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There was a pity clapper somewhere in the third row. Thorin finished his fourth song to polite applause from the people who noticed that the song was finished, but within the smattering of claps was someone beating his hands together like he was trying to rhythmically kill a fly. There was usually one of those, the kind who notices that no one else is paying attention and so is determined to compensate for that regardless of how they feel about the actual music. Thorin ignored him. It was easy to do so—he'd always hated looking at the audience when the singing was done. At the height of his career, it had left him feeling like a fraud. The first time he'd gotten a standing ovation, Thorin remembered thinking that perhaps people knew that they were expected to clap but that wasn't going to stop them from also getting their stuff and leaving. In all his brief run of success, he'd never gotten over the feeling that the applause was misaimed, that there was something exciting and magnificent happening right behind him, and if he took too much joy in the audience's adulation, someone would tap him on the shoulder and say, "I'm sorry, sir, but you're blocking our view of the fire-eating sword juggler behind you, and we're very excited to see what he does next." It was better to pretend he heard nothing, not even when the clapping shook the floor and rattled up inside him, not even when his face burned with unearned pride.
At the nadir of his career, he'd ignored the audience for an entirely different reason. He had ignored them until they had finally gone away, and he realized how hollow music sounded when it was played alone.
And now, here, at whatever quiet plateau of his career that he had reached, it was the audience’s turn to ignore him, but it was at least a benign disregard. In a tour with three acts where the second was a hot up-and-comer duo and the third was as close as you got to a star of folk these days, Thorin came out first, alone with his guitar and his thirty-year back catalogue to fill the air as everyone took their seats, got their drink, found their friends. Some nights, more listened to him than didn't. Some nights, no one listened at all. Tonight was somewhere in between. In the orange light of the sunset sloping down the hill of the Party Tree, Thorin could watch as attention waxed and wane, the eyes that turned towards him at the beginning and ends of songs when the scattered clapping told them to look, the bodies that twisted away to talk when they lost interest. He watched this ebb and flow of interest with a calm detachment that would have astonished him thirty years ago when it didn’t matter how much he pretended not to notice the audience, he was still the next big thing. It would have astonished him ten years ago, when he couldn't even look at a guitar without feeling like he was burning alive from the inside out. Now, he watched with a mild disappointment but not much else. It wasn't their fault that they weren't paying attention. No one had bought a ticket for him.
He laughed at himself halfway through a line, just a little huff. God save him from maudlin self-pity. He’d rather have his old rages back, if he had to pick a devil. It wasn’t right for a fifty-four year-old to sulk. He was on stage, wasn't he? That was what he'd decided he wanted, wasn't it? He'd never play in Erebor again, never get to be the main act at the Lonely Mountain, but he could still warm up a crowd for his nephews. He could be grateful enough that he at least hadn’t gone the route of his grandfather.
And it would be a good crowd for Fili and Kili whenever the denizens of the Shire finished filtering in. They looked like an amicable bunch, free with alcohol but with no indications that they intended to get rip-roaringly drunk, laughing and smoking together until the entire hill smelled of their leaf’s sweet smoke. They swayed absently to the music as they chatted to each other, settling in on the pews lined up under the cover of the stage’s half dome, or further back reclining on picnic blankets and rented lawn chairs on the soft grass under the open sky.
It was a lovely place, Thorin could grudgingly admit that, though no wooden knoll could ever compete with grand solemnity of the Lonely Mountain, Thorin's ever-present and only yardstick for comparison. But Thorin favored outdoor venues, especially on summer nights like this when the heat of the day was rapidly cooling into a chill fresher and fuller than manmade cold ever could be. The stars promised to be beautiful tonight, at least according to Tauriel who made it her business to know about the stars. She had said once that the harp sounded lovelier on nights when the stars were happy, and it was only in acquiescence to Kili's desperate little headshake that Thorin didn't mention that perhaps practice has more to do with the sound of the harp than the possible emotions of celestial bodies. It was better that Thorin had bit his tongue. All artists need their superstitions. Thorin’d once thought that he couldn’t perform a set without two pints of ale and his grandfather’s thumb ring. Their world was too fickle not to have faith in something.
