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There’s shouting.
It’s such a common, frequent thing that Fili doesn’t even hear it anymore. He simply sits up in bed with his head against the pillows, staring blankly out across the room he shares with his brother.
Kili is crying, a tiny bundle that can barely stagger. He’s pressed against Fili’s side, a weight, a burden, with his baby-soft hair brushing the blonde’s bare arm. He grabs fistftuls of thin cotton, worn down to threadbare rags with burst seams that their mother can’t stitch back together.
The sound of the slap makes him sit up, though. That is new. It’s a shock to the both of them. Lightning has struck the room and Kili falls silent, staring up with wide, wet eyes.
“It’s all right.” Fili pulls the little lump into his lap, his own arms soft and young and weak. Kili’s too heavy on his lap, he squirms and murmurs and there’s a gut-sinking smell, but he holds his brother tight.
-
Smoke fills the alcove, coming in through the wide cracks in the floor and the gap under the door. It’s acrid coal-smoke, tinged with metal, and it stings Fili’s throat if he breathes in too harshly, leaves Kili’s eyes red.
Uncle Thorin must already be awake. He dresses himself in a sleepy haze, working by touch and feel in the pre-dawn grey. Kili is at his side, pulling on his hand-me-down rags with a grim line where his smile should be. He’s so small, hovering at Fili’s shoulder. Neither of them have quite enough to eat.
There’s a grimness to everything they do, it seems. Grimness when they wake up, grimness when their mother spoons not quite enough of the thin porridge into their bowl, grimness when Fili descends into that dim, smoky room with searing-hot coal-fires, grimness when he tries to wash the dust and dirt from his hands with the grey water. Everything is heavy and grey and grim.
“Hurry up, eat quickly.” His mother’s voice is a bark. Mama has already laid out two bowls for her children, steam furling in the air. “Thorin needs Kili on the bellows, and Fili, you’ll be running water.”
Both her sons nod silently.
-
The courtyard is empty. Fili pauses in the doorway to breathe in the air, soft and light with a touch of a chill. Autumn is waning, and soon the glimmer of blue on the edge of the sky will sink into heavy grey and there will be no colour left at all.
One of the cats has caught something. With the empty pails in his hands, Fili stops and stares. An old tabby mouser crouches in the corner, her tail curling lazily in the air. Probably a rat or a small bird. Nevertheless, Fili runs towards the animal with a horrendous noise, banging the pails together.
“Scat!” He jumps up and down. “Come on - go away you beast!” He throws a pail and it bangs against the palisade wall. The tabby jumps and in a black-brown streak, vanishes.
“Oh.” Fili bites the inside of his cheek and kneels down beside the little grey bundle that has been left behind. A rabbit. Not much more than a baby. The cat must have ventured into the meadows outside the city walls and brought back inside. Dead, it looks like. Not much to eat, but he could be decent as a stew, bulked up with carrots and potatoes. None of them had eaten meat in weeks, not since Dwalin celebrated his birthday. His mouth is already watering.
The rabbit shakily moves his back leg, and with a start Fili realises it’s not dead at all.
-
“What took you so long?” Fili’s back is bent under the weight of the heavy buckets. Thorin lifts his head, eyes gleaming like twin white-hot coals in his soot-stained face.
“Pump took a while to work.” He lies shortly, heaving the water into the large copper basin. With his little hands straining to work the wood-leather bellows, Kili flashes a childish grin.
-
Dinner is muted. Everybody is too tired to talk and even Kili is drooping into his watery broth. He slurps it all noisily and stares down at his empty bowl with a frown.
“I’m still hungry.” His plaintive voice makes the other four still. They stare down at their own plates with slumped shoulders.
“Here you go, my nephew.” Thorin pushes three inches of lukewarm broth across the table. His face is pinched and tired, and there are crescents of black underneath his nails that their dirty washbasin will not clean. “Eat up, before it gets cold.”
Fili stirs the cloudy remains of his own dinner, feeling limp and exhausted. His stomach is gnawing with hunger, but he looks at the bony face of his mother and remains silent. He is old enough to bear the ache quietly. And then he remembers his new secret, and a smile twitches on his sagging lips.
“Come on.” Fili waits until everyone has finished eating and his mother has cleared the plates away. Thorin and Dwalin both find their pipes and crouch before the fire on upended pails, leaning forward and muttering darkly. Fili pulls at Kili’s arm, whispering in his ear. “I’ve got something to show you.”
“What is it?” He’s so painfully obvious, and Fili silences him with a glare. The adults assume the dwarrows are scurrying off into their little alcove to play. Fili climbs the ladder and unlatches the low door, carefully. This was supposed to be a cupboard, Fili is sure. It’s too small and cramped to house any men, but for the two young dwarrows, it’s a cosy little nook that is their hideaway from the grim, grey world.
