Chapter Text
That love means death,
I realized too soon
-When Sorrow Sang, Blind Guardian
Over the last five years, Bilbo had gotten very good at not being seen. It made him laugh sometimes, in a tired way, because in that respect at least it seemed he was finally becoming something of a burglar. It added to his repertoire rather nicely; he’d now genuinely both stolen and learned to be quite the little spy.
Thorin came to the East Boulder Dog Park every Friday, almost like clockwork. He missed a day here or there, caught up in company business no doubt, but Bilbo never missed a week, even waited as a rule an extra hour on those days he didn’t appear just to make sure he wasn’t late. He couldn’t afford to miss him, not when it was the best chance he had to watch Thorin uninterrupted from anything like a close distance.
Thorin came, and he took the bench closest to the gate, and while his coonhound ran he pulled a packet of cigarettes from his jacket pocket and smoked, usually two and no more. A third signaled a rough day or heavy thoughts while one showed impatience, a rush to get Mica back home before he threw himself back into his work.
From the other side of the fence, hidden by pines, Bilbo settled onto the soft needles and lit his own cigarette, careful to watch for sparks and tip the ash into an emptied coke bottle. He smoked a pipe in his apartment, tobacco as well as this world’s approximation of pipe weed, but here at the park the cigarettes gave him a solidarity with Thorin that mattered more than the richness of flavor he sacrificed.
In another life they’d truly smoked together, Bilbo settled back against Thorin’s chest as they shared a single pipe. Here, there was chain link and distance and filtered cigarettes, and Bilbo watched Thorin from the shadows. It was pitiful, beyond a poor approximation, and yet it remained his most sacred moment, an unbreakable appointment that couldn’t quite be called one of life’s joys and yet came closer to it than most everything else.
When Thorin finished, when he called Mica to him and paused to stroke her ears, Bilbo was usually coming to the end of his last draw of smoke. He lingered, strained to hear Thorin’s words as his voice softened and dipped low(he never could, not from his distance), waited until the two of them were through the gate.
Only when he could see no more of them, not even the tip of Mica’s tail, did Bilbo leave, steps softened by needles as he slipped back through the small grove and the shelter of the trees.
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“Just once, I wish you’d watch it with those needles. Don’t know how many times I’ve told you, when the paint’s drying-“ Bofur reached across the workbench, fingers snagging on the offending pine needle on Bilbo’s sleeve. It had yet to touch the paint of the fire engine at Bilbo’s elbow, yet with the scathing look he gave it any outsider would’ve thought the paint job somehow already utterly ruined.
Bilbo sighed, setting down his brush to scrub his fingers across his jeans. He’d hardly been in the door five minutes.
“Yes, yes, I know, I know, you’ll kick me out and I won’t ever be welcome to help you paint again, is that it? Because if that’s my punishment-“
“Are you threatening to quit on me, Bilbo Baggins?”
“Weren’t you just threatening to fire me?”
“I’d do nothing of the sort. I was, however, about to deny you dinner. Seems a much more valuable punishment, wouldn’t you agree?”
“Seems more like cruelty.” Bilbo muttered under his breath, though he cast Bofur a smile before picking up the carved dolphin he’d just begun to paint. She was a thing of beauty, like every toy that came from Bofur’s skilled hands.
When Bilbo first came to this world, he’d known two things- Thorin was alive, somewhere, and Bilbo himself had landed in surprisingly cozy home, utterly alone. From there he’d gathered information in bits and pieces, everything from the rather quick realization that he was no longer a hobbit(not in body, anyway) to the less useful knowledge that he was in a place called Boulder, in a land he’d never heard of. It had taken some research to find the others, and he’d never found Gandalf at all. In the end, he’d decided that somehow, the wizard must not have been included in the deal he’d struck, a fact that sometimes kept him up nights wondering just how dark a decision he might’ve made. He tried not to dwell on it.
He’d searched first for his most important goal, and he found him without too much trouble. Thorin was alive, strong and safe, well off and respected. He owned a mining company, though he rarely got to go below ground himself. He ran the corporate office downtown, and Bilbo scanned the news for pictures of him when he could. A year or so after they’d arrived he’d adopted Mica from a local shelter, a purebred redbone coonhound who’d been found wandering the Flatirons. He drove a black XTerra, simple despite his wealth, and his lack of socialization and willingness to immerse himself in society kept him a bit of an outcast. At first, that had made Bilbo smile, a settling conformation that at his core, the man he loved hadn’t changed. As time passed, he realized just how much harder that made it to keep an eye on him.
