Chapter Text
Every weekday at seven in the morning, Fíli’s uncle drops him off at the station, so he can take the subway into the city for class. Living on campus was inconceivable — Fíli hadn’t even bothered to ask — so he tries to appreciate this extra time to study in the 24-hour library, the only place open this early, when his classmates are just waking up in the dormitories across the street.
Mom had asked him once or twice if he wouldn’t prefer just taking the city bus for twenty minutes, so he could get onto campus in time for class instead of on the way to Uncle’s own seven-thirty start time in the auto shop. Fíli had said no — he loves those car rides, the city still mostly quiet, the sun rising in the pink winter sky, the radio playing AM news in mingled Punjabi and English. He doesn’t mind that they’re largely silent, because he knows Uncle is paying attention to him — not Kíli, not the auto shop, not any of their neighbours or family who need his help, but him.
Uncle hadn’t asked if Fíli wouldn’t prefer the bus — or whether Fíli wanted the ride, either. The first day of term everyone had turned up embarrassingly to watch the first person in their whole community go to university in this city (not just his household, but Balin and Dwalin and Oin and Gloin and Gimli, too — and it would have been more if Mom hadn’t seen Fíli’s pleading looks and persuaded the Ri and Ur families to stay home). The second day, Uncle woke him at 6:15 by flicking the light on and off in his and Kíli’s bedroom, told him he had half an hour, and then waited impatiently in the car while Fíli made confused faces at his brother and mom while they made confused faces back. It’s December now, almost the end of first semester, and Uncle has never explained his motives, or even had a conversation with him that went deeper than ‘are there many other Punjabis in your classes?’
Fíli doesn’t mind. Uncle doesn’t dole out hugs, or say ‘I love you’ unless it’s a birthday or he’s very, very drunk. Instead, he performs awkward unsentimental gestures like this one. Teaching Fíli how to tie his pagh, ferrying him to and from his karate competitions back in high school, cutting up fruit for them both as Fíli crams calc and Uncle watches the soccer game.
Fíli thinks he’d be fine here, even with the workload, as long as he had friends. It feels like everyone else is in small groups, quizzing each other as they get ready for exams in a couple weeks. Some days Fíli says goodbye to his family in the morning and doesn’t speak again until he gets home again that night. He made the mistake of spending high school with his brother’s friend group, who are all a year younger; he doesn’t know anyone at this university. Hell, he barely knows anyone who’s been to university. Fíli is the first grandchild, the first person since his family immigrated to get a degree. He has his whole family’s hopes and dreams and sacrifices on his shoulders.
Normally he doesn’t mind. Rebelling is for white people. (This is a sentiment his friends would laugh at him for, but he’s pretty convinced it’s true.) He’s going to become a programmer because it’s sensible and because he’s seen Kíli’s marks in school — one of them has to actually make money. Fíli does just fine under pressure. He’d just like… he doesn’t know. Appreciation, maybe. For Uncle to understand that Fíli achieving Uncle’s dreams is as difficult as Uncle setting Fíli up to achieve them.
Fíli’s phone chimes. A Whatsapp notification from Kíli in the chat they share with Ori and Gimli, because Fíli is pathetic and his best friends are his little cousins. It’s him grinning and making a peace sign beside his girlfriend Tauriel, who looks half-asleep. Her hijab is the same shade of green as Kíli’s pagh, which the picture makes a point of circling and marking with stars and hearts. were soulmates, Kíli says.
Work on your chem and leave me alone, Fíli says.
*we’re, Ori says.
@ori ill kill you, Kíli says.
*i’ll, Fíli and Ori say within seconds of each other.
Thirty seconds later, Fíli gets a text from Tauriel — a picture of Kíli’s phone sitting smugly in their Chem teacher’s confiscated phone bin, then Kíli flipping off the camera. He texts back a selfie of himself flipping off the camera, then slides his phone across the table so that when Tauriel responds with one of Kíli flipping two birds he doesn’t lose his hard-won adult dignity.
His linear algebra and calculus lectures in the morning, then eating his lunch of leftover dal and going through sample problems, because he needs to keep his GPA above a 3.5. Another thing Uncle doesn’t understand is that everyone’s marks drop in first year university — Fíli had come home proud with a B back in September and been scolded about how he got As in high school, and was expected to keep getting As now that his education was costing money. Mom understood and smoothed everything over, but that was hours later when she got home from work, not at the moment when Fíli was swallowing his retorts and trying not to lose his mind.
