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When it became clear that Natalie didn’t know how to wash her clothes, Kili said in no small amazement, “Just where are you from?”
“A faraway land, like I said,” Natalie snapped. She crouched in a stream, a dripping shirt in one hand and the other empty, grasping for nonexistent soap, and now straightened her back and lifted her chin. By the way Kili snorted, she’d only managed to seem more comical.
“A princess of this faraway land, she must be,” Fili said, “since she knows so little of how the world works!”
His tone was teasing more than cruel, but Natalie’s ears burned hot, and hotter still when Kili laughed. She snapped her shirt against the rocks and stomped off towards camp. She had only made it a few steps under the trees when she realized she’d left her tennis shoes and socks by the bank, but it was already too late to retrieve them without risking more laughter from the dwarves.
She only needed a minute to cool off anyway, or so she told herself as half-rotted sticks and pebbles nipped at her soft feet and she used the dry sleeve of the dwarvish shirt she wore to wipe tears from her eyes. Two days ago, when thirteen dwarves and a hobbit and a wizard had saved her from the trolls, she’d cried out at the sight of them and wept, and they had comforted her. Now they’d only sigh at her for being unhardy. They understood that she was lost, but they also thought she’d chosen to wander in the first place.
“My! What is the matter?” a high voice said, and Natalie pulled her arm away from her face to see Bilbo. His laundry was a high heap in his arms, and he had to crane his neck to peer over it.
“Nothing,” Natalie said. “Except… in my land we have soap and—and—” But she could not say washing machines. “Well, anyway, we definitely don’t beat the dirt out of our clothes!”
“Oh!” Bilbo said. “Soap! What I would not do for a good bar of soap, or a poor one if it came to that!”
“Right? And to make it worse, the dwarves laughed at me for not knowing what to do without one!”
“Oh well, the dwarves.” Bilbo sat, set his laundry down, and patted the spot next to him. Natalie settled next to him, folding her wet shirt into her lap since the only other option was to drop it in the leaf litter. “They are a hardy folk, and they have been on the road a long time already, and therefore they expect much of us, forgetting we are used to being settled.” He seemed to remember himself then and, puffing his chest out, added, “But I should think we will prove ourselves worthy of the task before our road is ended.”
Despite herself, Natalie’s lips quirked. “You will prove yourself worthy of the task. I just want to go home.”
“A fine goal! And one I wish I could share. But I have found myself in quite another situation.”
With this last sentence, longing came into Bilbo’s voice, and Natalie saw his focus drift away from the trees and the distant stream into a fantasy only he could perceive. She knew that the Company would soon come to Rivendell and pass into the East to have adventures in and about the Lonely Mountain, and through it all Bilbo would prove himself again and again—with no small amount of help from a certain ring. She knew that he would take two chests of treasure back with him, one of silver and one of gold, and be called Elf-friend, and live a long and a happy life. But she could not say any of that. She had not picked up the courage to say it even to Gandalf.
It didn’t matter. Right now, Bilbo was not that hobbit she had read so much about. Instead he was a very ordinary hobbit, away from the comforts of home and missing them dearly.
“Well,” Natalie said and cleared her throat. Bilbo came out of his daydream and arranged his face, but when Natalie smiled, kindly and sad, he faltered. “At least we can miss our homes together.”
“At least,” Bilbo echoed. Finally he smiled as well, a real smile and a bright one, and he hopped up and said, “Come with me! I will show you what to do with that shirt—and I promise I will not laugh!”
In Rivendell, Elrond and Gandalf didn’t know what to do with Natalie. Eventually she declared she was going with the Company and asked for a bow, and though the dwarves expressed surprise that she could use it, she didn’t say why she’d learned. It wasn’t like they’d ever heard of The Hunger Games.
In the Misty Mountains, Natalie said nothing for the sake of the Ring’s destruction. Shivering on the eastern slopes of the mountains with Bilbo missing, she dared not look Gandalf in the face as he took them to task. After Bilbo appeared out of thin air, missing his buttons but alive, it was easier to remember that for the sake of the Ring’s destruction really meant for the sake of the world.
In Mirkwood, Natalie reminded the dwarves to stay on the path. They groaned at her and complained that she liked to nag, but they listened. Therefore they came out the other side without having met a single elf, hostile or otherwise, but Natalie had forgotten that these days, the river was the one safe way to Lake-town. On the road, she killed an orc, shouted for joy, and then retched into the bushes.
In Lake-town, Bilbo said, “You say you are from far away, and yet your Westron is so similar to mine! Even these Lake-town men speak strangely, but you do not.”
“I don’t know what to tell you. This is just how I speak.” Natalie sighed. No doubt her past self would’ve been horrified, shaking her fist and exclaiming something about language barriers, but now she couldn’t find it in herself to mind.
Natalie never did see Smaug. Only Bilbo did, plus some of the dwarves—if the glimpse they had of him while lifting Bombur and Bofur to safety counted. In the tunnel, the dwarves’ anger at Bilbo was stronger than Natalie remembered, maybe because she’d robbed him of the chance to save them twice over in Mirkwood, and when the Arkenstone couldn’t be found, Thorin was not just agitated but suspicious.
At last the thought that Natalie had yet refused to think came into her mind: I will save his life.
The day of the Battle of Five Armies was grim and cold, and Natalie pulled her cloak close against herself as she picked up her bow and made to follow the dwarves. “You cannot mean to come!” Kili said, passing by, and for once he did not say it to tease but was deadly serious. “You must stay inside where it is safe.”
“Safe? It’s been months since I was safe!” Natalie exclaimed, then paused. “Just put me with the archers, if there are any, because in close combat I’m sure I’d be dead within the minute.”
This last comment, sudden and genuine, had her gulping, but she did not waver, and all the dwarves were too busy preparing to spend too much time trying to dissuade her. So eventually Natalie found herself high up on the Eastern spur of the Mountain with Lake-town’s archers.
She did her best to clear Thorin’s path by picking off his enemies, but in the end she saw him fall. Then she thought that it had all come to nothing, but she was not quite right about that, because when she got down to Thorin’s tent in Dale, Kili was in it.
“Kili? He made it?” she said to the dwarves huddled outside.
Balin inclined his head. “But Fili didn’t, and Thorin’s wound may well be mortal.”
When Kili came out of the tent, the strain of his loss was on his face. Natalie regretted it, but her heart still leapt, because he was alive to feel it.
The next day, after Bilbo was found and Thorin passed away, Natalie and Bilbo sat together outside of Natalie’s tent. Bilbo said, “I have been hearing all about how that man Bard slayed the dragon—and good for him—but I do not suppose anyone will remember that I found its weak spot in the first place!”
“No,” Natalie said, “but that does not change the fact that you did, and that we are better off for it.”
Bilbo preened at this, and Natalie realized that he was her favorite, not as a character but as a friend. It would soon be time for Bilbo to go home and for Natalie to wander the world with dragon-gold to fund her way, but for now she remembered an afternoon very different from this one, when Bilbo had found her crying and sat her down to complain about dwarves with her, when they’d both spoken of how they missed their homes. Then he’d been a different hobbit, but so had she been a different girl.
“Oh, Bilbo!” she said. “We are two of a kind, I think! Just two modern girls in Middle-earth.”
“What—whatever do you mean?” Bilbo said, clearly startled.
Natalie shook her head, a giggle caught in her throat. “Never mind. What am I thinking?” But still it was true in its own way, and so she gave in and laughed.