Work Text:
❦
The first ring was already finished before Bilbo arrived, which Thorin considered a promising beginning. If the second were done before luncheon, they might yet reach Bag End before the tea-kettle started singing.
He held the ring between finger and thumb, turning it beneath the light that fell through open doors of the forge in long, pale shafts. It was a plain band, as Primula had requested for her intended - broad enough for a man’s hand, smooth within, and polished until the gold caught the sun without glittering foolishly. Thorin ran his thumb once along the inside edge, feeling for any roughness that might catch against a finger, then set it beside its unfinished fellow.
A basket appeared on the corner of his workbench, directly over a small drift of filings. Thorin looked at it, and then at Bilbo.
Bilbo, already shrugging off his coat, followed his gaze and moved the basket an inch to the left, though not far enough to clear the filings entirely. The gesture was so familiar that Thorin’s mouth twitched before he could stop it.
“You have put that upon my work.”
“Beside your work.” said Bilbo. “There is a distinction.”
“There is gold beneath it.”
“Then you had best be grateful that I have brought elevenses before you swept it away.”
Thorin gave him a look and returned to the ring. Bilbo only smiled, set a stool near the open doors, and began unpacking the basket. He had chosen a waistcoat too fine for a forge and would, within minutes, have soot upon it. Both of them were aware of this fact yet neither took any measures to prevent it.
Neither of them was in any particular hurry. There was only gold, the warm smell of bread, and Bilbo’s shoulder brushing the edge of the bench whenever he passed behind him.
Thorin took the second band in his tongs and held it once more in the flame. The gold softened, brightening at the edges.
“You know,” Bilbo said behind him. “I think we may claim some small credit for this.”
Thorin withdrew the ring and set it upon the mandrel.
“For what?” he questioned.
“For bringing them together.”
“You invite people to dinner regularly.”
“Not with such excellent results.”
Thorin glanced over his shoulder. Upon seeing Bilbo’s playfully smug expression, he returned to the ring before Bilbo could see him smile.
For a while there was only the scrape of the file and the file and the quiet crackle of the hearth. Once Thorin had thought a forge ought to ring with many hammers, with bellows and voices beneath stone - and at times he still missed the great halls and the deep certainty of belonging to something made to endure.
Yet he had grown fond of the smaller things. The breeze through the open doors, and more shades of green beyond them that he had once known green possessed. The shelves Bilbo had filled with jars of nails while maintaining that he cared nothing for their arrangement. Bilbo himself, near at hand, whether talking without end or merely occupying the space Thorin had made.
When both rings were finished, Thorin laid them upon a square of dark cloth. They were not alike, precisely. Drogo’s was broader and Primula’s finer, yet they belonged together. Each shaped for the hand that would wear it.
He picked up Primula’s ring and placed it in Bilbo’s palm.
Bilbo turned it carefully between his fingers, his thumb brushing the smooth inner edge.
“It suits you.” he stated as though it were obvious what he was referring to.
Upon seeing Thorin’s one raised eyebrow, Bilbo realized that he did indeed need to clarify what he meant.
“Making rings for a marriage.” he explained.
“I have made more difficult things.” Thorin argued.
“I did not say you had not.”
“Then what are you saying?”
Bilbo’s gaze moved from the confusion on Thorin’s expression to the edge of the ring, where a thin line of sunlight rested upon the gold, and then back to Thorin’s face again.
“That you make things to last.”
The words were simple, and Bilbo had no intention of spoiling them by offering any further explanation. He instead sat the ring back upon the cloth and leaned in to kiss Thorin’s cheek, lingering just long enough for the warmth of it to remain after he drew away.
Thorin caught his hand.
For a moment neither moved. The forge seemed to settle around them like the hush after a bell had ceased ringing. Bilbo turned his hand beneath Thorin’s and laced their fingers together as naturally as if they had been sitting that way all afternoon. Thorin’s thumb moved idly across his fingers, pausing a moment at the base of one before moving on.
At last he let go of Bilbo’s hand, wrapped the rings in the cloth and tied it.
“They will be happy.” Bilbo said.
“I believe so.”
“We did rather well.” Bilbo continued as he took the bundle and tucked it carefully inside his waistcoat.
Thorin gave him an exasperated look, though there was no force in it. “Do not lose them.”
“Do not lose them.”
Bilbo drew himself up.
“I would like to remind you that I once carried a priceless jewel out from beneath a dragon’s snout.”
“Yes.” said Thorin plainly.
“That was perhaps not the reassuring example I had intended.”
This caused Thorin to burst into laughter, closely followed by Bilbo.
