AN: And with this chapter I am calling "With Shield and Body" complete. This does not, however, mark the end of my Hobbit stories; I had originally intended there to be a chapter from Thorin's pov preceding this one, but after writing and rewriting and reworking it for many days now I have decided that this piece works better without it. It will be reworked into its own story. In addition, there will be more line of Durin fics coming your way (I'd love to try my hand at an Ered Luin-era story!), and Bilbo fics as well because I love Mr. Baggins so much. Thank you everyone for the favorites, reviews, and follows, I appreciate it all more than I can say.

Of the twelve companions of Thorin, ten remained. Fíli and Kíli had fallen defending him with shield and body, for he was their mother's elder brother.

-The Hobbit, or There and Back Again, by J.R.R. Tolkien

III: Stone

He stands with his arms folded and his feet planted wide apart, solid as stone as he watches her. His beard is as thick as an animal pelt and smells like honey and woodsmoke, and his eyes glitter from beneath his brows like polished black stones. Dís is not afraid of him, but still when she meets that black gaze with her own she quails. She knows what those eyes have seen.

"I am told that it was you who bore my brother from the field," she says. She stands as straight as she can, staring down this monstrous man whose kneecap she barely reaches with the top of her head. When Balin had told her of the deed she had scoffed in disbelief at the thought, too numb to accept it, but seeing the man now she knows Thorin could have fit in just one of those massive arms, could have been cradled like an infant. Even imagining it is absurd. It hurts, because her brother was so proud.

The giant inclines his head slightly, gruff and implacable.

"It was I. Your brother fought like a King, lady."

"He was a King," she retorts. It is unjust of her to take offense, for she knows he was only attempting a show of respect for her brother—and that in itself is remarkable, if what Balin told her of the man is at all true—but she cannot help herself. His eyes narrow slightly, but aside from that his expression does not change. He is being patient with her, Mahal help her, he is actually trying to be kind.

The flare of injured anger goes cold in her breast and there are suddenly tears in her eyes.

She says: "You have my thanks, Beorn Carrockcarver," and after only the most meager bow she flees, clamping her teeth down hard over what she had truly wanted to say—to scream.

It was you who left my sons on the field to die.

They might have been dead already. She knows that.

But they might also have been saved.

She will never know.

Dís cannot remember any more how it felt to think her sons were alive; she tries to remember all the long, uncomfortable journey to Erebor but every memory she has is colored and changed now with their deaths. She packed light to travel and so all their belongings were by necessity left behind in their boyhood home: all the toys from their childhood, and their pens and their books, and the broken-soled boots Fíli swore for years he would repair but never did, and Kíli's spare fiddle-strings coiled in their tin beneath his bed. She is beginning to feel as though they were never alive at all, as though she dreamed them in the dark days of her exile, like she used to dream up playmates to entertain her loneliness when she was a girl.

Dáin had set guards at the gate to watch for her coming across the Desolation, so when she arrived at last at Erebor she found the lamps lit and a feast of welcome spread: wine sent from Thranduil's stores in Mirkwood, goat meat from the herds now thriving on the lower slopes of the Lonely Mountain, root vegetables baked in honey, and coarse dark bread. It was not a banquet like those in the days of her grandfather's reign but it is the richest food she can remember eating, and there was enough for everyone. She sat at the high table beside Dáin, and if he noticed that her beard was still shorn and that no ornament adorned her hair, he said nothing. At the end of the meal the entire hall stood and raised their glasses in a toast to her, crying Hail, Daughter of Thráin, Sister of Thorin, King Under the Mountain! She recognized Dáin's apology in that title, and the honor he did her fallen brother. But the wine was a dark red bright as blood in the cups, and in the silence as the hall drank she could hear for the first time the sweet, singing voice of the gold in the walls, slow and secret and potent.

The sound of it made her ill.

It is Balin who finds her after her flight from Beorn, old, kind, diplomatic Balin. She is in what once was Thorin's bedchamber, sitting on the very edge of the bed, bowed over her clasped hands, her whole body rigid with grief. Balin stands a brief moment in the open doorway and then enters, closing the door carefully behind himself before walking to stand in front of her, his hands clasped behind his back.