“Shh...” Fili holds a finger to his lips, making sure the door is closed. And with a secret look to his brother, lifts up the blanket on their own bed. “Don’t make a sound.” And he directs his brother to look in that little foot of dim shadow.
“Ooh!” Kili gasps despite his brother’s warnings. The baby rabbit is in an old wooden box, nestled in hay and some worn rags. “Is it real?” A pair of black eyes gleam in the darkness.
“Of course it’s real.” Fili lowers the edge of the blanket. “You can’t tell Mama or Dwalin or Uncle Thorin, all right? I know we won’t be allowed to keep it.” He chews on his lip. “They’ll probably eat him, or try to sell him to a furrier.”
“I won’t tell anyone.” Kili promises, his tired, peaky face lit up in a bright smile.
-
They argue, Mama and Uncle Thorin, at night when Fili should be sleeping. He lies awake and listens to their voices seep under the crack in the door.
“Do you want to go? Then go! Go and flee, live in the Iron Hills and abandon everything our forefathers fought and died for!”
“Oh Thorin, you fool.” Mama’s voice is shaking. “How is this better - how? So what if you give up our claim to the throne. It’s gone now, don’t you see?”
“No.” The growl sends a chill down Fili’s spine, as though a drip of winter-rain has leaked down the back of his too-small coat. “I will not give up. I will not forget, Dís. We will remain stout and proud, and-”
“Proud? Proud while you toil for pennies in a broken-down shack? Proud while your nephews starve and shiver in their rags? Proud while men spit on you call you a beggar? Thorin, there is nothing to be proud of anymore.”
And then the talk dies down to a low hum, and Fili can’t make any more of it out. But he rolls those words around in his head, over and over and over.
-
Fili does the best he can for the little rabbit. He feeds him nettles and weeds growing in the cracks of the cobblestones, and bits of browning lettuce that he filches from the market when nobody is looking. He cleans up the droppings and does his best to hide the smell.
He doesn’t name the creature. He’s too scared to, in case something bad will happen to him. He doesn’t want to get attached and he doesn’t want Kili to get attached either, although he knows it’s too late for that now. After a week, the rabbit is brave enough to venture out from under the dwarrows' bed, his pink nose twitching cautiously in the lantern-light. A week after that, he’s eating from Fili’s hand. And a week after that, the rabbit plucks up the courage to crawl right into Fili’s lap and be stroked, nibbling on the edges of the leaves Fili has scrounged up. One of his back legs is crooked and mangled, and Fili does his best to bind it, but he doesn’t know how good his efforts will prove.
Kili tries the same soft care, but he’s too fast and brash. He grasps the rabbit very tight and makes it squeak and scratch at his hands. Fili slaps his wrist and scolds, saying he can’t touch the rabbit until he can learn to be gentle.
-
How can Kili learn to be gentle, when everyone else tells him to be tough and hard? Fili watches him at the forge, sweeping and pumping and carrying. His little body isn’t built for the work, he’s bent-over and thin and always so tired. Fili wants to take him home and wrap him up in bed, feed him soup as though he were sick, whisper stories to him until he fell asleep. He wants to make him smile again, put the light back in his eyes.
Everybody is tired. They’ve overworked, underpaid, and they all know it. But what can they do? The guilds won’t accept Thorin amongst their ranks; they spit on him when they pass him in the street, and they regard Fili with a hard, cold stare. There’s no set prices, no conditions that must be met, for dwarves. They’re not good enough for them.
He feels sick with the anger sometimes, when he stews on it. It’s not fair. Their work is the best, everybody knows it, and yet they receive less than a third of what the men ask for. Even his Mama has to work, bent over the forge with a lead-lined apron tied around her broad, bony hips. Everybody does their bit, to put food on the table.
It’s better than it was. At least there’s no shouting, no broken plates and tipped-over chairs and bruises on Mama’s cheek. She’s tired and wearing thin and her eyes are heavy with shadows, but she can still smile, and she does it in a way that hides her missing teeth. Fili looks at her when she smiles and he knows that despite the aching of his bones and the scratchy-tired feeling behind his eyelids and the constant gnawing of his stomach, this is still better than it was before.
-
“C’mere, Smoky.” Fili is sitting cross-legged on his bed with a block of wood and a little knife, trying to carve. He looks up at his brother’s soft voice with a frown. So the creature has a name then. There’s no going back. Kili is stretching out his hand, half a wilted lettuce leaf in his grimy fingers. “I’m not going to hurt you, Smoky. Come and have a nibble.”