He finished his song with a guitar riff so intricate that his younger self would have wept at the thought that he knew how to do it, and Thorin heard the pity clapper again, applauding so fervently that Thorin in turn pitied his pitier's hands. It reminded Thorin of how he and Dis had cheered when little Kili had finally finished his first heat a full minute later than every other child. It was the sort of cheering you did when the takeaway message you wanted to give was, "I know how hard it was and how terrible you were, but you finished and we're so proud of you." Thorin laughed to himself again, leaning back from the mic so it wouldn’t carry, and just as he was leaning forward again, he heard from the crowd the faintest little whoop.
Thorin had never heard a delicate whoop before. It sounded like the whooper in question was perhaps familiar with the theory of how one yelled at concerts but had never applied the practice. Thorin looked now, couldn’t help but look. There in the third row was the gentleman. Thorin could tell who he was instantly—he still had his hands cupped around his mouth. But more than that, in a row of Shirefolk happily drinking and sprawling and laughing, he was the only one who looked uncomfortable at all. If he’d loosen up a little, sat in his seat with a little less caution of accidentally bumping anyone on either side, he would have blended in to the point of invisibility. He had the same curly hair as almost everyone else in the audience, the same quaint little waistcoat fashion, the same rounded face. He looked like a man designed to be unremarkable. But when he saw Thorin looking, he flushed a little redder and raised his chin a little higher, both at the same time. He clasped his hands in his lap. He looked as if he were waiting.
Off stage, in the corner of Thorin’s eye, he could see Ori waving. Play. Thorin stretched his fingers and settled them back on his guitar strings. He didn’t take his eyes off the stranger in the third row. The stranger, still with that strange combination of sheepishness and defiance, looked back. Ori waved a little harder, which was hardly necessary. Thorin would love to play.
“The Song of the Lonely Mountain” was the first good song he’d written after his grandfather’s suicide. It had never ended up on any of his albums, and that was probably part of the reason those albums had been panned. “Thorin Durinsson clearly has an eventful life to draw on,” every review more or less read. “It’s a shame he refused to put any of it into his music.” What they meant was that they wanted to peddle family tragedy in exchange for another half star higher review. Music critics too dignified for gossip rags would bleed ecstatic ink over the “honest artistry” of musical confessions. And maybe they were right. Hell, Dwalin and Balin kept telling Thorin that they were right. And Thorin kept saying, next album, next album, next album. He knew that the only songs that ever mattered were the ones that told the truth, he knew that. But Thorin didn’t have much he could call his own. These days, it was just his memories and his secrets. He’d hoard what he could hoard.
But then on the other hand, if people barely listened when he played, there wasn’t a risk of honesty at all.
Except the stranger listened. Thorin could see him listening, could see him see the music. Thorin’s song seemed to settle into the man, or maybe it was that the man was wrapping Thorin’s song around himself. As Thorin played, the man’s self-consciousness slid away, like his skin began to fit right as he listen, and Thorin’s fingers nearly slipped at the sight, except Thorin couldn’t have played badly right now if he tried, not while the stranger was looking back at him like that, so intimate and open that Thorin remembered what stage fright—not jitters, not nerves, but honest to god stage fright—felt like.
Honestly, it was like sex. But not the easy kind. Not the fun kind, because fun was many things but not this, this feeling of teetering between ecstasy and terror with some beautiful man waiting for you to make him feel good and for him to make you feel good. Good enough to hold back the shame you invited in so you could risk a little bit of joy. It was wanting to do good so badly you ached with it.
The song finished. The crowd clapped. They clapped a little more than they’d clapped last time, but they had nothing on the stranger in the third row. He sat as if in a reverie for one terrifying moment where Thorin thought that he’d lost him, before he burst into a one-man rapture of thunderous applause. He looked utterly ridiculous, and Thorin was so weak-kneed with relief that he literally staggered.
“Thank you.” Thorin’s ears were ringing. “I’ve never played that on stage before.”
The stranger clasped his hands together again. It looked as if he was imploring. Had the audience ever looked at Thorin like that before? Even thirty years ago when everyone looked at him? No wonder Thorin had never looked up. Art was terrifying enough when only the artist was bearing themselves.
“Thank you,” Thorin said again, thirty-plus years of basic stage patter drying up in his throat. “You’ve been great. It’s—you’ve been great.”
The stranger in the third row stood alone and gave him a standing ovation. The rest of the audience could have disappeared for all that Thorin noticed them.
