Chapter Text
Bilbo was still asleep on Thorin’s couch when Thorin came back from the meeting.
Well. Bilbo was asleep on a couch. It seemed wrong to call it Thorin’s couch when he never got to use it. In the five years since Thorin had been officially crowned king under the mountain, he’d slept on his grandfather’s recovered couch a grand total of three times, and those were all in the first months before Bilbo and Thorin’s quarters had shifted from neighboring to adjoining. The day after Thorin finished the door linking their studies, and without a bit of fuss or the slightest by-your-leave, his burglar claimed it. Bilbo may have stayed in his own quarters half the time—an arrangement that suited them as it turned out both hated living with other people—but even when he was gone, the couch remained stubbornly his. “Call it my share of the profits,” Bilbo had said when Thorin complained. He knew that Thorin could never argue with that.
“It went well,” Thorin said loudly as he passed by the hobbit dozing on his stomach, one arm shoved under the pillow under his head, one foot hooked over the back. “The best meeting I’ve ever had.”
“Good,” Bilbo muttered. “Then you didn’t need me there.”
Thorin shrugged off his cloak and tossed it on top of Bilbo’s head. When Bilbo, without opening his eyes, pulled it down and wrapped it around the rest of him, Thorin realized that giving him a blanket might not have been the clever little revenge he thought it was. “You would have liked to see how much we got done. You so often complain that we do nothing but talk. I feel sorry that you could not be there on a day when much was done. The council asked after you. They do miss those scones you used to make. Do you remember them? Scones. What a quaint hobbit food. You know, Erebor’s head cook once tried to make them. She said they weren’t nearly as good as yours. At the next meeting, you should prepare scones.”
Bilbo groaned wordlessly and curled a little tighter.
“Oh, I apologize,” Thorin said innocently. “Did I wake you?”
Bilbo cracked open the eye on the side of his face that wasn’t snuggled into his pillow (well, again, Thorin’s pillow, but if usage had anything to do with ownership, then it was unambiguously Bilbo’s). “If you say your bit about your wonderful meeting, can I go back to sleep?”
Thorin dragged over the footstool and sat facing Bilbo. Then he pushed Bilbo back a little bit and sank his head down on the fresh gap in the cushioning, with Bilbo’s body curling like a C around him. Banging his head against fluff wasn’t as satisfying as banging it against his desk, but if he tried very hard he could maybe smother himself.
“Oh, so it was that wonderful a meeting,” Bilbo said. He rested his hand on the back of Thorin’s head. He was probably trying to comfort him, Thorin thought, but maybe if he could just press down a little bit and help with the smothering, that would be comforting too.
“Stop that,” Bilbo said.
“Stop what.”
“Stop thinking morbid thoughts because you’ve realized that the stubbornness of dwarves is a force stronger than anything else in the world and that it’s not as helpful when it’s aimed against you.”
“You stop,” Thorin said, which even he could admit was not the greatest comeback, but he always got unnerved when Bilbo seemed to read his mind. Thorin turned his head and found Bilbo looking back on him, the hand that had been under his pillow now cupping Thorin’s cheek. The hobbit still did not look entirely awake, and the circles under his eyes were darker than he remembered them. This close Thorin could see the fresh greyness of Bilbo’s skin as well. Thorin would have to make him go outside more. For all hobbits lived underground now and then, they were made for sunshine.
“You should have been there,” Thorin said. “We exchanged pleasant greetings and then spent the next hour quibbling over who owned one particular meter of a loam. As if nothing else in Erebor mattered.”
“I suppose it matters to the person who would own that meter.” Bilbo stretched until his toes almost bumped the other end of the couch and then went back to curling like a cat. “Did you settle it at least?”
“Yes. The dwarf who won then pressed for the meter next to it, and the dwarf who lost is planning to sue.”
Bilbo hummed sympathetically. “That’s a shame.”
“Yes. Yes, it is.”
“You could delegate it.”
“It’s a meter of a loam of mithril.”
“Oh, right, don’t delegate that.” Bilbo frowned. “Then again, you could get Fili deal with it. He is crown prince.”
“Fili’s with Balin in Dale.”
“Is he?”
“You’re the one who recommended he go,” Thorin reminded Bilbo.
