Regrettably, Gandalf has not had cause to travel beyond Bree in some twenty years.

Though he has kept his ears primed for news of the Shire, chuckling fondly at the happy lives that the Hobbits lead, there has simply been no occasion to find his way on the path of old friends. Distraction plagues the wizard's days. The Greenwood, plagued upon by the darkness lingering about Gundabad though the Great Evil is no more; the Elvenking's wife, long-since slain, and Thranduil now rendered entirely opposed to anysensible reason! The daughter of Belladonna Took and, subsequently, the Shire had not entered his thoughts until the matter of the Lonely Mountain begun pressing on the wizard's mind. Erebor could be left to fester no longer. Thorin Oakenshield must reclaim his homeland, whatever fears the wizard may hold for the curse of his kin . . .

A Hobbit would be just the thing. Quick on their feet, their smell unknown to the fire drake Smaug. Mayhaps a Hobbit's plain sense might cull Durin's Curse, Gandalf chuckles to think, a Hobbit's hearty love of good food and good cheer might save them all!

The first sign that all might not go to plan comes as the wizard stays his journey in Rivendell for the night and dines privately with Lord Elrond.

"You seek the Shire?" Surprise sparks in the Elf's eyes, though Elrond's face remains smooth. "Could this perhaps have anything to do with Belladonna Took's child?"

It is natural enough, that the Lord of Rivendell should think of their dear friend when her home it mentioned. Yet something in Gandalf unsettles itself though he chuckles warmly enough.

"What a happy coincidence! I mean the very same. I fear I have rather neglected my duties as Belladonna's friend when it comes to the matter of Bilba Baggins."

Traces of a frown touch Elrond's face, mirthful though his eyes remain. "I hope you do not enter the Shire with the usual mischief in mind,Mithrandir," he cautions. Gandalf splutters, "Mischief, come now, Lord Elrond - " and the Elf Lord smiles faintly. "You might find it looked upon rather unkindly by the very one you seek."

Gandalf has always felt a profound fondness for Hobbits and the little lives they lead but he's not blind to their rather . . . stiff ways, their foolish attachments to comforts and meaningless trinkets. "Bilba Baggins was always a fine little girl," he says. If too eager with a wooden sword for the comfort of an old wizard's knees. "I've no doubt she possessess the spirit and heart of her mother . . . " he coughs. "However deep down it might have been buried. In fact, all the better reason for me to seek her out, with so-called mischief in mind."

The wizard is in need of a burglar. And Bilba Baggins, it shall be, he thinks with good humour, decided upon it now.

He does not expect how the Elf Lord hesitates, an unusual sadness upon his face, fleeting though it may be.

"I can see you are set upon finding her," Lord Elrond says quietly, something troubled in his brow. "Though one day you might wish you never had." The silver light of the moon, seeping in through the wind, shines in the Elf Lord's pale eyes, a glint of light amongst the darkness.

Gandalf's brow furrows. "What is it you have seen?"

"Seen? I have seen little of whatever plan you hold within your mind, Mithrandir," Elrond says pointedly. "But what I have seen of the girl is as charming as troubled. I expect the Shire has not yet forgotten the winter."

"Hobbits are slow to change, the Shire slower. Why, in all my years, I have never seen a place so very set in its ways!" No wise man would easily brush off the wisdom of the elves, and Gandalf is most certainly no fool yet he thinks he ought to concede to his old friend's faults on this matter. Elves saw so broadly, it could be difficult to look too closely. Too painful when it came to old friends and their children.

He expects it will take a while for Thorin and the Company to adapt to a fussy little Hobbit. But, ah, she would prove herself daughter of Belladonna Took in time.

The wizard's visit in Rivendell comes to an end. He bides the Elf Lord a warm farewell. "Though," he chuckles, "I expect we shall see one another sooner than you might think, old friend!" Gandalf stops, though, to hear the whispers in Bree and finds his sliver of doubt swells though the wizard journeys on with Bilba Baggins and the Shire heavy within his mind.

The young Dwarf prince took work where he could find it, a Hobbit will one day pen, clean strokes and black ink perhaps betrayed by a shake in hand, labouring in the villages of Men. But always he remembered... the mountain smoke beneath the moon... the trees like torches blazing bright. For he had seen dragon fire in the sky...and a city turned to ash. And he never forgave...and he never forgot.

