Work Text:
Dear Mr. Durin,
Congratulations! You have been accepted to the Blue Mountain University School of Art and Design. On behalf of our entire staff, I would like to thank you for your interest in our dual digital design/animation program and welcome you in the upcoming academic school year. Here are the following requirements for your preliminary semester at Blue Mountain…
Brown eyes scanned the acceptance letter proudly as a bright smile crossed his young face, joy and excitement evident in his expression. “YES!” he shouted to himself as he let himself into the apartment that he shared with his older brother, stopping long enough to drop his bag on the foyer floor before making his way to the kitchen and sticking the acceptance letter on the refrigerator. It was the proudest he’d felt in a long time, given the long laundry list of disappointments he caused his family, or so he thought. His grades were hardly anything to write home about, and he never heard the end of it from his uncle. Not that it ever bothered him. His older brother was always on top of everything, always getting the better marks and the cleaner academic record. The only times his brother got into trouble was when he followed the younger in one of his exploits.
But for once, he thought he might finally have found himself a niche that truly fit him. He didn’t have to be like his brother or his uncle. He never had been, and this might be his way to shine.
Pulling a jug of soda out of the refrigerator and taking a swig directly from the bottle, he screwed the cap on and put it back before wandering back to his bedroom and pulling out a sketchbook. In it were countless portraits, still lifes, and landscapes, some done in watercolour but most in pencil or ink. A small smirk pulled at the corner of his mouth. His uncle had often criticized his doodles as “wasteful and foolish” and yet they had been good enough to bring him into one of the best art programs in the Isles. So what if it was across the water in Ireland? That meant nothing. He would miss his brother and mother, certainly, but he’d see them at holidays and during break. It wasn’t impossible to take a weekend trip to visit the family. And the Durin’s were hardly wanting for money.
It seemed perfect, like the right time to spread his wings and fly.
“Kíli!” his brother hollered from the hallway, and the sound of the door slamming followed the sound. “Y’ home?”
“Look on th’ fridge!” he called back as he closed the sketchbook and pulled himself to his feet, peeking through his bedroom doorway into the hall. He could just see his brother’s goldenrod ponytail as he walked into the kitchen.
“Wha’ am I lookin’ for?” his brother asked sceptically after a few moments of what Kíli assumed to be aimless staring at the fridge. Kíli rolled his eyes in annoyance before coming into the kitchen behind his brother and sticking his finger smack-dab in the middle of the letter.
“Here, y’ tosser,” he groaned and set his chin on his brother’s shoulder.
“A letter?”
“Fíli! Read it!”
Wordlessly the elder set his briefcase on the kitchen floor and took the letter off the refrigerators, reading it with tired eyes. Unlike his younger brother, he had already completed university and was working towards a law degree, as was expected of the eldest male in the Durin family, and had been for generations. He was taking summer classes to keep ahead of schedule so that he could work towards taking his qualifying exams and begin practicing. It seemed that Fíli was always tired these days, though he tried not to let it show to his younger, more free-spirited brother. Still, he squinted to read the slanted script. When it finally clicked in his brain, a tired but excited smile crossed his own face as he glanced back at his young brother. “Y’ jus’ got this today?”
“YES!” Kíli hollered again and he pounded on his brother’s shoulders like a hand drum before snatching the letter back. “One o’ th’ top art programs this side of th’ Atlantic!”
“But it’s in Ireland,” Fíli added after a moment, his expression dropping. “You’ll be movin’ out again.”
“Stop tha’,” the younger scolded, giving his brother a small punch in the arm before crossing behind him and picking his briefcase off the floor. He set it on the counter for his brother and then pulled two glasses out of the cupboard. “Y’ know it’s better anyway. I won’ be distractin’ you all th’ time from your homework –”
“Kíli…”
“An’ maybe this time I can show our uncle tha’ I can actually take care of myself.”
“Kíli…”
“What?” He paused and turned around, and when he saw his brother’s sad blue eyes he stopped and leaned back against the counter, sighing.
“Y’ do realise this’ll be th’ furthest you’ve ever been from home?” Silently the younger nodded, his dark hair falling to cover his eyes as he turned to look at the floor. And his words struck a chord of truth in the young male. He’d been living with his older brother since he was 16, just to prove to his mother and uncle that he was a man, but he hardly lasted a day before he was spending the night back at their home in London. To this day, his old bedroom was still furnished on the off-chance that he lost his nerve and felt the need to stay home again.
