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Word of a new arrival reaches Thorin at the tail end of an open court session. He only has a moment to feel his heart quicken before a small figure storms into the throne room.
“Bilbo.”
The name escapes him as little more than a whisper, but Bilbo still hears it. His nose twitches in that rabbit-like manner of his that Thorin cannot help but adore, and his eyes narrow. He stops before the throne, hands on his hips.
“Don’t you ‘Bilbo’ me, Thorin Oakenshield,” he says, fuming. A murmur ripples through the small crowd still lingering in the throne room, but Bilbo doesn’t seem to notice or care. “You have much to answer for!”
A familiar wave of guilt washes over Thorin and his shoulders slump in shame. He knows he was too easily forgiven by most people he’d wronged — the Company, his sister-sons, even the Men of Laketown. Not Bilbo, however, who did the only sensible thing and ran back to the Shire the moment Thorin cast him out. That he now stands before the throne is nothing short of a miracle — even if he only intends to throw all of Thorin’s misdeeds in his face.
Thorin pinches himself, for he’s had this dream before. It always ends with Bilbo storming out, never to be seen or heard from again, but Thorin still prefers it to the recurring nightmare of holding Bilbo’s lifeless body in his arms, shattered on the rocks before Erebor’s great gate, with dark bruises around his neck the exact shape and size of Thorin’s hands.
He signals Dwalin to clear the room of any stragglers and slowly approaches Bilbo like he would a wild animal. His hobbit has never shied away from Thorin though, and this time is no different. It’s Thorin whose steps falter when he’s but a couple paces away.
“What happened to you?” he asks before he can stop himself.
Bilbo looks terrible. He’s lost weight, and he didn’t have much left to lose after their quest. His clothes look big on him, especially around the middle. There are dark shadows under his eyes, stark against the sickly pallor of his skin.
“You did,” Bilbo says, and his words pierce Thorin’s chest more viciously than Azog’s blade. It’s the least he deserves. “You showed up in my smial with tales of a lost home and a promise of adventure, and—and now I can’t sleep in my own dratted house!”
Thorin can only stare at Bilbo in puzzlement. He feels like he’s missed a turn on a familiar road and can’t quite figure out how to find it again.
“You can’t… sleep?” he says after a moment of stunned silence, hoping it will steer the conversation back into familiar territory.
“Exactly!”
Bilbo crosses his arms and nods in satisfaction. Thorin looks around for some kind of support, but finds none. Dwalin is the only one still in the throne room with them, and he looks as confused as Thorin feels.
“Do you—” Thorin starts and swallows the guilt that once again tries to choke him. “Is it nightmares that trouble you, Bil— Master Baggins?”
They’ve plagued Thorin since the day the dragon came, changing shape over the years, always lurking around the corner even in the better times. He’s seen signs of them in every member of the Company, even the youngest. Why would Bilbo be spared? Was he feeling them more keenly perhaps? Were Thorin’s hands still squeezing the life out of him even so far away?
“You think I would cross half of Middle-earth because of a few bad dreams?” Bilbo asks, his brow furrowed.
Thorin exchanges another helpless glance with Dwalin.
“Then why are you here?” he asks and winces when it comes out more sharply than he’s intended.
Bilbo sniffs and sends him an unimpressed look.
“I should think I’ve made myself clear,” he says, and Thorin barely holds back a groan. “I’m spending the winter in your dratted mountain so I can get some blasted sleep!” He grimaces and adds, a little sheepishly, “You can banish me again in the spring.”
Thorin stares at Bilbo for the longest time as hope kindles in his chest.
“You wish to stay in Erebor?” he asks, scarcely allowing himself to hope.
Bilbo’s expression turns thunderous. “And you cannot stop me, no sir!” He jabs his finger in Thorin's face. “You can throw me out all you like, Thorin, but I will come back, even if I have to sneak in like a thief…”
Bilbo’s voice cracks and he looks away, but not before Thorin sees the flash of hurt in his eyes.