Backstage was a flurry of bodies Thorin bumped into and hands he dodged, pats on the back that he didn't have time for. Fili said something like, "Great job!" as they rushed past each other, something like that because Thorin barely heard them. When someone held out their hands for his guitar, he slung it over his back. In the dressing room that still had bits of debris from the musical that had come through town the week before, Thorin flicked on the lights around the mirror and studied himself. He looked the same as ever, which these days meant that he looked like his father wearing his mother’s nose. The same grey was there, streaking down from his temples in what Kili called his skunk stripes. His beard was salt-and-peppered as well. Dis said it made him look distinguished. Thorin always thought it made him look tired.
Thorin jabbed a finger at his crow's feet, pulled them back until the wrinkles disappeared. He raised his finger and watched the wrinkles return. You could feel as young as you wanted for a moment. It didn't last. But Thorin hadn't felt young on stage. That wasn't it at all. He'd felt like a fifty-four year-old with a gut and a shot knee and the beginnings of his grandfather's arthritis and forty years of practice and twenty years of decline. He'd felt the same up there as he had this entire tour. It was just that this time, he hadn't minded it. This time, he'd almost been almost proud.
So that was what it felt like to give a shit. It was just as terrifying as Thorin remembered.
"Hello, Hobbiton!" Fili shouted on stage, his voice only slightly muffled by the dressing room walls. "How are we doing tonight?"
The crowd answered with a healthy roar, and Fili and Kili roared back.
Alone in the dressing room, Thorin smiled and rubbed his hands down his creviced face. What they had to be feeling, he thought. What joy they had to be having up there.
He wondered if the stranger in the third row was roaring for them too.
Thorin’s phone buzzed. His nephews always texted their mother right before they went on, the last step in their preshow ritual. Therefore, Dis always knew when Thorin was coming off. He flipped his cell open and read, How’d it go bro???
His thumbs hovered over the keys. He should have gotten a smart phone the way Dis and the boys were always needling him to. There was no space for eloquence on a flip phone. How was he supposed to describe—
But what was he even trying to describe? I played music and it felt good and I hadn’t realized it hadn’t. For one song I felt like me. There was a man in the audience and he was really feeling it. Pathetic.
And yet for a moment, Thorin was seized by the thought of finding him. As dark as the seating would be now, Thorin could find him if the stranger stayed just where he was. Third row, slightly off center to stage left. He'd been sitting with a little gap on either side of him, just far enough away from the people around him that it was clear he sat alone. Thorin could slip down along the lines and squeeze into the pew beside him. Maybe the stranger wouldn't even notice Thorin there, and then Thorin could watch him watch the music. Or maybe he would notice Thorin was there, and then—
Then what? Then Thorin is the singer who mistook applause for something more. For an invitation. Thorin had met enough of his idols to know that there was a difference between the artist and the person. If you liked the one, it didn't mean anything about liking the other. And that went the other way, he was sure. The fan in the abstract wasn't the same thing as the fan in the flesh. Thorin’s discography hardly needed another tune about disillusionment.
There was a dearth of beautiful moments in the world. You could ruin them, trying to get greedy.
Fine, he texted back and snapped his phone shut.
The stage manager had given them all a packet of Longbottom leaf before the show, a welcome to the Shire gift if ever there was. Thorin had thought for a moment that he’d lost it and he’d have to come crawling out of this ramshackle dressing room to ask someone for theirs. He didn’t want to talk. He didn’t know what prospect that he found worse—that they’d compliment him for tonight and implicitly confirm that he had been terrible for all the nights previous, or that they wouldn’t say anything at all because there was nothing to say. That this really was just another night.
It didn’t matter. He found the leaf and eventually his pipe as well, which turned out to be in the jacket he'd tossed under the couch somehow. Fili and Kili were just finishing “Firemoon,” always a crowd favorite, by the time Thorin slipped out one of the stage's back doors. The dome of the stage caught most of the noise so that here behind it, his nephews sounded as if they were playing a block away. Thorin could admire that construction, just as he could admire the neat little path winding into the woods behind the Party Tree, just as he could even grudgingly admire the stars. Tauriel was right—they were beautiful tonight. Though Thorin could concede that perhaps that had less to do with the stars than their beholder. Thorin could get ridiculously emotional about the stupidest things sometimes. You would have thought he’d have grown out of that by now.