“Tha’s the point, Fíli,” he admitted softly as he pulled himself up onto the counter so that he was sitting on the cool surface. “Besides, it’s no’ so far. I could’ve gone t’ Canada.”
“You shut your mouth!” Fíli scolded, giving his younger brother a smack, before pushing his briefcase aside so he could sit on the counter next to his brother. “Y’ don’t need t’ prove anything, Kíli.”
“Yes I do,” the younger argued with a brief shake of his head. “It’ll be good for me.”
“Maybe,” Fíli agreed with a shrug. “Maybe no’.” He didn’t seem convinced with his brother’s words, but he also knew that when Kíli got his heart set on something, it was almost impossible to change his mind about it. So, settling on defeat, the elder glanced sidelong at his brother and gave him a bit of a nudge. “Either way I’ll miss y’.”
“Stop tha’,” Kíli groaned quietly, and he hopped down from the countertop. “Classes don’t even start ‘til August anyway, and I won’ be movin’ until the dorms open up.” He crossed to the fridge and pulled out two bottles of beer. “IPA okay?”
“You shut your mouth,” Fíli teased again, and his tired smile came back as he watched the younger fill the two empty glasses.
~*~
“Art School? In Belfast?”
The Durin family was all sitting down to dinner in a crowded pub on a foggy Saturday evening. Kíli had thought it was a good time to break to his mother and uncle his plans for school, considering he only had a few weeks left and had already bought his plane ticket and put in for a dorm room. He had applied for a single, not wanting to adjust to roommates in addition to being so far from home, but he held out little hope that he would actually get one. There were only so many, and they tended to go to upperclassmen.
“Blue Mountain has one of th’ best art programs in the country!”
“I’m familiar with Blue Mountain, Kíli,” his uncle replied in an even tone, hardly looking up from his fish and chips. “You forget, I spent many years there, before we were able to get the law firm back.”
Kíli rolled his eyes and let his chair rock backwards so it was balancing on the back two legs which made his mother eye him nervously. Of course he understood where his uncle was coming from. Thorin was still bitter about having lost out his position as senior partner in the family law firm of Durin & Sons so many years ago to a ginger from the north named Samuel Maug, though most of the family simply referred to him as “red dragon,” both for his hair colour and his temperament. The lawyer had been welcomed into the company as an intern, but through some poor bookkeeping and a few well-placed decimal points, had lost the law firm for the Durin family. Thorin had at that time gone to Northern Ireland to seek help from his cousin Balin, a professor at Blue Mountain at the time, who had a good eye for bookkeeping and mathematics. It was a painful decade of fighting legal battles and producing evidence before barrister S. Maug was stripped of his bar certification and was no longer deemed fit for practice. Then and only then had Thorin been able to return to the family business, but at incredible financial cost. It was ancient history for his nephews, but for him it never really seemed to have ended.
“Y’ were always tellin’ me tha’ I was wasting my time with my drawings, bu’ they think I’m good enough!”
“You? In Belfast?”
“Leave him alone, Thorin,” the boys’ mother Dis warned quietly as she gently reached over to coax her son’s chair legs back safely onto the ground. “It’ll be good for him.”
“Y’ see?!” Kíli whined, gesturing to his mother as if her word clinched the deal. “Besides, I already bought my ticket. And it’s no’ like I’m goin’ to California or anything. It’s just Ireland!”
“Northern Ireland,” his uncle corrected tersely, and he never once glanced up to meet his young nephew’s eyes. Kíli watched him from across the table, and when his uncle did not speak, it was Fíli who leaned into their uncle and whispered something to him quietly. “Do as you choose, Kíli. I certainly can’t stop you.”
“No. You can’t,” the youth grumbled defiantly, and he pushed his chair back roughly before walking purposefully to the bar. He stayed there for a while, occasionally glancing over his shoulder to see if anyone was watching him, but of course every time his eyes landed on the table, his uncle seemed disinterested.
Well, it didn’t matter to him. He had already made up his mind. And whether or not his uncle was able to see it, he was old enough to handle what was ahead of him.
“Kíli?”
The male started at the gentle voice and glanced behind to see his mother standing just a breath away from him, her soft smile one of motherly encouragement. It softened his mood ever so slightly. “Mum.”
