Work Text:
Thorin did not mean to do it (and wasn't that the story of his life, of late).
(His mind felt like one long corridor, except half of it was caved in and the rest was just a line of doors and he kept opening the wrong ones and closing the right ones, and he no longer remembered which way was out, but he remembered the glint of firelight on Fíli's hair, and the way sometimes he would tilt his head away from Thorin, as if hiding his eyes would keep himself secret from him, and Thorin kept yanking open doors as if he would find the Fíli he had known before behind one, smile more restrained than his brother's, but still wide and open as the plains and valleys, covered in the warm glow of sunlight—)
He had not meant to sneak up on Fíli, the night he caught him playing the Misty Mountains on Thorin's own harp.
He had not meant to forbid him from playing the song again, even as Fíli's soft protests became more distressed.
He had not even meant to hold Fíli against his chest, wringing little whimpers from him as he twitched his head back and forth, hair spilling over his shoulders, letting Thorin drag his teeth across his throat, as if that did not put him at any risk.
Fíli kept baring his throat to Thorin as if Thorin had not become the predator dangerously close to tearing it out for its own sick desires—
For that matter–Thorin had not meant to take him the first time. The night in the treasure room—a night he refused to ever repeat, not wanting Fíli to ever see him there again, the way he used to watch his own grandfather lose himself night after night to the lure of the gold around him—had been a mistake.
He had been so close to resisting the pull inside his own breastbone, even with Fíli looking up at him, knees pressed hard against the gold, confusion and fear in equal measures on his face, and Thorin had almost even gotten away with placing the gold necklace around his throat, the look of that thick chain against his skin and hair enough to have driven Thorin mad if he wasn't already—but then Fíli had let his breath catch when Thorin's fingers tangled up in the chains and it was like an avalanche had been set off.
One that any mortal or beast would have been incapable of stopping, the awful power of the snow coming down the mountains built up over hours, days, weeks, longer—suddenly unleashed by the smallest of echoes between mountain peaks.
Thorin had been caught in an avalanche once, when all anyone knew of Fíli was his golden hair and blue eyes, too tiny to be a real being yet, before Kíli was born. He had gone with Dwalin, a few of the others, trying to find a way over the Misty Mountains. He had tripped, fallen, and the ensuing cry had set it off.
In the end Dwalin had dug him out, shivering and bruised, and they had never found the others.
He later thought that perhaps Fíli thought it was the gold, the mounds of treasure or the links of the necklace Thorin put around his throat with his own hands, but those things were only pebbles, the last weights that broke the scale irreparably.
He had taken Fíli like some wild animal, even when he realized somewhere in the midst of it that Fíli no longer seemed to be behind his own eyes, like his mind had taken itself somewhere else, but his body remained behind, in Thorin's hands.
He had not meant to go back, meant to take his hands and his filthy sickness back into himself, but that lie had only lasted seeing Fíli again, afterwards. Instead of running, he'd gone up to him, ran his fingers through Fíli's golden hair, and watched Fíli flutter his eyes closed, head bowing. He knew, then and later, it was submission born of fear, but that did not make it any less intoxicating.
Sometimes he thought about shaking Fíli awake in the middle of the night, just to ask him if he realized Thorin thought of himself as the moth, and Fíli as the candle, and if he would somehow find that amusing. Whoever would have thought of Thorin as a moth, before?
Then it became almost a strange game, of how long Thorin could stay away, how many days he could keep himself from tangling his fingers up in Fíli's golden hair—
Fíli seemed to catch onto the rules quickly, right before he upended the entire board game the night Thorin asked him what he wanted, the night Fíli actually looked right at him before he leaned up and pressed a kiss to Thorin's mouth.
Avalanche, he thought again, tumbling down the side of the mountain, and Fíli should have known better.
Instead he taught Thorin how to please him, little by little, accident by accident. He liked kissing, his hair pulled but never harshly, and while he did not like the jewelry Thorin could not help but shower him in, he shivered when Thorin forgot to take his own rings off.
He also taught Thorin what he hated, and Thorin in his more lucid moments thought he should not be keeping a catalog of how to hurt his consort.
(He liked the word consort, it allowed him to mentally side step all the other words, the other titles Fíli carried.)
But still he made note of them, one by one—Fíli did not like begging, did not like being on his knees on the stone floor, did not like Thorin giving him rules, did not like when Thorin's hands were hard and angry.
(His reaction to Thorin's hand on his throat required more exploration before it could be placed in one category or the other. He flinched away, eyes wide on Thorin's face, but there was something in his face that felt like—maybe—)
So when Thorin found Fíli sitting at his harp, plucking the strings in a tune he had not heard in over a year, he used what advantages he had to calm Fíli before giving him another rule, one he knew Fíli would hate. He just hadn't meant to, even when he pulled Fíli up to his feet, brought him up against his chest and wrapped his hands around his cock. He had not meant to make a demand.
But as he had walked into their chambers, through the back door in the bathroom he had never told Fíli about, he had been brought to a stop by the song, the words springing immediately to his own mind. He could almost taste them in his own mouth as Fíli kept playing them, one after another, even though as far as Thorin knew, he had never played that tune on a harp before.
