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Thorin stared out over the ledge, eyes blind to the bustle of his people below. Dwalin was a line of warmth at his side. They had woken together in the same bed, when the last that Thorin remembered was dying in Bilbo's arms, a bitter regret thick in his throat, full of words he could never say.
“I stayed,” Dwalin whispered. None could hear them, not on their ledge, not over the din of the market and the bustle of their people below. “In Erebor. I became your tomb-widow and I stayed. Bilbo...left. He never returned.”
Thorin closed his eyes for a long moment. “You could have gone.”
Dwalin tensed. It took a long while for his hands to relax on the stone wall in front of them. “I could not.”
“Dwalin –”
“You were King Under the Mountain,” Dwalin hissed, not turning his head. “You gave your life for our home, for our people. I was not about throw out your sacrifice like rubbish.”
“Dáin would have –”
“Dáin,” the word was a snarl. “Would and did plenty.”
Thorin drew in a slow breath and let it out on a gust of a sigh. “What happened?”
Dwalin's fingers drummed on the wall, a short staccato burst that Thorin recognized as the beat to one of Bilbo's walking songs. It had been agony to see their One on their Quest, seeing him confused and sad and hopeful and – and – and...
“You were dead,” Dwalin began. “The boys,” Dwalin bowed his head for a long moment. Thorin braced himself against the surge of fury and grief that swept over him. “All that was left was Dáin. The council demanded he be crowned immediately, right after the funerals.”
Thorin frowned. “So soon.”
“It was indecent. We didn't go. Bilbo...Bilbo vanished from the ceremony. We found him...by your tomb.”
Thorin swallowed against a painful knot in his throat. “And then?”
“Balin had heard enough to know that if I left with Bilbo...then your tombs would be wiped of your names,” Dwalin's breath was ragged as he leaned on the wall. “There were already proposals saying that our shares of what was left in the treasury should be rescinded.”
“What?”
“You know the Ur family was bad off. The Ri brothers were almost thrown out of Erebor by Dáin's cronies. If I had left, if I hadn't stayed and made my presence known...”
Thorin saw the shape of it, then. The way his Company would have been edged out of Erebor. How his people, his sister, what remained of their royal household, would have been cast out, their names removed from the histories of their people. Already the Iron Hills had more population than the refugees of Erebor in Ered Luin. Dáin's father had been loath to take any of them in and Thorin was starting to see why. If Thorin had no heirs then Dáin's line became the main royal line of the Longbeards.
It was politics, all politics. Thorin had risked and given his life, his boys' lives, for a people who would have spat on that sacrifice in the same breath they used to crown their new king.
“Thorin...”
“What do you think,” he interrupted Dwalin. “Of casting off the burdens of our future? Of...not going on the Quest that would return our Mountain to us?”
Dwalin was silent for a long, long time. Then, “We must go.”
“What?” Thorin looked at him then, surprised. Dwalin had been the one to offer that suggestion before, to scrap their plan and their Quest, just to be able to have their One.
Dwalin's expression twisted, but there was a canny look in his eyes that Thorin had never seen before. “After you...well. After , the world...changed. Erebor grew in splendor but there were hints of darkness even in the crowning of Dáin, as I said. It would be decades later when we would start getting...visitors. Emissaries from Mordor.”
“What?”
“They wanted to know about hobbits and where they lived.” Dwalin's gaze was ice cold. “They promised us three of the dwarven Rings for an answer. Dáin did not tell them anything because I threatened to start a civil war if he did. I made sure the entire Guard followed me by that point. The glory of a tomb-widow,” his mouth twisted. “I made the most of it.”
“But why...”
“Bilbo's ring,” Dwalin said. “Do you remember the trinket?”
Thorin nodded.
“It was the One Ring of Sauron.” It felt like all the air was sucked from Thorin's lungs. “Bilbo carried it for decades. It...twisted him, Glóin said. Extended his life but...dug its claws into him as well. Nori looked after Bilbo with his younglings. Balin did as well, until he went to Khazad-dûm.” Dwalin pushed his shoulders back. “Glóin said Bilbo's heir, a boy named Frodo, had to take the Ring to Mordor instead.”
“Bilbo's...heir?”
“A cousin. Glóin made quite sure.”
Thorin let out a breath he had not realized had been caught in his chest. “But if we go, then do we lose him again? For what? A chance to rule a people who would turn on our Company so quickly? We were so few before. I should have seen it.”
“I think,” Dwalin said slowly. “That we retake the Mountain. We know better, now. We know what it will cost, not just to us, but to the people that live there. We spent decades rebuilding Dale and our reputations for what we did.”
“But Bilbo...”
“I did not say you had to take the throne once we retook the Mountain,” Dwalin's chin went up. “It was something Balin said to me, before he left. That if we had put one of the boys on the throne, then we could...we could have...”
Thorin put his hand over Dwalin's, feeling him turn his hand and link their fingers together. “It can't be Kíli,” Thorin said after a minute. “He'd marry that elf in a heartbeat and then there would absolutely be a war over it.”
Dwalin snorted, his breath hitching. He started to shake, bending down until he was half hidden behind the low wall. Thorin rested a hand on his shoulder as the laughter turned to tears. He ached to pull Dwalin away, to find a dark spot for they two alone, but they were already being watched. Thorin could feel eyes on them. He just did not know from where.
It took Dwalin a quarter of a candlemark to pull himself together. The eyes on them stayed the entire time. Thorin tried to pick them out but he did not think they came from the market stalls below. The watcher was up high, like they were, but he was unsure just how close and if they had been able to hear anything they had said. From his memories Thorin could not point to any such talents in their people. Not even Nori...