Outside, the afternoon lay warm upon the Shire, and field gave way too hedge and hedge to hill beneath the sun. Behind them, a few bright specks of gold remained scattered across the workbench.
Thorin would sweep them away tomorrow.
For now, Bilbo was waiting in the path, one hand extended behind him without looking, certain Thorin would take it.
❦
A ring fell from Bilbo’s waistcoat two days later.
Thorin had done no more than shake out the garment while folding the washing left upon the bed. Bilbo had washed it that morning, and had evidently considered hanging it to dry the proper end of the matter.
It struck the floorboards with a sound oddly heavy for so small a thing. Thorin looked down, expecting one of the coins Bilbo was forever leaving in his pockets, and saw instead a circle of gold beside his boot.
Thorin bent and picked it up.
It was larger than either of the rings he had made for Drogo and Primula, though not greatly so, and wholly plain. There was neither stone nor engraving upon it, nor the least ornament about its edge. He could not remember ever seeing Bilbo wear it.
Stranger still was its making. Thorin turned it between finger and thumb, but found neither seam nor mark of hammer or file. He carried it to the window and held it beneath the light.
Whoever had made it had possessed extraordinary skill, though by what craft Thorin could not guess. Its plainness ought to have made it unremarkable. Instead, the longer he looked, the less he could imagine anything added to it. A stone would mar its shape. Engraving would only trouble the smooth gold.
It was beautiful.
Eleven years together had left few mysteries between Thorin and Bilbo, at least of the ordinary domestic kind. Thorin knew which letters Bilbo kept though he never answered them, where he hid the better tea from relations deemed unworthy of it, and which cupboard held the seed-cake Bilbo still appeared to believe secret.
He knew, too, of the magic ring Bilbo had found beneath the mountains. By Mirkwood the whole Company had known of it, once invisibility became too useful a secret to keep. Yet Thorin had never had cause to examine the thing. In his memory it belonged less to any object than to Bilbo’s infuriating habit of appearing where no hobbit ought to be.
Thorin lowered his hand toward the table, intending to leave it beside the folded clothes until Bilbo returned.
The movement stopped before it touched the wood.
It would be safer somewhere else. Bag End was hardly insecure, but its door opened often and not always to people Bilbo had invited. Thorin could put it in one of the small lockboxes at the forge and tell Bilbo where it was when he came home.
There was no reason not to put it down.
Yet he did not.
A curious reluctance had come upon him, no stronger at first than the feeling that he had forgotten some small but necessary thing. There was nothing alarming in it. Rather, it held something in the warmth of beginning a new work, when its finished shape is already clear in the mind though no hammer has yet struck it.
His thoughts turned to the forge down the Hill. It had served him well enough these eleven years, growing as his work required it. Yet now he saw it as one who had known the workshops beneath Erebor might see it - a little house of stone, with one hearth and two benches, fit for hinges and buckles and garden-tools.
Hardly a forge fit for a king.
He might build another. There was land enough beyond Hobbiton. He might have a greater hearth there, and proper furnaces, and bellows worked by more than one pair of hands. Room enough for steel in quantities worth the working. He had not lost the skill for greater things merely because no one here required them of him. Nor was there any reason he must confine himself to smith-work.
Thorin’s thumb passed slowly over the gold.
He had commanded more than a forge once. Dwarves had followed him across half the world. Men had bargained with him, armies had waited upon his decisions, and there were halls beneath a mountain where his word had been law.
He had surrendered all of it willingly, and the thought of taking it up again had not troubled him in years.
Now, for the briefest moment, surrender seemed an absurd choice.
He knew better now. That was the difference. Whatever he built need not become what Erebor had become. He understood the danger of greed, of pride, of mistaking possession for worth. Surely the knowledge bought at such cost was worth something. Given the strength to do so, he could make something better.
He could keep safe what was his. Bilbo would never again have to stand before a dragon, never be threatened upon some lonely road, never be beyond Thorin’s power to protect.
The room seemed abruptly too quiet. Afternoon sunlight still lay across the floorboards, the washing waited half-folded upon the table, and somewhere outside a cart rattled past along the lane. Nothing had changed, yet Thorin’s heart had begun to beat with an urgency for which he could find no cause.
He ought to put it down.
Thorin lowered his hand toward the table again, and stopped short of it. There was nothing preventing the movement. His arm obeyed him, his fingers could open. He simply could not make himself finish the act.
Bilbo did not need the ring. Clearly he did not, if he could leave it forgotten in a waistcoat pocket. He had never spoken of it, never worn it in Thorin’s presence, never treated it as anything of consequence. Thorin, at least, understood what he was holding. He could keep it somewhere safe, somewhere it would not be lost or wasted. Bilbo would hardly-
The thought broke.
