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Bilbo Baggins is buried in the cold.
The frost settles into their limbs and claws through the air, so cold even the Elvenking himself pulls his dark cloak tighter around him. Cold. As if the austere stars left vigil and fell and shattered on the mountains, cloaking the whole world in shards of white. Even the sun lies banished behind the clouds. They lower him into the ground. He is pale, paler than all the corpses Thorin has ever seen. Like the sky. Pale and grey and streaked with ash. On his chest the Arkenstone glimmers, fainter now, ever fainter.
He looks to the snow and it catches the wind like the ash did in the morn after Azanulbizar, like it did when they burned his brother and his grandfather and his mother. They wanted to burn him, too. Thorin didn’t let them. He didn’t deserve to go up in ash, like the remnants of a firedrake. He deserved to be buried in the earth, closest, closer to home.
He deserved a lot of things.
He steps forward, leads the blue cortège on. Swallows his heart and buries it in his chest.
Colder, now. Always colder.
In the hours after, all he does is stroke his hands, as if he can kindle the flame imperishable itself back into them. Touches his lips to his, but doesn’t kiss him. A cruel parody of what they could’ve had in life.
There’s no difference. Not now. Maybe there never would’ve been.
On his deathbed, after Óin whispers there’s nothing left to do, that all they can do is bid him farewell, goodbye, Thorin turns his head and does not weep. Not yet. He brushes past the cloth door of the tent and walks in. Bilbo lies on the bed, pale, head bloody and a bandaged soaked in red across his middle. He gives shallow, soft breaths, body ghostly still.
Bilbo, he says.
Before the ceremony Thorin fastens the red cloak, presses the stone to his silent chest.
Why? asks Balin.
Because it is the heart of the mountain. And therefore, the heart of the mountain king.
On his tongue there are words waiting to spill out as he holds Bilbo’s hand—both of them still as bone. As if they are constellations held in fragile frozen place, as if the world doesn’t move and it is only them, only them. Thorin’s tongue is still as the icefell on Ravenhill.
You're supposed to live. You should've walked away from that ice on your own two feet. You're supposed to go back to your books. Your armchair. Your garden. Plant your trees and watch them grow. You're supposed to die old and wrinkled and surrounded by those you loved, not here in the prime of your life next to a mad mountain-king who tried to murder you hours before.
I miss you. I want you. I love you.
He says,
Don’t.
You know, says Bilbo, as Thorin grips his hand, You’ll make a good king. A great one, even.