Bilbo frowned absently like he didn’t remember that but was willing to take Thorin’s word for the time being. “Kili?”
“Facilitating trade, fostering relations.”
“Are you going to say with whom?” Bilbo yawned.
“We don’t say his name in my quarters,” Thorin said, because he may have given Tauriel his blessing (thought Thorin suspected withholding it wouldn’t have stopped anything) but that didn’t mean he was ready to embrace her king as well.
“It’s good you’re not still bitter.” Bilbo’s eyes were already beginning to droop shut again. “That would be very petty.”
Thorin head-butted his stomach. Gently. “You sleep too much. You’ll be up all night.”
Bilbo kneed Thorin in the back of the head. Sort of gently. “I doubt that,” Bilbo said, his voice already slurred with sleep.
“Can hobbits suffer insomnia?” Thorin asked.
Bilbo replied by snoring.
Thorin snorted and chucked Bilbo under his chin, softly laughing as Bilbo scrunched up his nose and curled his head down against his chest. Thorin stood, cracking his back and groaning. It still wasn’t as strong as it had been before—though to be fair to himself he did get stabbed rather dramatically five years ago. “Sleep then,” Thorin said down to Bilbo, who looked like he planned on sleeping whether Thorin condoned it or not. “I’ll read you the next council’s agenda over dinner.”
Thorin spent the next few hours hunched over his desk (his desk, Thorin felt perfectly comfortable saying, though if Bilbo wanted to steal this instead and give Thorin the couch back, Thorin certainly wouldn’t mind). There were endless papers to write and then endless papers to read and then endless papers to rewrite once he had read the papers he was supposed to read. It wasn’t interesting work, but if you kept at it, you could forget how dull it was and, through sheer repetition of labor, rise above the typical limits of your own mind into a state of bored transcendence, floating free to some better world where none of this was actually happening to you. He was getting work done tonight, at least. That was more than he could always say, when sometimes his mind just kept going up and out of Erebor altogether, curling somewhere in the hollows of the stars or the snowfalls of the north or even the sloping green hills he barely remembered from where he’d plucked his burglar.
This evening, Thorin’s mind was about half a mile away at the forges, pondering whether he was going to set this emerald he’d just imagined plucking out of a particularly rich loam in the hilt of the dagger or to accent the bookshelf, when the clock on his desk chimed the hour.
“Nine in the evening?” Thorin asked aloud entirely for his own benefit as Bilbo was still gently snoring. But it was a good question nonetheless, one that could be broken down a variety of ways ranging from “how did three hours pass so quickly” to “Mahal, was that only three hours” to “if I gave Fili the crown right now and started running, I could get to Dale before anyone caught me and Bard would likely be more than happy to help me desert the throne,” though admittedly that last one was less of a question and more of a recurring fantasy Thorin had these days.
On the one year anniversary of the opening of the secret door, Thorin had stood with an arm around Bilbo and a tankard of mead in hand as Kili and Fili dramatically reenacted their heroic battles in Lake-town, which had only become more impressive with time since there was none who could confirm or deny the truth of them save Bard and his children, and they always straight-facedly agreed with whatever Fili and Kili came up with. So while Fili was helping Kili backflip off a table to decapitate three orcs standing rather conveniently in a circle, Bilbo had tugged one of Thorin’s braids till he dropped his head down, and he whispered drunkenly, and thus also rather wetly, in Thorin’s ear, “Do you ever think about how you’ve done it?”
“I’ve done a great many things,” Thorin had said, and Bilbo elbowed him.
“You’ve reclaimed your home,” Bilbo had continued, in a tone of voice that implied that he’d been trying to have a nice moment before Thorin failed to say the right response. “You’ve cleared out the debris, you’ve rebuilt the core, you’ve started a government. Barring any disasters, your job is done. Now you’ve just got to manage it.”
Then Bilbo had hurriedly slipped away to engage that strange hobbit tradition of knocking on wood while Thorin heard a noise in his head like someone shouting very loudly but very far away, “You are useless to the world now.”
Yes, that was likely the moment Thorin hate started hating the throne.