Then his foundations of comspci lecture and linear algebra tutorial in the afternoon. Classes with 300 people Fíli doesn’t know. He keeps his head down, takes notes on the laptop Mom worked so hard to pay for, and tries to make his family proud. He splurges and buys a coffee and candy bar from a 7/11 and eats it in between classes, watching freezing rain fall down onto the sidewalk, turning the snowbanks into dirty translucent ice and the ground miserable and muddy.
At five when he’s planning to make his long, soggy, freezing commute back uptown to his neighbourhood, though, he gets a text from his family friend Bilbo Baggins: If you drive me uptown, I will make your family food for dinner. I have my car, I just don’t like driving in this weather.
Yeah sounds great, Fíli says, because he really doesn’t want to take the train today and it’s been too long since he’s seen him. He takes the subway up to midtown and meets him outside his little South Indian restaurant.
Bilbo Baggins occupies a strange place in Fíli’s community — an outsider in a community notorious for its seclusion, a man who’s fussy and gentle instead of the ideal warrior of Sikh culture. His friendship with most of Fíli’s family is an exercise in baiting and teasing him so they can see his reactions, which are hilarious. His strange friendship with Uncle is the true magic of finding the only person in the world as bullheadedly stubborn as you — they’d hated each other when first they met and now would probably be best friends if Uncle was the sort of person who ranked friendships like that.
He’s also the only queer adult Fíli knows — and the only adult in the world Fíli is out to.
Mr. Baggins is standing in Bag End’s own doorway, a business that shifts between fast-food lunches in the day run by Mr. Baggins’ exacting standards and a sit-down family restaurant in the evenings run by his business partners, the Gamgees. He’s hunched against the freezing rain. When Fíli arrives, Mr. Baggins hugs him around the middle, quick and casual, and leads them towards his beat-up sedan. He asks about Fíli’s day. Fíli responds in monosyllables, then asks about Mr. Baggins’ day. The ensuring tirade against their vegetable supplier’s useless son who’s constantly late to delivery and holds up the rest of the business lasts them the entire drive.
“When we as a species set a system of timekeeping and when we as a community agree that a delivery should happen at a certain time, one would think that any socially-minded individual would understand when they have promised to show up at 9 am sharp, they should not be showing up at 9:20,” Mr. Baggins finishes as they pull into the driveway.
Fíli had honestly been tuning him out since they were on the highway, but he registers the last bit. “Mr. Baggins, are you saying that by getting held up in traffic or taking a smoke break this guy is responsible for the failure of society and the human race as a whole?”
“Indeed I am,” Mr. Baggins says primly, and gets out of the car.
There aren’t a lot of people over tonight — just their family and Balin Uncle and Dwalin Uncle. Fíli puts his bag in his and Kíli’s room as Mr. Baggins is surrounded by Fíli’s family. He brings the plastic grocery bag where he keeps his lunch downstairs to wash his tupperware, accepting Mom’s kiss on the cheek where she’s chopping vegetables and Uncle’s nod from where he’s sitting at the table doing some paperwork. Mr. Baggins comes in to greet Mom (a cheerful conversation but not a hug, since he’s not related to Mom and that would be weird), then sits down at the table beside Uncle. Fíli watches them for lack of anything better to do — Uncle doesn’t speak to him, just leans over to bump his shoulder into Mr. Baggins’, holding it there for a moment before straightening again. How is it that Uncle has managed to make a friend when Fíli can’t?
Fíli rushes through dinner and then goes back to homework. Kíli comes up and sprawls over his bed, doing his math work on his stomach while talking loudly to the room at large. Fíli turns up his music — AP Dhillon’s latest EP on loop although Fíli’s listened to it so much he’s nearly sick of it — and ignores him. The point with Kíli isn’t listening so much as it is not shutting him up, and he still doesn’t understand how to do runtime analysis four months into his year. If he doesn’t figure it out by exams, he may as well jump off Suicide Tower and save Uncle the trouble of running him over personally when he fails.