To dungeons deep and caverns old
We must away, ere break of day—
Fíli was not singing, but Thorin knew the words by heart, having written them verse by verse in the wild.
Coming around the corner at first Thorin froze, because Fíli honestly did not seem to realize how beautiful he was, especially sitting at Thorin's harp, hair unbound, in the light of the fire. Sometimes Thorin was grateful he started wearing his hair up, because it meant only he got to see this anymore. He coveted Fíli for his own, particularly this Fíli, and he felt like there was a monster curled up in his chest, one that rumbled in pleasure to know this was his alone.
Far over the misty mountains grim
To dungeons deep and caverns dim
We must away, ere break of day
To win our harps and gold from him
And not even the sight of Fíli in front of the fire, so caught in the song he did not even see Thorin, removed the sting of the memory of that song, the last time they had all sung in, in the hole in the ground of the hobbit and Thorin nearly hissed at the memory, of the way Bilbo had looked at him, when he first saw him, the way he puffed up when Thorin asked after his weapon, and especially of the way Bilbo had looked at him with the winter wind in his hair, up on Erebor's battlements—
He did not like to be reminded of Bilbo Baggins.
He perhaps liked it even less when he asked—“Why that song?”
“You used to sing it to us,” Fíli replied, and instead of Bilbo Thorin was suddenly reminded of the warmth of Fíli's little hands, when he stayed up too late and sneaked into the main room just to listen to Thorin sing the song to Kíli. Thorin had carried him to bed, sang the song specifically just to him, and then so many nights afterwards he sung it to both of them, Kíli's dark little head burrowed against Fíli's shoulder, but Fíli's eyes always stayed open the whole song, watching Thorin—
Thorin sometimes thought he should have cut his own fingers off after touching his nephew like he had that night in the treasure rooms, should have fled the mountain entirely and thrown himself back at the mercy of the wilderness for taking what should have never been his.
But then he kissed Fíli again and let himself forget. This Fíli was his, warm and shuddering in his arms, not the Fíli of the past anymore.
He could not forget with Fíli playing that song, eyes soft and distant as Thorin had watched him.
“We have our long-forgotten gold,” Thorin said instead, reached out for Fíli's hair, twining the tips of his fingers in the edges of it, watched Fíli drop his eyes and go quiet. As usual, the submission Fíli did not even fully seem to realize he was offering made something strange happen to Thorin, made him desperate to hold on, to take more from Fíli.
“You should play happier songs,” Thorin said, pressing his thumb to the line of Fíli's mouth. It always made Fíli shift, made him open his mouth just a tiny bit.
“I like that one,” Fíli said, lips forming the words against Thorin's finger. “It always meant something to me.”
“I will write you a song of our victory,” Thorin said, Fíli's eyes darting up to his face and it was too much for Thorin, breaking all over again as he pawed at Fíli's shoulders until he rose, until he kissed Thorin and Thorin, as ever, felt dangerously close to being lost there. He would kiss Fíli, and never stop. Did Fíli not know how dangerous it was to keep offering that—like his throat—
But then almost as quickly, as Thorin turned Fíli around with his back pulled up against his chest, Fíli tilted his head, offered his neck right up to Thorin and Thorin had never quite understood dragon-sickness until he had been offered the treasure of Fíli's submission.
(He would never let Fíli catch him in the treasure rooms, not again, not like Thrór, but also, he wondered if Fíli understood how rarely he went there. For all the quest, for all that he was King Under the Mountain, he stood surrounded by gold and longed for the fall of Fíli's hair across his bare shoulders as he threw his head back, and it was not that he would let a single coin from the hoard go, but Fíli both saved and damned him and Thorin had been there, that very night before he caught Fíli at the harp, shifting through piles of gold as if they had an answer for him—)
He knew he was sick. He knew it was Erebor itself that made him sick, the dragon's stench so deeply rooted it would forever echo down its halls, even if no one could actually smell it anymore.
But when he had Fíli's cock in his hands, had him shifting up against him, one hand braced on Thorin's forearm, he did not care.
He wanted this, forever, Fíli's head tilted to the side, Thorin's mouth on the join of his shoulder and neck, feeling the little tremors wracking Fíli's body.
Sometimes in the middle of the night he knew he had forced this, that Fíli would not have chosen him, even if he had done things right from the beginning. But in moments like this, Fíli's voice straining and breaking in the air between them, it was easy enough to forget that. However things started, Fíli wanted him now.
Fíli belonged to him now, to Erebor, because they were both Erebor, and someday Fíli would understand that, instead of longing for the wilds.
Someday.
In the meantime Thorin would tie Fíli closer and closer to himself, hold him just tight enough to not break, and take what he coveted.
Then Fíli turned his head, begged silently for Thorin to kiss him, and when Thorin granted it, he turned half way around, one arm going up to the back of Thorin's head just to kiss him, like he truly wanted nothing more in the world, and Thorin thought again that he really was the moth, drawn to that light over and over.
He wondered if Fíli had figured out yet he was the candle, and candles burned moths.