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How had they ended up like this? Did good people always get bad endings? No, it couldn’t be that way. If it were true, the world would be overrun with horrible, hollowed-out creatures, and that simply couldn’t be right. Because if it were, then everyone he knew would be nothing more than wolves wearing sheep’s clothing. He refused to believe it, maybe he never would. Good people got good endings, one way or another. Sometimes things ended in ways that made no sense at all, but eventually, they found their meaning.
“BILBO!” He had shouted the name at the top of his lungs, letting the sword fall from his hand. The blade was now buried to the hilt in his worst enemy, the creature that had nearly killed him, thanks to the intervention of that single name, the wound had been nothing more than a shallow scratch, one that would leave a scar but would heal with time and careful tending.
Still, his mind hadn’t caught up. He couldn’t understand how they had reached this moment, this point where the world had ripped his heart clean out of his chest. It might have hurt less if it had been literal. Instead, the pain was worse than any poison running through his veins. A metaphorical venom made of every desperate, tangled emotion crashing inside him at once. If love could kill, he would have been dead the instant that body had landed in his arms.
He would have traded places in a heartbeat, but then the sacrifice would mean nothing. It would only hurt someone who didn’t deserve it even more. But what was a man without his heart?
What was a king without his kingdom? What was a writer without his hands?
The journey had been so long, so brutal, that every hardship had bound them tighter than either of them had ever expected. Two souls who had started off on the wrong foot, only to realize that if they walked in step, they could change the rhythm, turn left into right, right into left. In the beginning, Thorin had thought Bilbo had the most beautiful eyes he’d ever seen. Bilbo, in turn, would have said that not even the clearest sky could compare to Thorin’s. He had wondered, back then, if the future would be filled with bells and songs, with laughter and hope.
After everything they had suffered, he had dared to believe he might finally get a moment to breathe. A chance to heal. But perhaps the Valar still had old debts to collect. He hated the thought, hated it with everything in him but right now he couldn’t think of any other reason the world would be cruel enough to tear his soul from his body. It shouldn’t have been him. It was never supposed to be him.
The wind howled across the northern slopes of Erebor like a wounded wolf, driving snowflakes that were no longer white. They had been stained a thick, clinging crimson that painted boots, cloaks, and shattered swords alike. The battlefield was no longer a field. It was an open graveyard beneath a sky that refused to lighten. Orcs and goblins lay piled like discarded refuse. Wargs, jaws frozen in eternal snarls, formed dark mounds among the fallen dwarves, elves, and men who had died together for a cause that now felt far too vast for any of them. This wasn’t victory. Not in any way that mattered. Hope was fracturing, piece by piece, yet somehow still held together by a single stubborn thread that refused to snap.
The cold bit deep into the bones of anyone unprepared for it and there were many. Among them was a hobbit with furry feet and a will like iron. Sometimes he thought he should have turned back long ago. At the same time, he was grateful he had accepted that mad proposal. It had let him see and live things he never could have imagined from inside the safe walls of a smial and a garden. Hobbits were made for breakfasts and second breakfasts, after all. The sharpest blades they usually carried were the little knives from a carving set, or perhaps a trowel for planting, or a needle for mending. Not swords. Never swords, not even in their wildest dreams. And yet here he was, with one in his hand.
There was no time to dwell on any of that. Not when the fate of the kingdom depended on winning. He prayed with everything he had that the powers above were on the side of the good that light would finally overcome the darkness, and they could walk the shadowed paths without fear again.
He had seen Fili fall. For one terrible moment he had thought it was the gold-madness clouding his own mind, or some cruel joke between the brothers. But when the orc blade came away wet with blood, the illusion shattered. And yet Fili lived. He didn’t understand how, and he didn’t need to. The young dwarf would be all right. If the gods were merciful, he would go on to live his life, to be with his family. Bilbo would pray for that later once the war was won.
When gentle voices fall silent, their echo doesn’t truly vanish. It lingers in some hidden corner of memory, where time holds no power over it. But he wasn’t dead. They had granted him another chance. There were words that kept breathing long after they were last spoken simple phrases, shared laughter, whispered confidences in the dark of a quiet night.
This was not a quiet night. There was no peace here. Only war, death, and screams. Losses so vast they made his hands shake.