The path looked like it lead to a picnic area, at least as far as Thorin could see in the dark. But he thought he heard laughter coming from there, even over the sound of his nephews, and Thorin knew enough about what people got up to in the dark when music was playing to steer clear of that. He wandered around in the darkness instead, his feet finding the land rising to meet them. The Shire was a land of rolling hills, and Thorin would never hear the end of it if he stumbled backwards down on in the night and cracked his head against the back of the stage. But his feet were sure, and the view was worth it, when Thorin reached the top and saw the light of the half-moon painting the distant roofs of Hobbiton silver and sapphire. Someone in the countryside had lit a bonfire, and it flared up its own rubies and gold. There was another figure on the hill, a shadowed silhouette standing a few yards away from Thorin, but Thorin ignored them and they ignored him. The view was big enough for two. Hell, Thorin was happy to share. If he was comfortable experiencing art for no one’s benefit but his own, he’d have given up performing a long time ago. And tonight—irrationally, for no good reason at all except one kind audience member who was just very, very good at appearing enthralled by sad old singers—Thorin was glad he was still on stage.
The world seemed exactly the same and yet it was somehow not. It was somehow new. Even the familiar thrum of familiar music sounded different. Thorin had listened to enough albums to know that sometimes on the three-thousandth spin of the same one, you heard the songs anew, as if walking into an old home from a different door or seeing an old lover in new place. Thorin had heard his nephews playing since he and Dis had taught them how, but listening to them muffled by the back of the stage, their songs carried to him on the evening wind, they’d never sounded so good. At least not to Thorin, who’d spent most of his life trying to make them better. He hadn’t wanted them to fail like he had, like their mother had. He’d worked them too hard, he knew that, and they’d forgiven him for it when they didn’t have to. But listen to them, the fire in them brought out by their diligent skill. Fili and Kili could be something, the same way that Thorin almost was.
It terrified him how good they were.
Thorin jerked his head. Enough. Enough. He was high on post-show giddiness, that was all. “You have one good gig, you act like you’ve just discovered fresh air,” Thorin muttered to himself as he patted his pockets for his lighter. Surely it hadn’t even been that good either. He’d just gotten caught up in the moment, in the old rhythms, in the eyes of someone who probably just remembered that Thorin had almost been famous once upon a time, someone who had looked at Thorin as if Thorin was the only remarkable thing he’d ever seen, someone who hadn’t just heard the music but melted into it the way that Thorin hadn’t even melted into his own music since before his grandfather’s collapse.
That was it.
And he’d forgotten his lighter anyway.
"Shit," Thorin said. He glanced the way he came, the long path stretching back to the chaos of a gig in progress. Then he glanced at the other figure on the hill, sitting with his knees brought up against his chest and looking down at the town below. "Excuse me," Thorin said, and the figure's head jerked, the ubiquitous curls of the Shire bouncing in shock. Perhaps he hadn't been ignoring Thorin so much as he hadn't noticed him at all. It was dark up here, for all the stars and moon. Thorin himself had only noticed the other man by the glowing pipe in his hands. Thorin raised his own, hoping the other fellow could see it in the moonlight. "Do you have a light?"
"Ah, er. Ah. Well." The other fellow seemed shell-shocked. Thorin hoped that wasn't because he recognized him. Thorin had enough trouble dealing with the audience on stage, he liked it even less when he was off. "Yes. Yes, sorry," the man said. "My mind was miles away." There was some movement Thorin couldn't quite see and the man said, "You're in luck, I've one match left."
"Thank you," Thorin said and walked over to the man, just close enough to take the matchbox he was holding out. Shirefolk tended to be so small, and Thorin was not so much. He didn't want to press too threateningly in the dark. But the other man let go too soon and Thorin's fingers closed too late, and both of them lunged to catch it at the same time, and they should have simply let it drop because Thorin almost managed to stop himself from tripping over a root he hadn't seen and squish the other man, but all the arm windmilling in the world couldn't stop his forward momentum. The other man rolled out of Thorin's way just in time—luckily for the other man and slightly less luckily for Thorin. He didn't want to tackle a stranger, of course, but he wouldn't have minded a softer landing.
"Are you alright?" the other man asked, scrambling back over to kneel at Thorin's side.
In a stab at salvaging what he could of his dignity, Thorin raised his ringing head from the dirt, reached underneath him, and held up the little square he found. "I have the matches."
The other man laughed a little and settled back on his feet. He was framed in moonlight now, and he looked larger looming over Thorin than he had when he was about to be flattened by him. "You mean the match, I'm afraid."
Thorin sat himself up. "I do just need the one, if you are still offering."
The other man held up his now extinguished pipe. He’d put it out in the rolling. "You’ve made it a little more difficult to be generous now."
Thorin winced. "Don’t worry about it. It’s yours. My apologies.”