Fili and Kili held jobs with the company and shared a house away from the heart of the city, next door to Balin, the principal of a local elementary school. Bilbo kept at his searches with dogged determination, scanning newspapers and searching the internet when he came to understand it, and the steady conformation of the company scattered all around him came to settle into his mind like ice on a wound. They all seemed well, settled, happy even, and for a time he’d done his best to content himself with that.
It could not last. There was nothing like the loneliness that came from sudden isolation after immersion in such a life of close companionship, made all the worse by how out of place he felt in this new world. The others, at least, had the luxury of having the memory of nothing else. Whether they belonged or not, they could feel that they did. Bilbo was forever out of place, disjointed even when he sat sipping tea in the library in his own apartment.
When he’d been almost sure he couldn’t take it, he’d stuffed a printed off address into his pocket and walked the seven blocks to Bofur’s toyshop. He’d meant to see him only, to satisfy himself with perhaps a ‘hello’ at the most but he’d found himself fighting back tears at the sight of such a dear friend after so many months alone, and that first day he stayed for two hours, talking over the weather and the toys and Bombur’s work as a chef at the Italian place two blocks over.
Three weeks later, he had a job running the register and stocking the shelves, and he quit his old job at the downtown library. A month after that, they sat after closing drinking a bottle of wine in the stockroom, a place that smelled of woodchips and paint and the smoke that lingered on both their clothes. The tiny room with its scents and clutter and Bofur’s presence felt more like home than anything in that new place had yet managed, and he took a chance and told Bofur the truth.
He told him everything, from the deal to the life that came before it to details about he and Bombur and their cousin, Bifur(who Bofur had yet to even mention) in desperate grasp at believability. It might have been the details or his desperation or Bofur’s nature or the wine(more like a combination of all of the above, to be honest), but he was, in fact, believed. He didn’t just have a friend after that, he had someone to bear the knowledge with him. Little changed outright, but he breathed easier, something loosened about the weight that had dragged heavy on his chest.
He spent as much time working the shop with Bofur as he could, happy for the company and the distraction. They sold all sorts of things, modern board games and soft stuffed animals of all kinds, but Bofur’s carvings remained their crown jewels. He made arks filled with animals, stables with working box stalls for model horses, dollhouses that took the breath of even the parents that came in pick them out for birthdays and Christmases. He was a master, and though he’d offered more than once to try and teach Bilbo his skills with blade and wood, Bilbo preferred the painting.
The dolphin in his hands was a recent addition, planned for an ocean display complete with pirates and mermaids and a ship that Bofur had designed but had yet to start on. For now, there were palm trees, two turtles, an eel, and the dolphin. She was smooth and flowing, more beautiful in her natural white pine Bilbo thought, but the children almost always seemed to want them in color.
“How was he today?”
Bilbo’s grip tightened on his brush, well enough accustomed to Bofur’s questions that he’d long ago learned how to keep himself from twitching.
“Fine. Just fine.” Bilbo cleared his throat, cast around for a detail he could give. There’d been little out of the ordinary. He’d smoked his first cigarette, paused to call Mica away from the water’s edge before lighting his second. He never let her swim once it got cold, but in the summer she came back to him drenched, and from his station in the grove Bilbo could hear Thorin’s grumbles that often gave way to laughter as she shook all over him. “He ah…” There was nothing, really, it had all been pitifully ordinary. The only new information he had didn’t come from the park, might not even be information at all, and yet, he’d carried it like an insistent itch for two days now.
Bilbo sat the dolphin down gently by her tail to let her back and belly dry, resting poised between tail and nose. Across the table, he could feel Bofur’s eyes still on him, waiting for him to stumble his way into whatever he wished. If he grew tired of letting Bilbo speak to him about Thorin, he never showed it, not once.
“Did you read the paper, yesterday morning?”
Bofur’s fingers stilled on the block of wood in his hands, head bowing as he dropped his hands to rest against the workbench. Somehow, Bilbo wasn’t surprised to find he’d only been waiting, unwilling to be the one to bring it up.