He had told himself much the same thing once of another treasure.
Memory came without warning - not of the Arkenstone, but of bilbo beneath his hands. For one instant he could feel the terrible smallness of Bilbo’s throat between his fingers and hear his own voice twisted by rage, demanding what he had decided ought to belong to him.
His hand opened.
The ring fell from his fingers and struck the boards with a small, heavy sound.
Thorin stumbled backward into the chair and overturned it. The crack of wood upon the floor vanished beneath the roaring of blood in his ears. He caught at the dresser, fingers digging into the wood, and stared at the little circle of gold.
His stomach turned. He bent over the dresser with one hand against his mouth as sickness rose bitterly in his throat. For several seconds the room seemed to narrow until there was nothing in it but the ring upon the boards and the violent beating of his own heart.
Not again.
Not here.
Not after all this time.
After waking beneath the Mountain eighteen years ago, he had discovered that surviving his madness had not ended his desire. Even after he had taken up the crown again, even after Erebor had begun to live around him, gold could still draw his eye and hold it. More than once he had gone down to the treasure vaults and stopped outside its doors, tracing the carvings softly with his fingers the way a tongue worries at a broken tooth. Some days he had wanted it badly enough to stand there for hours, yet that one memory had kept him from entering.
Not Bilbo as he was now, laughing in the forge or sleeping warm beside him, but Bilbo beneath his hands. Bilbo unable to draw breath. Bilbo looking at him with a fear Thorin had put there.
Thorin looked at the ring on the floor and felt, beneath the horror, the urge to pick it up again.
He turned away from it so violently that his shoulder struck the wall. For one terrible instant he wanted to snatch it up, hide it in his palm, prove that he could hold it without being ruled by it. The impulse was followed immediately by a sickening certainty that this was precisely how it would begin again - one touch, one excuse, one failure disguised as control.
His hands flattened against the wall, the plaster pressing cold against his palms. He locked his elbows and counted his breath, but each one broke apart like glass struck upon stone before it reached his lungs.
Bilbo would notice the ring missing from his pocket. Thorin knew he ought to return it, but the thought of touching it again made his stomach turn, while another quieter impulse beneath the fear supplied reasons why one touch would do no harm.
He backed toward the passage instead, keeping his eyes fixed anywhere but the floor.
The ring remained where it had fallen. Bilbo’s half-folded washing lay where Thorin had abandoned it, and the ordinary disorder of the room seemed almost obscene around something that had overturned nearly eighteen years of careful containment in a matter of minutes.
❦
Bilbo noticed the washing first.
He had been home for several minutes before he went in search of the waistcoat he meant to wear to supper. He found it hanging over the back of a chair, one pocket turned half inside-out. The rest of the washing had been abandoned across the room - one half folded into Thorin’s usual severe rectangles, the other still waiting in its basket.
Stranger still, a chair lay overturned beside the dresser.
Bilbo righted the chair and reached for his waistcoat when something gold caught light near one of its legs.
His ring.
A sharp little rush of relief accompanied the sight of it. Bilbo stooped immediately and slipped it into his pocket, pressing his fingers against the familiar shape before irritation overtook the momentary alarm. He was rarely so careless with it. It must have fallen out when Thorin folded up the washing, though why Thorin had left it on the floor along with an overturned chair and half the laundry was another question entirely.
The question remained when Thorin came home.
He was not terribly late, but Bilbo knew something was wrong before he had finished hanging his coat. There was little enough to explain the feeling. Thorin was dirty from the forge and quiet after a day’s work, neither of which was remarkable - but there was a strained deliberation in his movements, as though every thing required thought.
Thorin scarcely ate. He pushed the food about his plate and now and then seemed to remember that some of it ought to reach his mouth. Bilbo carried most of the conversation alone. Twice Thorin’s attention wandered so completely that Bilbo had to repeat himself. The third time he fell silent instead and watched Thorin stare at his own hands, his thumb moving slowly across the side of his finger as though testing for something upon the skin.
“Thorin.”
His hand stopped.
“You are not eating.” Bilbo stated, with a glance at his plate.
“I am not hungry.”
That was sufficiently improbable for Bilbo’s concern to sharpen further. Thorin seemed to realize it too, because he muttered something about having eaten at the forge, though Bilbo knew exactly how much luncheon had gone down the hill that morning and how much remained when he collected the basket.
❦
Later that evening, Bilbo found him standing motionless in the passage.
Thorin’s lips were moving. Bilbo caught only the tail end of whatever he was muttering before he said his name, and Thorin turned with such violence that Bilbo stopped short. For an instant his face was entirely unguarded.