“No, no, it’s fine. I’m sorry, I’m the one who’s sorry, I should have come to you.”
“That’s not necessary. I’m sorry.”
“Well, I’m sorry as well. Sorrier, in fact. Although you nearly did kill me in the toppling, so I supposed that makes us even.” The other man gave a huff somewhere between a laugh and a sigh. “What a fitting way to end the evening.”
“I hope you weren’t at the show, if the night’s been going so terribly.”
"No! I mean, yes, I was—well, it doesn't matter and I'd like to go back to smoking in peace, if you don't mind, and I don’t mean to be rude, but that’s exactly what I was doing before you got here. You snuck onto private property, I should say. You've wandered right out of the Party Tree and into someone's backyard."
Thorin hesitated. He was clearly being dismissed, but at the same time the man had stayed perched by Thorin’s side, and his voice, though nervous, was warm. Perhaps this was the strange manners of the Shire that everyone on the tour had been warned about. It was the sensation of being shooed away and welcomed at the same time. "My apologies again,” Thorin said. “I didn't mean to trespass on your home."
"Oh god, no, not my home.” The man said that with such rapid disgust that Thorin had to smile. “I’d never live adjacent to this nightly din. It's not all good music, you know. The summer program this year has been ghastly."
“Doesn’t that mean you snuck onto private property as well?” Thorin asked, not really knowing what else he was supposed to say.
"Oh, well," the man said as if it were some minor technicality. He fussed with the bowl of his pipe and added, "Have the match, if you like. I’ve already smoked my bit, you ought to get yours."
"Thank you,” Thorin said, trying to keep amusement out of his voice. He'd smoked with many people after shows, but few sounded as fussy as this stranger. “But I think we might manage to share it.”
“Oh, that’s not necessary. I was just headed down.”
“No, please, I insist,” Thorin said. “I can’t keep your pipe extinguished so I can get mine going when it’s my fault yours went out in the first place.”
“It’s fine, I promise. I was just about to head home.”
“Then that must be quite a walk, if you are so insistent you live far from the stage.” Thorin must be still a little drunk from the stage. None of his usual interactions with strange men in the night involved teasing them. “You should go home with a lit pipe at least.”
“No, no thank you.”
Thorin pinched the matchbox and shook it, the sound one baleful stick inside bumping against the side. “If you don’t share it with me, I’ll just return it to you.” When the other man hesitated, Thorin added, “I can’t have your smokeless pipe on my conscience.”
The man snorted. “Very well. Since it was your fault.” He settled down in the grass beside Thorin as if he were doing him a tremendous favor. “Mine gets lit first then."
"Of course."
The man held out his hand. “And I think I’ll light them, thank you. You seem a little unsteady on your feet.”
Thorin smiled. “I don’t need my feet to light a pipe.”
“No, you just need to trip over them to put on out.”
Thorin laughed, he couldn’t help it, and he handed the matchbox back. To spare himself the risk of another mishap in the dark—Thorin didn’t think his pride could handle the judgment if he dropped it again—he carefully placed the matchbox right in the other man’s palm. He brushed the stranger's warm skin. It was oddly intimate in the moonlight, and when Thorin brought his hand back, his fingers tingled. Thorin shook out his hand and popped his pipe into his mouth. "Lean in, if you please," Thorin said. The other man hesitated just long enough for Thorin to realize that he might have overstepped, and then he leaned in, until their foreheads were almost touched and the bowls of their pipes bumped. Thorin could make out the soft lines of the other’s man face now, the strange glint that some eyes have in the dark.
"You hold them steady, I'll light," the man said, who had switched from reluctant participation to bossiness with remarkable efficiency.
Thorin wrapped one hand around the bowls and cupped the other above. "It's windy," Thorin said.
"I know. I had enough trouble lighting the first time. Which way is it coming from?"
"The north, I think."
"Here, scoot towards me, we'll try to block it with our bodies."
"Be careful with your breathing as well."
"Be careful with yours, thank you."
It might have sounded a little ridiculous to anyone else spying them on the hill. But Thorin had been at multimillion dollar record deals that had less at stake than when you wished very much to smoke and had only one match left. Or sometimes no match at all. Once when they'd been teenagers and dumb and locked out of their grandfather's house at two in the morning because they'd snuck out, Thorin and Dis had squatted in a carpark down the road for an hour trying to get a spark going with some rocks they'd picked up. Somehow lighting their pipes that night was one of the purest triumphs of Thorin's life.
