" Fíli poked you lightly with the stick. Nothing happened.
"I said leave the poor lass alone," Balin said firmly, in the tone that had on occasion made even Thorin reconsider his decisions.
Fíli took a few moments to consider this and poked your boot once more, before Balin yanked the stick from his grasp and threw it across the field.
"You're not helping," said Bilbo, who was looking at you with an expression caught exactly halfway between worry and bewilderment. He'd barely signed himself up for one unexpected addition to this journey, and now there were—implications of two. "And where did she come from? People don't just—fall out of the sky. Do they?"
"Not as a rule," Balin agreed.
"Then—"
"Master Baggins." Gandalf's voice was mild. "I think we may set aside the question of how for the moment, in favour of the rather more pressing question of what is to be done."
That, as it turned out, took somewhat longer to resolve. They stood in a rough half-circle around you while the ponies shifted and the afternoon light moved through the pale sky overhead, and the debate ran its course with the particular energy of thirteen dwarves, one hobbit, and one wizard who already knew what was going to happen but was waiting for everyone else to arrive there themselves.
"We can't leave her," Balin said, for the second time, with the patient firmness of a dwarf who was prepared to say it a third. "She's unconscious in an open field. Wherever—she is from, she's no threat to us, and to leave her here is to leave her to the wilds. Literally."
"She'll slow us down," said Dwalin. He said it without particular cruelty, the way he said most things—as a plain fact, presented for consideration. He was looking at you with the calculating assessment of a man who thought in terms of march-pace and supply weight. "We don't know who she is."
"She's a person," Bilbo said, and then looked slightly surprised at himself for having said it with that much force.
"She's an unknown," Thorin said. His voice was level. Not unkind, precisely, but—measured. He was still watching you with that flat, unreadable look. "We know nothing of her origin, her allegiances, her—"
"She fell out of the air, Thorin," Gandalf said, very gently. "I suspect her allegiances are currently the least of her concerns."
Thorin's jaw shifted slightly.
"She is not a threat," Balin pressed. "And we are not the sort of company that leaves injured souls to die in fields because they are inconvenient. Are we?"
Silence. The sort of silence that had a particular shape—Thorin's silence, which meant he was weighing something he had already, privately, decided.
"Make a stretcher," he said finally, his tone conveying with considerable precision that he would not be discussing this further. "We move before the light goes."
They were efficient. Whatever else the company of Thorin Oakenshield was—loud, stubborn, occasionally catastrophic—they were efficient. A stretcher appeared from lashed packs and spare rope inside minutes, and you were lifted onto it with a care that surprised Bilbo, who was watching from a slight distance with his hands in his pockets and his brow furrowed with the specific anxiety of someone who'd already agreed to one impossible adventure and now appeared to be in the middle of a second one without being consulted.
They slung the stretcher between four of the ponies, adjusted until you lay stable and level, and the company moved on.
You swayed gently with the motion of the walk, still deeply, undisturbedly unconscious, your hands softly folded over your middle by Balin with a peacefulness entirely at odds with the manner of your arrival.
Kíli kept glancing back at you.
"Stop that," said Fíli.
"I'm not doing anything."
"You're staring."
"I'm watching. There's a difference." Kíli paused. "Do you think she'll wake up screaming?"
"...Why would she wake up screaming?"
"Well," Kíli said, reasonably, "if I'd fallen out of the sky I think I'd wake up screaming."
Fíli considered this. "Fair point," he conceded.
It was Nori who noticed the bag first or rather—it was Nori who acted on noticing it first, which was a different thing, and far more characteristic. He'd spent the better part of an hour watching it sway from where it had been carefully transferred to a hook on the stretcher frame, and the watching had turned into wondering, and the wondering had turned into the irresistible conclusion that it would be doing everyone a favour, really, to know what was in it. Information-gathering. Practical, even.
He'd barely gotten the clasp open before Bofur appeared at his elbow.
"What've you got?"
"Don't know yet," Nori said, and upended the bag.
The contents of your handbag landed in an arrangement on the grass beside the path as the company paused for a brief rest, and several dwarves drifted over with the unconcealed curiosity of people who had excellent reasons not to do what they were doing and were doing it anyway.
There was a small wallet, soft leather, which Bofur opened and peered into with great interest before deciding the flat, laminated cards inside were probably currency of some kind even if they looked like nothing he'd ever seen. There was a set of keys on a small ring with a little disc of metal on it that had an embossed design—Óin picked this up and turned it over in his fingers with a medic's assessing eye.