He moved carefully between the legs of the living and the dead, his small stature forcing him to watch every step. Sting still blazed in his right hand, gore-slick to the hilt. He hadn’t sheathed it. He wasn’t sure he could. Every time he closed his eyes he saw the face of the orc he had run through. A hobbit wasn’t made for this. Hobbits were made for tidy gardens, second breakfasts, and books that smelled of dust and home. But war didn’t care what you were made for. It broke you and left you to put yourself back together with whatever pieces remained.
He had come this far for many reasons. The contract. The ring that sat heavy in his pocket like a promise he never wanted to keep. But more than anything, he had returned for a stubborn dwarf who had looked at him like a traitor and, at the same time, like the only thing left worth saving in the world. Thorin Oakenshield had accused him, banished him, nearly thrown him from Erebor’s walls in a fit of golden madness. Bilbo could have left then. He could have gone home to the Shire, to his armchair, his pipes, the quiet that smelled of apples and woodsmoke.
His heart had refused. It kept beating here, in the blood and the ice, because it no longer knew how to beat anywhere else if Thorin was gone.
Bilbo didn’t know it yet, but later Kili would live too. The Valar had chosen to be generous with those who deserved it.
“No, you shouldn’t have done it. You were meant to reign. You were supposed to reign at my side.”
The raw, broken cry that followed tore through him, layer by layer, until there was nothing left to destroy but the will that had kept him standing until the world collapsed without warning.
“Someone… had to,” Bilbo whispered. The words hurt, but if they could ease even a fraction of a warrior’s suffering, he would endure the battle of his own. “Someone had to save the savior.”
He had never been a hero. Never a figure of grand courage. He was simply a creature who had fallen in love in the noblest, most honest way possible, the same way stars fall in love with the sky. A lover who would shed every last tear when his beloved had no more left to give.
“Is this your revenge for calling you a grocer, Master Baggins? I’ve learned my lesson,” Thorin said, voice cracking. “Now please… stand up. Please. Stand up for me… please.”
He had never been good at this. Never particularly skilled at shedding tears. And yet here he was, weeping openly, letting the heavy, salt-heavy drops fall and soak into what was already wet, because he couldn’t stop. Because he didn’t want to.
“Don’t cry… don’t cry, my king.” Bilbo’s hand rose, trembling, to rest against the damp cheek of the dwarf above him. He tried to wipe away tears that would not stop falling.
Thorin only leaned harder into the touch, as if he could make it last forever.
“Don’t ask me to do the impossible,” he rasped. “I would fill a lake until it overflows with my suffering.”
There would come hours when old wounds would return from the deepest corners of memory. Not with thunder or the violence of a storm, but with the patient insistence of the tide returning again and again to the same shore. A scar he had believed forgotten. A pain buried beneath years of routine. A loss time had seemed to soften until it was almost harmless. Yet a single scent, a song overheard by chance, a street walked at dusk, or the fleeting shadow of a face too much like his would wake it all again. And he would understand that some wounds never truly disappear. They simply learn to sleep. And when they woke, they would threaten to consume him from within, sending roots through his heart until he felt as raw and vulnerable as the very first day.
“Y-you will be a magnificent king,” Bilbo whispered. His hand slipped downward slowly until Thorin caught it in midair, refusing to accept what fate had prepared. “Rule with your heart… Thorin.”
There would also be days when life felt suspended in an impossible balance. Days when no scale could tip toward happiness or sorrow. Joy would be too small to fill the void left by absence, yet pain would not have the strength to break him either.
“Then you must stay with me,” Thorin pleaded. “You must live, so I can have my heart back. You stole it, you thief, and I want you to keep it always.”
He would exist in a kind of emotional twilight, caught between the person he had been when that soul was still part of his life and the person he did not yet know how to become. He would rise each morning, fulfill his duties, exchange words with others, even smile when required. But inside he would carry the strange weight of someone walking without direction. There would be moments when he wondered if he was moving forward at all, or simply learning how to remain still without shattering.
“I have always considered myself… an honest thief,” Bilbo murmured. “But I fear I see the gardens of my lady… closer than I should.”
The hours would continue regardless. No grief possessed the power to stop the turning of clocks. The sun would keep rising each morning and setting each night. Seasons would change without asking permission. Rain would fall on the same roads. Flowers would bloom again when spring arrived, and leaves would fall when autumn claimed its turn. The world would keep spinning with serene indifference while he tried to understand how to keep walking beneath the weight of that absence.
“Couldn’t you ask for more time?” Thorin’s voice broke. “I am a selfish dwarf who does not wish to let go of what has become his most precious jewel—the one to whom he will swear devotion until Mahal himself must pry it from his hands.”
