Chapter Text
Recovery was generally a slow process. Bilbo knew that. Thorin hadn’t just broken a bone (in fact he had broken several) or been slashed across the face on Raven Hill. His pride was also bruised from being saved, yet again, by a meddling hobbit. Bilbo couldn’t regret putting himself and the mithril shirt between Thorin and Azog’s blade, but by now he had some idea of how a warrior’s pride suffered from being saved in such a way. Some of the Iron Hills dwarves now whispered the name Thorin Bagginshield, though never where Thorin could hear them.
Then there was the fact that, from the sound of things, Thorin had been trying to die for nearly his entire life, only to be thwarted time and again of the glorious battlefield death his people prized. It wasn’t terribly surprising then that his recovery was slowed by an attempt to die of overwork. It was just upsetting to see Thorin’s mind clear of the dragon sickness, and yet to know that he still had no peace. He’d been ready to die and wipe the slate clean, his legacy cleared by a heroic death, and Bilbo had stopped him. Bilbo had forced him to live with the consequences and rebuild the bridges he’d burned in his illness. So of course he had grudgingly rebuilt all but one.
Thorin still refused to see Bilbo.
It had been a week since the Battle for the Mountain. A week since Thorin had plunged his blade through Azog, fear and worry shining in his eyes. A week since Thorin had run his hands all over Bilbo’s torso as he’d lay there gasping for breath with the wind knocked out of him, the dwarf searching desperately for a mortal wound, only to breathe a sigh of relief at finding nothing but a darkening bruise. In that moment, it had seemed like there was something Thorin wanted to say, but then he’d heard Dwalin shout, and remembered the equally mortal peril of his nephews, and then run off. There had been nothing since then, and though Bilbo hadn’t been officially kicked out of Erebor, he hadn’t seen the King either. Not that he hadn’t tried. But no matter what he tried, coming at different times of day and night, or if he brought food, he would find Balin and Dwalin shaking their heads sadly.
“Your banishment was revoked,” Balin assured him the first time. “But Thorin’s not ready to see you yet. Not after what happened.”
Bilbo took that to mean he wasn’t forgiven for preventing Thorin from killing himself (though it was always possible that Thorin was still bitter over the theft of the Arkenstone), and the news that came from the royal chambers had agreed with him. Dori reported disapprovingly that Thorin ate and slept little, putting everything into the restoration of the mountain. It felt like a return of the dragon sickness, except now Bilbo was the untrustworthy one, instead of Thorin’s kin. As much as he tried to tell himself that at least this was a restoration of the natural order of things, Bilbo couldn’t shake the feeling that Thorin was still trying to kill himself, and this time it was his fault.
But of course all of that was ridiculous. Fíli and Kíli were both still alive, but in a precarious condition. Fíli hadn’t woken since being thrown off the tower, and Kíli’s chest wound had become infected thanks to whatever vile substances Bolg’s blade had been coated with. Of course Thorin would try to distract himself from something so terrible as his nephews hanging on for dear life.
There at least, Bilbo could make himself useful, once the bruising on his ribs from Azog’s blow had healed enough that he could move without screaming. The battle had left many wounded, and if Fíli and Kíli had not been princes, they would have been given up for dead to focus on more saveable patients. Óin only had two hands, and the Iron Hills dwarves had only brought a few healers. They needed all the help they could get, and though the blood and pained cries were hardly pleasant, Bilbo did the best he could to help. Sometimes he cleaned wounds and dressed them in new bandages. Sometimes Óin sent him outside to hunt for useful herbs, as he trusted no one else to tell the medicinal plants from the poisonous ones. There wasn’t much of that to find in the Desolation of Smaug, but thankfully the elves had stores to spare. He just had to ask the right elves.
Some small part of Bilbo hoped that he would finally meet Thorin again while caring for Fíli and Kíli, because he had to visit eventually. But it was a petty part of him, and he shoved it down as deep as he could. Whether Thorin ever wanted to see him again or not, he wanted Fíli and Kíli to wake up again. Once they were well, he would try one more time to see Thorin, and if he failed, then he would return to the Shire. Thorin was alive, had his home back, and wasn’t sick anymore. Even if Thorin didn’t forgive him, it was enough. It had to be enough. If he had ever thought there could be more, well, those days were behind him now. He couldn’t keep waiting forever.
At times he wondered if Fíli and Kíli lingered so because they knew what he intended to do. They would want him back on good terms with Thorin. But then, Bilbo also hoped they would understand why he couldn’t just wait for that to happen. They had known their uncle longer than he had after all.
Bilbo had been called in to the infirmary to help Kíli through a fever spike when he found that someone else had gotten there first. The red-haired elf captain didn’t have to kneel or bend to fit in the room, something Bilbo wouldn’t have expected until he’d actually been inside Erebor. In fact, the sick room had windows that could open and close by tugging on pulleys to air out the room and refresh the ailing. Yet another thing he never would have expected. It seemed like a structural weakness, but he knew by now not to question dwarves on engineering matters unless he wanted to be stuck there for an hour at least for politeness’ sake.