“Aye. Still, they take a lot from a picture alone, don’t they? She-“
“He held her hand. Not just getting out of the cab, he was still…” One picture it might be, but it had told Bilbo enough. Her name was Marianne Delian, and she’d walked with Thorin to a company charity event Wednesday night, and on the way down the sidewalk, he’d held her hand. Thorin had never been overgenerous with gestures of affection; if he gave them, he meant them. “This was always going to happen, wasn’t it? I mean, I couldn’t properly expect…” He was helpless to even finish, unable to give the words life and be forced to hear them. It was stupid, childish really, because how could he have imagined that here in a world where there was no Erebor to reclaim and no place for him in Thorin’s life that Thorin would not so very easily find another? Really, the impressive part was that it had taken so long.
From a cabinet back to his right, Bofur pulled a bottle of Maker’s Mark and two shot glasses. His chair scraped against the floor as he stood, the thud of his boots heavy as he came around to squeeze Bilbo’s shoulders.
“Go on and pour for us. I’ll call Bombur; he’ll have our dinner sent here.”
-------
The man came to him the day of Thorin’s funeral. Down to the day of his own death Bilbo knew he’d remember every detail, every inch of red on the hem of the man’s black robes that seemed to glitter just a little in the candlelight.
He leaned against Bilbo’s door, fingers wrapped around a silken red cord he toyed with in a way that seemed far more purposeful than absent. Even as he looked up to question the man the swing of the pendant on its end caught his eye, onyx black, a wolf and then a bird and then a hobbit, shaping as it swung as if it was malleable to the air. Or, perhaps, the thoughts of the man who held it, flowing freely through the cord as his fingertips danced along its length.
“Bilbo Baggins. I have a proposition for you.” His voice was like smoke over water, smooth and fluid and dark.
“Who are you?” There, in the safety of post battle Erebor, he hadn’t belted Sting to his hip like he’d grown so accustomed to on the road. His eyes flickered to where it rested in the corner, too far to casually pick up, and he shifted on his feet uncertainly instead. His mind was heavy with enough already; he wasn’t prepared to deal with the sudden mystery of a stranger at his door. For an instant the symmetry cut him, a flash of Dwalin at Bag End flashing through his mind, but he shoved it aside as quickly as it came.
“I have no name you’d know, little hobbit, but that doesn’t concern you. All you need to know is what I can do, and what I can offer you, and that-“ He stepped inside just as Bilbo opened his mouth to protest, swinging the pendant rapidly until the chord wrapped fully around his fingers. “-is Thorin Oakenshield’s life. Are you listening now, or shall I leave?”
The sound of his name in that unfamiliar voice rankled him; he had the sudden irrational desire to hiss that the man didn’t have the right to speak it. Still, he wasn’t wrong. With that, he had inescapably captured Bilbo’s attention. He swallowed hard, his throat at first too tight to navigate the words he needed.
“Thorin’s dead. He’s gone, he….” He died in my arms, right before my eyes; I know it’s true, I know there’s nothing to be done. “Look, I wish there was something you could do, something anyone could do, you have no idea how-“
“Are you going to listen to me or aren’t you?” He shook the head of his robes back around his shoulders to reveal a face framed by dark hair, holding equally dark eyes. The smile that played across his lips wasn’t quite mocking but he tested Bilbo nonetheless, letting the silence stretch before nodding, pleased. “Very well. You’re quite right; Thorin’s dead. From the moment he chose to come to the Lonely Mountain that was his fate, and I regret to say, once some courses are taken, fate along that course becomes inescapable. However. “ He leaned forward, fingers drumming against the closed fist of his right hand around his cord as he stared Bilbo down. “Every course has its own fate. Thorin Oakenshield presents a particular problem because he is noble to a fault, stubborn as a mule. I could take you back to Bag End and you could try a thousand times but you would never convince him not to come to Erebor. Even so, all is not lost. There are a thousand lives you each may have had elsewhere, Bilbo Baggins, and if I take you to one of them, if I take all of you, then I can promise you a life where Thorin is taken only by old age. And the young ones as well.”
