Chapter Text
Bilbo awoke with a start, covered in a cold sweat, and fought against his sheets until he fell out of bed with a plunk and blinked at the morning sun. “Oh, my.” He swallowed hard. “That wasn’t a very pleasant dream.” In his dream, there had been fire and a winged shadow with great big teeth and a kingdom burning.
He righted himself, picking his bedding off the floor, and out fell the book he had been reading last night. Yes, the History of the Fall of Gondolin. The great elven city had been besieged by orcs and balrogs and…
“Dragons. Of course, dragons at the wall. The stuff would give anyone nightmares.” The terror that gripped him on awakening was quickly fading in the cheery morning in Bag End. He shuffled off to his kitchen to fry up eggs and bacon. Silly things dreams. In his, the elven city looked more like a rumbly mountain than a proper palace. And if his poor imagination had made the elves much too short, well, he was a hobbit after all. One did think of themselves on a certain scale and he would unconsciously make everyone in proper hobbit proportions. Bilbo had no idea where the beards came from. Big, bristling, bushy, fierce things, braided and beaded. Elves don’t have beards, Bilbo laughed to himself. Not even the hairiest Stoor could sprout something so magnificent. Maybe a few men could…
He found he could not remember even half the dream faced with a pan of sizzling bacon. It vanished like steam from his tea kettle.
The midmorning was so bright and welcoming, Bilbo could not help giving up on his spring cleaning for a rest out in the sun with a pipe in his hand.
The air was sweet with the smell of cut grass and Bilbo closed his eyes and breathed deeply, completely oblivious until a shadow blocked out the sun. Bilbo’s eyes shot open and looked up, and up some more, to see a tall man with a long gray beard, draped in gray robes, leaning onto a staff, peering down into Bilbo’s face intently.
“Good morning,” Bilbo greeted the stranger politely if not cordially.
“What do you mean by wishing me good morning?” The big folk asked in a gruff voice.
Bilbo blinked. “It is what one commonly says around these parts. I do not know how they greet people where you are from, but seeing as it is a remarkably lovely morning, I believe the saying stands. Good morning.” He repeated, clamping his pipe stem between his teeth.
The old man ducked his head, hat shielding his face from view and muttered something that sounded like, “To think I’d see the day…coming all this way to be good morning’d by--” He cut himself off and drew up to his full height. “I am called by many names, but you may know me as Gandalf the Grey. And Gandalf means--me.”
“And…what are you?”
The old man chuffed. “I so happen to be a wizard.”
Bilbo looked over the tattered robes and wayward beard, raising an eyebrow. He was not impressed.
Gandalf stooped over to gaze into Bilbo’s eyes. “Have you found what you’ve been looking for, Bilbo Baggins?”
Bilbo coughed on a bit of smoke that went down hot and wrong. The thoughts of dragon fire burned him from within and the sound of swords clashing metal and metal rang in his ears. “I don’t know what you mean by that,” he scolded, frowning. He brushed past the wizard to check his mail, shuffling through the letters without reading them. He gave the wizard one last glance and good morning before spinning on his heel and marching back to his green door.
It was not until he was safely ensconced within Bag End that the thought hit him. Now how did that wizard know my name?
The next night found Bilbo restless. He broke into his larder twice. Once for blueberry scones. The next for clotted cream for the scones. Then of course he had to make tea, and this was heading onto a eighth meal, but Bilbo would just count this as a midnight snack. The empty plate of crumbs sat on the bedside table, cup and saucer propped on his chest as he lay back in bed. He would have to shake the crumbs out of the sheets in the morning, but there was nothing that settled a hobbit’s restless mind like a full stomach.
He was just drifting off, when a tremendous crash had him bolt upright, heart thumping out of his chest. Bilbo slapped a hand across his mouth to stifle his agitated breathing as he strained to listen. There were thumps…footsteps! A bump, a clatter of silverware falling to the floor. Several muffled voices. Burglars! He was being burgled!
A sensible hobbit would have climbed out the window and run for help. A sensible hobbit might have even hid under the bed and waited out the intruders. But Bilbo was half Took, and that half seemed to have seized control because he found himself belting on his robe and creeping to his bedroom door, cracking it to peek through. There was nothing to see in the dark, so he slipped out into the hall and crept toward the voices with only the moonlight to guide him. Deep, rumbling, voices. He could not count how many. Bilbo could see nothing but shadows against the night. They were in--He straightened up. They were in his larder!
“Of all the nerve!” Bilbo hissed. He looked about him, grabbing a walking stick from the umbrella stand. Burglars were supposedly a cowardly lot, right? Sneaking in the middle of the night. A lot of noise and a little light would frightened them off, no matter how many they outnumbered Bilbo.
Bilbo swallowed, braced himself, and before he could talk himself out of this nonsense, leapt out into the doorway. “Who goes there?!” He shouted.
There was a half a moment of silence, and then the room erupted. A dark blob separated from the group of shadows and charged him with a ferocious, foreign cry, tackling the little hobbit to the floor. Bilbo struggled as the other shadows closed in and hands grasped his arms and legs and something sat on his chest.
“I’ve got his feet! They’re huge!” A voice rang.