He crossed the remaining distance between them and laid a hand against Thorin’s shoulder. Thorin went rigid beneath his palm. He did not recoil or push Bilbo away - every muscle simply tightened at once, as though the touch had caught him unprepared for something much worse.
Bilbo withdrew his hand.
“Forgive me.” Thorin said.
“For what?”
No answer came.
A weary silence settled between them.
“Come to bed.” Bilbo said at last. “You’re exhausted.”
Thorin hesitated before agreeing.
For a while he thought exhaustion might accomplish what conversation had not. Thorin lay quietly beside him in the dark, and eventually Bilbo drifted into an uneasy sleep.
When he woke again, the sheets beside him were cold, and a thin line of light showed beneath the bedroom door.
Bilbo found him in the kitchen, standing at the window in his nightshirt with one hand braced against the frame. The lamp had been turned low behind him, leaving his face reflected faintly against the glass.
“I couldn’t sleep.” Thorin said when Bilbo approached.
It was too fast. Even in the weak light Bilbo could see the pulse beating hard in his throat. This time, when he reached for him, he did so slowly - yet Thorin was wound as tightly beneath his arms as he had been in the passage.
“What are you frightened of?”
Thorin’s breath stopped.
For one long moment Bilbo thought he had reached whatever had followed Thorin through the house all evening. Thorin’s hand curled into the cloth at his back, and he bowed his head until his cheek nearly touched Bilbo’s hair.
“Go back to bed, Bilbo.” he said. “Please.”
In the end Bilbo went, because Thorin would allow him to do nothing else. Sleep, however, did not come. He lay facing the door and listened until, much later, Thorin’s footsteps came slowly along the passage.
A moment later he found Thorin’s hand beneath the covers and took it.
There was a pause before Thorin’s fingers closed around his.
Bilbo held on anyway.
❦
The following morning was no better, and by the day after that Bilbo had stopped expecting it to be.
He began measuring meals by how much Thorin left behind. Half a slice of toast at breakfast, most of a pie at luncheon, a bowl of stew gone cold while Thorin sat before it with his hands clasped beneath the table. Asking whether he was hungry only made him insist that he was fine, so Bilbo stopped asking and simply put food within reach. Sometimes Thorin ate a little of it. More often Bilbo cleared it away later without comment.
It was the muttering he found hardest. Thorin had always spoken to himself now and then while working, particularly when something refused to behave as he thought it ought - but now the habit followed him through Bag End. Bilbo would hear his footsteps somewhere beyond the room and a low voice begin, too quiet to understand. Whenever Bilbo appeared, Thorin stopped.
That afternoon he caught enough to make him freeze halfway out of the pantry.
“...no doors here.”
Thorin stood near the front door with one hand gripping the little table beside it.
Bilbo’s blood ran cold.
“What do you mean?” he tried, though he could already predict the answer.
“Nothing.”
❦
That night Bilbo woke to silence and knew, before reaching across the bed, that he was alone. The sheets were cold, and the kitchen empty. No light showed beneath the door to the study either, and when he reached the passage he found Thorin’s coat missing from its peg.
By the time Bilbo reached the forge, fear had acquired an edge of anger. The hammer blows carried through the walls before he opened the door, heavy and uneven enough that even Bilbo knew they were wrong. Eleven years together had taught him something of the rhythms of Thorin’s work. He knew the quick ringing cadence of lighter jobs and the measured blows used to shape stubborn iron. The sound that met him now belonged to neither.
Thorin stood at the anvil with his hair loose and his sleeves pushed above his elbows, bringing the hammer down upon something far too small to require such force. He did not seem to hear Bilbo enter.
It took his name twice before the hammer finally stopped.
He looked dreadful. What had begun as shadows beneath his eyes had become bruised hollows, his face drawn with exhaustion. Sweat darkened the hair at his temples, and the hand resting against the anvil trembled. There was blood on the heel of his other hand.
Bilbo crossed the forge and took the injured hand before Thorin seemed to realize what he was doing. The cut was shallow, but the fact that Thorin had apparently failed to notice it frightened him more than the blood itself.
He found a clean piece of cloth and began wiping the wound.
“Come home.”
“I have work.”
“You can barely hold the hammer.”
Thorin’s mouth tightened before he replied.
“I could not sleep.”
Bilbo wrapped the cloth around his palm. As Thorin tried to pull away, Bilbo tightened his grip.
“I don’t know what is happening to you, Thorin.”
For the first time since this began, Thorin looked directly at him. The fear Bilbo had caught only in fragments was plainly visible now, and somehow seeing it confirmed was worse than wondering whether he had imagined it.
“You should go home.” Thorin said.
“I want you to come with me.”
“I cannot.”
“Why?” Bilbo searched his face for some answer.