The man readied to strike.
Thorin held his breath.
The man hesitated a moment, and though Thorin could not see his eyes, he imagined he saw them anyway, darting to look at Thorin’s face.
The match flared, so bright in the dark that for a moment Thorin was blinded.
And then Thorin was not.
Thorin’s stomach dropped. So did his jaw. But his hand steadying the pipes didn’t, due entirely to the iron knowledge in his arm that if he dropped it, that was smoking ruined for the evening. Thorin could have been struck by a lightning bolt, he wouldn’t have moved his arm.
Conveniently enough, it happened to feel as if he’d been struck by a lightning bolt.
“Almost,” the stranger muttered, though he wasn’t such a stranger as Thorin had thought. Or he was, yes, he was stranger and strange indeed, for Thorin didn’t know this man at all, not really. He was still a stranger. But he was Thorin’s stranger.
“You.” Thorin said it simply. It could have been quite dramatic—the moon overhead, the darkness all around, two unknown men crouching in the shadows, the burst of flame, the recognition, the exclamation. You! It was a scene from a gothic. At the very least, Fili and Kili could have been playing something dramatic in the background. But instead, the word slipped out as casual as a hello. Ah, yes, you, of course it’s you. Who else could it have been?
And, after this peaceful half-second, Thorin’s mind switched from mild acceptance to terror, so wholly terrifying that it manifested as a sort of numbness. Thorin might have considered that a miracle, if he wasn’t still working through the terror.
“There!” the man said, and Thorin realized dimly that he was referring to their pipes, that desperate need already a distant concern as the man shook the match out. Darkness. Thicker than before, massing stronger than ever around the fainting glowing red of the pipes, and the other man’s pipe was still where it was, they were still practically pressing foreheads, and Thorin said it again because he couldn’t not.
“You.”
“Pardon?” the man, his man, said.
“You’re the—” Thorin paused. He was about to say the pity clapper, but he couldn’t think of a sadder descriptor to actually say aloud. “Third row,” he said instead.
Thorin hadn’t thought of the other man as fidgeting before, back when the man had just been a man and not the man. Now Thorin knew that the man had been fidgeting by its absence. The man stilled, and Thorin felt the stillness.
“Oh dear,” the man said. “I was hoping you wouldn’t—I didn’t want to make things strange, and you coming up here to relax, the last thing you want is to talk to a—and you nearly fell on top of me! So, that’s—” Exactly what that was, the man left unclear. He made a gesture like a chopping motion, but Thorin wasn’t sure what the hell that meant. He wasn’t sure the other man did either.
“So you knew me?” Thorin said, with an eagerness he didn’t understand.
“Knew you? Of course I knew you!” the man said. He still sounded flustered, but now exasperation was layered on top of it. As if he were offended by the implication that he ever might not know Thorin. “I should be able to recognize your voice after all—all that. I just didn’t think you’d recognize me.”
Thorin almost said, Of course I knew you too. But he stopped himself again. He shouldn’t recognize one face in the audience. The man would know that Thorin cared too much.
Then again, Thorin had already tipped his hand in that regard.
“You’re distinctive,” Thorin said. He’d meant it as a compliment. When the man gave an embarrassed cough and another quiet yes, well Thorin guessed he didn’t interpret it that way.
“I didn’t want you to think I was following you or anything like that,” the other man said, a little softer. “I don’t know, you hear such dreadful things about rabid fans.”
Thorin had none of those and doubted most looked like a middle-aged professor with stars in his eyes. “You were here first.”
“Well, in retrospect that’s obvious,” the man said. “But I was too flustered to think about that. You doesn’t expect the other stargazer on Farmer Cowley’s hill to be the musician from the stage you’ve just fled. It was rather too much of a ‘think of the devil and he will appear’ moment for me to take it in stride.”
“Were you thinking of me?”
It came out lower than Thorin intended. Low and smoke-filled. Once again, Thorin noticed that the man had been fidgeting only in the presence of his new and sudden stillness. And now Thorin thought, really thought, about how they hadn’t pulled apart. Apart how their heads still leaned together, as if they were telling each other a secret. And about how the air had gone silent now, silent of music at least while nature chattered around them and the distant crowd in their anticipation began to hum like the electronic ring of the earth after lightning strikes.
That was the stage, and under the spotlight the man said, matter-of-factly, “Yes. You’re quite good, you know.”
