Carry Your Will

A/N: I recently found some old Hobbit fic on my tumblr that I never posted anywhere else. (Apologies to anyone whose already seen this!)

i.

They settled in one of the old guard rooms just above the Front Gate, which they had spent the last days shoring up. The antechamber, large and round and dusty, opened onto a small lookout post: an open ledge carved out of the sheer cliff face. The post was invisible from the lower mountain slopes, and the view, of Dale and the Desolation spread out beyond it, was a grand one.

"The runes," Bilbo said, pressing his palm flat against the stone wall. He could feel the carvings beneath his hand. Not just lines and empty space—the same kind of magic that had tumbled from the waterfalls in Rivendell, something bright and strong against his skin. "What do they say?"

"Names. Of all the guards ever sworn to Erebor, and what they came to defend," said Balin, who was standing nearby. He frowned for a moment, considering, and then reached out and tapped a set of carvings just over Bilbo's head. "There I am. And just below it, my king and my brothers."

"Brothers? I thought it was only you and Dwalin."

"There were four of us," Balin said, tracing the runes, and Bilbo wondered how long it had been since he had last seen those names. But something else soon caught his gaze, and he pointed out a set of carvings a few inches away. "She was my training master."

"What was she protecting, then?" Bilbo asked, curiously.

Balin obligingly read it out him. "The graves of my father, my husband, and my children, it says. Ah, and here's a fine one just below it. The pretty coiner I jailed last year, may her beard grow long and her sentence soon be commuted."

Almost half of the curving wall was filled, the runes cut deep and clear into the stone. Thousands of names, and most of their owners dead, Bilbo supposed. But the life hadn't left this place. Not yet.

Here, more than anywhere else in Erebor, the mountain remembered; even the walls echoed with it.

"We'll be safe enough here," Balin said, stepping back. "And if any army comes within a day's march of the mountain, we will know."

ii.

Somehow Bilbo always ended up on watch in the cold dark hours of the morning, when the stars crystallized overhead and his breath froze in the silent air. On this particular night he sat out on the lookout's post, his knees pulled up to his chest, blowing on his hands in a vain attempt at keeping warm. He was so close to the edge that one good shove from behind would send him tumbling off the cliff. But the only soul nearby was Thorin, smoking quietly beside him, and there was no danger there. The rest of the Company was asleep in the antechamber of the guard room, blankets and battered clothes spread out across the floor.

Bofur had offered Bilbo his hat before he'd gone on watch; after only a few minutes on the ledge, Bilbo was cursing himself for saying no. When he started shivering in earnest, Thorin offered him the pipe, but Bilbo shook his head at that, too.

"I would drop it over the edge, like as not. I can hardly feel my fingers. And that stuff you call pipe weed is foul."

"Tobacco. How did your mother come to raise such a fussy little gentlehobbit, Master Baggins?"

"My mother," said Bilbo, with great dignity and chattering teeth, "raised a sensible young son with excellent taste."

"And yet here you are, quietly freezing to death," Thorin set the pipe aside, taking Bilbo's hands in his own. "Sensible, indeed."

"I had a coat. A blue one, perfectly serviceable, until several tons of stone fell on it," Bilbo said. Thorin's hands were blessedly warm, and it took a great deal of willpower not to edge as close to him as possible and curl around him like a purring cat. "But I shouldn't complain. It was just the coat, without me in it. Otherwise you might've marked up one of the topmost boulders and left it as a gravestone: Here lies Bilbo Baggins, our burglar, once a respectable hobbit of the Shire, who thought that his companions could be trusted to haul rubble and was duly punished for his blind faith."

"Hm," said Thorin, in the tone that he usually used when Fíli and Kíli were behaving badly. "And buried to your left and right would be the fools who thought rope a century old was suitable for load-bearing work."

"Oh, well, if you're going to go killing folk for me, I suppose I can forgive the loss of the coat. It wasn't even mine to begin with."

Thorin laced their fingers together. "You're terribly hard on your clothes, burglar. Can I trust that you will look after your armor, at least?"

"I look ridiculous," Bilbo said, a little mournfully. Beneath his shirt, the mithril mail glimmered in the starlight, pale and silver. "I wish you'd given me something simpler."

"You are not a simple creature. Do you dislike it, then?"

