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He’s going to be late.
It’s a warm night in Rivendell, but the clothes Bilbo has chosen to wear for the spring soiree are light and airy, with a tracery of leafy vines embroidered up around the collar of the robe and down his long sleeves in golden thread. Just one of the many indulgences he’s decided to afford in light of having too much money and not enough people in his life to spend it on, as the silence filling Bag End tends to remind him when the days grow cold and short in winter. The rest of his attire is plain, and he he wears no jewellery save the sapphire ring on his left hand. The cane he has with him to check his pace keeps a slow metronome going on the stone floor, tap, tap tap. Every now and then he will stop to lean his weight slightly into it, momentarily resting his ailing leg before he continues on. It’s one of the few reasons why he can’t walk as long as normal, apart from a bad sprain from years back and a collection of joints that creak their protest whenever the weather is particularly damp.
The stewards tug open the double doors for him when he reaches the Hall of Fire, bless them, and he enters to a light chatter and a smell of good food. Candlelight ripples orange across the pillars and walls. He stands in the doorway, hand on cane, to survey the room. It’s slightly different from the last time he visited — and last time is a very, very long time ago — but the layout is familiar enough, as are several faces he picks out from the crowd of guests. There is music playing already, but the dishes on the serving table are still covered. Not late after all, then. He allows himself a grateful smile and shuffles in to join the function.
For the next hour, Bilbo is perfectly content to immerse himself in the serenade of harp music and some rather nice-tasting treacle tarts. It’s a small, humble event that lasts long enough for him to pay compliments to friends he hasn’t seen in years, and make new ones besides. If he has any wine, he remembers his health and has just the right amount to be polite. The conversations, he enjoys the most, and whatever idle gifts he happens to have on his person are gone long before the food trays begin to run thin.
There’s a short address by Lord Elrond before the dinner formally concludes, and then they are left to retire to their rooms for the night at their own leisure.
Bilbo doesn’t plan to linger, only it really has been too long since he’s had elven fare and his stomach agrees eagerly with this sentiment. He sneaks a couple more tarts until he’s completely stuffed and a little worried he might have done himself in — between the wine he has had and his own full stomach, he’s not sure if he can get up anymore. It’s a small miracle that he eventually manages to, though this has much to do with the thought of falling asleep where he is and how incredibly un-gentlehobbitly that would be, and he’s always been a hobbit if not the hobbit of propriety.
His room seems much further away from the Hall of Fire than he recalls. It’s darker now, but cooler, and he shakes his sleeves out to take brief advantage of that. Other late leavers mill out from the hall behind him, greeting him goodnight as they walk past. He returns each and every one companionably with a tired smile, and almost forgets his desire for sleep in doing so. Almost.
Someone touches his elbow. Bilbo turns around, ready with his goodnight, and feels it shrink back in his throat when he sees who it is. Not an elf, nor is it a newly-made acquaintance; he’s much shorter than that even at a head taller than Bilbo, and stockier. Long, braided hair and a long, equally braided beard to match. He’s wearing a robe of royal blue and a heavy-looking crown rests on his grizzled head. The scar trailing down from his temple is the first thing that truly catches Bilbo’s attention, nearly translucent in the moonlight. The dwarf’s eyes search Bilbo’s face, and as they brim over with an ancient sort of fondness — or perhaps something sadder and more heartbreaking — Bilbo can’t for the life of him bring himself to look away.
Bilbo finds himself staring up at the reigning King Under the Mountain.
***
There are a number of benches in a pavilion nearby, which is a mercy if the stiffness in Bilbo’s legs is anything to go by. Thorin guides him to sit with steady, measured movements, as if Bilbo may slip away from him and shatter at any given moment. Which, now that Bilbo’s brain has unfrozen and he can reevaluate the condition of his bones, isn’t too far from the truth. His cane goes by his side, propped up against the bench he’s on as he rubs some warmth back into his knees, and Thorin wordlessly takes the space right next to him. He never was good at asking about these things, Bilbo thinks. Out of the corner of his eye, he sees Thorin studying him, and somehow that makes the tiredness of a whole day spent awake return in spades.