Bilbo let out a soft, low laugh that tugged gently at the bleeding wound like a river. Strangely, it did not hurt as much as it had at the beginning. Perhaps it was the cold. Perhaps it was the warmth of the body holding him. The hands that refused to let him go. His heart ached more than the wound itself when he looked at the devastated face of the strongest warrior he had ever known.
“I’m glad…” Bilbo sobbed quietly. “I’m glad it’s you. I’m glad you’re the last person… my eyes will ever see. Because that way I’ll take the most beautiful sight with me.”
And the days would pass. Some would be bearable. Others would feel endless. There would be nights when exhaustion was not enough to bring sleep, and dawns when waking felt harder than any battle. There would be moments when he wanted to give up, to abandon the silent fight of continuing to exist when the heart felt worn through. Yet somehow, in a way too difficult to explain, he would keep going. One step after another. One breath after another. One sunrise after another.
“No… don’t say that, Bilbo.” Thorin leaned down, pressing their foreheads together with such raw intimacy that anyone watching would have said two soulmates stood before them, loving each other even in ruin. “I ask your forgiveness… for the way I behaved when that cursed treasure invaded my sanity and turned me into a dragon. I ask forgiveness for failing to protect you as you deserved. For saying things that were not true. Because if there were more people like you in this world, it would be filled with nothing but good souls.”
“There is nothing to forgive,” Bilbo whispered. “I made that choice a long time ago. I'm glad to have shared... tour adventures and perils...it is more than any Baggins deserves.”
Because in the end, when everything had been said and the years had piled upon his shoulders both joys and sorrows, he would discover that there existed a humble victory no one could take from him. It would not be perfect happiness or the absence of suffering. It would not be the grand reward he had imagined in his youth. It would be something far simpler, and precisely because of that, far more precious: having endured.
“Will you plant the acorn for me? I don’t think I can stay, but I’ll watch it bloom from beyond… so you’ll have a way to remember me. And I’ll have the certainty… that you won’t follow me too soon.”
“I will make it the greatest oak that ever lived, Ghivashel. So great you will be able to see it even from far away. But in return… marry me.”
Bilbo laughed softly. He had no strength left to draw upon, but he would not ruin this final conversation before Yavanna came to claim him.
“I would marry you in this life… and in a thousand more.”
Thorin smiled through his tears. His hands trembled as he removed a bead of his own and, with reverent care, wove it into his lover’s hair.
To remain here despite the loss, despite the farewell, despite the shattered dreams and the scars that never fully healed. To remain here even when parts of himself had changed forever. To remain here even when the path had seemed to lead only into darkness.
“Wait for me, Amralimê. Because I will come to you no matter how many I must defeat. Wait for me… because only then will I know that I lived correctly.”
“Don’t take too long… but don’t hurry either… my beloved husband.”
And then there was a kiss. Slow, tasting of metal and blood, but a kiss nonetheless—one that held everything they had never found the words to say, yet somehow explained it all in a single act.
And perhaps, in that simple persistence, there existed a quiet form of hope. Proof that pain had not triumphed completely. Evidence that even when the wound returned and the scales of life remained motionless, he was still capable of moving forward. Perhaps slowly. Perhaps with a weary heart. But forward all the same, carrying that loss, that memory, and that scar as testimony that he had been alive. That he had loved, suffered, and endured. And sometimes, when everything else had been taken from him, enduring was the deepest and bravest way to keep existing.
The happiest hours of his life had been spent at his side. They weren’t necessarily the grandest or the most memorable to anyone else in the world, but they were the ones that mattered most to him. When he thought of happiness, he didn’t picture great triumphs or moments of glory. He pictured him. The quiet afternoons they had shared without hurry, even as they raced toward the mountain. The conversations that seemed to have no end. The way his presence could turn ordinary days into something worth remembering.
Because with him, he had found something close to rest. A simple, warm peace he had never known anywhere else. Just hearing his voice or feeling the nearness of his hand was enough to make worries lose their weight and the world feel less hostile. It was a gentle relief, almost impossible to put into words like finally coming home after a long and weary journey.
And as long as he could hold on to those memories, as long as he could still hear that voice in the quiet corners of his mind and feel the warmth of that presence in his loneliest moments, he would never grow tired of being grateful for having known him. He would never tire of blessing the mark he had left on his life
Nor of loving, in silence, everything he had been to the king.
When one closed his eyes as the eagles carved paths across the sky, the other, through tears and pain, promised to live for both of them.
To live for both.