Thorin settled back. He needed more space between them, less intimacy. There was something childishly similar to disappointment churning in his gut. “I’m fine,” Thorin said.
“You’re better than fine.”
“That’s not what the critics say.”
“Then I’m sure they’re wrong.” When Thorin didn’t answer, the man popped his pipe back into his mouth and added cautiously, “I don’t mean to overstep my bounds. I certainly don’t mean to, to, to come off as some sort of groupie or whatever the term is. I just mean to say that I went into this not knowing anything about you and—” The man trailed off as Thorin stared away silently. “You were good,” he ended lamely.
Thorin remembered his pipe as well. He clenched it in his mouth as he tried to discreetly wipe his damp palms on the grass. It was that or bury his face in them. His pulse still rattled his teeth. “Is this how you cheer up all morose musicians you meet in the dark? Remind them of their obscurity?” Thorin hoped the man heard the teasing in his voice. He wasn’t sure how much to put into it so he put as much as he could.
“I should think that an artist would be pleased to hear that he’d made a new fan.” The other man teased better. He teased much better.
“Only if they buy the CD.”
The man laughed, and he rustled in the dark for a moment as he fumbled with his jacket. The CD case he pulled out glinted in the moonlight.
This time, Thorin did bury his face in his hands.
“I bought it straight after your set,” the man said, sounding both cheerful and smug.
“And you didn’t go back to your seat?” Thorin asked, mostly so they wouldn’t have to talk about his CD. He obviously knew the one they sold at the merch table. It was Dis’s design, and he looked ridiculous on it. The songs were fine, but no plaid shirt was meant to be unbuttoned that low.
“No, I suppose I didn’t.” The man paused and puffed his pipe. “They’re very loud, aren’t they? The boys who were playing. Very young as well.”
Thorin thought about his nephews and said firmly, “That’s true.”
“I find myself less enamored with youth these days, now that I’m old.”
“You’re not old.”
“I’m older. I’m practically a senior citizen.”
“You can’t be a day over fifty.”
“I am fifty.”
“Then I was right.”
The other man snorted, and Thorin counted that a victory. In whatever the hell this was. “I left, at any rate. As you gathered.”
“It seems a waste of money,” Thorin couldn’t help pointing out.
“I didn’t actually buy the ticket. A friend gave it to me this afternoon, and I couldn’t refuse.”
“Did they come with you? I thought you were alone,” Thorin said, before he remembered that this was probably something that the singer on stage wasn’t supposed to notice.
“I was,” the man said dryly. “Gandalf neglected to join me. That was likely his plan from the beginning, in retrospect.”
“A strange plan from a friend.”
“My thoughts exactly.” The man tipped his head back and blew a smoke ring. Thorin’s eyes had adjusted enough to see the a little more of the man’s face. The pursed lips, for example, as the smoke puffed out. “He thinks I don’t get out well enough.”
The conversation was going too well, surprisingly well, which was why Thorin steeled up the courage to ask what he said next. “Is he right?” It seemed a shockingly intrusive question to ask a stranger. Perhaps that was just because Thorin would himself be loath to answer its underlying question: do you think you live well enough?
“No,” the other man said. And then, “Yes. I suppose. From a certain point of view. He’s a wild wanderer, you know. Not respectable at all.”
“High talk from someone who stole onto private property to smoke with a stranger,” Thorin said. He expected the other man to have some quick response to that, but his companion on the hill stayed silent, and so silence stretched between them. Thorin didn’t know how to break it.
The last wisps of harp floated towards them. She had other instruments—like Thorin, she played almost anything with strings—but she never sounded so good as when she played the harp. Distantly, she sang “The Fade,” Thorin’s favorite of her songs for the sheer grief of it. She sang like a ghost mourning herself.
“You get old,” the man said, as quiet as the harp. “I suppose you get stuck in your ways, and it doesn’t seem worth it to get unstuck. Gandalf tells me to chase after what I want, but I’m not sure what exactly that is.”
Thorin, who had wanted the same thing since he picked up his grandfather’s banjo at age four (or maybe it was since he read his grandfather’s suicide note at age twenty-five), said nothing.
“I suppose that’s why I liked your songs.” The man leaned back, his face tilted up at the moon. If Thorin could have watched him through the corner of his eye, if he could have pretended that he wasn’t watching at all, he would have. It was too dark for that. Thorin had no choice but to stare. “They sounded like—oh, I don’t know.”