“Bilbo…”
“Please,” Bilbo says. All the fight seems to have left him at last. He closes his eyes and takes a shaky breath. “I’m so tired.”
He sounds so small and wretched that Thorin has to fight the urge to envelop him in his arms. He has no right. After everything he's done to Bilbo and all the pain he's caused him — that he's still clearly causing — Thorin should be down on his knees, begging for forgiveness. And yet he cannot seem to move. His feet are affixed to the stone floor, his voice encased in lead.
“I promise I won’t cause any more trouble,” Bilbo says after the silence has stretched too far. “I’ll— Once the winter’s over, I’ll leave—”
“No.”
Bilbo flinches away as if struck, and Thorin briefly considers cutting out his own tongue with a dull knife.
“Forgive me,” he says instead. “What I meant to say is, you don’t need to leave. You’re welcome to stay in Erebor for as long as you like.”
“But—” Bilbo’s brow furrows in confusion. He glances at Dwalin as if seeking confirmation, then looks at Thorin again. “But I thought—”
Thorin’s heart aches as he forces himself to meet Bilbo’s wary gaze. This is his own doing. Blinded by the allure of gold and that accursed stone, he cast Bilbo out like corroded iron when he should have treated him like the purest mithril that he really is.
“Allow me to show you to your rooms,” he forces out. It may be too late to erase his past deeds, but Thorin will sooner leave Erebor to Thranduil than let Bilbo feel unwelcome in it even a moment longer.
“My rooms?” Bilbo echoes. “Oh no, that’s— I wouldn’t want to impose.”
Dwalin snorts, startling them both.
“Didn’t you just invite yourself to spend the winter?” he asks, amused.
“Now see here!” Bilbo sputters indignantly. The wagging finger is back, as well as the glower, and Thorin is ridiculously pleased they aren’t aimed at him for a change. “I didn’t ask for rooms, now did I? I just need a place where I won’t be disturbed. A bedroll, perhaps.”
“A bed?” Dwalin says with a pointed look at Thorin, who sends him a rude gesture in response.
“If you can spare one,” Bilbo says slowly, watching Dwalin with suspicion.
Rightly so, it would seem.
“You might need to share—”
“There is a bed in your rooms,” Thorin interrupts Dwalin with a glare that gets completely ignored.
Bilbo bites his lower lip and taps his foot on the ground without quite looking at Thorin. “It’s not a cell, is it?” he asks, and Thorin’s heart breaks anew. “Only, I brought some things with me from the Shire and I’d like to leave them with Bard if that’s—”
“I’ll see to it,” Thorin says. Some of the anger he feels towards himself must have crept into his voice for Bilbo seems to steal himself before giving him a decisive nod.
“Right,” Bilbo says. “Lead the way then.”
Thorin opens his mouth to explain, then closes it. Nothing he’s said so far has been helpful, so he grits his teeth and leads Bilbo out through the back door, trusting Dwalin to follow.
Walking through the mountain is like moving through tar. Word must have spread about Bilbo’s arrival, for whichever way Thorin steers them, they’re followed by curious eyes and whispered conversations. Heavy crowds have gathered in the market despite there being no trade. Thorin backtracks and chooses another path, only to encounter a similar problem time and time again.
Bilbo seems unaware of the attention. He walks silently next to Thorin, his eyes fixed on the ground. Though he seems less troubled, there’s still an air of sadness about him, and Thorin has to stop himself constantly from reaching out and offering comfort. He imagines Bilbo shying away from his touch and scowls. The group of dwarves pretending to examine the restored part of the wall wisely scatters out of the way.
When they finally reach the royal quarters, Dwalin plants himself firmly before the entrance to Bilbo’s rooms. Thorin’s jaw twitches and his hand rests on the pommel of his sword. Dwalin crosses his arms, unfazed.
“The Company will want to see him,” he says in Khuzdul.
Bilbo’s ears twitch and he glances briefly at Dwalin before looking down again.
“They can wait,” Thorin snaps. “Now move.”