The pen will linger above page. A drop of ink, black as night, splashes on the parchment and bleeds through to the wooden desk below like blood, like blood on snow.

Slowly a quill returns to an ink pot. In this world, Bilba Baggins will breathe and turn away.

This is the story that will not be told:

Meanwhile, far off in the West, a different tragedy was brewing . . . one wrought with ice . . .

The first whisper Bilba Baggins hears of the horror that is to come is the result of chance . . . or perhaps it was a consequence of fate that urges young hands, still bloodless, to scoop up a pile of snow, eyes turning towards Lobelia Bridlegird. It is a choice just as important as the one she will make, a jewel in one hand and blood in the other, and the one before that which starts with a single step beyond her front door. Winter had come to the Shire mere months before, soft flakes of snow settling over the land and thickening. The market place grows scarce, stalls resources dwindling away, and Bilba's parents begin to whisper behind closed doors. But she's bright and young and safe, ignorant to the trap she stands upon.

(Bilba Baggins does not know fear. Not yet.)

The Shire is made of beautiful things. Anything else is forgotten. (Erased, she will whisper someday, bitterness darker than bruises. Bled out.)

Here is what happens before: a snowball flies, and Bilba flees in a flash of her molten gold mane. Lobelia shoots to her feet and, shaking her finger furiously, runs towards the fleeing figure. Bilba flings herself an extra few feet forward, slinging her body round stunned hobbits and ricocheting off sad damp market stalls, heedless of the splinters stabbing into her numb hands. Her heart was races, skin flushing hot under the cold air, ear throbbing from the racket Lobelia was making in her wake. Like a rampaging orc from mam's stories, she thinks gleefully, a grin splitting her face despite the near-miss give of her ankle as she hurls herself round an abrupt turn, bare feet thudding across frozen grass hard enough to bruise as she rabbits through the Shire, wild blonde hair spilling over her red face in unruly twists, blinding her to the laughing Hobbit lad ahead.

"What've you done now, Bilba?" Paladin Took cries, making her head snap. At the sight of him, dark hair stark against snowy skies, Bilba grins. Lobelia lets out a furious shriek. Paladin freezes, the drop of his mouth visible from yeards away. "No." He step back, seeing his death in Bilba's shining eyes. "Oh. Eru no."

But it's too late for him to flee. Bilba has him, clinching him into her body once as she whirls on her heel, snow flying around them in an arch; as Bilba spins and hurls Paladin straight at Lobelia.

"I'll tell your mam you died bravely!" Bilba howls, breathless, laughing, whipping her head round. Paladin lands softly in the snow, rolling, skinny limbs wheeling about as he laughs and shouts, "Sod you, Bilba Baggins," and starfishes out on the ground in Lobelia's path.

He's a good boy.

It isn't enough.

Lobelia lunges over his prone form and charges after Bilba, wickedly fast in her garishly pink skirts. Bilba half-trips, gawping, slowing in her absolute astonishment. Paladin sits up, looking shell-shocked.

"Eru," Paladin whispers. His voice carries across the snowy fields, and Bilba flinches back to herself, golden hair swimming about her face with the harsh lash of the winter winds. And then Paladin; laughing; "I'll tell your mam you died bravely!"

This is why she went after Lobelia. Bilba remembers suddenly to start running again, arms and legs pounding, icy air whipping her skin. She hunts like a damned wraith.

Eventually survival instinct forces Bilba to take refugee in the Thain's house, darting through the halls, quiet as a ghost up the stairs, sweeping through the halls, pressing her back to the wall beside the Thain's study, panting. The Shire has an open-door policy for tweens but even Lobeliawould think twice about shouting at the Thain's granddaughter within earshot.

It is this thinking that leads to one of the most important moments of Bilba Baggins' life.

It is not her intent to linger, to stumble across the moment that she does, a moment that she will remember later with a trembling hand over her eyes and think quietly amidst puffs of smoke: here is what ruins me, this is the moment that kills me. Chance. Fate. It is such a small thing, in the end, a thread of fabric and as Bilba goes to lurch away from the door, her dress snags on a splinter. Had it been any other day, she would never have noticed, have stopped. Had it not been winter outside.