“Captain Tauriel,” Bilbo said in greeting, then winced. She had mentioned the first time they’d been in the princes’ sick room at the same time that she’d been relieved of duty and even banished from the Woodland Realm. Not unlike how he had been banished from Erebor, though her king seemed less likely to yield on that subject.
“Just Tauriel,” she reminded him, though she didn’t sound offended. “His fever hasn’t broken.”
Always straight to business, that one.
“Óin says there’s not much we can do except give him water,” Bilbo admitted, setting the water jug he’d brought next to the bed. “The wound’s been cleaned a dozen times over with every infection purging herb we can think of.”
And of course Tauriel herself had put some of her own power into trying to cleanse the infection. Nothing had worked for long. Sometimes Bilbo wondered if Kíli would only begin to truly heal once Fíli woke and he heard his voice. The fevered dwarf still didn’t know that his brother was alive, even if only barely. It was part of why they were kept in the same room.
“I wish there was more I could do,” Tauriel admitted. “My people rarely stay sick for this long. When they do...” She shook her head, unwilling to finish the thought.
“Dwarves aren’t particularly fast healers, but they’re stubborn. They hold on, even beyond all reasonable hope,” Bilbo assured her, though at times he wondered about that. “His fever will break, and he’ll recover. Why don’t you help him drink, just for a bit? I have to help Fíli.”
Tauriel nodded and lifted the water jug. Once Bilbo was assured that she wasn’t going to drown Kíli, he turned to Fíli.
The real danger with Fíli was from the fall. His stab wound had managed to avoid infection after careful cleaning and the application of poultices, but he still hadn’t woken up. His limbs sometimes twitched in sleep, confirming that they hadn’t missed some hidden damage to his spine, but there could be any number of problems with his brain. Óin wasn’t willing to risk trying to crack his head open to find out, and no one disagreed. Fíli’s brain would recover on its own, or not at all. In the meantime, all he could do was try to give the dwarf prince a little soup at a time and hope he swallowed.
Bilbo wondered sometimes what he would do if Fíli never woke up. It wasn’t something he liked allowing himself to consider, as if felt too much like giving up, but sometimes his Baggins pragmatism wouldn’t be ignored. Would he just stay here forever, holding onto hope when everyone else had given up? Would someone eventually decide that it would be more merciful to let Fíli die? He had a hard time believing Thorin capable of that, but then, dwarves were not hobbits. Their values were different. Letting Fíli linger if there was no chance of recovery was probably seen as just delaying the inevitable.
“Ah, there you are Bilbo!” Balin called out cheerfully as Bilbo was closing the door to Fíli’s room. “I thought you might be done around now.”
“Am I that predictable?” Bilbo asked. Somehow, it didn’t feel like it had been long enough for him to develop a reliable routine.
“Well, you can almost always be counted on to be with the lads around this time,” Balin admitted. “How are they looking?”
“The same,” Bilbo replied, fighting to keep the disappointment out of his voice. “Fíli’s wound heals more every day, but he still doesn’t wake, and Kíli’s fever hasn’t broken.”
“It will,” Balin assured him with a comforting pat on the shoulder. “And you shouldn’t work yourself to death waiting for it. It won’t make Fíli and Kíli happy.”
Was that what he had been doing? If that was true, he was starting to take after Thorin!
“I’ll be careful,” was all he said.
“Good,” Balin said with a nod. “Now, I found something in the library I thought you might like. Something to take your mind off things.”
“Something I can read? There’s not much of that in your library,” Bilbo admitted dryly, though he followed Balin anyway. Most of the writings in Erebor’s library, at least those unearthed so far (which admittedly wasn’t much), were written in various dialects of Khuzdul, and though he might want to learn the secret dwarf language, he couldn’t. For all that he had been through with dwarves, he wasn’t one. The company would have more than Thorin to answer to if they broke that rule, as he understood it.
“You can read this,” Balin replied dryly. “I found a collection of dwarven poems, translated into Westron. They don’t translate perfectly, especially in a medium like poetry, but I thought you might be interested.”
Bilbo was interested. There was a lot you could learn about a culture from their poems, both from the subject matter and the structure, and he’d only gotten a little of that from their singing. And really, it would be a nice distraction from the unpleasantness of the infirmary. Going out to look for herbs barely accomplished that, as there was really nowhere to go where there wasn’t evidence of the battle. If he wandered too far, he’d end up in Dale’s infirmaries, helping their wounded. Bard had quite firmly sent him on his way the time that had happened.
“Here we are,” Balin declared, dusting off a small leather-bound volume. It was almost pocket-sized, as if meant to be carried around and taken out in moments of contemplation. Balin offered it to him. “Don’t worry about bringing it back, we have enough to go through in here without worrying about one little poetry book.”
Bilbo accepted the book gingerly, as if it would fall apart at any second. But it felt rather solid in his hands, the pages holding fast under his fingers instead of crumbling into dust. Like everything else, the dwarves had made it to last.
“Smaug didn’t much change this room, did he?” Bilbo observed, taking in the dusty library. Balin had cleared most of the corpses and decay away during their very first days in the mountains, so now it looked much like any other library, if an underground one. A necessary distraction from Thorin’s state at the time, no doubt.
