A/N: Aaaand the angst is back. This is technically the same timeline and set just after 'Passing' though Dis' attitude to Thorin has moved on a bit and is now...well, not so generous right now. But grief is complicated right?

Thank you to everyone who has reviewed thus far - I love you all very much.

T

"Swear you'll be mine...one day?"

Urgently, and in full view of my cousin who had crept so secretively from the inn behind us, he took my hands and held me still as he spoke. I laughed, my head dizzied by our earlier celebrations – my brother, Lord of Ered Luin for fifteen years past! – I stepped closer to him, and kissed him without any thought of propriety or my cousin's watchful gaze.

"I have been yours," I smiled, "Since the day we met."

We danced that night beneath the canopy of the trees, wildly and without a care and with no music save for what notes drifted from the inn and the gentle, sweet-scented breath of the wind through the flowers. Finally, we fell to the ground, breathless and made giddy by the night air and the knowledge that less than twenty feet away my cousin watched in silent – perhaps furious, perhaps amused – resignation. He shifted up on one elbow to look into my face, his red hair gloriously disheveled and his nose still slightly crooked from our earliest days of courtship when my kin were neither so silent nor restrained in their disapproval. I reached out one hand to stroke gently down that face, and through his wild mane, only stopping when he dipped his forehead to touch against mine.

"Marry me?" His breath was hot against my face and I withdrew. Something like fear flickered in his gaze and he too retreated slightly, eyes flicking back to where our guard still waited.

I nodded, unable to stop my joy from bubbling forth from my mouth even as my gaze grew watery. I pulled myself close to him, giggling once more as he buried his face against my shoulder with a relieved laugh of his own.

"Marry me," he repeated with a grin in his voice as he raised his head to nudge his nose gently against mine as our kind in the North do. "Marry me. Marry me. Marry me."

I fell asleep there, with him, with his breath against my face and the grass tickling at me where we lay.

I fell asleep with him and when I awake in my bed I have nothing but the ring he made me – misshapen and crudely formed with edges that are barely worn smooth by a mere decade of wear – to prove it had ever been any more than a dream.

"The world is a lesser place without him, that's for certain."

I blink, too wearied to do anything else. My eyes feel raw; they itch and swim in turn as though I have been slaving over the forge for far too long.

"You are not alone, you know," he tries once more, reaching out as though he will pat my knee. I shy away from him, curling my legs further into my chest. He sighs, nods as though he had expected it before standing and pausing at my side, hands raised to tilt my face to his, his thumbs brushing at the dark hollows I know must be beneath my eyes. "You know where I'll be, Lassie, if I'm needed."

We stare at each other and for a second I see the same compassionate gaze that I have known all my life, one that is full of the familiar promise of a warm embrace and soothing words in my ear as I mourn for the life I feel as though I barely glimpsed before it was snatched away from me. The moment passes and that look is obscured by uncomprehending dullness, the only way in which I seem capable of viewing the world of late. I nod, only because I know he will not leave until I do so and after a pause, he heaves another great sigh and drops his hands.

"Ah, Dis… The world is a lesser place without you too though, my dear."

The world. What care I for the world outside? We should have done better were He never to have been born at all; both the world and I might have been spared this agony.

"I…I hope you will not be so hard on them for very much longer," he says softly despite the obvious reprimand. "It is easier, I'm sure, to blame the living than the dead. And there is tragedy, of course, but there is honour too! Dis please…do not look for blame where there is none to be had."

I close my eyes against my swelling emotions, will them away that I might tell him what I think to his talk of 'honour' and 'tragedy' when he has lost no one, he mourns for no one but when I open them again he is gone and I am alone once more. I glance around the room, with its carefully carved features and fine wooden bedstead and the mangled, bloodied form within, its skin beginning to green and slip as He starts His slow return back into earth. I catch my breath, horrified and when I look again the bed is empty, blankets untouched and barely a speck of red to hint at its last occupant's fate. Unable to look any longer, I curl myself tighter in His chair, lower my head to my knees once more and cry.

The bed dips behind me as my visitor sits, the gentle click of the closing door my only warning of their arrival.

"Come back."

His breath warms the place between my shoulder blades, only serving to chill the rest of me and raise goose pimples across my skin.

"Dis," a nose nudges at the base of my neck, "Come back to us. For your children's sakes."

I shudder and the warmth recedes. I hate it; his presence sickens me and yet…I ache for its loss.

"I am not gone away," I say through lips so unused to this unnatural movement that they crack as I speak. There is no reply and, after a moment, I turn, desperately seeking the face I did not think I could bear to see.

"Yes," he nods very slightly, wiping the warm, seeping liquid from my mouth with only the barest of touches, "You are."

One of us – and I am almost afraid when I realise it is me – gives a gasping half-sob and I turn my face into his touch, holding his hand against me, fingers curled against my jaw.

"I cannot find my way back!"

He moves then, suddenly as though it is a signal for which he has waited, trying to take me in his arms. I drop his hand as though burned, fall to my side upon the bed and try to forget his hand in mine, how I could taste my own blood upon the familiar fingers that had sought to console me. I will not grant him that, not now – perhaps not ever. For there is another's blood on his hands and I will not allow that blood to be washed away by my tears.

I sense him rounding the bed and I close my eyes against any further attempts at comfort but there are none. Cool air chills the tear tracks upon my face as the door beside me is flung open. He pauses on the threshold and I feel his eyes bore into me as he speaks

"If you will not let me try," his voice is hard like rock, so far from the gentleness with which he began that it is almost comical, "Then I cannot help you."