Hating your work was better than obsessing about it, Thorin supposed, but neither was an attractive option. And at least obsession had some fire to it—too much fire, Thorin quickly amended, thinking of the rooms and rooms of gold he wouldn’t look at, couldn’t walk past. But in the privacy of his own head, where in fact it was most dangerous to think such things, he understood too well the appeal of grasping something and refusing to let go. Obsession was a gaudy, tasteless gem, but it shone bright beside the dull grey rock of trudging obligation.
Thorin could do the work, as pretty and minute and small and necessary as it was, so very necessary to the functioning of Erebor that just thinking about it could set Thorin’s heart pounding like the great hammer and anvils that boomed out in the deep, except instead of great works of priceless treasures, all these hammer and anvils made was an ulcer and a tendency to jerk awake just as he was falling asleep as he remembered there was just one more thing to do.
Because there was always something to do. Worse than that, there was always something to worry about. There was a crack in a pillar in the lower great hall that might splinter sometime this month. Or an Erebor noble promised his child in marriage to the chief miner of the Iron Hills, but his child eloped with a weaver from the Grey Mountains so now Erebor had to pay fifteen percent more per ton than they did last month until someone was appeased. Or a guild of miners wished to dive deeper into the earth when history taught that much deeper risked grave threats, but how long could the guild be dissuaded by words alone? Would Dale’s crops succeed this year or would the rootworm blight from two springs back strike again? Would the rumblings in the north mean war, and would Erebor ever have to pay for the orc blood spilt securing it? When Balin stepped down in five years’ time to rejoin his family in Moria, who could be trusted to step in as royal treasurer when Thorin couldn’t bring himself to look at the treasure himself? If Kili and Tauriel’s forces did not succeed in clearing out the blight of Mirkwood, how could Erebor send its treasures west? And since the blight they were clearing out was, alas, not Thranduil, what beastly taxes would he exact for safe travel through his cursed realm?
On the couch, Bilbo snuffled softly. It sounded almost like, “Stop.” Thorin stopped. He breathed a little
Thorin could do this. Or rather, Thorin could keep doing this, for he’d ruled in Ered Luin for decades, and he’d done right by his people. Six years ago, when he set out on surely the most foolhardy quest this land had ever know, Thorin hadn’t believed that. He’d judged himself a middling replacement for his father and grandfather at best, the last scrap of a once great line whose honor lay in its past. So he’d scraped together a plan and a company and a hobbit, and he’d done the impossible largely thanks to the last of those components and the aid of Dale and Dain, and Erebor was reclaimed, and now he had no doubt that he’d been a good ruler in Ered Luin because he was a fairly terrible ruler in Erebor.
No, you’re not, Bilbo might have said if he was awake. He wouldn’t even have needed Thorin to say anything aloud. Sometimes when they were both pouring over work together, Bilbo would say, without even looking up from his reading, “You’re doing very well, Thorin.” It was as comforting as it should have been unsettling. But after everything they’d gone through together, they hardly needed words to communicate. Thorin could have as good a conversation when Bilbo was asleep as when he was awake.
Though he did generally prefer his conversation partner be conscious.
Thorin wadded up a piece of scrap paper (or possibly a trade treaty—Thorin was reaching the punch-drunk level of bureaucratic work overload, and it was hard to be sure) and lobbed it at Bilbo. When bounced off his forehead, Bilbo made what sounded almost like a honk of disapproval. Thorin was impressed. That was one of Bilbo’s more inexplicable noises. “It’s been three hours. How are you still asleep?” Thorin asked.
“How are you a king?” Bilbo mumbled after a moment, squinching his eyes even tighter. “You’re a toddler with a beard.”
“All toddlers have beards.”
Bilbo muttered something that sounded like “Dwarves are horrifying,” as he flopped over so his back faced Thorin.
Thorin threw another piece of paper at the back of Bilbo’s head. “Dinner. We’ll have missed the main one already,” he said.
Bilbo said nothing.
Thorin got up, crossed the room, and kicked the couch. “Dinner,” he commanded.
“You go get dinner.”
Bilbo squawked when Thorin scooped him up. “You’d never forgive me if I let you skip a meal,” Thorin said with maybe a bit more amusement in his voice than Bilbo would appreciate.
Bilbo twisted in Thorin’s arms to glare at him. “Put me down. I am not a sack of potatoes.”