Dwalin does not move. He simply stares at Thorin, not backing down like any other guard would. Thorin is about to remind him who’s the king of this mountain when a barely remembered piece of a disastrous throne room conversation echoes through his head. You sit here in these vast halls with a crown upon your head, and yet you are lesser now than you have ever been.
He deflates, every bit of his anger and frustration drowned under a new wave of familiar shame. Bilbo’s presence is not his to hoard like a dragon would his gold. Like a mad king would.
“Can you hold them off?” he asks, because he might not be that mad king anymore, but he is still a dwarf parched that has seen a glimpse of water.
“Not for long,” Dwalin mutters and steps out of the way.
Thorin clenches his jaw, but nods. Whatever his feelings are, he has no right to keep Bilbo away from his friends — ones who didn’t banish or threaten him, who didn’t attempt to end his life…
He steels himself and opens the door. “After you, B— Master Baggins.”
Bilbo moves as far as the threshold, where he stops abruptly and stares at his receiving room with wide eyes. Thorin follows his gaze, but he cannot find any fault with it. The room is spacious, but not vast. There are armchairs facing a fireplace, with a small table in between them that one might use to serve tea. A desk sits on the other side, in a nice little nook that also houses a bookcase sturdy enough to hold quite a few heavy tomes, though for now it stands empty.
Perhaps Bilbo simply finds it too strange. Thorin tried to emulate what he’d seen in Bilbo’s home, but concessions had to be made for living inside a mountain, and—
“What— what is this?”
Bilbo finally moves, but it’s only to face Thorin, his eyes still wide and confused.
“Do you not like it?” Thorin asks, a little desperate. “We can move things around, of course, and change whatever you wish to, though perhaps you’d like to see the rest of it first. The bedchamber is a little farther in—”
“Why?” Bilbo interrupts him, and Thorin once again feels like he’s lost his footing.
“You… said you’d like a bed?” he tries.
“No, I mean all of this.” Bilbo steps into the room at last, gesticulating and pointing at seemingly random things. “Why would you give me this lovely room after I—” His voice cracks and he takes a shaky breath before looking directly at Thorin. “You banished me.”
Thorin looks away, for he cannot bear to see the heartbreak on Bilbo’s face. “I did,” he says, then turns and closes the door, stalling for time. It occurs to him only belatedly that it might make Bilbo feel cornered and trapped, and so he forces himself to look. Bilbo does watch him warily, but he doesn’t seem alarmed. “Bilbo, I would never— If I wasn’t—” Thorin clenches his jaw and curses his useless tongue and meaningless excuses. “I would take it back if I could,” he manages at last. “I did take it back, but at that point you were long gone.”
Bilbo’s face goes through a myriad of emotions faster than Thorin could ever hope to name them. He looks away to stare into the unlit fireplace. Thorin risks a step towards him, but stops short when Bilbo pins him with a strangely mild look.
“These rooms are lovely,” Bilbo says and gestures all around him. His face has become a mask of bland politeness and Thorin wants to scream with how much he hates it. “The whole mountain is, in fact. You must have been very busy.”
“I was.” Thorin frowns.
“Right, I see.” Bilbo nods and links his hands behind his back, then bounces back and forth on his feet. “No time to send word to the Shire, I’m sure, and we’re so terribly far away as well. It’s not something a king should trouble himself with, especially for a—”
“I wrote you letters,” Thorin blurts out, for he cannot let Bilbo think he was cared for so little. “So many of them. But I could never find the right words.”
He tossed all of them into the fire, frustrated with himself. What right did he have to disturb Bilbo’s life all over again for the sake of some poorly worded apologies from half a world away?
“A simple ‘sorry’ would have been a start,” Bilbo mutters, as if he can read Thorin’s mind. He sighs and collapses into one of the armchairs. “I thought you hated me,” he says quietly, staring down at his hands.
He sounds so tired and dejected that Thorin abandons all caution and throws himself to his knees in front of Bilbo.
"Never," Thorin says, forcing himself to meet Bilbo’s wary gaze. "My words and actions at the gate shame me to this day. I thought you'd be better off without the reminder of what I did to you, that you would--- that the Shire would help you heal."
