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Thorin woke with an ache that was familiar from the beginning of their journey atop the Eagle’s rock. He opened his eyes to grey skies instead of blue, but the figure hovering over him was the same. Gandalf the Grey, with perhaps more wrinkles and lines of exhaustion on his face than there were before, looked down upon him and sighed out his name.
“Bilbo,” Thorin croaked, as his memory dragged its dirty heels back to him. He had been fighting Azog. He had been willing to die, to end it all, to give his sister’s sons his throne if they lived and finally rest among his ancestors. But then Bilbo, small and fierce, had come and-
“Bilbo,” he called, because the hobbit had shoved him aside to face the orc in his stead and then-
And then he remembered nothing.
But Gandalf did not move aside, as he had before, and gesture at the curly haired creature he owed everything to. He sighed again, his eyes dark, and his voice was hoarse when he spoke.
“Your sister sons live,” he told him, instead of speaking of Bilbo. “Dwalin found Fili from his fall and protected him and Tauriel, the elf lass with the bow, saved Kili. Though, the way he puts it, they saved each other, so you shouldn’t be too hard on him.”
Thorin couldn’t follow. Why would he be hard on Kili? And what was Gandalf doing, babbling about elves?
“Bilbo,” he repeated harshly, “where is he? Is he still angry with me?” He tried to sit up, but found his chest hurt, ribs likely cracked at the very least, and he gritted his teeth on a pained noise. He caught a glimpse of Fili and Kili, huddled together a little ways away at the edge of the ice. Over them stood Dwalin, who’s face was grim, and the red headed elf, who looked as if a stiff breeze would take out her knees from under her.
Gandalf sat back, giving him more view of the grey sky and the way his beard drifted in the cold, gentle wind. He said nothing as Thorin struggled to sit up and when he finally did, leaning heavily against a rock, he felt as if all the air has left him, empty and wanting.
“You told me you could not guarantee his safety,” Gandalf muttered, shoulders slumped as he fiddled with a small wooden pipe in his lap. “Nor did you claim any responsibility for his fate. It is not your fault, Thorin Oakenshield.”
His sister’s sons moved, shifted in their grief, and Thorin could see him, small against the icy rocks on the edge of the cliff. He was wearing the same worn blue shirt he had gotten from Bard, but underneath the armor that should have gleamed in the weak sunset was absent. Instead there was pale skin and blood.
So, so much blood.
“His shirt,” Thorin said, his tongue too heavy in his mouth. “I gave him a shirt. One of mithril-”
Gandalf looked suddenly cross and tall, for a flash of a moment, like the wizard he was. But then he was impossibly old, and worn, and small, weary in a way Thorin knew only too well.
“He gave it to Tilda,” Gandalf told him, hands still clasped around the pipe in his lap. Thorin could have been wrong, but it did not look like his pipe of old did. No it looked like it had belonged to someone more good of heart and fool hearty than either of them had realized.
“Tilda,” Thorin repeated. Gandalf nodded, head heavy.
“Bard’s youngest,” he elaborated. “She was scared and small and Bilbo… Bilbo saw something in her. I asked him why he would do such a thing, and he told me that she reminded him of his mother when she laughed.”
Thorin felt as if there was a crater torn in his chest, though he knew he had no right to. He had given that shirt to Bilbo in the hopes he would be safe, but Bilbo’s concerns had been with others, smaller and weaker than he. How the hobbit made him feel so small, so humble, he didn’t know.
He would likely never know, now.
“What did he say,” Thorin asked. Gandalf peered at him, eyebrows rising, some of his grandeur returning. Thorin cleared his throat, rough and loud enough that Dwalin jerked to look at him. “What were his last words, wizard?”
Suddenly the powerful wizard looked like an old man about to cry. His eyes watered and his beard trembled, head twisting to look away, out across the frozen waterfall and past that, into the sun.
“I do not know,” the tall grey wizard rasped, voice soft enough it hardly carried at all. “By the time we arrived, he was gone.”
Thorin reflected that he had never failed anyone so completely, so wholly and horridly, as he had failed Bilbo Baggins. He had just been a little curly haired creature he mistook for a grocer, but he become important.
Bilbo Baggins had become so much to him, not just his burglar, but his friend too, and now….
Now he was at peace.