No answer came.
“I don’t know how to help you if you don’t tell me what is wrong.”
Thorin closed his eyes. His shoulders sagged, and when he answered, his voice was so quiet that Bilbo almost wished he had not heard it.
“I know.”
The forge seemed larger in the silence than Bilbo remembered it. The workbench stood between pools of failing firelight, and familiar tools cast long, strange shadows across the floor. For the first time Bilbo felt less as though he were standing in Thorin’s home than waiting at its threshold.
Eventually Thorin asked him to go home again, and this time Bilbo understood that there was nothing he could say that would bring him up the hill.
He nodded, then reached past Thorin and took the hammer from the bench.
“You are in no condition to use this.”
He carried the hammer home, shifting it from hand to hand as he climbed, surprised anew each time by how much weight such an ordinary thing could possess.
Once inside Bag End, Bilbo set it upon the kitchen table and left the lamp burning beside it. He did not know when Thorin would follow, and by now he knew better than to wait awake listening for the door.
Whatever Thorin believed he had to face alone, Bilbo could not bear the thought of him coming home to darkness.
❦
The rings were brought forward beneath the expectant hush of the gathered company.
Bilbo recognized the dark cloth immediately. He remembered Thorin in the forge only days before, turning the finished bands beneath the afternoon light, and the warmth of the memory made the change beside him all the more terrible.
Thorin had gone still. His attention fixed upon the rings with an intensity Bilbo had not seen all afternoon - what little colour remained in his face drained away, and his bandaged hand closed tightly against his knee.
Bilbo reached instinctively for his arm. The muscle tightened beneath his fingers, though Thorin did not pull away. When Bilbo murmured his name, barely loud enough to carry between them, it took several seconds before Thorin broke his stare.
“I am fine.”
“No,” Bilbo said quietly. “You are not.”
Thorin’s eyes flicked towards the hobbits seated nearest them, all of whom remained occupied with Drogo and Primula.
Bilbo kept his hand upon Thorin’s arm, light enough that from a distance the touch could have been mistaken for nothing more than affection.
“When we are at home, this ends.”
Thorin turned fully toward him then.
“Bilbo-”
“No. Listen to me.” Bilbo tightened his fingers once around his sleeve before remembering where they were and forcing himself to loosen them.
He could feel his pulse beating unpleasantly hard, and when he spoke again his voice was quieter.
“I have spent the better part of a week watching you grow more frightened by the hour while you insist there is nothing wrong. I will not do it another night.”
Bilbo moved his hand from Thorin’s sleeve to his wrist, feeling the pulse beneath his fingers.
“Look at me.” he urged.
Thorin hesitated before obeying, and what Bilbo saw nearly undid him. Weariness had worn through what remained of Thorin’s defences. For one painful moment Bilbo wanted nothing more than to take him home, put him to bed, and ask no questions until morning.
“I don’t care if you think it is foolish.” Bilbo continued. “I don’t care if you think I will be angry, or frightened, or unable to understand. Whatever it is, you are not doing this alone for another night.”
“You don’t know what you’re asking.”
“No.” Bilbo said. “How can I when you refuse to tell me?”
Thorin stayed silent, so Bilbo continued.
“I am not asking you to make it less frightening before you share it with me,” he said. “I am asking you to trust me enough to tell me what I am frightened for.”
At last Thorin nodded.
Only then did Bilbo let go.
When he turned back toward the ceremony, Primula had taken Drogo’s hand, and one of the rings they had asked Thorin to make was being slipped upon her finger. Bilbo watched it settle there, the gold catching briefly in the afternoon light. Beside him, Thorin’s hand shifted upon his knee until the back of it rested lightly against Bilbo’s.
Bilbo did not take it. He merely let their hands remain touching.
For the moment, it would have to be enough.
❦
By the time they reached the hill, the wedding had dwindled to music behind them.
For a while the wind carried pieces of it over the fields - a fiddle rising clear above the hedges, a burst of laughter, the beginning of a song swallowed before Bilbo could place it. Then the road bent, the lights disappeared, and there was only the dry whisper of their footsteps and Thorin walking beside him with his hands clasped behind his back.
Bilbo did not take his arm - the week had made him weary of reaching for Thorin. The realization ached in his chest.
Bag End received them in its accustomed silence. Bilbo lit the lamps, and familiar things emerged from the dark - the clock above the mantel, the worn kitchen table, Thorin’s hammer still lying among the teacups and seed-cake crumbs where Bilbo had left it. It looked absurd there, too heavy and severe for the room, like an unwanted guest among familiar company.
“Sit.” Bilbo commanded.
