Author's Note: So, here it is. My first attempt at a romance. Full credit for the idea goes once more to the lovely Dunadanka. This is written as if the Battle of the Five Armies went a different way, and all members of the Company survived.

It was actually really enjoyable to write, even though I'm terrified of my first OC being pathetic, so I hope you like it.

So, the triumphant heroes had returned unscathed from their harrowing adventure. Well, more or less unscathed. I was walking a bit slower than usual do to one or two broken ribs, and Kili had ingeniously clasped his hair back into a loose and faintly effeminate bun so as to disguise the fact that a good portion of said hair had been burned clean off. This made him look like an idiot, in my opinion, but I wasn't about to mention it.

The important thing was that we'd won, and we were going back to Ered Luin to bring the dwarves there news of the outcome of our quest.

What with Bilbo heading back to his Shire with Gandalf as an escort, and Thorin busy establishing himself as King Under the Mountain, the rest of us had begun to trickle back westwards to find our families.

Some of the others, Nori in particular, had expressed a desire to linger awhile longer in Lake-Town, doubtless to enjoy the very fine ale that the men there made, but Kili and I had pressed on, eager to see our mother again,

We'd had a few interesting encounters on the return journey, of course. A lone warg had attacked us just after we got clear of Mirkwood, and later on, a horned creature that somewhat resembled a goblin had leapt from the underbrush while we were enjoying supper, and tried to throttle me.

Armed as we were, we'd dealt with the warg fairly easily, and Kili had felled the horned thing with a well aimed blow with the stewpot. He'd spent the rest of the journey regretting the fact that Thorin hadn't been there to see that particular fight.

The only other incident worth mentioning was a rather lively one, when Kili, exhibiting his amazing ability to find trouble anywhere, had tossed a rock at a rather large wasps' nest. The wasps that inhabited it were also quite abnormal in size, as I'd had ample time to observe when they all shot out to get revenge. Only by throwing ourselves unceremoniously into a pond had Kili and I managed to escape being severely stung.

But now we were standing in front of the Eastern Gates, preparing to signal our presence to the guard in as dignified as way as possible.

"Oi!" Kili yelled, cupping his hands to his mouth "Let us in!"

I backed up this plea for admittance by giving the gate a good, hard kick, and it wasn't long before it swung open and we were allowed in.

The guard stationed there looked rather taken aback to see us standing there grinning at him, not a blackened and burnt mess, but both whole and more or less healthy looking.

"Fili...? Kili...?"

"Hello - Torfi, isn't it?" I said, pleasantly "How are you these days?"

"Well enough. But if you're here, then..."

"Erebor's ours again," said Kili, nodding "Thorin's got his throne back, and Smaug the Terrible is dead."

He omitted to say that it had, in fact, been Bard of Lake-Town who had done the deed, but there would be time to elaborate the details later. Kili and I had planned to announce our victory in as grand a manner as possible, but it was somehow more satisfying to say it almost casually, as if we were merely remarking upon the weather.

"So, if I were you," I said "I'd start spreading the word."

Torfi nodded and started hurrying towards his fellow guards to impart this news. Kili grabbed my arm, clearly intending to find our mother as quickly as possible, but I paused.

Plums, and wood smoke, and the sound of a knife against a whetstone.

"Torfi!" I called "Is Gudny, daughter of Snorri still living by Bersi's forge?"

Torfi looked up from where he was deep in whispered conversation with the other guards and nodded.

"Snorri's daughter? Aye, she's still there."

Kili had enough decency to wait until we were out of ear-shot before bursting out laughing.

"Gudny?"

Yes.

You don't get to know many dwarves your age when you grow up the way that Kili and I did, and dwarf children in general were steadily becoming rarer.

But I'd known Gudny.

The dwarf standing in the marketplace watched me in a faintly unnerving way. Her hair was dark brown and had been twisted into four braids, all of which were starting to come undone. She had broad, sturdy features and brown eyes set beneath thick, dark eyebrows.

There were probably many other eloquent phrases that could be used to describe her appearance, but I wasn't a poet. She had a determined sort of face, still too young and round to be particularly good looking.

She was, I found out later, a bit younger than me, but she stood half a head taller, and I noticed to my annoyance that her beard, which was already coming in along her jawline, was quite a bit thicker than mine.

"How many plums can you fit in your mouth?" she asked, abruptly, and her voice pulled up at the vowels in the accent that was common among some of the less noble clans.

Well, it wouldn't win any prizes for being a particularly deep or intellectually stimulating question, but I knew a challenge when I heard one. She was holding a large wooden bowl full of plums, which she proffered to me.