“I don’t think he had much interest in the treasures of knowledge,” Balin admitted with a sigh of relief. “Not that he could fit in here anyway. Very fortunate for us, or the whole room would likely be a pile of ash. If we’re to begin work in the mines, we need the records from earlier excavations to avoid collapsing the place.”
“Have you found them yet?” Bilbo asked. He rather liked not dying in a cave in.
“Not yet,” Balin told him, shaking his head slowly. “No one who worked in here originally is still alive, and their filing system is still something of a mystery to me. If there even is one. It’s certainly not alphabetical by title or author, though maybe by subject…”
Balin was clearly talking to himself now more than to Bilbo, so Bilbo slipped quietly out of the library, the poetry book clutched close to his chest. He navigated the corridor back to his chamber with practiced ease, neatly avoiding the heavily armored Iron Hills dwarves as they marched quickly down the hall.
When the company had originally entered Erebor, Bilbo had chosen where to stay based on proximity to the treasury, so that he could easily check on Thorin in the middle of the night. It proved necessary more than once. Now it was hard to think of being anywhere else, after the many hours he’d spent running back and forth between the treasury and the library to consult Balin, and so he had a proper room in very close to the same spot. The mountain was confusing enough even with landmarks, painful as some of the landmarks might be, so he was grateful.
When Bilbo reached his room, stifling and windowless as it was, suddenly it didn’t feel like the right place to go. He wanted to read the poems, but the mountain felt too close, too suffocating. It would be impossible to enjoy proper poetry if he couldn’t breathe.
Bilbo didn’t remember running, but when he finally felt able to breathe deeply, he was on the wall, staring out at Dale. If anything, it should have been harder to breathe up there, in the place where dragon-sick Thorin had tried to kill him. But that section of the wall had been utterly destroyed during Thorin’s charge, and with all the comings and goings, no one had made an effort to fix it. Perhaps that was why he had decided to read up here, and make some good memories to balance out the bad. It was just a wall, after all.
Mindful of the patrolling guards, Bilbo found an out of the way spot and cracked open the book to a random page.
Thundering hammer-blows
Swift as lightning
The heartbeat of the mountain.
Mixed metaphors, no rhyming, nor any syllabary pattern that he could see, but then maybe that was only obvious in the original khuzdul. It was certainly a very dwarvish poem, and he could see the image if he closed his eyes, though imagining Thorin hammering over an anvil shook him right out of it. Kings did not work in the smithy.
Shaking his head lightly, Bilbo flipped forward a few pages to another poem.
The workmen sing of home and hearth
Their work tearing gems from the rock
At the end of the day they may rest
But for me there is no warm home
Only eyes like dragonfire.
Bilbo nearly slammed the book closed. The first poem had been short and cheerful, and this was its opposite in every respect. Unfortunately, ‘eyes like dragonfire’ was an image he wouldn’t soon forget.
“Oh, why if it isn’t Master Baggins!”
Bilbo started at Dáin’s greeting, unconsciously putting the book behind him as he turned to face the Lord of the Iron Hills. He wondered if it would be appropriate to bow, even though he’d never bowed to Thorin, and was halfway through one and a greeting of “Lord Dáin,” when Dáin waved dismissively.
“Och, none of that now! Thorin said you’re to be treated as kin, and kin don’t bow to kin. I’m just Dáin, or Ironfoot if you prefer,” Dáin informed him with a hearty pat on the back that made his knees buckle.
“Thorin said that?” Bilbo asked. Quite a change in status from being banished! He couldn’t help but wonder if Dáin even knew about the theft of the Arkenstone.
“Almost first thing after the battle was over,” Dáin admitted. “I expect he thought you might get lost in the shuffle, or barred from the mountain by dwarves who didn’t know what they owed you.”
“Oh no, I didn’t-” Bilbo began in protest, but once again Dáin wasn’t having it.
“Don’t be modest now! Even if you’d done nothin’ else, you saved the King! That’s a deed any dwarf would respect. But agreein’ to help Thorin when few else would, that’s all I need to know your character is a worthy one,” Dáin said with a satisfied nod. His accent seemed to become thicker the more comfortable he became.
“Then why won’t he see me?” The words came out in a rush before Bilbo could stop them, though he regretted them instantly. He barely knew Dáin. They had only spoken once or twice before, while he tended the wounded. But Dáin was another cousin of Thorin, and surrounded by them as he was, it was too easy now to get comfortable, especially when Dáin seemed more immediately friendly than Thorin had ever been.
“He won’t see you?” Dáin’s eyebrows shot up.
Too late to go back now.
Bilbo nodded. “I know he’s busy, but-”
“That’s no excuse,” Dáin said firmly, his accent fading again as he became serious. “He said to treat you as kin, and here I find that he’s not doin’ the same! I’ll talk to him.”
“Oh, no, that’s not necessary-”
“Worry not, I’ll soon have it set to rights,” Dáin assured him, though Bilbo was not the least bit assured. “We can’t have Thorin at odds with his Bagginshield.”
With that truly alarming sentence uttered, Dáin was off, leaving Bilbo to wonder if maybe Dáin was the one who had started the whispers about Thorin Bagginshield.