The mention of Fili and Kili staggered him, all of the grief still too heavy to properly bear. The night before he’d seen their bodies when he closed his eyes, still covered in blood in his mind despite the care he and the others had taken to wipe them clean. From what he heard, Thorin had seen them fall, had to be helpless to do more than watch as the boys he loved like his own died in his defense. Bilbo woke from the nightmare shaking, cheeks wet, torn between his own ache for his friends and the pain he felt in sympathy for the man he loved. If he could have borne that memory for Thorin, taken it out of his mind so he never had to see, he’d have gladly done it.
He scrubbed a hand over his eyes, struggled to wipe his mind clean so he could focus. “You…you’re saying you could…” It seemed beyond imagining, beyond possibility. Bilbo shook his head, tried to find stability in meeting the man’s eyes. “Look, I may not know who you are, but I know what Gandalf told me about the other wizards and you-“
“Ah but of course he couldn’t have told you; he has never met the likes of me. I’m not a wizard as he would call it, nor would I necessarily use that word to describe what I can do. I deal with layers, with dimensions…” He waved a hand through the air, dismissive. “But you need not understand. Think of me as a landlord, filling empty spaces. There is room for you elsewhere, if you will take it. An offer of a different life. In return, I’ll fill your space here. Others will fight for the Lonely Mountain, Bilbo; it need not be you and your friends. Fate changes, the world changes, and in another world, you move on. You could not ask for a better deal.”
It was all too much, swirling, heady knowledge, and he latched onto one piece at a time. “Think of you as a landlord? What’s your price, then? If a man’s seeking to rent a room he’s not doing it out of the goodness of his heart.”
His laughter was almost melodic, just a little too sharp, and he smiled as he settled back into his chair, one arm slung over the top. “Smart boy.”
“It’s a simple observation.”
“You’d be surprised how many don’t ask about the price until they’ve paid it.” A fact this stranger seemed to enjoy, for his smile widened just a bit. “You’re right, Mr. Baggins; there’s always something in it for me. My kind feeds off the energy of siphoned emotions; we have for centuries. We shift players on a thousand boards and in turn those we move give us all we need to continue. Symbiosis; it’s harmless. However, it does mean that with every move we make we must ask-“
“Spit it out; what do you want? You want me, is that it? I make the choice and they go on without me?” In all honesty, that didn’t sound so bad.
“Not hardly. You are the center of the shift, the focus; you are vital. You alone will know it’s occurred at all. No, the price I ask comes from the very drive behind your decision-a decision I know you’ll make, I might add, otherwise I never would have bothered to come.” He rose from the chair, something cat like in his stalk across the floor that froze Bilbo cold. “You love the dwarven king enough that you’d have forsaken your home for him had he lived, enough to blind you to all else, enough to choose a course that spares his life even if it means on pain of returning here, to this moment, he can never again love you.”
That, he had not expected.
“He was destined to, from the moment he entered your house, but all of it will be erased, all of that will be my payment. You may see him if you like, watch him, speak to him if you must, but at all times you must remember what I told you about fate: once set in motion, it is inescapable. If you let him get too close, if he takes too much notice of you, your chance is over, and you’ll be sent right back. That is my price. Do you accept these terms?”
Bilbo’s head was swimming, swept too far ahead into that potential future by the thought of Thorin alive and whole only to be whipped back by memory to a moment when Thorin’s fingers closed around his on Sting’s hilt, adjusting his grip. He’d been losing his temper, frustrated with Bilbo’s inexperience to the point that Bilbo had been on the verge of giving up and sheathing his sword when Thorin grabbed his hand.
Please, you must learn this. You must do this for me.
It wasn’t until days later he had the full truth of it, talking softly as they passed a pipe between them. In smoke and moonlight, Thorin spoke to him sometimes with the kind of bare honesty he rarely allowed himself to offer up.
When we came to you, I told Gandalf I couldn’t ensure your safety. I couldn’t know it then, but it’s a truth that’s come to rest heavier on my mind than I ever expected. You cannot doubt that I would never wish for you to be anywhere but with us-not now, but all the same when I remember what we face, I can’t help but think a better man would never have brought you along at all. I do my best, but I may not always be there to protect you, Bilbo. I can’t promise you that, though I wish I could. If the time comes that I cannot, I need to know you can protect yourself.