A few minutes later, I had to admit that even though plums are quite small and tend to mash together when you chew them up, you can only fit so many in your mouth.

"Eight," I said, indistinctly, spraying plum juice everywhere "Wha' about you?"

"Only six. But I've been practicing."

We stood there for a moment or two, while I tried to swallow my plums and ended up spitting most of them out into a sticky pile of mush.

"Lovely," said my new acquaintance, twitching her dark, blue skirts away from the mess "Just lovely."

I shrugged - I could remember when Kili had been born, and he'd spent a good deal of time spitting up worse.

"Fili, at your service," I said, with courteous, if slightly emotionless politeness.

"Gudny, at yours," she said. Her face was wearing the strangely solemn expression that she'd had throughout the conversation, but the now decidedly upwards slant of her eyebrows gave me the uncomfortable impression that she was laughing at me.

We both moved to shake hands, but we both timed it wrong and ended up sort of tangling fingers. My hand was still sticky with juice and there was substantial evidence to prove that she'd recently used hers to wipe her nose, which made it one of the most unhygienic pseudo-handshakes of the Age.

I was just about to hastily wipe my palm on my tunic, before I noticed that Gudny was grinning. Up to that point her features had been set into a faintly surly expression, but now it creased into a perfectly normal, cheerful grin. Her eyes crinkled at the corners, and it made her look...not bad, really.

"Are you even listening to me?" Kili asked, nudging me in the ribs.

"Mmm?"

"Come on, Gudny, just this once."

Gudny, who had been leaning over the hearth fire, prodding the contents of her mother's stewpot with the air of someone bracing themselves for a ghastly discovery any second, straightened up and scowled at me.

In the past few years we'd both grown quite a bit, though she was still aggravatingly taller than I was, and even her glares were more amusing than disconcerting now. I could always tell when she was actually angry, and when she was only being bad tempered for the look of it, because when she was truly serious she had the habit of stuttering and stumbling over her words.

"Where's Kili?" she asked "He enjoys this sort of thing much more than I do."

"He's off with Thorin," I said, grimacing "Archery practice."

My own experiments with a bow had resulted in me having to tug a good number of arrows out of the beams of our roof, and I had done my best to avoid this particular weapon every since.

"Look, it's never any fun because you always win," said Gudny, coming back to the matter at hand.

"Not always. You won last time, right?"

"Only because you felt sorry for me. I'm not doing it, Fili - no. If that's the only reason you're here, you can get out of my house."

"I won't leave until you say yes," I said, resorting to tactics which were unfortunately a little childish "In fact, I might just sit down, right here in the doorway, and you can just try making me move."

Gudny sighed but nodded - the thought of me cluttering up the place for all eternity doubtless rather unappealing.

"Right," she said "Toss me a stick."

I'd brought two, in fact. Thick, sturdy sticks made of oak that Thorin often used when he gave Kili and I fighting lessons, and which were about two arm-lengths long, to use the most useless and uncertain unit of dwarven measurement.

I was about to throw her one, like I would if she had been Kili, and then thought better of it and simply held it out to her. It wasn't that I thought that she couldn't catch it, it was just that...

Well, I couldn't really put my finger on why I did this, to tell the truth.

Gudny took the stick and reversed her grip on it, bringing it up in front of her to act as a shield between us. I'd pestered her into helping me practice sparring enough times that she knew from experience that I was most likely to lash out at chest height first, and had adjusted her technique accordingly.

I raised my own stick, but then held still, knowing that if I waited long enough she'd grow impatient and therefore be likely to make more mistakes.

And I was right. Gudny swung her stick at head height, but I was already ducking and bringing my own...well, for the sake of an argument you might call it a weapon...up to block the blow. Gudny staggered, and barely managed to parry my own swing.

To be strictly honest, it wasn't exactly a fair fight. Apart from the obvious issue of the amount of training that I'd been doing, there was also the fact that Gudny was wearing a heavy, movement impairing dress.

But she was a little faster than I was - though, not faster than Kili - and she wasn't weak, either. And I was, though I'd die before admitting it, letting a little slowly. I was trying to do it subtly though, because Gudny tended to react badly to people pitying her.

She stumbled sideway to dodge another one of my attacks, and my tip of my stick glanced off her fingers.

Gudny yelped (well, she would have called it a yelp, though I thought it was approaching 'squeal territory'), and dropped her weapon.

"Are you...are you alright?" I asked, uncertainly, watching as she doubled up, nursing her hand.