“Don’t pay him any mind, love,” she spoke in her musical timbre and she reached over to rest her hand on his shoulder. “This is what you want?”
He didn’t speak but nodded his head in affirmation.
“Then that’s all that matters,” she spoke without a second thought, and she rubbed her youngest son’s back in gentle circles. “He’ll come around.”
~*~
The plane from Heathrow to Belfast International had hardly left the ground before the loneliness set in. It wasn’t a particularly long flight, but the simple symbolic action of lifting into the air and leaving behind the people who meant the most to him was more than enough to set the young man’s nerves on edge. He already missed his brother. Pulling his mobile out of his pocket, he looked at the blank screen, mentally writing out message after message to his brother of what things were like in Ireland, what his campus was like, the many things he’d seen.
To keep his mind at ease, he put in his iPod headphones, and to the sounds of “Vincent” by Don McLean, he pulled out his sketchbook and started to draw aimlessly – an attempt to keep himself from being too homesick. Chewing on the end of his pencil in momentary thought, he brought the lead to the paper and began to tentatively pull shapes out of the milky whiteness of the page. In spite of the music in his ears, the work that spilled out onto the paper had far more in common with Giger than with the tragic Dutch impressionist. His art had a way of fluctuating between minimalist to dangerously dark, and this was one of those times.
This time what he drew was a portrait of himself, though it was easily stylized. From his chest stretched a black cloud that grew around him as if trying to swallow him, and inside the cloud were subtle variations in shading, all set apart and echoes of his family and friends that he was leaving behind on the other side of the channel. Perhaps it was a dark metaphor for how he was feeling, but often when he sketched like this he didn’t bother to think about what he was sketching. He simply let his pencil decide for him.
Next to him in the window seat, a young woman who looked to be around Kíli’s age, couldn’t help but glance sidelong at the image with curious eyes. Initially Kíli didn’t notice that his work was gaining attention from those deep blue eyes, but when his neighbour leaned closer and bumped into Kíli’s shoulder, he paused and finally glanced at the female, pulling the earbuds out of his ears.
“Sorry,” the young woman said with a sheepish smile, and she sat back. “Didn’t realise I was so close. They keep making these planes so tight, you know?”
“Oh, it’s fine,” Kíli answered simply, and he passed the sketchbook over to her in an attempt to open up conversation, and thereby distract himself from his lonely thoughts. “It’s no’ th’ best.”
“I like it,” the woman replied and her honest smile and eyes made Kíli trust her. She continued to study the work before her before she finally handed the sketchbook back to Kíli with the same subtle smile. “I’m Sam, by the way.”
“Kíli.” And he offered his hand to Sam, which the other took and shook heartily. “Where’re y’ going?”
“Belfast,” Sam replied with a laugh, before she handed the sketchbook back to Kíli gently. “But no, I’m actually going to university. My boyfriend is going to be starting classes in the fall and I haven’t seen him in a couple o’ months.”
Kíli shifted a bit in his seat and closed his sketchbook before stuffing it in the backpack he brought as his carryon. “Wha’ university?”
“Ever heard o’ Blue Mountain?” Sam asked casually, and she brushed a few golden locks behind her ear.
“Tha’s where I’m going!” Kíli spoke with excitement, though he realised his voice had gotten loud and had to pull himself back. “Th’ school of art and design.”
Sam smiled and her eyes flicked to the backpack where he’d just placed the sketchbook. “Are you really?”
He laughed brightly, a musical thing, before turning his torso a bit so he could better talk to Sam. “It’s no’ exactly wha’ my uncle would like, but –”
“You’re uncle?” interrupted Sam.
“Yeah,” Kíli paused and for a moment he considered whether or not now was the time to go into the odd intricacies of the Durin family. The fact that his father had died when he was still a baby and Fíli was just a child while traveling abroad and how his uncle had taken both boys and their mother, his sister, into his home. How he had adopted the boys, having never had children of his own, and brought them up as his own. But it seemed a lot to share with someone he’d only just met, so what he settled on was, “he’s…been like a father t’ me an’ my brother, since we were children.”
“You’d get on well with my boyfriend then,” Sam answered with a bit of a sympathetic smile on her round face. “He was raised by his uncle too.”
It seemed an odd sort of coincidence but it piqued Kíli’s interest. “Really?”