“Hello, Thorin,” Bilbo says.
Thorin blinks, but doesn’t say anything back. His gaze shifts to rest in his lap, upon which his fingers have knotted together in a manner that doesn’t look entirely comfortable.
Even though a nagging feeling tells him he shouldn’t, Bilbo decides to try again. “I didn’t, um. Expect to see you here.”
If there’s something different about the way he says it, Bilbo is unaware, but this garners a small nod from Thorin. “Nor I, you,” he murmurs.
Bilbo looks him over from head to toe, taking note of the silver streaks in his hair and beard. There are now lines in Thorin’s face that Bilbo doesn’t remember and fainter lines framing his eyes, but yes, it’s otherwise the same dwarf who’d stood beyond his front door all those decades ago. The physical changes he can observe are smallish, but entirely significant in context of when they last laid eyes on each other. It’s hard to pretend sometimes that he hasn’t stopped keeping tally to the precise year. Or day, depending on how deep down the loneliness strikes, as and when it is oft to do.
“Elrond invited you as well, then?”
The sound of Thorin speaking jolts Bilbo out of his reverie. He thinks, ponders why he even needs to think for such a straightforward question, then nods once in reply. It’s always safer, not having to say anything.
Thorin grunts and lifts his chin. The gesture is a wholly familiar one. “Would you have come if you knew?”
“Of course,” Bilbo says, surprising himself with how well he buries the wavering in his voice. Small wonders. He half-expects to be seen through anyway, but Thorin just smiles a strange, tight smile and Bilbo doesn’t know what that means, if at all.
“Are you keeping well?”
“Reasonably,” Bilbo admits. “For my age. I mean, I’m not exactly spry anymore, but I guess you probably know that already.” He throws a wistful, lasting look at his cane, and Thorin follows suit, eyebrows furrowing in the centre of his forehead.
“Your leg,” he says slowly, simply.
“Mm.”
Thorin makes a small noise and shakes his head. “I’d have thought you knew how to take better care of yourself.”
Bilbo just smiles, already too drained for anything else. Numerous as the rebuttals that come to mind are, he’s growing drowsier by the minute and it’s becoming increasingly difficult to keep his eyes open. If he doesn’t get to his room soon, he’s not going to have it in him to worry about propriety much longer.
“Are — are you tired?”
Bilbo lets his head loll forward in a drawn-out nod. He only realises that he’s briefly dozed off only when he hears Thorin saying, “Come. I think it’s time you went to bed.”
***
Thorin walks him back to his room, ensures that he’s inside before saying goodnight and closing the door. It’s a full minute before Bilbo can move from the spot he’s rooted to, and another for him to be unable to hear the sound of Thorin’s fading footsteps anymore. Then, he stumbles over to his bed and sits on the edge, where he presses a quavering hand to his mouth and tries his hardest to keep himself from falling apart, oh, how he tries.
***
When Bilbo wakes up, it is almost mid-day and he’s ravenous. There is food in the main parlor, good food that he enjoys as much as he can for all the dryness in his mouth. There are few people around him, all elves, no sign of dark hair lined with silver. He still finds himself keeping a lookout even after he has finished another serving of breakfast and is putting in a request with the stewards for a third.
Full up once again, he doesn’t return to his room immediately, liking his postprandial walks just as much as any other ageing hobbit. Good for digestion, and his leg, too, or so he’s been told. He slips out the breakfast parlor and decides on the longest way he knows to the gardens, taking his time with the journey.
Spring has put colour back into the flowers and grasses and the sun is rising over the neighbouring peaks of the Misty Mountains. The garden teems with life everywhere he goes, from birdsong in the trees to new shoots poking through the soil to the rustling of leaves whilst the morning wind blows. A bumblebee buzzes by lazily, and Bilbo smiles; the distant memory of waking on a stable floor shared with thirteen other dwarves comes to mind despite his best intentions.