"No," she gasped "You've cracked my knuckles open, you - y-you brute!"

"But - but, I didn't even hit you that hard!" I stammered, dropping my own stick and staring at her, starting to feel unpleasantly guilty.

"Look," said Gudny, still clasping her hurt hand to her chest.

"Well, I can't if you keep hiding it, can I?" I snapped, now feeling distinctly worried "Let me look - ack!"

Admittedly, I hadn't planned on saying the 'ack!' bit, but as I leaned over Gudny, she suddenly twisted sideways and kicked my legs out from underneath me, resulting in me connecting rather painfully with the floor.

"I won, I believe," said Gudny, grinning widely as she stood over me.

"By cheating," I said, sitting up and cautiously rubbing my now rather sore back "Where's the honor in that?"

"Honor is for dwarven princes," said Gudny, sticking out a hand to help me up "I'm not one, am I? So why should I bother with honor?"

There was an undeniable logic in that.

Kili had stopped trying to talk to me, and had begun to hum. I knew the tune of course - we all did.

The sword is sharp, the spear is long,
The arrow swift, the gate is strong,
The heart is bold that looks on gold,
The dwarves no more shall suffer wrong.

"You're a fool," said Gudny, bluntly "You're a fool and you're going to die. I'm surprised you mother is even letting you two go."

"She took quite a lot of persuading," I said.

We were sitting outside the forge in which Kili and I had lately been working, in the process of sharpening the numerous knives which I'd decided to bring with me on the journey ahead.

Gudny adjusted her grip on the whetstone in her hand, then looked across to me, her expression grim.

"Let Kili go, but you stay here."

"What? Let the little idiot go off alone? Without me? Don't be stupid."

"Fili, you're going up against a - a d-d-dragon. You'll all be b-b-burned to cinders."

Something about this wording struck me as familiar.

"You've been talking to Bofur, haven't you?" I asked, suspiciously.

"Well, maybe I have," said Gudny, looking a little embarrassed "He m-m-might be exaggerating a little, but not much. Do you remember leaving Erebor?"

"Not distinctly."

"B-because I do. Smaug destroyed Dale easily, Fili. He w-wasn't even trying very hard. And yet there's only ruins, now, around the Mountain. Ruins and wastelands."

"I'll be fine," I said, as confidently as I could manage, but even as I said it, I felt a strange, cold feeling wrap around my heart "You'll see."

"Well, there it is," said Kili, gesturing "There's Bersi's forge. Now, can you tell me why coming here first means so much to you? Because if this means what I think it means, then..."

I was about to reach out and cuff him about the ears - tell him that Gudny was like my sister and of course I wanted to see her.

But I didn't.

Because there she was, stepping out of the forge, her soot-smudged face rather at odds with her intricately braided hair. She looked strange and familiar too, and I noted, in a disconnected fashion, that her dress was a deep purple.

The colour of plums.

Gudny looked up and I saw her eyes widen slightly. She stopped in her tracks, her skirts trailing in the dirt and her lips pressed very tightly together, as if she was trying to stop herself from yelling something out.

We watched each other for what might have been a few moments or a few hours, and I wondered if maybe she truly hadn't expected me to come back.

Later, I would be indignant about that. But for now, I was almost as surprised as her to find myself standing there.

And then she was running, tripping and stumbling over the hem of her dress which was really much too big for her, and all of a sudden she was standing there, right in front of me. I didn't really have much experience in what happened next, although Gudny assured me some time afterwards that I'd done alright.

Kili had only said that he had never seen anything quite so amusing before in his life.

What's amusing about a kiss? I found it enjoyable, if a bit strange, myself.

After a few moments in which Gudny and I both did our best to ignore the sound of Kili trying (unsuccessfully) not to laugh, I took a quick step back, and she did the same.

"You look...different," Gudny said, clearing her throat a few times before doing so.

"You do too. In a, um, good way, of course."

Gudny laughed, and it was a rather nice laugh, and it made her eyes crinkle at the corners.

"Go find Dis, if you haven't, already," she said "Then come back. I think you might have a lot to tell me."

I let Kili pull me away at this point - I wasn't in any state to resist. I would come back, and we would talk, and maybe I'd tell her about my adventures, and she'd tell me about hers. It was something to keep with me, and something to look forward to.

"So," said Kili, as we walked "Gudny, then?"

"Feeling jealous?" I said, feeling much too happy to get into an argument.

"Of her? Never! I mean, you're not bad looking or anything, brother, but I've never really liked fair-hair..."

"Kili?"

"Yes, Fili?"

"Shut up."