Thorin obeyed with only the faintest stirring of protest. While Bilbo put on the kettle and brought out bread and cheese, he sat with his bandaged hand upon the table and the other hidden in his lap. In the warm light his face had the grey cast of weariness, the hollows beneath his eyes dark as shadows beneath a waning moon.
Bilbo sat opposite him.
“I only want to understand, Thorin. Please.”
Thorin sighed. He held himself very still, but it was the stillness of a brow drawn taut, every line of him strained against the effort of remaining so.
“I do not know where to begin.”
The kettle began its small noises over the fire. Bilbo waited through one silence, then another. He had spent days doing so - waiting outside doors, waiting over untouched plates, waiting for footsteps to return to the bed. He had watched each sleepless night take something from Thorin. Each morning found him paler, the lines of his face drawn a little sharper around the bone, and still he insisted there was nothing to see.
“Start badly.” he said. “You have plainly had no success finding a better way.”
Something almost offended flickered through Thorin’s exhaustion, and was gone.
“I thought I had left it there.”
Bilbo’s anger quieted like a flame beneath sudden rain.
He did not need to ask where there was.
Thorin rose and went to the hearth. He braced both his hands upon the mantel and bowed his head between them, his hair falling forward enough to hide his face. For a long moment he seemed to have nothing to offer the room but the bowed line of his back and the weight of his hands upon the stone. Then his fingers tightened against it.
“I was wrong about myself.” he stated with a hoarseness to his voice that had not been present only a moment ago.
There was something in the words Bilbo disliked intensely. It seemed less like sorrow and more like judgement already passed.
“What happened while you were folding the washing?” Bilbo carefully asked as he too rose from his chair.
Thorin’s shoulders drew suddenly upward and held there, as though the question had laid some sudden weight across them.
There was no denying it any longer. Bilbo had wondered for days whether the abandoned clothes and overturned chair had anything to do with this, and now the answer stood before him in the rigid line of Thorin’s back.
For a long while the fire spoke more readily than either of them, snapping softly in the hearth.
“I found a ring.”
Bilbo’s hand went instinctively to his pocket.
Thorin turned at the movement.
Bilbo’s fingers had already settled over the small, familiar weight through the cloth. He took an instinctive comfort in its familiar weight. Whatever else had gone strange around him, the ring at least was precisely where it ought to be. He remembered finding it near the overturned chair, though until now he had seen no reason to connect so ordinary a thing with Thorin’s distress.
“You mean this?”
Thorin’s eyes fixed upon his hand, and understanding arrived so suddenly for Bilbo that for a moment he merely stared at the dwarf.
“Thorin. This is my magic ring.”
The words seemed to make no sense to Thorin at first, but then his expression altered.
Bilbo had expected the revelation to do more than that.
Instead Thorin gave a weary shake of his head.
“It makes no difference.”
“Of course it makes a difference.”
“I know what I felt.”
The force of it silenced Bilbo.
Thorin turned from the hearth. Something stronger than weariness had stirred in him now, like coal showing red beneath ash.
“I could not put it down.”
Bilbo’s hand fell from his pocket.
“I tried. There was nothing holding my fingers closed. I simply-” Thorin looked at his hand as though it belonged to someone else entirely. “I would not.”
Bilbo thought of the clothes scattered across the bedroom floor, the chair lying upon its side, and Thorin gone from the room before he returned. Until now those things had belonged to the beginning of the mystery. He had not understood that, for Thorin, they had already contained its answer.
Still, he did not interrupt or ask questions, but instead merely waited for Thorin to explain at his own pace.
“I thought of the forge. Of the gold upon the bench and how little of it there was. No-”
Thorin frowned, and for an instant his eyes seemed to turn inward, following some path grown strange even to himself.
“Erebor came before that. Or after. I cannot tell you. I thought of the Mountain, and then of things I might make, and then I was thinking of what had been mine there. What might have been mine still.”
His fingers curled against his palm as he continued, the words coming now like water through a broken floodgate.
“It would not keep its shape in my mind. One thought became another before I had properly understood the first, but beneath them all was the same thing. I desired. And the more I desired, the more reason I found that I ought to.”
Bilbo felt a chill that had nothing to do with the dying fire. He knew enough of those last days beneath the Mountain to understand that Thorin was trying, with such miserable care, to tell him. The thoughts themselves mattered less than the familiarity of them.
Thorin raised his eyes at last.
“I knew that desire, Bilbo.”
Bilbo knew what would come next before Thorin even spoke the words.
“I remembered your throat beneath my hands.”
The room seemed very small.
Eighteen years had done nothing to make that memory pleasant, but time had given it edges. Bilbo could touch it now without falling into it.