With that he is gone, the silence to which I have become so accustomed feels oppressive now – threatening even. Come back! I want to scream, Come back, please! Show me how! But my reply, when I give it seconds, minutes, hours later for who even knows how they pass now, is cold.

"I do not want your help."

Sometimes I hear their voices outside my door - hushed whispers and half formed protests as their intrusions are prevented by men who are not Him.

One night I awake from this...this waking death to another presence in the room and His name on my lips only to find our eldest blinking back at me through the darkness. Disappointment burns through my blood along with a vicious resentment that sees me turn my back on him - I will not, cannot send him away but his presence is but a reminder of His absence and I cannot bear it.

In the otherwise silent night, I hear voices calling for him, drawing ever nearer.

"Mama?" A hand curls itself into my clothing as if he is afraid he will be dragged away this very second.

I do not speak but turn my head ever so slightly in his direction.

"Kili has been wondering…" he begins in a voice which suggests his brother is not alone in his wondering, "How long is 'forever'?"

The wail that escapes me surely wakes half the town. Behind me, the door is flung open and a moment of noise follows as the new intruder whisks the child away. Though my heart breaks as his sobs echo down the hall I find I cannot summon control enough to cease my own tears let alone comfort his.

My nights are undisturbed after that and I do not know if it is through his choice or theirs that a week passes without my catching sight nor sound of him. Eventually, he comes though it seems he is reluctant to do so. After this, they often bring one without the other and were I capable of such articulation I would ask them 'why?' But I am not, and the observation passes almost before I can comprehend it. More often than not, it is the younger who is delivered to my room and I wonder if there is some reason for it. I hold him on my knee, stroke his silken hair and try not to show my disappointment that the hair beneath my fingers is near black rather than red. He speaks, and though I do not try to discern the words from the babble, I nod and hum in response when he eventually stops to draw breath. He grows bored of his own chatter and whines to be set down. My arms feel empty without him and I think that if he would only sit still and quiet then I would have him here all the time.

Once - just once - I hear laughter and a child's giggling squeal. In my mind I watch as he is flung skyward and caught again, or else plucked from his hiding place and reduced to breathless cries of protest as fingers dance feather-like across his ribs. I am halfway to my door before the moment is, for me, lost. The name the child shrieks is wrong, the answering laughter too deep. Thankfully, I am not subjected to this torture for long as the play is ended as suddenly as it began.

I barely blink as a cup flies past my face to clang against the stone behind me. A second later and its fellows, along with several other oddities are swept to the floor with a great roar from their attacker.

"ENOUGH!"

I stare back impassively as he glares, great shoulders heaving. His fury passes and after a moment he sighs, surveying the mess his outburst has caused. I watch as he shakes his head and stoops to pick up the scattered things and set them to rights. Finally, he makes to collect a box from where it lays in one corner of the room. It was not his violence that had cast it there but my own.

"Don't."

He pauses, his fingers barely brushing it. Then, as if I had not spoken, he takes it in his hands almost reverently. Setting it aside, his fingers hover over one corner where I can see a vicious gash in the otherwise perfectly carved wood.

"Enough." He repeats through gritted teeth. The source of his renewed outrage is clear even through my detachment. This box,though I am its keeper, is sacred to us. It was not mine to have damaged so even in the darkest of my days.

"What would you have had us do?" He asks eventually, his gaze downcast. "He would not be stopped - you know that."

Yes, I know that. I almost say it aloud. He would not have been felled by any less a wound than He received. He would not have stopped until every foul thing that threatened us in word, deed or intent was dealt with. And neither the will of His king nor the protestations of His wife, friends, or children could have stopped Him. There had been no 'if' only 'when' but Mahal I had prayed our days together would last so much longer - forever!

"Nothing. There was nothing to be done." I admit eventually, the cloud seeming to lift ever so slightly. There follows a pause, then:

"And now? What would you have us do now? How much longer are we to suffer?"

"I don't know."

There our drawn out, half-exhausted conversation ends and I feel sleep once more pulling at my eyelids. In silence, and without a glance at me, he settles himself on the floor against one wall. I am momentarily seized by the urge to wrap myself around one of his trunk-like arms and sleep plastered to him as I used to do as a child - whilst our older brothers discussed matters that we (or rather, I) were too young to be troubled with. With his silent presence as my lullaby and though I know he will be gone back to his duty and his king when I awake, sleep claims me once more.

"Marry me."

The words wake me from my dream, my heart in my throat as I close my eyes once more and try to return to the sweet smelling woods and rowdy, drunken celebrations of that night. I remember his eyes, dark and strong, and how even from him, no words had ever sounded sweeter.

And when I open my eyes, unable to summon even a sense of how I felt that night, I lay my body back down upon the bed. The hour is late, the darkness so complete I might not have opened my eyes and the silence is stifling, pressing down on me until I can bear it no longer. I turn to His side. Bury my face in His pillow. Clutch blankets that still smell of Him to my chest and try to recall how it felt to mould our forms together as one. And, when finally I feel my head throb, see stars erupting across my vision, feel my chest aching and my throat burn from the inarticulation of my grief, I stop. The world is still black, the room stifling, but there is sound - like emerging from water, there is sound. I lie breathless for a moment, and listen to the sporadic, explosive cries of others whose grief has gone too long ignored; grief which has been too long stifled by my pain, my fury, and my guilt.

I stand, cross the room upon shaking legs, and open the door.