There was a folded piece of paper, which turned out to be a receipt for something called a 'meal deal'. There was a small mirror, which caused a brief stir. There was a tube of something—Bofur opened it, sniffed it, and passed it to Dori with an expression of profound uncertainty.
There were several soft-wrapped packages. It was these last items that proved the most interesting.
They were individually wrapped in thin, crinkly material, flat and rectangular, with a sort of adhesive tab along one side that released when tugged. The contents were soft, absorbent, wings that folded neatly. Óin, who had seen field dressings of every variety across his many years of campaigning, picked one up and turned it over in his hands with the slow, thoughtful nod of a professional assessment.
"Bandaging of some kind," he said.
"Good quality," Glóin agreed, fingering the material. "Very fine weave. Look at that padding."
"Aye." Óin was already applying it to a shallow cut on his forearm that had been annoying him since the previous evening, pressing the adhesive wings down with the satisfied precision of a man who appreciated good medical supplies. "Whoever she is, she travels well-prepared."
Bifur said something in Khuzdul.
"Yes it's remarkable," Bofur replied, abandoning the tube to crouch and examine the application more closely. "Doesn't even need a bandage over it."
"Clever folk, wherever she's from," Óin agreed, smoothing the edges down.
"What," a voice hissed from behind them, "are you doing with that."
Bilbo had come back to see why the back half of the company had slowed. He stood now, looking at the arrangement of your belongings spread across the grass, at Óin's arm, at the remaining unopened packages, and then back at Óin's arm, and something in his expression twitched.
"Look bandages, Master Burglar," Óin said, with enthusiasm.
Bilbo opened his mouth. Closed it. Seemed to make a private decision that this particular battle was not one he had the vocabulary to win in it's entirety. "Has anyone thought," he said instead, with admirable composure, "that perhaps we shouldn't be rifling through the belongings of an unconscious woman?"
"We're cataloguing," said Nori, who had moved on to—a flat, dark-screened rectangle that he was turning over and over with the intense interest of a man who had found the most puzzling thing he'd ever held in all his years of handling puzzling things. "There's glass on the front. Very thin. Very smooth. And it's—heavy, for its size. And there are buttons on the side but they don't seem to—" He pressed one.
The screen lit up, several dwarves jumped.
Nori dropped it.
It landed screen-up in the grass, luminous and improbable and cycling through a sequence of coloured images.
"Sorcery," Dori breathed.
"I'll take that Dori," said a deep, calm voice from behind them all, and Gandalf stepped over Nori's outstretched hand and picked up the rectangle from the grass with the practiced ease of someone retrieving an object they'd been waiting to examine. He turned it over in his fingers.
Pressed the side button. Watched the screen with his eyebrows elevated to an altitude that suggested considerable interest carefully disguised as mild curiosity. Gandalf then began to mutter something the dwarves could not hear and causing the rectangle to emit a rather pathetic whine before collapsing in on itself and simply disappearing.
He took the bag from Nori without looking at him. Examined the wallet. The keys. The little mirror. The receipt. He had retrieved and reviewed approximately two-thirds of the contents with the methodical attention of a man reading a rather absorbing letter when a small, firm hand closed over the bag and pulled.
Bilbo looked up at him with an expression of patient reproach.
Gandalf looked down at him with an expression of a wizard considering whether he had, technically, been caught doing anything.
"She's unconscious," Bilbo said.
"Yes," Gandalf agreed. He relinquished the bag. His expression was perfectly composed, giving away nothing except, perhaps, to someone who knew him well enough—and Bilbo was beginning to—a faint shimmer of something that was not quite suppressed wonder.
He straightened, and looked ahead to where you still swayed in your stretcher between the ponies, peaceful and unaware of any of it.
"Keep that safe would you please, Master Baggins," he said, at last.
"I intend to," Bilbo said, holding the bag close with the firmness of someone who had found a principle and intended to stand on it.
They moved on. The sun slipped lower. The field gave way to a path, and the path to the first suggestion of hills in the distance.
You slept on, carried between four patient ponies, in a world whose name you didn't know, dreaming whatever it is people dream when they fall through the seams of everything they've ever known.
The company walked on. And somewhere ahead of them, the road curved east toward Erebor, toward danger and wonder and things not yet dreamed of.