Fíli thought it was kind of fucked up when he first got to uni and found out there was a designated area where the computer science kids killed themselves. Now he’s just confused why each program doesn’t have one of their own.
That Saturday morning, while Fíli is eating breakfast, Kíli is resentfully washing the dishes (he lost the arm-wrestle), and Mom is doing some dark magic with her sewing machine, she says, too-casually, “I saw Gurinder Aunty at the grocery store and she said that Harleen is going to be back from university in a few weeks.”
“That’s cool,” Kíli says absently, speaking English in response to her Punjabi, the way he and Fíli often do to her and Uncle. Fíli focuses on his Cheerios.
“She’s studying health sciences,” Mom says. “She wants to be a cardiologist.”
“She was always really smart,” Fíli says for lack of anything better — they’d been in school together since seventh grade. Fíli used to check her work in math class and Harleen would proofread his essays.
“She’s gotten really pretty, too,” Mom says. “Gurinder Aunty showed me a picture. You were good friends with her, weren’t you, Fíli?”
His heart gives a painful thump. “Mom, really?” he says, trying to keep his voice uninterested. Kíli has stopped doing the dishes, frozen up to his elbows in the dishwater. “I’m not even 20 and you’re already trying to get me married off?”
“Not married off, but all the best girls are going to be snatched up if you wait too long! She’s pretty, she’s smart, we like her family, she’s a good girl, and you were friends with her,” Mom says. “Just agree to meet her when she comes back for the summer, that’s all I’m asking.”
“Mom, you said no arranged marriages,” Fíli protests — after the disaster Mom’s own had been she’d been very insistent on the point.
“Who’s your mother arranging your marriage to?” Uncle says, coming in the door from his morning walk, striding over to the kitchen sink to wash his hands and bumping Kíli out of his way, flicking water at him to make him laugh.
“I’m not arranging his marriage, I just want the poor boy to go on a date!” Mom says, laughing. “You don’t want your little brother to get married before you do!”
“Oh, okay, this is just that you want at least one nice Sikh daughter-in-law,” Fíli teases, so that Mom has to rush over to reassuring Kíli that no, no, she likes Tauriel, Hindu or Sikh or Muslim doesn’t matter in today’s age as long as they believe in God and respect their parents.
On cue, Fíli’s brother, the best person in the entire world, jumps in with: “Wow, Mom, what do you have against Tauriel? She might end up being a doctor, too. Do you hate Muslims?”
“Tauriel’s going to be a doctor?” Uncle says, taking the bait — he’s not nearly as tolerant as Mom about other religions but it seems doctor outweighs everything.
“No, she hates school and she thinks biology is boring, but she could be if she wanted to,” Kíli says, but Mom says, “Seriously, Fíli, you’ve never even been on a date, you need to start meeting people.”
“How do you know I’ve never been on a date, maybe I had a secret girlfriend too,” Fíli says.
“I’d find out from someone if you had a secret girlfriend, I know my ways — it’s almost like you don’t like girls at all!”
And Fíli freezes, and Kíli freezes, and Mom freezes, and Uncle freezes, and the truth sits there in the middle of the sunny silent kitchen and nothing will put it away.
“I’m sorry,” Fíli says, in Punjabi, to show how deeply he means it.
Without the running water or the sewing machine going, his voice seems very loud.
He says, again, into the silence: “I didn’t mean to. It’s not something I can control or stop.”
“I know,” Mom says, shakily. “I — I know you can’t stop it. It’s not your fault.”
“Uncle?” he says, risking a glance. Under his beard, all the colour has been drained from his face, his eyes so wide you can see the whites all around. He looked like that when Kíli had been playing near the road once and a semi nearly ran him over. Fíli had understood it as rage until Mom had explained to him later it was fear.
Uncle turns and leaves the kitchen. Fíli watches him go, lump in his throat even as Mom gets up out of her chair, walks over to him cautiously, and delivers a fierce kiss to his forehead.
“I love you very much,” she says in English, and it’s all Fíli could have asked for but even as he hugs her he can’t help thinking about how her emphasis was on I.
“I — can I go take a walk?” he says, standing up even as Mom nods.