“Get some light over here. Let’s see his face.” Another shouted.
The strike of a match blinded Bilbo, then a lit candle was shoved in his face, illuminating the faces of his intruders as well. Four, eight, ten…thirteen! Thirteen burly, bearded figures stared down at him. Dwarves!
“A child?” An elegant silver-haired dwarf frowned down at him.
“Can’t be. This place is too small,” a young, fidgety one commented. “More to scale. Suggesting he’s fully grown.”
“I’m not a child!” Bilbo remarked indignantly, groaning internally. He really should keep his mouth shut.
“Eh, what’d he say?” An older one held a trumpet to his ear. “Who’s gone wild?”
“He’s got no beard!” A dark-haired one commented, rather astonished, nudging a blond peer, both wide-eyed, open expressions betraying their youth.
“Secure the doors. Get him off the floor,” a deep voice rumbled. Those not holding on to Bilbo scampered off to obey the orders, while the remainder wrestled him off the floor, two locking Bilbo’s arms so he could not flee.
A dwarf with a outrageously complicated hairstyle returned first. “All clear. No one’s gettin’ in or out.”
“I don’t understand. This is where the mark on the map led us.” The deep voice grumbled, belonging to a tall, imposing dwarf with piercing blue eyes that glowered at Bilbo as if he was responsible for all the wrong of this condition. Bilbo almost felt castigated under that glare until he reminded himself that this was his home and these were his burglars--that is, they were burglaring his home--Blast it all! Bilbo puffed himself up and tried to stare angrily back, but those deep blue eyes passed over him as if he were a gnat.
“I found the mark!” The young blond came loping back with his shadow, like a pair of puppies. “It’s right there on the front door!” His dark haired cohort chimed in, proud as punch.
“What’s on my door?” Bilbo demanded.
“I don’t understand.” The dark dwarf, their leader, took a bit of parchment from an inside pocket of his coat, unfolding it, and studied it as if looking for some secret. “The map led us here.”
“But it’s a door! And we have a key! Maybe the key will work--”
The blond dwarf thumped the other. “This isn’t the Mountain, Kili.”
“Excuse me, but--” Bilbo tried to interject, eyes worriedly following the few dwarves who poked about his larder shelves.
“But we’re underground!”
“Are we?” A dwarf in a floppy hat peered out the big round window at the twinkling stars above. “Seems we’re both under and outside.”
“I said, excuse me!” Bilbo shook off his captors’ holds. They fell off surprisingly easily as if they did not truly consider him a threat. And with the size they were, and outnumbering him, and…just how heavily he noticed they were armed--spears, swords, axes…did that dwarf have one imbedded in his head? “J--just what are you doing in my house and--put down that wheel of cheese!" He pointed in shock as a rotund dwarf with a long coiled braid waddled past.
“Bombur, will you stop eating!” A fearsome, tattooed tall dwarf with twin axes growled.
Bilbo stumbled back and into a bushy white beard, whirling around. The beard was attached to an elderly dwarf whose eyes twinkled. “Balin.” He bowed graciously. “At your service.”
“Uh, B-Bilbo Baggins, at yours.”
“A pleasure, Master Baggins,” he started soothingly, placing his hand on Bilbo’s shoulder. “We apologize for intruding on your evening, and we’ll only be a moment before we’ll be going on our way. Only, if you could just tell us, where exactly are we?”
“Where--? Bag End. This here.” He pointed down. “Is Bag End.” He was met with a blank look. “You’re in Hobbiton. In the Shire.”
“I see, and we are not near any mountains.”
Bilbo tilted his head in bewilderment. “Mountains?”
“We’re in the wrong place,” their majestic leader growled. “Again.”
“Maybe we’ve been reading the map wrong, Uncle,” the young dwarf surreptitiously cleared a space on the countertops, plucked the map out of their leader’s hands and spread it out in the candlelight.
Bilbo could not help but be drawn to it. The dwarves had seemingly forgotten he was their captive--they certainly did not seemed concerned enough to tie him up or stuff him in a sack. Tookish curiosity won over propriety and he silently drew closer to get a look at this map from over the dwarves’ shoulders. It was like no map he had ever seen, a complicated set of whorls and arcs. At some parts he could almost make out familiar places, Bree, the forests around Buckland. The names of unfamiliar places were there for him to read one moment: Gondor, Rohan, Isengard, only to shimmer away the next. One place caught his attention, a solitary mountain peak with a winged creature poised ominously above it.
“The Lonely Mountain,” Bilbo read to himself before the words disappeared.
The dark haired leader abruptly glanced up at him, frown tugging down his mouth.
“What do we do about him--whatever he is.” The tattooed dwarf growled low.
Those blue, blue eyes--like a summer sky after the sun has set, when the fireflies some out to play, and couples walked hand and hand along winding paths--for a moment Bilbo saw something fragile and lost in their depths, but they turned away and Bilbo turned his attention back to that marvelous map. He loved to look at maps. His mother had gone on her own adventures and had brought home books, histories, and the maps. She would point to the each of the places she had gone, Buckland, Bree, Rivendell! And each place had a story, but few maps had shown much of Middle Earth outside of Eriabor, and Bilbo longed to know what lay beyond the Blue Mountains to the West or the Misty Mountains to the East.