Bilbo snorts in a way that's far from amused.
"It didn't," he says, worrying at the hem of his jacket. "I should have known it wouldn't work, but you told me to go, and it was almost winter already..." He shakes his head with a rueful smile. "I barely made it in time, much good that it did me."
Thorin curls his hands into fists to once again stop himself from reaching out. He hasn't earned that privilege.
"Will you tell me what happened?" he asks instead, though he's bracing himself for rejection. Bilbo doesn't owe him anything.
His question is met with a furrowed brow and a confused look.
"I told you already," Bilbo says. "I couldn't sleep."
Thorin takes a deep breath and lets it out slowly.
“Forgive me, Bilbo,” he says, happy to note his voice doesn’t betray his frustration, “but I do not understand.”
The furrow between Bilbo’s brows only deepens as his eyes roam over Thorin’s face as if searching for something.
"Do you not..." he starts before falling back against the armchair with a mirthless little laugh. "Of course you don't. This explains so much!"
Thorin waits for him to elaborate with as much patience as he can muster. He will not pry. He will accept whatever Bilbo chooses to share with him, even if that turns out to be nothing at all, and he will not let his frustration show.
Bilbo takes one look at him and shakes his head.
"Right, sorry," he says, and Thorin berates himself for already having failed. “It’s just— Dwarves don’t sleep through the winter, do they?”
Thorin blinks and braces himself for what he realizes only after a moment is Fíli and Kíli bursting through the door to have a laugh at his expense. It does not happen, and Bilbo looks at him as if he’s genuinely expecting an answer.
“Like bears?” Thorin blurts out and immediately regrets it.
Bilbo narrows his eyes and purses his lips in obvious displeasure.
“Like hobbits, thank you very much!” he snaps. “Not like bears at all, in fact! We— well, we do tend to overindulge a bit in autumn, I suppose, but it’s not— we don’t— oh, bears indeed!”
He crosses his arms with a huff, and Thorin probably shouldn’t find that endearing, but he does. He can also feel hope grow in his chest. It will not be long until the first snow of the year falls, so if Bilbo is serious about sleeping through the winter, perhaps he really means to stay. Perhaps Thorin can still salvage at least a fraction of their broken friendship.
“Winter is almost upon us.”
“Yes, Thorin, I am aware,” Bilbo says drily.
“Will you… sense when it’s time to sleep?”
Thorin hasn’t forgotten that Bilbo intends to leave again come spring. He’d like to stop that from happening, but making amends will take time, and he doesn’t know how much of it he’s going to get.
“Oh, honestly!” Bilbo grumbles. “It’s not like I go to sleep with the first chill and only wake up when the snows all melt!”
Thorin closes his eyes and allows that tentative hope in him to grow. He might get enough time after all.
“Peace, Bilbo,” he says, meeting his hobbit’s eyes again. “Forgive an ignorant dwarf.”
“No, it’s—” Bilbo shakes his head with a sigh. “I suppose you wouldn’t know better, would you?”
He watches Thorin for a moment, then gets more comfortable in his armchair and motions Thorin to sit in the other one. Thorin‘s reluctant to put even that small distance between them, but he does as he’s bid and waits.
“I know you’ve all teased me about my eating,” Bilbo starts in his storytelling voice. Thorin knows it well from those nights spent around the campfire when the mood struck the Company to trade songs and tales. “But it’s just how hobbits are. We need more food because we burn through it more quickly.”
A terrible suspicion grips Thorin, digs its claws right into his gut.
“Were we starving you?” he asks, horrified.
They all assumed that Bilbo’s complaints about food at the start of their journey were just further proof of how unsuited to life on the road he was — like all his other gripes about lack of comfort, or handkerchiefs. He stopped mentioning it even before they reached Rivendell, and so Thorin thought nothing more of it. Clearly, he should have. Did Bilbo simply get tired of their disregard, forced to suffer in silence?