O!

Had it only been summer still.

There's a world where it was, she tells herself after the worst of things.

But it is not this world. It is winter. And Bilba Baggins lingers to free herself. It takes a second for the voices to filter through the Thain's study, for everything to change.

"The Elves of Rivendell would be glad to aid us," a grave voice said, a sharp punch revealing anger.

Bilba . . . stops and holds her breath, wanting to slink away. The Shire is made of beautiful things, Bilba thinks abruptly, an echo of a memory, and instead she creeps in closer, arms curling around herself. Something . . . shifts in her mind, waves rippling across still waters.

"No." The anger in the second voice made Bilba flinch, a frisson of unease unspooling inside of her. "We are Hobbits, we cannot invite outsiders into our affairs. It is too dangerous."

"The Rangers say it won't be long before the Brandywine freezes." The first voice belongs to Belladonna Took, Bilba realises and shrinks against the wall, startled. Her mother's quick to annoy, slow to anger, except . . . "And then the wolves will come when they can no longer hunt elsewhere. Our people will starve, your grandchildren will starve. How dangerous will it be then?" Except for when . . .

"You have too much confidence in your friends." And that was her grandfather, the Thain, but not as Bilba had ever heard him. There is something dangerous in his voice, dark and unknown like the shadows moving across her bedroom wall in the dark, like a figure stumbling by Bag End as Bilba peeks outside, blood on the cobbles. Wolves. Bilba's head spins. She has not thought of this in years. "We have weathered harsher winters than this before and so shall we again."

"And you are too proud!"

There comes a quiet clink of metal on china. Bilba closes her eyes and sees the mildness of her grandfather's face, the delicacy of a small white tea cup in hand, the angles the golden light gives him.

"You are too wilful," he says lowly, thunder brewing, soft and gentle. Bilba freezes to hear it, a slow uneasy confusion coming through her. "You, my daughter, who fled your home at the word of a wizard without a word to anyone. Who left your husband at the alter to bask in the company of your elves and returned three days later, expecting all to be as you left it. How your mother wept for the Baggins boy."

Her mother's breath comes in sharp, wounded. Bilba has never heard anything like it before, never seen how her mother bleeds. Bilba's mind turns to her father, summoning up the darkness of his eyes whenever her mother laughed through that story, sweeping Bilba up into her arms, and his eyes drown out the joy in her mother's face. How Bilba had laughed and thought it well.

She draws in her own breath, a little sick, a little dizzy. Her memory feels sullied, greasy, and Bilba thinks nonsensically don't, pleads don't, because the angles of her world are shifting, new light flickering down from above, shadows sprouting in different places. She thinks again of her father, of her mother's anger, and her body does not seem to fit, the developing wideness of her hips, the weight of her chest. I was fifteen, Bilba thinks as sudden as a flaming arrow across the night sky, I was fifteen, and a women was crying, screaming for help over the rain, in the street that night, and I didn't understand why father pulled me away, didn't help her.

. . . shouldn't have been out there, her father had said behind his study down, a stone in the hurricane of her mother's rage.

And if it had been me? Belladonna had demanded. I assure you, Bungo Baggins, I have lived much wilder than my cousin ever has!

That's different. You're different.

Because I am yours? Her mother snarled. Bilba remembers tucking cold feet under herself, the stairs hard under her, and she waits for her father to disagree, to explain it had been a misunderstanding, it was a mistake or a part of a game, the lusty laughter of lads and her cousin's screams, the iron grip of her father's hand when Bilba had tried to go to her. It never comes. Bungo Baggins had been silent for one moment, a moment that had tipped over into another. Because I am wed now, I live free from the end of unruly girls?

Her father's silence, wrong-footed and slow, is answer enough, a pause Bilba remembers in her bones for years to come in half-clouded moments and a fear she will never understand. There had been a figure stumbling by the white gates of Bag End that night, and Bilba had closed her eyes, small body tucked tight into a ball, and tried so very hard not to see.