He’d been so worried about that, ever since the aftermath of their encounter with Azog, ever since the eagles. He did all he could to protect Bilbo, hovering and watching and guarding and at first, Bilbo thought it was only that Thorin felt he owed him a debt. It wasn’t until he said as much that he’d had his answer, stumbled words that led Bilbo to take a chance and reach out and….
And all of it, every moment since his fingers had brushed Thorin’s cheek under the shadow of pines would be wiped away. The very thought burned him, less like fire and more like acid and yet, that was a visceral reaction, emotional and poorly rooted. What did it matter, now, if it was erased? He was the only one left to remember, and his memories he’d be permitted to keep. Did the dead have memories at all? Did it count as taking a man’s memories when there was no man left to take them from?
“Your answer, Mr. Baggins.”
Bilbo tried to wave him off, breath quickening as he glanced back toward the door. He should go, he should get Gandalf, should know for certain if this magic of his was safe, but what if the man was gone when he came back? What if this was a chance, a chance presented only to him and he squandered it?
He could hear his heart pounding in his ears, his thoughts a mess of memory and argument and justification.
“Bilbo-“
“Yes. Yes, alright, yes, if it saves his life-“
He never even got to finish his sentence before he was swept away. After, when he thought about it, he knew that just as the man intended, he chose rashly, under pressure, driven by fear and grief and desire. Still, he consoled himself by thinking that given hours, given counsel with Gandalf and the chance to sit alone and muse, one fact alone would have driven him to the same conclusion:
Thorin never fought for the sake of his own life, for his own protection. The times when Bilbo could look out for him were few and far between, and at his last attempt, he’d failed miserably. If he could save Thorin’s life, whatever the personal cost, how could he do anything less?
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It was hard, so very hard to hold onto a truth of which no evidence remained outside your own mind. It wasn’t that Bilbo ever doubted Thorin, not really, wasn’t even that he ever doubted the past he was wholly certain he remembered. It was simpler and yet almost worse than that, a loss of details, every minute facet of a life he wanted so desperately to cling to.
He’d spent five years living in a world removed, a span already longer than the time he and Thorin had shared. They had, altogether, known each other for seven months. Five of those in particular had been the absolute best of Bilbo’s life, rocky ground and wounds and all. Laying it out like that, it seemed so short a time. To think that they’d had five months only to be together, less than half a year...
At the time, it had seemed so much longer, and at the time, he’d been sure it never had to end. No matter what the road had already taught him about hardship, no matter what answer he’d have given if any one of the others had asked him, Bilbo had never truly been prepared for the possibility of Thorin’s death. Thorin had seemed invincible in his eyes, a truth that endured even after Bilbo saw him lying limp at Azog’s feet. When he did lose him, he didn’t even have the time for the loss to properly sink in. Not to mention that just before it they’d fought in a way that felt so final even as he hoped it wouldn’t be, and even though they’d been reunited in the end that former discord between them had remained its own horrible weight.
The aftermath had been dizzying, and it wasn’t until he came out of it that the truth of his new circumstances really came clear. He was young, for a hobbit, fairly young for a human now that he was one. He had years left yet, quite a few of them in all likelihood, and everything he wanted was bound up behind him, in five months that he alone in the whole of existence remembered. The emptiness of it cut him, but not in the way the world tried to tell him it might. In the estimation of many, it’d have been long time he moved on, but he knew better than that. What they’d had hadn’t been that simple, not by a long shot. He’d heard it before and never properly understood, but he’d found himself overwhelmed by an old truth: He’d had the kind of love that made the world pale in comparison and after that, nothing else would ever do.
The most valuable possessions he had left were his memories, and he guarded them as jealously as he could, ran over them again and again in the dark as he smoked his pipe by a window that looked out over the city. He could only hope that if he kept them close enough, they’d never start to slip away. So far, it had worked. He still had his details, could still remember how Thorin had smelled like leather and pine and pipe smoke and dirt. He’d breathed it in deep so many times, wrapped tight in Thorin’s arms, his head nestled between fur cloak and the warmth of Thorin’s neck. When Thorin hugged him before that first glimpse of Erebor, he’d thought himself lucky to have that embrace once, just once. The heat in his spine after had left him wobbly, and all that night as he slipped in and out of sleep he couldn’t help but remember that he’d never felt so safe in all his life as he had for those few seconds.
It wasn’t until days later that he’d begun to realize if he dared, he just might be able to find himself in those arms again.