Thorin rocked back on his heels as Dwalin settled at his side once more. “Nori,” Thorin said before Dwalin could speak. “I know you're there.”
Dwalin went stiff at his side. Then came a deliberate scrape of a shoe and a shadow appeared at Thorin's side, between one blink and the next.
“If you make Kíli your heir and the next King Under the Mountain I'll kill him,” Nori's lips barely moved.
“You will not.”
“Watch me. I dealt with Dáin until my death, which was after the battle with Sauron's forces in front of our gates. He was a pain in the ass but Kíli would make the kind of chaos only our ancestors could handle. I'm not dealing with that if you're leaving to be farmers or smiths or something else stupid.”
Thorin had to pause at that. He hadn't planned that far. “I don't know what we'll do.”
Nori turned so he could roll his eyes at them. “You do realize that Bilbo was basically a prince, right?”
They stared.
“He was the grandson of the nominal ruler of the Shire, not that the hobbits put much stock into it, but my boys scoped the place out well enough. The Took line did more than just look after their area of the Shire. The Baggins did too. The whole lot of 'em were a bunch of fakers about that slow, soft living crap. Nar was rather taken with it. I almost lost him to a marriage hunt.”
Thorin blinked at the once-thief. “A what?”
Nori's teeth were sharper than Thorin remembered. “That's what most of Hobbiton thought Bilbo was off to do. He chased us, so therefore he was going to catch himself a spouse. Apparently that was half the scandal when he came back alone.”
Thorin opened his mouth, thought about that for a moment and then closed his mouth without saying a word. What would they have done, had Bilbo pressed his suit? Hurt him worse than they already had, no doubt. Thorin rubbed a hand over his brow. As it was...
“How old do you think Bilbo is, now?”
“Just twenty,” Nori said. He leaned back on the wall, glancing out over the market. “And you've got at least two assassination attempts to foil before you can go meet him when he's thirty-three.”
“Thirty-three? But that's...”
“Of age,” Nori's smile was as hard as diamonds. “Or do you want to be known as something other than the king who retook the Mountain and then passed it off like a hot potato?”
Thorin shared a look with Dwalin. “I see I have much to learn about hobbits and their ways.”
“You do,” Nori said and pushed off the wall. “When did you wake?”
“This morning.”
“And you remember...”
“My death,” Thorin said on a breath. Nori's face twisted, once, a grief so deep it took Thorin by surprise. It was there and gone in a flash.
“Don't do it again,” Nori clapped him on the shoulder, surprising Thorin with a jolt. “I'll get onto making some inquiries. Do not make Kíli your heir, and I mean it. If anyone gets to be crowned as a queen it's going to be Ori. Got it?”
“Ori? But...”
“ Ori gets to be whatever he wants, and if he wants to be the Consort of the King Under the Mountain then that's what he's going to get. Got it?”
Thorin blinked a few times. “Ori...and Fíli? Were they...”
Nori made another face, this time one of an annoyed older brother. “There was a detailed plan. Flow charts. I'm pretty sure he had the whole wedding planned out. Then you and your idiot heirs got themselves killed and Ori didn't get to put his plan into place. It's what killed him in the end,” a darkness passed over his expression. “We're doing this the right way, oh my king. Say yes like a good lad and I'll make sure you know everything you need to know about not upsetting your in-laws before the wedding.”
Thorin raised an eyebrow. Nori's expression didn't shift. “Yes,” Thorin said, tamping down the irritation that wanted to rise.
Nori just grinned at them again and was gone in a breath. Thorin didn't even see him move.
“He has changed,” Thorin said, still staring at the spot where Nori had stood.
“We all did, Thorin. It was a long mourning.”
Thorin turned back to his lover, his best friend, his husband in the eyes of all their people. “I am sorry,” he said. Dwalin's face twisted but he gripped Thorin's shoulder hard, a tremor running through his arm and into Thorin's chest.
“Don't do it again,” Dwalin echoed Nori. It was Thorin's turn to laugh until tears gathered in his eyes.
There was much to be done. A Company remade, plans to lay out, a potential hobbit husband to court and beg forgiveness from and so much more. All of their Company made their way to them over the course of the next few days, Fíli and Kíli staying especially close when before they had run wild in Ered Luin, getting into all sorts of trouble. The Ur family staged a take over of one of the mining teams...which, as Thorin thought back on it, meant several nasty cave-ins might never happen in their new future. Of Nori they saw nothing until the forth day, when the once-thief materialized inside their sitting room when Thorin could have sworn that all their doors were locked and there was no way in.
But all his questions about Nori's abilities – and just what he'd gotten into after Thorin's death – died at the look on Nori's face.
“Bilbo's gone,” Nori said. The Company around them went silent. “He should have been at home with his family but my boys found half the Shire mobilized, the Bounders out and the Thain in a strop. Bilbo's gone, has been gone for at least a month. No one knows where he's gone. He just vanished one day, left letters about a terrible winter to come and left.”
Thorin sat down hard on his chair, his hands shaking. “Where did he go?”
Nori's expression was as hard as granite. “You know where he went. He's gone after that Ring. He's going to Mordor, to destroy it. On his own.”
Thorin closed his eyes. All the plans for their future dissolved like dust in his mind's eye. “No,” he said, opening his eyes once more. He looked up at Nori and raised his chin. “He's not going there alone. We're going with him.”
And then absolute chaos exploded around him.