“Want me to come?” Kíli calls. Fíli shakes his head, not even caring if Kíli sees, throws on his parka and his boots over bare feet, and heads out to the road to call Mr. Baggins.
“He said nothing,” Mr. Baggins says, and Fíli has heard Mr. Baggins spitting mad but he’s never heard him like this, flat and calm as if he’s gone past his usual dramatics and fussiness into the icy calm that makes him so useful in a tough situation.
“He said nothing,” Fíli confirms, kicking a chunk of ice sullenly along the sidewalk. “Just looked at me wide-eyed and left the room. So now he thinks I’m a monster and a freak.”
“You aren’t a monster or a freak, because if you are then I am and I am not a monster or a freak, thank you very much,” Mr. Baggins says. “And I’m sure he doesn’t think that either.”
“Sorry, I forgot he’s your best friend,” Fíli says, suddenly ashamed. “Do you want to be hearing all of this? I just don’t have anyone else to talk to about it.”
“He’s not my best friend, I’m a 50-year-old man with a career, 50-year-old men with careers don’t have best friends,” Mr. Baggins says. “And I’d be furious if you didn’t tell me, because then I couldn’t come over and straighten him out.”
“No, don’t!” Fíli cries, so loudly the family he’s passing on the sidewalk look over at him to make sure he’s alright. “Don’t, Mr. Baggins, please. Please. I don’t want him to know that I’m — to think that I’m —"
“What don’t you want him to think you are?” Mr. Baggins asks, and lets Fíli take the time to sift through his feelings and translate them into English.
“Weak,” he says. “I don’t want him to think I’m weak. I know I’m gay, but I’m still — I’m still a man. I can’t have him thinking otherwise of me. I can’t have him treat me like a girl or like I’m Kíli, it would kill me.”
“You Sikhs and your martial race toxic masculinity,” Mr. Baggins says, a well-worn complaint of his. “Would your Guru Nanak approve?”
“Guru Nanak Dev Ji died before we got genocided like three times and we had to miliatarize to live, and then his wisdom passed into the other gurus after him so that they knew they were doing the right thing telling us to fight,” Fíli says, feeling vaguely like he’s either forgetting one of the massacres or adding something that only really intense Khalistanis call a genocide — Fíli had slept through most of Sunday school at the gurdwara and had made Kíli do his homework, so his grasp of religious history was shaky. “Please don’t talk to him, Mr. Baggins.”
“You have 48 hours,” Mr. Baggins says. “If he hasn’t come and told you he loves you and supports you before then, I’m coming over to talk some sense into him.”
If it was summertime, Fíli would be on the basketball court Saturday nights, but since it’s winter he’s lying on his bed scrolling aimlessly through Instagram instead. On impulse, he finds his university’s queer alliance and follows it — then unfollows it — then follows it again. Uncle knows he’s gay now — what does it matter if his algorithm does, too?
Kíli, tying his turban in the mirror, keeps sneaking glances back at him. “I’m fine,” Fíli tries to say, but the words ring false even to him. “I’ll be fine,” he says instead.
“I know you will,” Kíli says. “Come hang out with me and Tauriel tonight.”
“Crash my little brother’s date? I don’t think so,” Fíli says. He doesn’t need pity.
“Bruh, we’re literally just grabbing McDonalds and sitting in a parking lot listening to music,” Kíli says. “Don’t stay here all by yourself.”
So Fíli re-ties his own pagh and trudges after Kíli down the stairs. Mom looks up from the TV where she’s sighing over Shah Rukh Khan in some over-the-top action movie trying to crack a safe. “You’re taking your brother with you?” she asks Kíli, as if she put him up to it.
“Yeah, don’t worry, he’s making sure I get properly socialized,” Fíli says, then when Mom gives him a look for just barely missing the line of disrespectful, says, “I’m sorry.”
“Do you want to stay and watch the movie with me?” Mom says, then teases: “Deepika Padukone’s in this one —"
She cuts herself off. “Shah Rukh Khan’s in this one,” she says instead, cautiously.
“Gross, Mom, he’s like sixty,” Kíli says, kissing her goodbye on the cheek.
“He is not,” Mom says, offended. “He’s fifty-seven!”
Fíli kisses her goodbye as well. She grabs him by the back of the neck and looks steadily at him for a second. “Be safe,” she says.