“Bilbo.”
He stops walking and closes his eyes. Of course. Of course. “Didn’t see you at breakfast this morning,” he says without turning around.
Thorin moves up the garden path to stand beside Bilbo, his hands clasped behind his back. He’s not wearing his crown, Bilbo notices. The absence of it makes him look less weary, somehow, and all the more handsome for that. Just as Bilbo remembers, though not quite as clearly as he used to.
“I woke early,” Thorin says. There is a notable pause, like he’s considering saying something else, and it turns out to be, “I couldn’t sleep.”
“Ah.” Bilbo thinks about the first few nights he’d spent in Bag End after returning from Erebor, sleeping in his too-large bed and living in his too-large hobbit hole with the spaces of people no longer in his life, and he suddenly feels entirely worn-out. He’d horrified himself in those days, once, with the shadows under his eyes when he looked in a mirror, as though he was looking at a different person altogether. He grips the handle of his cane a bit tighter, relaxes. Grip, relax. Grip. Relax. He’s not going to buckle or fall over. Not here, not in front of Thorin.
“And you? Did you sleep well?”
Bilbo draws a deep breath, and when the air tumbles out of him it takes the shape of a weak, shuddering laugh that hurts his chest to hold. “I don’t think I’ve slept well in over thirty years, Thorin,” he says.
***
They walk together in silence, Thorin taking Bilbo’s left to allow room for the movement of the cane on his right. The path meanders on ahead, leading them to the other end of the garden. There, the river comes into view, sunlight sparkling off its surface as it curves along Rivendell and disappearing over the rushing falls a short distance away.
“You were so angry,” Bilbo murmurs.
Thorin jerks slightly. “What?”
“When we first came here,” Bilbo clarifies. He comes to a halt and turns to watch the river, resting his arms on the parapet. A light wind rushes him, ruffles his whitening curls. “Do you remember?”
“Gandalf,” Thorin mutters in that mix of irritation and grudging respect only he knows how to muster.
“Gandalf,” Bilbo agrees.
“When will you be leaving?”
Bilbo lets go of a sigh. “Tomorrow morning.”
“That’s…” Thorin looks startled. “Rather soon.” Though the tone of his voice contains a restrained alarm that indicates he might ask Bilbo to stay longer, he does not.
Bilbo smiles. “I miss home already. I’m sure you do too.”
They can’t seem to find anything else to say to each other after that. It’s just as well. While he’d like to deny it, Bilbo’s scared stiff of the likelihood that he might have forgotten how to talk to Thorin, or that he’d never really known in the first place. The Thorin he’d thought he understood was younger than this, an exile in strangers’ lands, and he didn’t dress in fine clothes and wore no crowns; Bilbo is willing to concede the latter in light of current circumstances, but his growing reservations remain.
“You kept the ring,” Thorin says, like it’s paining him.
Bilbo closes his left hand into a light fist, resolutely not looking at the silver band around his ring finger. The sapphire inlaid in the ring glints like a small star against his skin. Frankly, he’s surprised that it has taken Thorin this long to notice, except maybe he did from the first time they saw each other and he’s been steadfastly avoiding it since then. It certainly seems the more plausible explanation; Thorin’s surely not as unobservant as that.
“It reminds me of you,” he says, which is really all he can say. He makes no mention of the yellowed contract he keeps at the back of one of Bag End’s many closets, or the chest of gold he only opens when he absolutely has to. These are the things Bilbo chooses to think of, rather than a declaration of love in the ruins of a kingdom reclaimed and a wedding that eventually never came to be.
Thorin’s mouth twists, and a sort of helplessness comes over him, settling in his expression and shoulders and posture. “I…you left nothing of yourself behind. When you went.”