"We do not invite trespassers onto our land," the Thain said, his voice the iron piercing Bilba's chest and forcing her still, to look this moment in the eyes and hold the gaze this time, inflexible as it killed something in Belladonna - a whisper of a breath, a death rattle. I can't look away now, Bilba realises, and it feels a lot like fear, a mist steaming along her vision. Her limbs have grown heavy, her weight slumping into the wall as she stands and as she listens, and as she learns. "It has been so since my time begun. It will be so long after my time ends. That is final. Leave me."

A whisper of a breath . . . "That's it," Belladonna Took whispers. Bilba strains to hear her voice, bending her neck forward. "You would have us hide from the world."

"A matter of safety, my dear."

"A matter of power," she says hotly. The silence comes like a slap, Bilba's shoulders tingle under the sting, skittish and fearful. "You would have us know no other world but the one you made, know no other way but yours . . . "

The Thain says nothing for a long moment.

(This is it. How she begins to learn.)

Bilba stands, white-faced and sickly, enlightened as she hears the raggedness, the hurt, in her mother's breaths and the delicate clink of a china cup returning to saucer.

"You would be wise not to share such concerns, my dear," The Old Took says finally. He sounds like my father, Bilba notes numbly; gentle and concerned; and the horror of it all was sickening, his voice and her mother's realisations, and the wolves, the implications of starvation . . . "Tempers rise higher with snowfall."

Bilba's stomach drops, the slippery feeling tightening as the organ topples into a void. Her mouth stings, bitten in shock, unease rising.

"That sounds like a threat, father," Belladonna says quietly.

"Does it?" Another gentle click of china; the roaring flickers of a burning hearth; and something hard in familiar tones, fierce as few things had ever been and growing darker with every word, quicker and more explosive. "How unfortunate. Leave me, now; obey me, child."

For a single instant, a flicker of candle flame, all is silent; and then the door hauls open, Bilba freezing in place as her mother sweeps right past her, once soft shoulders stiff as Bilba has never seen her, and disappears down the hall, the proud tilt of her chin howling rage. The Thain follows his daughter out of the door, but not a step further. He stands for a moment, his form cast tall in shadows that hung over Bilba as an axe, white hair darkened in the crackling flames.

He doesn't look gentle anymore. Bilba's blood washes cold as her grandfather smiles, a dark little quirk, and says lowly; "Do you think yourself a thief, Bilba? Creeping in the dark?"

The surge of rage in his voice, as sudden as beast roaring from still waters, chokes Bilba, shock pulsing through her, as her grandfather's head turns to where she hides against the wall. His eyes are black, the blue submerged beyond any hope, and Bilba thinks fast, feels something - everything - slipping through her fingers . . .

This moment is slippery ground, and Bilba fears she might not survive the fall.

"I am no thief, sir," Bilba says, casting her voice as bold as she could and sinks from the shadows on trembling legs, lets her fearfulness be . Weak. I'm nothing. "I seek to take nothing from you."

This is not like mam's stories. In them, there was bravery and defiance and heroes. There were never women screaming for help denied to them or grandfathers who had once patched up bloodied knees with the stares of monsters or tricks like these, revealing weakness to avoid the threat of strength. Of madness, Bilba realises, a quick stab of hurt, over the pounding of her heart, and power, and nothing a hero is supposed to crave.

"And yet you spy on me," the Thain says harshly, taking a step closer. Before Bilba can splutter a denial, his hand lifts - her heart gallops and in the space of a split second, Bilba thinks is he, is he - and then stills, not for her flinch. His hand hovers in the air, eyes sliding from her face, off to the side. Bilba's eyes dart away, mind frenzied for the cause of his distraction, and then she catches a wink of light from his collar, a glitter of gold . . .

A long finger hooks a curl of her hair, and Bilba's eyes snap to her grandfather's face, to the sharp hungry thing in the lines of his face, almostanimal with the blank horror it inspires; a starved desperate creature you cannot escape. Bilba doesn't dare breathe, for fear of springing this creature into an assault.

"Gold hair," the Thain murmurs, eyes black, greedy, as he watches the strand of dark-gold twisting around his finger in a ring, singing as bright as molten gold in the firelight. "Such a rich gold, burning gold . . . "

It was more than Bilba could take, terror creeping under her skin, and she shifts her weight back on her heels, trying to free herself -

The Thain's hand goes tight and yanks, sending Bilba staggering forward, gasping in pain, wispy fear breaking into reality.