Fíli nods, a lump in his throat. She kisses him on the forehead — wow, he’s gotten more physical affection from her today than in ages, like she’s trying to make up for Uncle — and lets him go.
Outside, Fíli gets in the driver’s seat and starts slowly coaxing their shared pickup to life while Kíli knocks all the ice and snow off it. The truck is older than Gimli, so it takes him nearly ten minutes of attempts and sweet nothings before it’s finally warm enough to move, but having a pickup is automatic clout. Balin Uncle keeps telling them the truck is going to fall apart while they’re on the highway someday and kill them both, but they love it enough to take that risk.
They wait at the end of the block while Tauriel sneaks out her window and parkours her way down to the ground. Kíli sighs dreamily as she runs over to them, climbing in the backseat — Kíli must have told her what had happened.
“Hey, Tauriel,” Fíli says as she squeezes Kíli’s hand. “Figure out your life plan yet?”
“Right now I’m thinking I’ll be a hitman for the mob,” she says seriously, ducking and bobbing so she has a vantage point to adjust her hijab in the rearview mirror. Fíli bursts out laughing; it’s an old joke between the two of them, but Tauriel’s answers change every time. She’s probably the only person in the world as unabashedly weird as Kíli is, which is why they’re still together despite every single person in their lives except maybe Fíli thinking it would be better if they weren’t.
He laughs and laughs until Kíli starts looking at him funny, and then he keeps laughing because if he doesn’t he’ll cry, breaths tearing out of him as he tries to get himself under control.
“Is he okay?” he hears Tauriel ask, but he’s still laughing, or sobbing — he doesn’t know but there’s a lot of it — and Kíli grabs him bodily and pulls him across the seat into his shoulder and Fíli wails, there’s no other word for it, just yelling his head off like a maniac in this small space with his brother’s girlfriend in the backseat confused out of her mind.
He comes back to himself slowly, sobs quieting until he goes a little blank, staring out the windshield at the suburban street, a handful of middle schoolers playing street hockey, in hoodies despite the cold. He feels Kíli turn as Tauriel taps him on the shoulder, and then his brother presses a water bottle into his hand. Fíli drinks.
He feels all hollowed out — half grief and half relief. He’s out. He’s out, his family knows. Things will never be the same again. They’ll never see him the same again. Mom is grieving the life she thought he’d have, the Sikh daughter-in-law she wanted. Uncle hasn’t spoken to him at all. But he’s not living in secrecy anymore, watching every word he says, hiding who he is. Fíli has scoured the Guru Granth Sahib for its position on homosexuality, and it says nothing at all, neither positive nor negative. What it does say is that Sikhs have to be brave and honest, even if that puts them in danger.
“This was the worst it’ll ever be,” Kíli says. “It can only get better from here.”
They send him shakily to lie down in the backseat, not bothering with his seatbelt, while Tauriel gets in the passenger’s and Kíli drives them to the McDonald’s. They hand him ice cream and fries and a chicken sandwich, which he eats in that order, staring up at the ceiling, as they talk quietly in the front and Sidhu Moosewala plays over the stereo.
Monday morning Uncle drives him to the bus station, the winter sky pink, the radio playing AM news in Punjabi and English. Fíli looks over at him, then looks away. Uncle keeps his eyes on the road.
Monday afternoon, Mr. Baggins sends him a text: I’m assuming by the fact you haven’t spoken to me that he hasn’t spoken to you yet.
I don’t think you can fix this one, Fíli writes him back, stomach aching dully. He puts his phone away before Mr. Baggins can promise something he won’t be able to achieve.