“No,” Thorin agreed as he carried Bilbo to the door. “Potatoes have a nicer personality.”
They got to the private dining hall a few minutes later. Bilbo had agreed to walk after they got out of the royal section. Thorin suspected that he didn’t want the other dwarves to think hobbit-carrying was an acceptable behavior. Bilbo at least seemed a little more awake by the time they arrived. Bombur fitted them up with a late feast, and Bofur happily joined them, tinkering with his latest toy between bites. And it was nice. It felt good. Life in Erebor often felt good, even if Thorin was hard-pressed to remember that when he felt bad.
And if Thorin worried at all when Bilbo went right back to the couch and right back to sleep, that was just the old paranoia, the lingering scars from when life had been far, far harder.
“The laziness of hobbits will never fail to astound me,” Thorin said the next morning when he walked out after waking and found Bilbo still asleep on the couch.
“s’off,” was all Thorin caught of Bilbo’s reply, though he heard few more expletives as he pulled Bilbo to his feet. Still, by the time they were both mostly dressed, Bilbo was at least standing upright on his own, though he looked offended by that.
“You look awake at last,” Thorin said, and Bilbo looked offended at that as well as he fumbled with his cravat.
“No one should be up at this hour.”
“Nine in the morning is an unreasonable hour now?” Thorin asked. “I thought we were sleeping in.”
Bilbo’s face fell. “It’s nine? I thought—” But whatever he thought, he didn’t say, nor did he finish tying his cravat. His hands had paused in midair, and there they remained as if he’d forgotten about them. Thorin went over and finished the knot.
“You’ve slept too much,” Thorin said as he stepped back. “It’s addled your brain.”
Bilbo shook himself and glanced in the mirror. “Is that your official diagnosis?” he said as he redid the knot, and Thorin’s mouth went dry. He didn’t know why. And if he did, he wouldn’t look at it.
“There’s nothing to diagnosis,” Thorin said, in a tone he didn’t recognize. Bilbo looked at him strangely. “Just get to work.”
The day, as it always insisted on doing, began.
Thorin spent four hours in the royal mint that day between Balin and his chief assistant Varda, trying to figure out how he was supposed to evaluate whether the new gold flowing into Dale would massively destabilize the local economy without looking like the thought of gold made his hands start to shake. He needn’t have worried, and he should have known that by now. Gold in concrete form was alluring, tantalizing, entrapping. Gold in the mathematical abstract could put even the sickest mind to sleep.
Bilbo had his own work, though Thorin saw very little of it. His weren’t essential projects—as Bilbo put it, he hated to work on anything important, that was far too much pressure—but they were popular little efforts that made life around Erebor better. Bilbo worked with Ori and the head librarians on curating the new collection, and he worked with the historical society on preserving the more important bits of rubble, and he worked with seemingly every guild organization on their party planning projects. “Proper Shire work,” Bilbo had called it once. It was the kind of genteel community work that his mother and father had enjoyed in Hobbiton and that Bilbo never had. Thorin certainly enjoyed them, these fineries of culture. They made the mountain feel less like a mausoleum and more like a home.
Thorin didn’t, however, enjoy when the planning of the finery of culture interrupted his private lunch. But when Thorin entered the western family dining room at three in the afternoon, he found he had company. Bilbo, dressed in a fine shirt but missing his usual waistcoat and jacket that Thorin had once thought were attached to him, smiled at Thorin as he came in and said to Freya, “Oh, don’t put Bari in charge of decorations again, she’ll only use it as a chance to make your guild pay for her emeralds.”
Freya, head of the gold workers guild and a second cousin of Thorin’s, had stood when Thorin entered. He gestured her down and took a seat himself at the table himself. “Please, don’t let me interrupt you,” Thorin said, with a regal voice he hoped didn’t imply anything sarcastic about how unpleasant interruptions at lunch could be.
Freya nodded her head at him and said to Bilbo, “I’m not opposed to dwarves profiting from their work. She does fine work.”
Thorin made himself a plate of Bombur’s laid out feast as Bilbo replied, “Yes, but so do plenty of other dwarves, and I say we let them profit.” He shook himself and rubbed his eyes. “I haven’t forgotten what she said about Ragni last year, even if everyone else has.”
“We certainly have not, but insults about manners matter less to our kind than yours,” Freya said.