And with a little frown on his face, Fili puts down his wood and waits. He waits for the inevitable, for Kili to grow impatient and try to drag the rabbit out from under the bed the way he has done before. He fights the urge to roll his eyes and bites back the sigh while he waits.
And waits. The seconds stretch into minutes and Kili is still crouching before the bed with his hand out. His head is cocked, messy hair falling over his eyes, but Fili can see his gaze is fixed on the black space beneath the bed. He doesn’t move an inch, doesn’t raise his voice above a soft murmur.
Smoky comes out. His nose twitches smelling the air, and after a pause, he clumsily darts forward. The creature is still limping, although Fili is sure it’s not as bad as before. Kili holds out his hand and the smile grows. The rabbit snatches the lettuce and before the pair can blink, he’s gone back to his little nest beneath the bed.
Kili looks up at his brother, still smiling.
-
He’s sent to market. It’s a dull, rainy day and the clouds threaten to burst overhead as he makes his way out of the dirty ghetto where he lives with Kili and Mama and Uncle Thorin, and with the few dozen other dwarf households that can stand the hostility of this town. He’s wearing his oilskin just in case, although it doesn’t do much to keep the water out anymore. Kili holds on to Fili’s hand, gabbling about anything and everything that comes to mind. Fili just nods and smiles, pretending to listen.
He’s memorised everything he needs to get. Three pounds of oats, two of flour, a half-pound of butter, another of cheese, six onions, a dozen carrots, and ten pounds of potatoes. It’s supposed to feed all four of them for a week, somehow. He’s halfway through when the rains come, cold and heavy and turning the dirt at their feet to thick, sloppy mud.
“Damn.” Fili whispers the curse, hoping his brother can’t hear over the sound of rain on his hood. He shoulders what food he has and bows his head, hoping the flour and oats at least, will be protected.
He doesn’t realise he’s being followed until it’s too late. Not until they’re breathing down his neck and there’s a hand on his wrist and the sack is torn from his shoulder and Kili is screaming, screaming. Fili lashes out but they’re all too strong. He howls for his brother to run and with a sharp cry, he’s gone in a flash of brown and grey and Fili is left alone. Heavy boots trample his precious sack of food and bury it in the thick layer of mud.
-
He cries, a lot. He doesn’t know what else to do. The screaming and tearing and biting and kicking only get him hit and cursed at, and threats that his pretty little throat will be slit.
“Shit, he’s small. How old do you even think he is?”
“How should I know? Probably about twelve, by our count. Voice hasn’t broke yet and there’s no beard to speak of.”
“And the hair. He’ll fetch a pretty penny and no mistake. Not often you see golden hair.”
“Aye, they’ll pay through the nose for a piece of this. You’re going to make us very rich, little dwarfling. Very rich indeed.”
Fili doesn’t understand what they’re talking about. He doesn’t know what they want a piece of, but he hears the leering in their voices and he’s very, very afraid.
-
It’s a sleepless night. They lock Fili in a little room, one like his cupboard, with a bowl of tasteless-looking gruel and some water. Fili doesn’t touch his meal; he leans against the wall with his head on his knees and cries and cries and cries until he thinks he’s about to be sick.
Near morning, he hears muffled shouting. A low bellow that sounds very familiar to him, the dull thud of wood on bone. Fili listens with his hands pressed over his mouth, afraid to breathe.
And then the door opens and it’s Uncle Thorin, and Fili starts crying all over again, big, ugly sobs that seize his ribs and make it hard for him to breathe. Wordlessly, Thorin sweeps him up in his arms and rocks him, whispers that it’s all right, it’s going to be all right and no one will hurt him.
He carries Fili against his shoulder, trying to shelter his face, but Fili catches the bodies on the floor, broken and bleeding with the life oozing out. He sees Dwalin wiping his red, red hands on a ragged old towel.
-
The fallout lasts for days. Fili is sent straight to bed when he comes home and for that he is glad. He’s coddled and tiptoed around, given second helpings of all his meals even though he lost all that food at the market. Kili asks if he's all right and Fili is silent for a very, very long time before murmuring that he will be fine. He doesn't even know what happened, it's all a blur of darkness and colour but there's an ice-cold, sick feeling in his stomach that he's avoided something much, much worse.
The others return downstairs to the acrid forge and Kili with them. Fili is left alone in the apartment, safe in bed, but they thread a bit of string through a crack in the floorboards and tie it to a dented brass bell, so he can call if he needs anything. He doesn’t like this cupboard now. It doesn’t feel like a safe hideaway. It feels like a prison. It’s small and suffocating and Fili just wants to get out. But he can’t leave, he’s bedridden and he has to bear this all alone somehow.