“Should I have done? What difference would it have made?” Bilbo sighs, turning away. Every move he makes drains him, even the littlest ones such as looking at anything but Thorin. He wants to return to his room and lie down for a very long time, only he doesn’t know if that would be of any use at all. “Honestly, Thorin. It wouldn’t have mattered, not really.”
“It could have.”
“Well —”
“It could have,” Thorin repeats, a bit firmer now.
“Maybe,” Bilbo says, because it’s the only thing which can be said to be remotely fair to either of them. “I guess we’ll never find out.”
Thorin looks at him. “And you’re alright with that?” he asks, and something deep in his voice cracks. It might be his heart; Bilbo can’t tell for sure.
He folds both of his gnarled hands upon each other. His bad leg has started to ache again, so there’s that to digest instead of how heavy his chest feels all of a sudden. “I don’t know,” he says quietly.
The sun comes up bright overhead, and it is early noon.
***
When they finally tire of shambling about the Rivendell grounds, they stop to rest in a small gazebo erected down by the banks of the river. There, seated next to each other, Thorin moves his hands to hover over Bilbo’s for a moment, the request for permission implicit. Bilbo nods, lets him cover his hands with his own. They’re large, rough hands, suited to swinging weapons about and working hot metal at the forge, but they are also tragically gentle on him, and almost too kind.
He feels Thorin’s index finger brush against the ring, soft and fleeting, as Thorin draws nearer. “Can I,” Thorin says, and stops there.
Even without the rest of the sentence, Bilbo knows the look in his eyes well enough to fill in the blanks. He nods, and closes his eyes as Thorin kisses him. Tenderly, tenderly, now, with barely any pressure behind it. The sound of Thorin breathing stills him, compels him to exhale in time with each warm breath that flocks down his face. He wonders, distantly, when the dwarf had learned to handle another person with such heartbreaking care. He knows for a fact that he hadn’t been the one to teach him. Not consciously, at least.
“I’ve missed you,” Thorin says once they have pulled apart.
Bilbo smiles, licking at the faint, dry taste of Thorin on his lips. “Evidently.”
Thorin gives him an expectant look.
Bilbo sighs, refraining from rolling his eyes with great difficulty. “Of course I’ve missed you too, Thorin. I hardly thought it needed saying.”
Thorin blinks at him, looking sad and confused all at once. “I…just wanted to be sure. You were the one who left.”
It doesn’t feel like an accusation, and yet. And yet. “If you thought that me leaving meant that I wasn’t going to miss you,” Bilbo says, frowning, “then you’ve got another thing coming.”
“Then why did you go?”
It’s not that Bilbo didn’t expect the question, but he hadn’t expected there to be a world of difference between the act of parsing it in his head and actually hearing it said out loud. He loses his hold on his reply for a moment, has to shake his head to get his stumbling thoughts back into some semblance of order before he can speak again. “It’s not that simple, Thorin,” he murmurs.
“You hated me. For what I did to you. Was that it?”
Bilbo says nothing for a very long while, then shakes his head. “No. It wasn’t that, I. I guess it felt like it was what I had to do.”
“You felt like you needed to leave me,” Thorin says, and by the things he is saying his voice should be sharper around the edges, much angrier. But he only sounds wounded and infinitely sad, and this is somehow a lot worse.
Bilbo shakes his head again. “Needing to leave and not being able to stay aren’t the same thing,” he argues. Petty semantics, but he’ll take it. He’ll try anything to make Thorin understand.
Thorin leans in. “Do you still love me?” he asks.
Holding Thorin’s eyes is both the easiest and hardest thing Bilbo has had to do in years. “Yes,” he replies. “And that’s why, oh. I didn’t hate you, Thorin. I never have. Never could.”
“But you could leave.”
“Look, if you’re expecting me to say I’m sorry for that —”
“I’m not,” Thorin says quickly. “I’m not. It’s just that. I want to know the reason why.”
“Why what?”
“Why you couldn’t stay. In Erebor. With…with me.”