"Do not," her grandfather says, angry, close, "Do as your mother has done, my dear." Bilba nods, quick as she can, tears springing to her eyes as her scalp burns. The Thain looks at her hard for a moment, grip gradually loosening until finally, finally, Bilba can spring free, lurching away fast, so fast that her back thuds into the wall.

The Thain's eyes do not waver, and he says, "Let us pray you have your father's sense," and Bilba Baggins thinks no, no. Let us pray I have my mother's courage.

"Do you mean to wish me a good morning, or do you mean that it is a good morning whether I want it or not? Or, perhaps you mean to say that youfeel good on this particular morning. Or are you simply stating this is a morning to be good on?"

Well.

Well. Yes.

She certainly should have expected that when tales of a Man matching the descriptions her mother had whispered in her ears as a child was seen entering the Shire. After dismissing young Drogo Baggins with a few biscuits, Bilba had taken out to her garden for a well-deserved smoke and perhaps to tend to her prized tomatoes with the feeling of the sky collapsing around her, and had instead been ambushed.

Regrettably Bilba thinks she ought to have expected this.

A visit, she had considered; a request, she had expected from the wizard; but . . . not this. Not quite this.

"All of them at once, I suppose." Bilba Baggins squints up at the great looming figure above her, realising in the back of her mind with a dim feeling of unease that she was submerged entirely in his shadow and well within reach of his walking . . . staff? Stick? Certainly a prop. "Though," she continues in the same wry easy tone, "I am, in truth, having a rather odd morning myself."

The wizard frowns down at her in a bemused fashion as if she was not quite what he expected. He knew me as a girl, Bilba realises distantly, a weapon she knows how to use well. "Is that so?"

"It is so," Bilba returns gravely, stalling for time, for time to think.

It takes the wizard a moment to realise she intended to say no more. With an odd contemplative hmming sound to jolt her into action, which Bilba deliberately ignores, and an uncomfortable cough, the wizard eventually prompts her with an, "Oh?"

"I find myself rather lacking in companions to share tea with," Bilba says and lets a smile unfurl across her face, teeth tucked away. Cast your eyes away, don't show him your teeth, let him think you can still be a gentle thing. "Perhaps you would like to join me, sir?"

She gives no time to hear his response.

Turning on her heel into the door of Bag End, Bilba Baggins leaves a flummoxed wizard on her front stoop and bustles into the kitchen with a bright cry of, "Do make yourself at home!"

She sets the kettle to boil, listens to the wizard entering her home through open doorways, and sets some biscuits out on a tray.

Only then does Bilba Baggins stop, pressing her palms into the counter. She felt as if the weight of her years was curving over her, making a mountain of her, towering, cold and remote, above a helpless city.

Within her, there blooms such a great power to destroy.

It was not a strictly polite thing to do, especially to a stranger invited into her home, but Bilba's long since stopped bothering overly with what her priggish neighbours might have to say about her. Mad Baggins, they called her when they thought she couldn't hear. If the sane alternative to Mad Baggins was Lobelia Sackville-Baggins, well, Bilba could certainly take that as a compliment of the highest order. She at least refrains from pinching silverware, for all her apparent sins.

Silver and gold are the least of my troubles, Bilba concedes distantly. Panic fluctuates around her chest; there and gone; quick as a knife.

The only reason the wizard would come to her door, so promptly after passing through Bree, was if he meant to incite her into adventure as he had done her mother . . . more specifically, into a grand adventure, one that required Bilba to quit the Shire rather than a simple trip to Rivendell or some such paltry thing. Gandalf's manner of introduction, both grand and perplexing as if to intrigue, only reinforces Bilba's suspicions.

It's a sweet thing, Bilba thinks with a dim curl of satisfaction in her chest, that he thinks to trick me.

It was rare, these days, for anyone to think so kindly of her. Even in ignorance.

Bilba knows such tricks, has used them herself to fascinate fauntlings and provoke respectable types into unreasonable actions, while keeping her own eyes clear on the path she desires, on keeping Paladin's path clear of threats and uprisings from how things had once been in the Shire under another Thain's rule; has danced with words and flirtation and led the Shire, trembling, gasping, into the world whilst walking backwards and thinking eyes on me, eyes on me all the way. Bilba Baggins was a being of tricks, cobbled together in ruins and blood on snow to soften blows, to trade barbs like flashes of steel and - above all else - to serve a better hobbit than her grandfather had been. Then she ever had the chance to be.