“Yeah,” Sam explained, and she reached into her purse to pull out a small photo album. She flipped through several pages until she found what she was looking for. Then she handed it to Kíli and pointed to the two faces in the photograph. “That’s Frodo, my boyfriend.” Her finger rested on a short young man with a boyish face and brown curls that had grown somewhat unkempt. Though, as Fíli considered his long, haphazard ponytail, it occurred to him that he was hardly in a place to judge. “And that is his uncle, Bilbo,” she continued, this time pointing out the man standing behind her boyfriend – he had similar features, a bright smile on his round face, and instead of brown curls a headful of reddish-blonde hair. Nearly ginger, though not quite. “He’s the dean o’ students,” Sam said with a smile that betrayed her affection both for her boyfriend and for his father-figure. “Some o’ the older students were on Frodo that he only got in ‘cause o’ his uncle, but I told him, ‘don’t you let them rob you o’ your joy, Frodo Baggins.’ And he hasn’t let it bother him since.”
“He looks nice,” Kíli offered simply. “Wha’ program?”
“English Literature.” Sam took the photo album back from him then and tucked it into her purse. “He loves to read. It seemed like the best choice for him.”
Kíli had to smile to himself as she talked about her boyfriend. His uncle would have considered that another useless field. To Thorin, anything that wasn’t marketable or profitable was a waste of time. He never saw much of a future for Kíli when it came to following his artistic passions, but here was someone who was pleased that her partner was going to study literature. He was beginning to feel better about going to this school and the homesickness slowly started to melt away.
The pair spoke for the short flight, and by the time they landed in Belfast they were talking as easily as if they had been long-time friends. They disembarked together, determined to share a cab to the campus, and Sam offered to give Kíli a brief tour of what she knew of the place. She wasn’t the university kind, as she explained easily, but she had been to the campus more than once, thanks to Frodo and his uncle. It was a nice place, she admitted, and one she liked to visit as often as she could. She couldn’t always afford to, but her boyfriend and his uncle often spotted her the money to get her out there.
When they finally arrived at the campus, Kíli was blown away by how beautiful the place actually was. It was not in the city proper, but rather on the outskirts, where one could easily venture into civilization, or get lost in the rolling hills of the countryside. The campus was dotted with trees and flowerbeds, and the buildings were centuries old, hewn from rock. A few students wandered around from building to building, and a pair were sitting in the grass, one drawing and another either day-dreaming or sleeping. Kíli looked out the window with the wide-eyes of a young man who had hardly ventured out his parent’s house who was seeing bits of the world for the first time in his life. It was such a simple pleasure, but it seemed to do the trick for him. His expression was bright as a child at Christmas and most of the homesickness had melted away. Indeed, since they landed and he sent a quick text to his brother, he hadn’t ventured too much thought to his family across the water. Sam had been a good distraction and the campus was like a home he’d never set foot on before. As they unloaded the taxi, Sam went about explaining things to Kíli.
“All first-years are usually in the Reuel dorm; I’ll show you how to get there. Frodo’s there. His RA is a 3 year named Ori.” She helped him with his few suitcases, as all she brought was her purse and a small carry-on suitcase for her short stay, and lead him past the buildings one by one. “I think that’s the art department,” she spoke as she gestured to a large, imposing looking structure that stood 4 stories and decorated with crawling vines. Kíli stopped to look it up and down and his ears were pulled around the corner to the sound of music. Leaving his suitcases sitting on the sidewalk, he peered around the building to see an older man, probably 30s, playing a guitar and singing to himself. It was a familiar melody that Kíli had heard before – an old Irish air called ‘The Parting Glass’ – but the singer’s voice had that lovely lilting quality that captured his attention that for a moment he totally forgot about Sam. However, she soon followed after him to see what had captured his attention. She had a knowing smile on her face as she placed a hand on her new friend’s shoulder. “That’s Professor Broadbeam,” she explained with a chuckle. “He’s in your department I think.”
Kíli heard her but he didn’t look at her right away, instead listening to the song on the air and strangely intrigued by the thusly-identified professor, with his unique facial hair, dimples, and casual dress – not what the youth had expected of a professor. It took a lot of Sam’s pulling and prodding to get Kíli to move again, but not before the professor took notice of the pair and gave them both a friendly wave.
Something told Kíli that this was going to be a good semester.