People were always talking to Thorin about paths in life. The forks in the road, the twists and turns, the open windows because of all those shut doors. The paths to glory, the paths to the grave, the paths the Durinssons had trod into the bitter earth, the paths Thorin could blaze for himself. Things like that. They didn’t talk so much about the times when the path split, when one side led back down the mountain and one side led right off the precipice. You didn’t need to talk about that. The answer was obvious. You say you’re fine, you’re happy, you’re doing well, you’re thankful, you’re just chuffed to be on stage, you want nothing, you’re disappointed by nothing, you’re just glad to be here. You sing the old songs. You walk back down the mountain.
“Please tell me,” Thorin said. He didn’t try to keep the pleading from his voice.
The other man looked away, as if embarrassed. He probably was, Thorin realized. That delicate whoop had been a sound from a man who had never made such a sound in public before. He’d clapped alone with a red face and a proud chin, and stood to cheer while everyone around him sat. How horrible it was, to admit what you alone admired.
“Please,” Thorin asked again, with a sinking, soaring feeling in his gut. That was stage fright for you. You stood at the edge of the precipice with no hope that you would fly.
Thorin’s voice made the man’s head turn, and they regarded each other in the moonlight eye to eye. “I—I’m sure you hear this quite a lot,” the man said, and took a deep breath. “But yours is the most wonderful voice I have ever heard. The most wonderful. And when I heard you, I thought that you sounded—” He took another breath. Thorin held his. “I thought you sounded like the kind of adventure I wanted to take.”
“Oh,” Thorin said.
The other man shrugged, his eyes dropping. “Yes, well. Then you almost squashed me. I suppose that’s all the adventure I can handle.”
Self-deprecation. That was always one way to handle stage fright.
“My name is Thorin,” Thorin said through a thick tongue and a dry throat.
“I’ve gathered,” the man replied, still studying the bowl of his pipe. “It’s on the cover of the CD.”
“And what is your name?”
The man looked up again, then back down, then back up with a cautious tilt to his chin. “Bilbo. My name is Bilbo Baggins.”
“Bilbo,” Thorin said. “Bilbo. Thank you, Bilbo.”
His stranger in the night, his face in the crowd, waved him off. “Oh, it’s just—”
“No,” Thorin said, and Bilbo stared at him. “Thank you, Bilbo.” He tried to pour everything into those words, everything he could. Everything he couldn’t say. Everything he couldn’t play. “Thank you.”
In the soft silver light, Bilbo’s wide eyes shone like the stars, and Tauriel had been right. The stars were beautiful tonight. They were bright enough that Thorin could watch Bilbo once again wrap Thorin’s words around himself. Thorin could watch his words make Bilbo sink a little more comfortably into his own skin. “Thank you,” Bilbo said softly. What else was there to say?
Except this, an unmeasurable time later when Thorin’s hand was just starting to get used to the warmth of Bilbo’s: “We are still on the Took’s farm,” Bilbo said.
“That won’t do,” Thorin said. “A respectable member of the Shire can hardly be found at night trespassing with a long-haired foreign musician.”
Bilbo was close enough to Thorin that Thorin could see his smile. He pointed to a hill just under the half-moon, where Thorin could just dimly make out a chimney. “That’s my home.”
“The one you don’t get out of enough?”
“Precisely.”
“It doesn’t look too inescapable from here.”
“Perhaps you need a tour.”
Thorin’s stomach tightened with nerves. The good kind. They were pretty similar to the bad kind. Joy was always too sharp and hot to handle safely. “I’d like that. I’d like that very much.”
Bilbo turned back to him, turned his face up to his. Then he laughed, the kind of laugh that seemed like the laugher in question hadn’t been expecting it. “I don’t think becoming a groupie was the adventure Gandalf had in mind for me tonight,” he said.
“I was thinking you could be my muse instead.”
“Only if you can be mine. You could do wonders for my poetry.”
It was too much. It was too fast. It would hurt all the more because it felt so good now, Bilbo tucked underneath Thorin’s arm and the way Bilbo gripped his shirt when Thorin started to sing, soft and low so that it would shake through his body, so that Bilbo pressed against him could hear the notes, could remember that sound was heard, yes, but sound was also felt. Music was physical as two bodies pressed together. And this moment—Bilbo swaying and Thorin singing, the one spurring the other one on—would become another song Thorin couldn’t sing on stage.
But he’d probably get a love song too. Thorin was beginning to remember that there was a reason you jumped off the precipice for the sake of one love song.