Bilba Baggins the Clever, the Deft-Hand, the Kindly One and the Cruel One and the Right Hand. Mad Baggins. Baggins of Bag-End. Took of Tookland. Disturber of the Peace. Dog, the Thain's Dog. And one last thing, one last name no other knew but Paladin, Thain of the Shire, though he would deny, deny, deny.

The Good Thain. Bilba's relief is a soft wave of bliss, dark with the reminder of before and what had been done to make Paladin so; to keep him so amongst the shatter of tradition she had wrought through him.

Through him. On the counter, Bilba's hands look white, whiter than blood on snow. The Good Thain. Paladn Took, who trusts her far too much; who Bilba catches herself looking at from the corner of her eye, still waters staining dark, and leading instead of following, still thinking eyes on me, eyes on me as if wolves surround them still.

It is not kindness, exactly, Bilba feels in those moments.

When Bilba returns to her living room and gently settles the tray on the table, herself delicately into her armchair, it is to find the wizard's large form perching awkwardly in a too-small armchair.

"Forgive me," Bilba says, lilting her voice upward fussily. Her hands fold in her lap, prim and proper and clever, too, in that. "I've misplaced the chair mother kept for you - that is to say, if you are Gandalf the Grey? The one who made such splendid fireworks?"

The wizard's eyebrows rise skyward in astonishment. "Most peculiar," he mutters as if to himself. And then: "Yes. I am he." And nothing else.

I was right. Bilba does not smile at his petulance.

Instead she shifts within the confines of her bodice, lets the wizard see. It ought to make his eyes flash as if winning a victory. Only . . . if she had been any other, Bilba would tilt her head; he does not look triumphant, she observes with sharp eyes, instead there's a downward plunge to his mouth, a glint Bilba cannot quite pin down.

Sickly heat rises to Bilba's temples, a low-ebb of disquiet.

The wizard wishes to trick her. Bilba does not know if she will let him; if she can.

"Is that what brings you to the Shire, then?" Bilba flutters her hands before pouring the tea, the arches of bare feet pressing into carpet to mute the threat of the skies coming down around her again and calling in a tide of anger; useless against a wizard, against a Thain. This is not like her, Bilba knows in the centre of her mind. To feel so much. As if still cowering outside her grandfather's office, as if his hands linger in her hair. The wizard reminds her, but she does not allow it to bruise her calculation. "Matters of business?" Still the wizard's brow furrows at her as if he's squinting to see the layers under Bilba's skin, and Bilba rather thought that would not do. "I had no idea you were still in business."

Gandalf looks at her as her grandfather once had. As if she has disappointed him in some way.

". . . "

Bilba tilts her head, birdlike. "I'd think a wizard had more pressing matters to be getting on with in truth."

"BILBA BAGGINS!"

Shadows, flung across her walls, devouring all daylight and rumbling around her, surrounding the wizard rising up, up, up out of his seat and towering above her, his roar echoing around her. Bilba Baggins' heart stutters, something slivering through her bones and stiffening flesh, but she does not flinch. The wizard towers, his boom echoes like howls, like clashing swords, and memory pressing against the seams of her skin . . .

Bilba simply tilts her head back and gazes at Gandalf.

She is conscious, as ever, of the fragile press of her bones through skin, the delicacy of her collarbone, the wideness of her dark eyes and the straightness of her spine, pale legs draping over the chair and barely brushing the floor, shell pink silk settled over her knees.

"Do you intend to threaten me," Bilba's arch tone cuts cleanly through the storm, "In my own home?"

Gandalf stops, the wind flagging in his sails, and the shadows flicker, creeping away, giving as light returns to them. Birds flutter outside the window, their high cries sounding out the passing of fear. Gandalf's shoulders slump, face sinking as if aging rapidly, as if shamed. Needlessly, Bilba thinks with pity for the wizard. She does not enjoy the wounding of others.

Yet, a voice burbles in the back of her mind frantically. Yet. Yet.