Thorin, he realised, had spent the better part of a week doing precisely the opposite.
“I dropped the ring,” Thorin said. “and then I wanted to pick it up again.”
The voice had gone nearly toneless.
“That was when I knew.”
Bilbo stared at him.
“Knew?”
Thorin’s brow tightened.
“That it had returned.”
For one suspended moment Bilbo felt only the enormous relief of finally understanding what had been happening the past week. That relief, however, was followed so quickly by incredulity that he nearly laughed - though nothing about Thorin’s face permitted it.
“You didn’t know anything.” Bilbo said. “You found a magic ring of unknown making, felt something you could not explain while holding it, frightened yourself half to death because it reminded you of Erebor, and decided that settled the matter.
“It did not merely remind me of Erebor.” Thorin stepped toward him. “It was not a passing greed. Everything began to turn around it, every thought found its way back. I could make taking it reasonable. Necessary, even. I could make myself righteous in my desire.”
His voice had risen, though he seemed to catch himself and stop.
Bilbo did not retreat.
“I know, love.” he said.
Thorin looked almost angry at the gentleness of it.
Bilbo touched the ring through his pocket.
“And this is still magic.” Bilbo continued. “I found the thing on the floor of a cave. I know neither who made it nor how. It makes me invisible, which I should think is sufficient evidence that it does not behave like an ordinary piece of jewellery.”
“That is not an explanation, you do not know that it caused this.” Thorin argued.
Bilbo could see the fear in him beginning, little by little, to give beneath the warmth of another possibility, like the last snow of winter under a spring sun. Thorin himself did not seem to have noticed.
“No.” Bilbo said as he stepped closer. “Neither do you.”
The words were quiet. They needed to be.
Thorin stared at him like a man who had come suddenly upon a door where he had been certain there was only stone.
For days, Bilbo realised, there had been no uncertainty in his fear. Thorin had taken the worst explanation available and built everything upon it, then gone backward through eleven years gathering stones for the foundation.
His gaze drifted to the bandaged hand.
“The rings.”
Thorin flinched.
Bilbo remembered him in the forge - the care with which he had turned Primula’s ring in the light. The faint, strange stillness when Bilbo had remarked that making rings for a marriage suited him. He remembered Thorin catching his hand before he could withdraw it, their fingers lacing together beside two circles of gold made for other hands.
“You’ve been thinking about those too.”
Thorin looked toward the darkened window.
“I wanted them beautiful.” he said. “I enjoyed making them.”
He said it with shame rather than a craftsman’s pride, as though pleasure itself had become evidence against him.
Thorin’s jaw tightened, as though Bilbo were refusing to understand something obvious. A muscle stirred sharply beneath his cheek, and his mouth pressed into the stubborn line Bilbo knew so well. He looked almost offended by Bilbo’s failure to be horrified.
Bilbo studied him instead.
“Did you want to keep them?”
At last Thorin looked at him.
“No.” Thorin responded simply without hesitation.
“Even today?”
Thorin’s eyes flickered. Bilbo could almost see the memory of the ceremony passing through them - Primula’s hand, Drogo’s beside it, the gold catching sunlight as it settled where Thorin had always intended it to go.
“No.”
The second answer came more slowly, but no less certainly.
Something shifted.
Bilbo thought again of that afternoon in the forge. Thorin had wanted something - of that much he was now oddly certain. But it had not been the gold upon the cloth. Thorin’s attention had kept wandering from the rings to Bilbo, and when Bilbo had spoken of marriage and things made to last, Thorin had reached for his hand.
Bilbo looked down at the hand he was holding now.
Thorin’s thumb moved unconsciously across his fingers and lingered, for no more than a heartbeat, at the base of one.
Bilbo kept his face carefully still, for perhaps this was not the hour to question Thorin whether one desire had been mistaken for another.
“You are allowed to feel things in the presence of gold.” he said instead.
Thorin gave him a tired, suspicious look. Then a breath left him that might almost have become a laughter.
Bilbo curled his fingers more firmly through Thorin’s, answering the unconscious touch with a small pressure of his own.
“One strange thing happened while you were holding one very strange thing. You don’t know what it meant.”
Thorin’s gaze strayed towards Bilbo’s pocket. For once, Bilbo let the silence do the work.
At length Thorin closed his eyes, and the words he spoke came out scarcely more than breath.
“No, I do not.”
Bilbo felt the relief go through him so sharply that it was almost painful.
Then he remembered the untouched suppers. He remembered the cold half of the bed. Once his memories got to the blood upon Thorin’s hand, his relief acquired teeth and claws.
“You should have told me.”
Thorin looked away.
“Bilbo, if I had been right-”
“I don’t care.”