There’s only one way to respond to this and Bilbo takes a bracing bite of air, looks Thorin in the eye to do it. “Because I loved you more than anything else in the world,” he says, the words tumbling forth with an astonishing ease, “and even then you were more than willing to let me go.”
***
At the end of the day when dusk has gathered and burned away the last bits of blue in the sky, there is a dim room and two cups of tea between them, one sweetened with honey and the other without. Bilbo sits in one corner with his tea, Thorin’s larger-than-life presence just across from him. The other cup continues to cool in its neglect, and Bilbo sort of wants to chide Thorin for wasting perfectly good tea, but ultimately decides against it. That’s not who they are now, not anymore.
“Here,” he says instead, stretching out a hand. “Come on. I’ve something for you.”
After a moment’s hesitation, Thorin gets up and walks over to where Bilbo is seated, his gait uncertain. He doesn’t make a single sound when Bilbo passes him the ring off his finger, just bows his head to stare dumbly down at it. The dwarven runes etched into the metal around the sapphire are just visible in the candlelight. “I…I don’t understand.”
“Take it.” Bilbo smiles at Thorin. “It used to be yours, anyway.”
Thorin shakes his head swiftly, thrusts the ring back at Bilbo. “I can’t take this. I won’t.”
“Thorin —”
“It’s yours,” he says, looking genuinely angry for the first time since Bilbo saw him yesterday. “I gave this to you.”
“And that’s why I want you to have it, don’t you see?” It hurts to keep on smiling, but Bilbo forces it. He tells himself that this might be his last chance. “You said so yourself, I never left you anything of mine. Well, this belongs to me, now, doesn’t it? So I’m giving it to you. Just…something of me, like you wanted. To remember me by.”
“But,” Thorin shakes his head again, his voice steadily growing hoarser, “what will you have, then? There must be something.”
“Oh,” Bilbo laughs. “Don’t worry about that. I’ve got loads. Promise.”
The way Thorin looks to Bilbo makes the hobbit’s heart tilt in a manner that has him grateful he’s sitting down. Thorin turns the ring over in his hand, holds it between thumb and forefinger, but he doesn’t wear it. He closes his fingers around it and pushes it deep into the folds of his robes, then cups Bilbo’s face in his hands and kisses him like there’s not enough air in the room. “I love you,” he says, sounding precariously close to tears. “I love you, I love you —”
“I know,” Bilbo whispers back. There is a dampness about his cheeks, and his breaths have started to catch in his chest, too. “I’ve always known.”
***
It’s not the last time.
There’s still breakfast the next day before Bilbo sets out for Hobbiton, and Thorin comes round to find him in the parlor. The savoury sweetness of elven bread becomes a lot less important, after that.
“Will I ever see you again?”
Bilbo sets his lembas and teacup down on the tabletop for fear he might drop either one. He brushes breadcrumbs from the corner of his mouth with his sleeve and tries to gather up his courage. And because he knows now that this is it, he works up a smile.
“Breakfast?” he asks.
***
The carriages out of Rivendell are ready to leave at a moment’s notice, and Bilbo climbs into the one at the front with his cane and his luggage on the porters not far behind. The seats are spacious and padded and comfortable, more than capable of accommodating two elves, or perhaps even four hobbits if they squeezed. He thinks about getting a smaller carriage, one with just enough room for him, and realises it would be pointless, hardly worth the fuss or trouble. The profusion of space around him isn’t exactly the problem here.
As the carriage trundles away, he settles against the side and doesn’t turn to look out of the window at the last of the elven settlement disappearing behind him. The absence of the ring on his finger niggles at him, a presence of its own that cannot be ignored, and he feels exposed and oafish without it. Luck-wearer, he thinks, and chides himself privately. With great difficulty, he turns his thoughts to other things. To old adventures and empty larders and forgotten handkerchiefs, to dreams of snow and nightmares of dragon fire. To long lives and his own aching bones, and the coming of soft spring rains.
His hands shake.