"No," says Gandalf. "No, my dear, that is not my intent."

"Perhaps," she says with gentle understanding, "We may speak a little plainer now."

Or rather, Bilba thinks, you shall.

"Yes. Yes, perhaps we shall . . . I am looking for someone to share in an adventure."

It was such a forgone conclusion that there was scant pleasure.

"An adventure, you say?" Bilba Baggins sips her tea, patting her mouth delicately with a napkin, before her cup returns to the saucer with a clink of china on china that reminds her of too much. "You do, ah, know where you are, yes?"

"I am in exactly the right place," the wizard says decidedly, bushy eyebrows furrowing down at her. He was frowning once more, likely at her impertinent tone. "And in exactly the right time, too, if I am an not mistaken."And I am not mistaken, his body language says, Bilba notes with distant amusement.

"Perhaps you are."

Bilba takes a few moments to languidly exhale a puff of smoke merely to see Gandalf's ire rise. He's used to controlling the conversation, Bilba realises, and no bloody wonder why if he's a wizard, and files the information away. She allows a whimsical smile to come across her face. "But do you have the right Hobbit for this adventure, I wonder?"

"I certainly think so." Gandalf stoops slightly, a barely noticeable bend of his thin frail form, to peer down hard at her. "You are Bilba Baggins, child of Belladonna, yes?" And then he continues: "Slayer of Wolves?"

The world does not end, her grandfather says, with a shock, dear girl.

Bilba sits and considers. It was, of course, a possibility that Gandalf might have heard of her on his way into the Shire - not a favourable one, as Bilba prefers to walk softly and leave no footsteps to follow, but not impossible. Not difficult to work with. It's an easy thing, to allow her hands to tremble as they lower the pipe, to swallow tightly; alleged cracks in a pretty face, faults in a rose, all lies.

"No," Bilba says and casts her eyes away until it feels real, wisps of smoke blending into regret pinching under her skin. "No," she repeats lowly, "I am that no more."

There is a moment, falling through the air, in which nothing is said. Smoke curls in the air from the tea between them.

"My dear . . . " Gandalf's voice comes low and troubled. "I do not think you have ever been anything else."

If Bilba Baggins is a lie, she is one that the wizard does not quite buy.

"Bilba has started spending time in the woods again," Bungo Baggins tells a Took relation one evening, a teasing affection in his voice. It's all Bilba can do not to move her head to see who, exactly, from where she stands a few feet away and feels oddly ill at the sight of a depleted market which had once been so plentiful. What had once been treats, are now threats as the roads begin to ice over; as she hears Farmer Gamgee mention the lack of harvest to her mother; as she feels the sift of her grandfather's hands through her hair, sees the black greed in his eyes, as if fresh still and she fears, she fears, she fears. "Picking berries, of all things! I don't know why she bothers - we've plenty other food in the pantry."

For how long? Bilba wants to demand, to sling in their oblivious faces a subject she can't really grasp. A food shortage is beyond her imagination, that Hobbits simply could not hunt and that there would be no way of supplies coming in when the roads freeze over completely. She still thinks her clumsy efforts will save lives; berries, and bravery, and last minute heroics. Bilba still hopes this might end well.

Her belief flickers for the first time at a family gathering the next day when her grandfather, dark eyes sparkling, gestures her to sit at the foot of his armchair. I don't want to. Don't touch me. Don't touch me. Please don't touch me. Please. Please. The words live and die on her tongue.

Bilba Baggins is not brave like her mother.

"I don't want you in the woods anymore, dear," the Thain says, voice rolling soft and smooth. "It isn't safe."

She sits, stiffly, with her back to him, her skirts pooling across the living room floor. Across the room her mother and her father argue in low voices, and Lobelia chatters with her friends, and Paladin laughs, his neck a pale line, as he twirls their grandmother around the room, the silver of her hair catching in the light. Bilba feels her heart stutter, swelling with something powerful, forceful . . .

But she has been silent too long; her grandfather's hand sinks into her hair, nails scrapping hard across Bilba's scalp. "Anything could happen to a young woman. Do you understand?"

"I see."

The next time Bilba goes into the woods to search for ways to find food, she doesn't let herself be seen. The time after that, she brings a blade.