Thorin's grip on Bilbo's hand tightened, even as he straightened and pulled away, adding inches to the distance between them. It might as well have been leagues.

"No," Bilbo said quickly. "No, it's not—it's beautiful, Thorin. Oín told me that the kings of Gondor commissioned mithril helms for their citadel guards, to honor their loyalty. And I like to think—you'll laugh, but sometimes I feel like if I stood between you and the world, it would be the world that gave way." Impulsively, he leaned forward and kissed Thorin's cheek, determined to bridge the gap between them.

Thorin turned to face him, startled. So Bilbo kissed him again, this time on the lips. They never said anything to each other about the affair, if their quiet understanding could even be properly called that; it was a fragile thing, and strange, but their hands fit together as if they'd been carved from the same stone, and it was the easiest thing in the world for Bilbo to believe himself in love.

"I wanted to see you in proper armor," Thorin said, as if he were confessing some private shame. He tugged Bilbo closer until he was half-sprawled in his lap. "For weeks, now, ever since the Carrock. I thought I would have to scour the mountain, but grandfather kept all the mithril we had in the royal armory."

Bilbo hummed, only half-listening. From his new vantage he was more interested in tracing the line of Thorin's collarbone, and he tugged at the collar of Thorin's shirt.

"We're on watch," Thorin said. "On a narrow ledge, halfway up a mountain," he added, when Bilbo opened his mouth to protest. "Imagine what they would write on my gravestone, if we toppled over."

Bilbo sighed and buried his face in the crook of Thorin's shoulder. "It's unsettling, when you're the sensible one of the two of us."

Neither of them spoke for a moment, and then Bilbo added: "Is mithril so very rare, then? I rather thought you had oceans of it lying around somewhere, like the gold in the treasury."

"The lords of the west would empty their coffers to pay for the armor you wear," Thorin said. He spoke so matter-of-factly that it took Bilbo a moment to realize what he was saying. "My father told me it was made for the last high king of the elves, when he was but half-grown. But Gil-galad died long ago, and Moria is lost to us, and the line of kings in Gondor was broken. The guards in Minas Tirith wear the heraldry of a long dead house—and the greater part of their Steward's wealth," he added, dryly.

Bilbo wondered if they weren't too close to the edge after all. He tried to speak, failed—cleared his throat and tried again. "Oh," he managed, softly. "I. Oh."

"You brought me to my kingdom," Thorin said, and it looked as if there was something else he wanted to say, too. Instead he shrugged and fell silent.

Bilbo ached to tell him about the Arkenstone. But he could still hear the echoes of the dragon's words, and he feared them more than he did any distant army of elves and men. Not just yet, he thought. I can wait a little while longer.

But what he was waiting for, Bilbo didn't know.

iii.

"What about Thorin?" he asked Balin next morning, over their meager breakfast. "Is he here? On the walls, I mean."

Thorin himself had vanished sometime before dawn, presumably to see what else could be done about the defenses; Dwalin and Fíli were gone, too. Everyone else was enjoying the opportunity to sleep past sunrise.

"Oh, all the kings are," said Balin, in between bites of stale bread. He gave Bilbo a knowing look. "Thorin's somewhere on the northeast side, I think. Shall I find him for you?"

"No, that's all right. But the runes under his name—what he swore to defend when he joined the guard. Is it—"

Balin was already shaking his head. "There's nothing written there, lad. None of the kings have any marks beneath their names."

He didn't explain, and Bilbo decided not to press. He figured it out on his own soon enough, anyway. It was the kind of riddle that he most appreciated: one with an answer hidden in plain sight.

After all, just because there wasn't anything written didn't mean that there wasn't anything there.

Thorin's name was carved into the northeastern corner of the guard room, just as Balin had said. Beneath it there was nothing but plain stone. Nothing but Erebor itself.

Oh, Bilbo thought. Of course.

How long had the mountain been waiting for its children to come home? How long had it been calling Thorin eastward, driving him half-mad with longing for the kingdom he had sworn to defend?

I'll look after him, he promised, just in case the mountain was listening. I haven't the faintest notion how. But he trusts me. And that's something, isn't it?

iv.

Yes, the mountain said, though Bilbo didn't hear it. You have what you need. You have my heart.

And his, too.