Mountains. If these dwarves wished to find mountains, they are far off the mark, Bilbo thought to himself, curiously.
His ears pricked as he picked up the tail end of a conversation.
“He’s hardly a threat. We’ll leave and he’ll have no trace of us.”
“And what if he talks?”
“He can hear you,” Bilbo announced loudly, turning to see the tattooed dwarf and the leader bent close, muttering. Bilbo put his hand to his forehead, not even wondering where his sense of self-preservation had gone. It must have fled leaving his nerves shot to the point where he could not even properly cower with fear. “Look, I have had it up to here with you dwarves. Now, you can go back the way you came, and you--you can take the cheese!--just, I’ll be happy to pretend you were never here.”
Most of the dwarves looked taken aback at his outburst, others looked amused--the one with the hat chuckled--only the young dwarf in his knitted cardigan had the grace to look ashamed. Their leader approached him, looming over Bilbo to stare down his nose like the hobbit was some squawking nuisance. It took the last of Bilbo’s nerves, bound together by threads, to stand his ground under that heavy gaze.
Their leader’s lip curled and he broke away first, leaving Bilbo to sag, hands trembling, and with the feeling that he had been found wanting.
“Where do suppose the way out is, Fili?” The dark-haired miscreant went knocking his bookshelves. The dwarf with the hat was peeking under the rugs, lifting up doilies. A dwarf with a bushy red beard was poking at the ceiling with his axe. In short, these dwarves were searching for an exit anywhere but the front door. There was really nothing like looking if one wanted to find something. Frankly, Bilbo could not find it in himself to care over the sudden, overwhelming ringing in his ears. Bother and confusticate these dwarves! He slumped against the wall of the larder, exhausted. The fat dwarf, Bombur, seemed more interested in poking around the contents of said larder, a plate of chive scones piled on the cheese wheel, all tucked under his double chin.
“Pardon me,” he said quietly to Bilbo as he squeezed by. It was a tight fit between the shelves and Bilbo, and the poor dwarf went stumbling right into the wall, and Bilbo’s heart almost stopped as the wall collapsed under his weight.
“He’s found it! Kili, over here!” The blond one named Fili crowed. He the dark haired one--Kili--came bounding in first, the other dwarves hot on their heels, all shoving and crowding around the wall. The wall had not crumpled, but had moved back by a good foot, revealing a line between worn floorboards, and new untouched wood beyond. Fili laid his shoulder against it and shoved, sliding the wall back another couple inches. “This is the exit! Good work, Bombur!”
Bombur looked mournfully at the spilled and trampled scones. Bilbo acutely felt his pain.
“Come one, everyone. Dori, you’re the strongest! Gloin! Dwalin! Push!”
Bilbo filtered to the back of the group as the strongest of the dwarves surged forward, grunting as they pushed the wall another half a foot. I am going to have a new hallway in Bag End, he thought in a daze. He found himself standing with the timid-looking younger dwarf who gave him an enthusiastic grin, cheering on the one called Dori. “He’s my brother. I’m Ori, and that’s my other brother Nori,” the young dwarf explained, a bit nervously, worrying at his knitted handwarmers. Bilbo nodded politely on reflex, because as annoying as these dwarves were, he could not be angry when faced with this shy, unassuming fellow. Ori looked at him curiously. “What are you, Mister Baggins, if you don’t mind me asking?”
“Oh!--why I’m a hobb--”
He was interrupted as sharp crack split the air and a gale force wind swirled in out of no where, banging the windows and door and buffeting Bilbo into Ori.
“Thorin!” Balin yelled, and their leader whipped around, eyes widening in something so close to fear it made Bilbo quake.
“Everyone! We have no time! Push!” The leader--Thorin--yelled. The group did not have to be told twice as they all stormed the wall as one.
“What is it? What’s going on?” Bilbo yelled to be heard about the roar of the wind.
“Oh, Mahal! He’s followed us.” The dwarf with the hat looked back, his eyes wide.
From out of the storm spilled smoke and a voice like thunder. “RETURN WHAT YOU HAVE STOLEN FROM ME!” Smoke quickly spewed into the little hobbit hole, spurred on by a hot wind that had sweat running down Bilbo’s face.
“What is that!?” He yelped, looking around for a place to hide.
“Push! On three! Push!” All the dwarves put their shoulders to the wall and shoved it back ten feet. Bilbo glanced at them and then back at the glowing heat, like a red hot poker or a stoked oven, flames billowing into his larder. There really was no choice. He sprinted after the dwarves, catching up to them and lending his weight to push the wall into an ever-lengthening corridor, as they charged forward. He glimpsed the conflagration over his shoulder, fire curled and licked the corridor, the floor hot under his feet, and Bilbo grieved for his pillaged larder and his comfortable home.
“RETURN WHAT YOU HAVE STOLEN! RETURN! RETURN THE--!”
The wall gave way into nothingness and their momentum was too great to halt as they all tumbled down, down, down into a dark abyss as a furious roar of defeat howled above them.