As soon as he knows it’s safe, Fili ducks under the bed and clicks his tongue, calling for Smoky. The rabbit ventures out on command and snuggles in his lap, sniffing about for a scrap of food.
“I don’t have any sorry.” Carefully, he climbs up on the bed with the rabbit in his arms. He’s so cold and he doesn’t know why. Smoky half-jumps across the mattress, pawing and sniffing at the cloth laced with Fili’s scent. “My brother will bring something back when he can.”
He wants to stay awake and play with the rabbit, but Fili is tired. He sleeps on his back, nose pointed towards the ceiling, and after more cautious sniffing, Smoky settles down in the crook of Fili’s neck, burrowing into a nest of golden hair.
-
There’s nightmares. Rough hands grabbing at him and his hair being pulled and a high, mocking laughter. Fili awakes gasping, heart pounding and hair plastered across his face. He sinks back down to realise that there are new voices, rough, sharp voices from down below. Fili jerks away, startling the rabbit, and listens.
“Attacking four unarmed men - leaving them for dead in their own home. Really Thorin, you have some nerve with what you’ve done.”
“I came to you!” Thorin’s voice rocks the walls. “The moment Kili told us what happened I came to you and you did nothing! You said you weren’t paid to look after dwarves! What was I to do, let them sell my nephew like some sort of-of-”
“Thorin, careful!”
“You better toe the line, dwarf.” Fili finds himself reaching out for Smoky and holding the rabbit close, against his chest. “We don’t take kindly to troublemaking folk around these parts. We’ve been charitable enough, letting your lot set up their pathetic wares, trying to drive our own people out of business, turning this street into a filthy hole for peasants. Don’t push us.”
And that old panic is back again, beating in Fili’s head and hurting and making it hard for him to breathe.
-
“We have to leave.” Fili and Kili listen in bed, peering at the half-inch gap of light underneath the door. “We can’t stay here - it’s just not safe Thorin. They hate us. They’ve always hated us. Anything is better than here.”
“We could go back to Dunland. They’re wild as the rain but their gold and silver is all the same to us. They didn’t try to take my son from me, Durin’s beard, I know that much.”
“I know we cannot stay.” Thorin’s heavy voice is like a weight on Fili’s chest, pushing him into the thin mattress. “These people - it’s only a matter of time before blood is spilled in retaliation. They’ll try to burn us in our houses, or ambush us in a dark street, or Mahal knows what else. I know we must leave.”
There’s a silence. Fili can hear Smoky scratching around in his nest of hay.
“As soon as the frost melts, we’ll go. No more than a month. We can’t risk those mountain passes with the chance of snow.”
-
Smoky is fit enough to bounce around the bedroom, his white tail flashing as he hops from wall to wall. Kili claps his hands in delight and Fili smiles in soft pride. The shirt seems to have done its job.
“We’ll take him into the woods soon.” He finds Kili’s hand, laces their fingers tight. Fili still feels cold, and for a moment, he wonders if he’ll ever feel warm again. “And he can find his family.”
-
Mama sits them both down and tries to talk them through what will happen. They’re going to move away. They don’t know where, or how long it will take, but they are going to find a new home, somewhere that will accept them, be welcoming, and still let them be. Kili doesn’t understand, he whines and says that he doesn’t want to go back to riding a pony and sleeping in a tent. Fili remembers those hands on him, those cruel eyes and snarls of laughter, and he shudders and knows that he wants to be far away from here. Far, far away, and he will never come back.
-
The night before they are supposed to leave, Fili and Kili sneak out of their little alcove, tiptoe through the one-roomed apartment with Uncle Thorin snoring in their ears, glide down the stairs, across the courtyard, and through the complicated maze of streets and alleys to the walls of the town. They’re unguarded, and it’s easy enough for the two of them to climb over, Fili clutching Smoky closely to his chest.
They walk until they’re sure it’s safe. In a pale outline of moonlight, Fili kneels down in the grass, the rabbit cupped in his hands.
“Here you go, Smoky.” He whispers, lowering his interlaced palms to the grass. “You’re free now. You’re all better.” Kili is sniffing. Fili knew this would happen, that his brother would get silly and attached, but he bites back his admonishment, and as Smoky leaps from his hands he winds his arms around Kili’s shoulders and brings him in close.
They watch the rabbit together, sniffing about at first, lifting his head to test the air, then bounding off, hopping through the grass, growing further and further away until even the white flash of his tail is swallowed up in the shifting pattern of moonlight.
“Is Smoky going home?” Kili whispers, his soft voice almost lost in the breeze.
Fili smiles. “Yes.” He squeezes his brother’s hand. “He’s going home.”