Drabble thing: Thorin, Fíli, and/or Kíli, post-BoFA everyone lives AU, 7
There is a scuffling over stone floors in the night. Heavier treads during the days and evenings, and Thorin is glad to hear footsteps inside Erebor again. The winter had hastened its approach after the battle, and so the doors to the mountain were opened to the sick and the wounded and the hungry. Open to all, by those criteria, though thankfully few elves tested their hospitality.
The large hall filled with the healing was never entirely quiet, and dwarven healers never did much to shush the soft exchanges. Better a dwarf speak to those around him than to close his lips and speak to Mahal. And some spoke more than others - Balin had been a near constant bubbling of assurances news from beyond the halls. In contrast, at the opposite end of the hall, Thorin had been mostly silent since he had been brought into the mountain.
The scuffling grows nearer, and in the darkness of a cavern without torches, Thorin can make out the small shadow of his youngest nephew. Kili walks with a pronounced limp, one side of his body made unreliable as a result of the blade thrust through him. He half falls onto another bed, grasps a pale hand in his own. Fili, who had been in a sleep of sickness for far too long, had woken earlier in the day.
“’Undad,” Kili murmurs softly as he clasps Fili’s hand. “I almost lost you.”
Thorin strains his ears to hear a response, and when it comes Fili’s voice is weak and there is a rattle in his chest, but his words are steady. “I could say the same,” he whispers. “Looks like you’ve lost a leg and had someone else’s stitched on.”
“Funny,” Kili replies, “I’ve often said the same thing of your face.”
Fili huffs in annoyance, and Kili leans close, pressing their foreheads together for a long moment. “So,” Fili murmurs into Kili’s hair, “are you ready to go home yet, nuddadud?” Kili pretends to bite at Fili’s nose in response to the term of address, and though Fili’s laugh sounds so very tired it is a laugh nonetheless, and a gift to the ears,
Thorin turns his face away in the darkness. He is glad that his nephews have not been lost to one another, but perhaps it is both wise and fitting that he finally allows the burden of himself to be lost to them.
