Chapter Text
Tell me a story.
In this century, and moment, of mania,
Tell me a story.
Make it a story of great distances, and starlight.
The name of the story will be Time,
But you must not pronounce its name.
Tell me a story of deep delight.
- Robert Penn Warren
Bilbo Baggins was a morning person before he began teaching these sodding fucking high school kids.
He used to pride himself on being able-bodied and fit, happy to wake before the sun rose. He used to read and watch the beginning of the day come to life, curled up with a nice cup of hot earl gray and his beloved cat. Forgoing ever owning an alarm clock, he worked more hours but made so, so much more out of the day. The days were his; the mornings, in particular, he was satisfied to say he owned, but the afternoon and evening had their own routines that kept him busy. Comfortable. Comfortable with his books, his pet, and his bachelorhood.
Satisfied, maybe, away from these bloody teenagers, this life, this devotion to time and work and schedule.
Happy, yes, when his mother was more than a pile of bones in the ground. Happy when he was cleaning up what his father had been doing for decades, spending hours pondering over Bungo's thoughts, his notes, and his character charts, wondering just how wired his father had to have been to think of a story like that!
If people had their lives controlled by a ticking bedside clock, one that could be both forwarded and reversed, why couldn't time be the same?
The blaring trill of his phone awoke Bilbo from a dream he didn't remember, and he groaned, stuffing his nose as far as possible into his pillow. Gray clouds rose around his London flat, a soft, calming rainshower upon the tin roof of the old Victorian. It was the perfect day, mused the teacher as he gave up ignoring time and rolled out of the bed, to stay home and read. Work on his books. Read some more Oakenshield, that one novel he did many years ago about the young girl who was in love with the earth, and not the boy who was in love with her face. Sometimes, when he was feeling his lowest and missing his mother, Bilbo imagined himself being that girl.
Ignoring the people of society and escaping to the fields behind an old house, sometime in the 1800s when England was yellow and green with growth. Dreaming of love, but being respected as a woman could dream in that time. Finding men annoying and balls and parties obscure. Poking around in Father's study in search of pencils with an eraser still intact. Drawing the flowers from the windows, and then drawing the boy, but finding the eraser necessary after deciding the boy was as much a burden as a classroom full of gum-chewers and girls whose favorite author was John Green.
Bilbo grabbed that copy of Oakenshield's Western Starlight from his bookshelf on the way out of the flat, tucking it underneath his arm. The rain was cool and fresh on his face, a gentle wind making the trees spray more droplets onto the shoulders of his gray coat. He tucked into the garage overhang and slipped into his little car, setting the book on the passenger seat along with his schoolbags. He wouldn't get a chance to read it during the day, too busy with lecturing and grading and writing referrals to the principal in response to a student's crude language, but it didn't matter, as long as it was with him. A reminder of what he wanted out of life. A hope for something better, even if that something better was no better than being a girl in a Victorian novel, written by a grown man whom he would never meet.
Bilbo resonated that ever meeting his favorite author, a certain Thorin Durin, pen-named Oakenshield, was as much of a dreamy desire as walking out of his job breaking the spine of his thick teaching contract while he stormed down the hallway. For some reason, he grouped the two into the same melting pot -- work and Oakenshield, Oakenshield and work.
Of course, one was the devil on his shoulder, offering him a lackluster paycheck and a budget enough for a cheap Penguin set of The Illiad. The other was the angel; he often thought of Oakenshield himself looking someone angelic, pale in the face but thoughtful, a man engrossed in his thoughts as much as Bilbo himself. The photograph on the back of each of the hardcover novels that the teacher kept in his classroom in hopes of a certain student asking to borrow revealed the author to be nothing more than a simple, handsome man. He was mid-forties, a few years Bilbo's senior. He had short brown hair and often wore glasses in the interviews he had watched on his laptop hundreds of times over, appearing Oxford-y in a dignified way. He spoke with a London accent and was quiet, didn't talk much about his own life but expressed gleefully about his novels.
Bilbo deemed the entire makeup of his beloved author was very nonsensical. It was as if Oakenshield, his words spread onto mass-media pages in popular bookstores, was too good to be true. Most things were too good to be true for a middle-aged English teacher in rainy London, but Oakenshield was an entire enigma, an idea. Someone who needed figuring out, pieced together. Bilbo had been attempting to pick his brain over email and social media for years now, wondering about certain lines and dialogue to perhaps create conversation, but he had never gotten a response. The fans on the chats that he was a part of thought him crazed for wanting to know who Oakenshield was , the man behind the characters. Behind Willoughby Greenhold's blond curls and Eliot Cramper's freckled face. Behind the stories he had quartered together so thoughtfully, the tales that held Bilbo in the night like a thick blanket.
With a cowering glare at the sky, making no notion to stop raining, Bilbo strutted into the old English school, his boots squeaking against the cheap tile. He clutched his book, his bag, his coffee. He adjusted his glasses and bowed to the secretary who had always been more like a friend than a co-worker to him and descended the hallway to his classroom.
He hoped for a moment of solitude before 5 pm where he could look back at that one line in Western Starlight and wonder just how Greenhold did it.
How did she shut out the rest of the rotating, evolving world even as she was forced to be a critical part of it?