That brought his gaze back.
“I do not care if you had been right.” Bilbo said. “Not about this.”
Thorin stared at him, bewilderment opening a crack in the misery of his expression
“If it comes back tomorrow - properly comes back, with no magic ring to blame - then you tell me tomorrow.”
“I would be a danger to you.”
“And I would deserve to know that.”
Thorin recoiled from the words, but Bilbo caught his wrist before he could move farther away.
“We have lived together for eleven years. We do not get to share the roof and the work and my impossible family and then suddenly become strangers because something is frightening.”
A tremor went through Thorin’s hand. Bilbo continued regardless.
“You do not protect me by leaving me in the dark.”
“I nearly killed you.”
“I remember.”
“Though I lacked words for it at the time, I did love you then.”
Bilbo’s breath caught, but now it was Thorin’s turn to continue.
“I loved you, and that was still not enough to make you safe.”
Thorin’s face had begun to come apart.
For the better part of a week he had seemed to Bilbo like a man holding shut a door against something terrible. Now the strength required to hold it had simply run out.
“I did not know what was mine anymore.” Thorin whispered.
Bilbo said nothing. Thorin’s mouth shaped the beginnings of several answers and abandoned them. For once Bilbo did not come to his rescue. He waited.
At last the words came, haltingly at first.
“I remembered the rings and could not remember why I had wanted them beautiful. I remembered coins in my hands, things I had made, things I had admired. Every time I thought I had found the difference, I doubted it. Then I doubted the doubt. I would remember something one way and an hour later it had changed.”
His breathing had grown shallow.
“It was like the Arkenstone. Not only the wanting, but everything around it. You begin with one certainty and soon every other thing must bend itself around it. A question becomes suspicion. Fear becomes proof. You turn a thing over until you cannot remember what it looked like before you touched it.”
Thorin pressed a hand to his forehead.
“I could not find the edge of myself.”
The last words broke.
Bilbo reached him before he could turn away.
For an instant Thorin resisted by sheer habit. His hands caught Bilbo’s shoulders and held there. Rigid, frightened hands that had spent four days finding occupations for themselves so they never needed to touch him without thought.
Then they closed around him, and Thorin folded.
Bilbo staggered beneath the sudden weight and planted his feet, wrapping both arms around him. Thorin buried his face against Bilbo’s shoulder with a sound so small that Bilbo wished afterward that he had not heard it. The body in his arms shook with exhaustion that had nowhere left to go, so Bilbo held him tighter.
“I thought I had brought it with me.”
“You brought yourself.” Bilbo murmured softly into Thorin’s hair. “I rather wanted you.”
Thorin’s arms tightened painfully around him, and for a little while Bilbo bore the whole weight of him - not merely his body, but all that he had held upright these past days.
They remained that way until the trembling eased by slow degrees, each shudder smaller than the last, until at length Bilbo could feel nothing but Thorin’s breath stirring against his shoulder and the weary weight of him in his arms. The kettle had long since begun to complain behind them, but Bilbo let it. There were priorities even in a respectable household.
Eventually Thorin lifted his head. His eyes were red, his face exhausted and damp, and Bilbo discovered that it was very difficult to remain properly irritated with a face one loved quite so much.
“Now,” he said, wiping Thorin’s cheek with his thumb. “you are going to eat.”
The only response he was met with was a disapproving sigh.
“That was not a suggestion.” Bilbo insisted.
“I have noticed you have become unusually commanding.”
Something shifted in Thorin’s face. It was no great transformation - the exhaustion remained beneath his eyes, and multiple sleepless nights could not be undone by a few quiet words in a kitchen. But the terrible watchfulness had gone from his gaze, and when the corner of his mouth turned upward, Bilbo’s heart gave a ridiculous little leap at the sight of it.
“You married a tyrant.”
“We are not married.”
“We have just spent an entire day at a wedding. Do not become pedantic now.”
Thorin’s mouth moved first.
Then his chest.
The laugh that emerged was quiet and frayed at its edges, nothing like the one that had filled the forge only days earlier while Bilbo stood waiting in the path with his hand behind him. It did not need to be, Bilbo was close enough to feel it.
And when he finally stepped away to cut the seed-cake, their joined hands stretched between them for another heartbeat before beginning to part.
His thumb passed once more across the base of Bilbo’s finger.
Bilbo looked down at their hands, then up at him. There was longing in Thorin’s eyes still, but nothing fevered in it now. Nothing that asked to be hidden or feared. It was a quiet thing, warm as the kitchen fire and familiar as the hand that lingered around his own.
Neither of them said a thing. There would be time enough for that. For now, Bilbo returned his hand beneath Thorin’s and held on.
❦