“No, don’t be silly,” Bilbo says in a forcefully dismissive tone that does nothing to assuage Thorin’s worries. “I had been eating quite well in the Shire before you lot stole me away. I could afford to miss a meal or two.”
He offers Thorin a quick smile before looking away. Shame swirls in Thorin’s chest again, threatening to choke him, and he barely manages to push it down.
“And the sleep?” he croaks.
“Yes, I was getting to that.” Bilbo clears his throat, and composes himself to tell the rest of his tale. “The Shire is a plentiful land and we have enough food to sustain us through the year, but of course it’s not so readily available in winter. We make preserves and store what can be stored, but it is more scarce no matter how you look at it. And so we sleep.” He pauses and stares into the fireplace with a faraway expression. “We still get up every day, mostly, but we sleep longer and deeper, which lets us conserve our energy and— well. And heal. If there’s anything that needs healing.”
He glances at Thorin and quickly looks away again. As silence falls heavily between them, the voices in Thorin’s head only grow louder. He longs for the privacy of his own chambers, where he might finally acknowledge them in peace and allow himself to fall apart. Or maybe a night in the forge would suffice — hammering at a piece of metal over and over again until it crumbles under the weight of all his failings in his stead.
This is not the time and place, however, and so Thorin forces himself to break the silence.
“But you couldn’t sleep.” The words feel raw, practically torn from his throat.
“No,” Bilbo says, and it’s barely a breath. “Turns out it only works when you’re home.”
Thorin’s heart stops before breaking into a gallop. Surely, it cannot be.
“I thought the Shire was your home,” he says.
“Yes, well. I thought so too.” He fidgets with the hem of his jacket again, seemingly unaware of Thorin’s disbelieving gaze. “I actually started missing all your dwarven snoring, can you believe it? My smial was just too quiet without it. And there was no one there to make a mess of my dishes or… or laugh at my expense, and I must have truly gone mad to actually want that, but—” Bilbo swallows and finally looks directly at Thorin. “Can I really stay?”
“Yes,” Thorin says at once, and then adds, marvelling at his own daring, “This could be your home, Bilbo.”
For a moment, Bilbo simply stares at Thorin without so much as blinking, but then his expression shutters, and he launches himself at Thorin with a desperate whimper that quickly turns into a sob. Thorin gathers him in his arms like he’s wanted to ever since he saw Bilbo again in the throne room. Bilbo not only allows it, but clings to him. His shoulders shake as he continues to cry; his tears soak into Thorin’s tunic. Thorin just holds him, barely daring to breathe.
Finally, the sobbing stops, and Bilbo disentangles himself from their embrace. He stands before Thorin and dries his face with a sleeve of his jacket, not even bothering with a handkerchief. Thorin swallows and waits, his gut churning with nerves.
“I’m still angry with you,” Bilbo says at last, and Thorin closes his eyes, pained. He should not have expected anything else.
“I understand,” he says and stands up, fully intending to leave Bilbo alone.
“Oh, sit down, would you?” Bilbo says. “I wasn’t finished.” Thorin sits back down. “I am angry, about many things, and I’m sure you’re angry with me, too…”
“No, Bilbo, I was never—”
Bilbo levels Thorin with a look, and Thorin immediately stops talking.
“Now, I’m told winter is quite long in this part of the world,” Bilbo continues, and his expression softens. “That’s plenty of time for things to… take new shape, come spring. Don’t you think?”
He looks a little uncertain even as he says so, but his eyes reflect the same fragile hope that has been growing in Thorin's chest.
"Aye," Thorin says quietly, afraid to ruin this moment between them.
The moment is broken anyway by a commotion at the door, followed by the whole Company barging into Bilbo’s rooms with the subtlety of a snowstorm. They descend upon Bilbo with their usual enthusiasm, and though he protests, Thorin can tell it’s all for show. Bilbo looks more settled already, calmer too. He positively lights up when Bombur ushers in a small cohort of kitchen staff, all carrying trays laden with food. He glances at Thorin, and his smile becomes a little more hesitant, but it’s still there.
Thorin thinks of spring and smiles back.