2-hour calculus lecture in the morning, frantically grinding for his a compsci assignment due tonight, he hasn’t done his linear algebra reading yet and his lecture is this afternoon, if he doesn’t do it he’ll be so lost all lecture he may as well not bother showing up – maybe he shouldn’t show up and just finish the compsci assignment due instead, is he going to get it done on time – he skips lunch and doesn’t even notice, his code keeps crashing, is he going to have to turn it in half-done and beg for part-marks, should he be asking for an extension – he checks – it’s too late to ask for an extension. He’s behind on sample problems, maybe he should just give up on them, it’s almost exam time anyways, hasn’t he lasted long enough – his culminatings are all due next week and none of them are more than half-done, how much should he be studying for exams, should he have already started? He runs his program. It crashes. If he wants to go to linear algebra he should leave now – Fíli gets up – he sits back down – he gets up. Mom and Uncle spend money on these classes, he’s not skipping a single one of them. He works on his program in class at the back row. He runs it. It crashes. He copy-pastes the name of the error into StackExchange and ends up more confused. He’s resorted to commenting out individual lines, seeing when it runs and when it doesn’t. Linear algebra is over – he hasn’t absorbed a single word of lecture. Literally the skeleton of his program and nothing else runs. The lecture hall is empty, so he stays. He goes through each individual line, looking for some semicolon out of place. His phone vibrates. Maybe one of his loops is too big or too small. He experimentally changes a for loop to run to j + 1 and the program crashes in new and terrifying ways. His phone vibrates again. He hasn’t even started looking at runtime analysis yet – maybe he’s going about this in entirely the wrong way – does he have the time to start from the beginning? His phone is ringing.
“Bhenchod harami sala kutta kamina fucking bitch-ass piece of shit,” he’s muttering under his breath as he digs around in his bag for his phone – he doesn’t have time for this – and it’s Uncle calling. His heart gives a big thud-thud.
“Hi,” he answers cautiously.
“Hello!” Mr. Baggins says. “Your uncle and I are on your campus to pick you up, where should we meet you?”
“What?” Fíli says — it’s a forty-minute drive from the shop to campus, Uncle would have had to take the afternoon off in order to be here. Uncle only takes time off when he’s half-dead from illness, and even then Mom has to bully him into it. He tells them the intersection to meet him at and packs up his things to go there, assignment forgotten, profoundly uncomfortable about the whole situation.
But there they are — Uncle glowering in the driver’s seat, Mr. Baggins’ face set in grim determination in the passenger’s. Fíli climbs awkwardly in the backseat, backpack on the seat beside him, stomach churning.
“Would you prefer to have this conversation while driving so you don’t have to look at each other?” Mr. Baggins asks Uncle, polite but angry. Uncle stays silent, driving them uptown in the vague direction of home.
“Look, it’s fine,” Fíli says, staring at his Adidas sneakers. “Just say you won’t kick me out and we’ll call it a day.”
“Of course not, how could you even think —" Uncle shouts, before cutting himself off and saying awkwardly, “Your home is never in question.”
“Thorin,” Mr. Baggins warns. They’re stopped at a light, but Uncle is staring straight ahead at some old lady crossing the street, breathing in and out deliberately through his nose.
“It’s not my fault,” Fíli says, a little bit angry — shouting at him would be better than this silent treatment.
“You have nothing to apologize for,” Mr. Baggins assures him. “I swear to God, Thorin, if you don’t help this boy now, I’ll leave you.”
“You can’t force me,” Uncle says to Mr. Baggins, looking at him. “You swore you’d never force me.”
“And I’m not — but if you leave your boy feeling like this you aren’t the man I took you for,” Mr. Baggins says.
“Wait, what —" Fíli says, putting together the pieces.
“I’m the same as you,” Uncle says, and his eyes in the rearview mirror are so wide with fear Fíli can see the whites all around them. “I — I like men as well.”
“Holy fuck,” Fíli says, and Uncle snaps, “Language!” but Fíli is still processing, head reeling, he hasn’t been alone this whole time, he hasn’t been alone but Uncle let him think he was — “And you and Mr. Baggins?”
“We’ve been together for four years,” Mr. Baggins says.
Uncle is still looking at the road, but Fíli looks at him — his strong rough hands, his ten-year-old scrupulously clean shirt, the proud line of his posture tense with fear, the neat turban. He taught Fíli to tie his turban the same way. He and Fíli both lived with this inside them, and never even suspected it about the other. Uncle never said because he was afraid — Uncle has been in love since Fíli was a kid and he hid it — Uncle would have kept hiding, even when Fíli stopped. It shows a cowardice that Fíli could never have imagined Uncle posessing. It shows a cowardice Uncle would never have tolerated in Fíli himself. Even now, Uncle won’t look at him. Fíli watches Uncle watch the road and thinks that maybe he never knew his Uncle at all.