"Beorn has departed for his home," he says at last. "He wished me to tell you so. He is not offended, Dís," he adds before she can open her mouth. "He understands. Sometimes he seems more beast than man, it is true, and I do not think he bears much fondness towards Dwarves, no matter how he has helped us. But he understands."

She nods, and swallows. She feels as though she is suffocating.

"How can I bear it, Balin?" She asks at last, her voice thin with anguish. Her knuckles are white and she wears no rings. "I wanted only to speak with him, to thank him, but then I saw him and all I could think was—was—"

"Beorn does not know," Balin says gently. "Nor do I. If any one saw their deaths it was Thorin, and he too is—dead." His voice falters a little. "I know Bolg's guard carried spears, but that is all I know."

"Spears," she repeats hollowly, and she unclenches her right hand slowly, finger by finger, until it lies open in her lap, cradled upwards and open, like an empty cup waiting to be filled. When her babies were first born she could sit there, her hand just like that, and fit each little head entire in her palm.

"You are Thráin's daughter." Balin sits beside her, spreading out the skirts of his robes before settling down on the old, flat mattress. A cloud of dust rises up and then falls again, slowly.

"You are strong. You will survive this, lass."

"Yes," she says, and the bones of the Dwarves are the bones of the earth, their hearts the earth's heart, and they do not break.

(But.)

Her children are gone, and her brother is dead, and all were buried with honor before she even had news of their deaths, locked away in stone with a bright Elven sword laid over the tomb. She does not know what wounds were upon her children's bodies, or what garments they were buried in, or who wove the final plaits into their hair.

(Or how they died.)

She hopes they did not suffer.

She hopes they thought of her.

She hopes they did not have time to think of her.

"My sons," she whispers, and her face is wet. She does not know when she began crying but now that she has realized it she cannot stop. "My brave boys."

"They fell defending Thorin with both shield and body," Balin says heavily, and in some far distant part of herself she recognizes that he has grieved nearly as much as she has, these past weeks.

"They did so well by him, Dís," the old dwarf halts out, and there are tears in his eyes, on his face, running into his beard. "And Thorin was so proud. They knew it, before the end."

She tries to say that it is good, that she is glad, that she knows that Thorin deeming them worthy of their blood was all her boys ever wanted since childhood, but all the sound she can make is a moan, low and desolate and animal. She buries her face in her hands, keening her grief, and Balin watches her helplessly. Briefly, he sets his hand upon her shoulder as if she was not his Queen, but only a child again in an unfriendly world, a little girl struggling to understand why Frerin will never return from Azanulbizar.

Then, he leaves her.

She composes herself once he has gone and just sits there, on her brother's empty bed, staring blankly at the wall, at nothing.

That night she sleeps in her childhood room, old dolls still piled in a box at the foot of the bed, the scrawled runes of her name still legible where she cut them into the wall when she was young. She traces the letters with her eyes as she tries to fall asleep but it does not help her. When she closes her eyes the images that have plagued her all this long year are still there as vivid as painted pictures in the darkness behind her lids: Her brother falling, her sons leaping to his defense and then—what? Kíli, vomiting up blood, his eyes round with terror as Fíli tries to hold him up, stroking his hair back with trembling fingers. Fíli, falling forwards over her brother's body with his riven shield still strapped to his broken arm. Kíli, struggling weakly as the goblin standing over him raises a knife to slit his throat. Fíli, curling forward over with the spearhaft protruding from his stomach as Kíli screams, and screams, and screams.

The bear-man slew Bolg thrice-accursed and all his guard, and scattered their bodies in pieces across the field. There is nothing left for her to do, no one against whom to avenge herself. And so it is the same every night since first the messenger came to her door in Ered Luin, and it will be the same, she knows, every night of her life: Dís lies in the darkness and watches her children die, and it is never the same death twice, and she will never know which is the truth.