“I—I have gathered.” Bilbo shook his head again like he needed to knock something loose. Freya started discreetly sweeping up the parchment fanned on the table between them.
“I’ll reach out to Goma first then, but we may need to endure working with someone you don’t like,” she said.
“Intolerable,” Bilbo muttered. “Still if you can stand her, that’s what matters. You’ll be in charge now, after all.”
“Alas, I will be.” Freya sighed and stroked her silken beard. “It won’t be the same without your touch, Master Burglar, but I wouldn’t have you working on it if you wanted, peaky as you’ve been looking.”
“You are stepping down?” Thorin asked, his spoon paused halfway to his lips.
The two turned to Thorin, Freya’s face worried and Bilbo’s face—tired. He looked tired and so he looked as he always looked these days. “I thought I ought to give someone else a shot,” Bilbo said with a wan smile. He leaned his chin in his hand, and it almost managed to look like he wasn’t doing it to hold his head up.
“And we’ll be poorer for it, your majesty,” Freya said, standing. With the curt bow of a guild master and followed by the slight nod of a cousin, she gave a last, “At your service,” and had the good sense to duck out.
When the door shut, Thorin said, “I didn’t know you were quitting.”
“Quitting is so harsh,” Bilbo said. “I’m delegating more responsibilities.
Thorin ran his thumb over the handle of his spoon. “Is it—you’ve been tired lately.” Bilbo didn’t reply to that. “It’s good to take a break now and then.”
Bilbo scoffed and reached for the bread basket between them. “That’s rich coming from you, Thorin. When was the last time you took a break?”
“I slept in this morning,” Thorin said, watching the bags under Bilbo’s eyes.
“Ah yes, perfect, you’ll be good for another five years now.” Bilbo shook his head, and perhaps it was in loving exasperation, an expression Bilbo wore well and often. But it looked more as if something had been creeping up towards his head again and he just managed to brush it away a moment longer.
Thorin looked down at his food. It was back, that feeling that the wound in his gut had never healed and some invisible hand now and then stuck itself in Thorin’s stomach and twisted. “I’m glad you’re stepping back if you aren’t feeling perfectly,” he said as he lifted his spoon again, his eyes on Bombur’s stew. “Step back from more if you need.”
Thorin waited for Bilbo to say something about how he didn’t need Thorin’s permission either to work or not to work, and that he’d hardly take lessons on health and time management from the king who’d managed to work three days last week before he remembered to attend a meal, to which Thorin would point out that he was eating now, and Bilbo would say something about how eating now wasn’t going to help Thorin then, and Thorin would ask why he needed to be concerned about Thorin back then because he clearly came through it alright, and Bilbo would say something about how Thorin back then would set precedents for Thorin to come and that he couldn’t go about thinking it was alright to skip meals, and somehow fifteen minutes later they would be talking about the latest news from Dale, or whether or not Bilbo’s tomatoes were going to come in, or about the story that Thorin’s mother had told him before he went to sleep, the one that he barely remembered and he’d leave Bilbo to invent the parts that went into the gaps in his memory.
Or anything. Or everything. Because on the one hand Thorin had shared enough conversations with Bilbo to know the rhythm of them better than his own heartbeat, and on the other hand Bilbo had the slipperiest mind of anyone Thorin had ever met. He surprised you. That was what he did.
“I think I might,” Bilbo said. “I’ve been—well. It’s best I stop pretending that I will do some projects that I evidently will not be able to do.”
“Good,” Thorin said before he could say anything else, before he could think anything else. “You’ll be able to attend council meetings again.”
Bilbo laughed, a startled little sound. “You couldn’t pay me,” he said, and Thorin replied, “True, I’m already paying you too much and you still will not help,” and Bilbo said, “You’re paying me my contractual share of the profits, you royal prick,” and Thorin said, “I thought my couch was your share,” and Bilbo said, “My share is vast, stop hogging the cheese tray,” and Thorin passed over the cheese tray, and he didn’t think about how Bilbo’s hand shook as he took it, he didn’t think about Bilbo’s drooping eyes, he didn’t think about what he didn’t think about as he helped Bilbo stumble back to their quarters after lunch and laid him down sleeping on Bilbo’s damn couch.