Work Text:
There are twenty-four hours in a day. Daylight lasts half of that. Twelve hours, no longer.
Thorin swears not to keep count. He does it anyway.
***
Behind him, the door clicks open. Midway through a paragraph, he pauses, turning in his seat to look.
It’s Balin. The dwarf shuffles in and stands next to him and puts a hand on his shoulder. They both look down at the sleeping hobbit in the bed before them, saying nothing to each other for a while. “Alright, then?” Balin asks quietly.
Thorin blinks at the open book in his lap. “I…I was just reading to him.”
“He reads an awful lot when he’s up,” Balin reminds Thorin gently.
“I know. I just thought — maybe he’d like it.”
The way Balin smiles is painfully kind. “I’ll make sure to tell him.”
Thorin doesn’t return the smile. There’s hardly any sun left in the sky outside. He marks the page he stopped at and shuts the book, placing it on Bilbo’s bedside table. Then, he stands and moves to the far corner of the room, where he collapses into the hobbit’s cushy armchair and closes his eyes.
***
The next morning, Thorin wakes to an empty room and a thick, warm blanket draped over his body. Grey predawn light filters in through the curtains. His book is gone from the bedside table, but in its place is a pie — blueberry, from the smell of it; Bilbo’s specialty — and a note. Thorin’s hands tremble as he unfolds it.
Thought you’d be hungry. Balin said you didn’t have dinner last night.
He is, because he very well didn’t, but with Bilbo’s vacant bed in front of him he doesn’t have much to spare for his appetite. Bilbo often loses track of the time he’s got left and tends to drop off in the most inopportune of places before it is Thorin’s turn to rise. There’s no cause for real worry, not really, except Thorin can’t quite help himself every time he awakens and Bilbo is nowhere in sight.
He finds Bilbo in the pantry, folded across the baking counter with his forehead on his arms, flour still dusting his fingers. Thorin hesitates to touch him, like he’s scared of disturbing him from sleep. Idiot. Of course he’s not going to wake. He picks Bilbo up and brings him to his room, putting him to bed and pulling the covers up to his shoulders. He doesn’t forget the pie when he leaves to dress for another day in court, and cuts himself a piece in his chambers after he is done washing up.
It’s delicious, but he already knew that.
***
Most days he can go about like he’s not slowly losing his grip on everything. It’s a careful sort of normalcy that’s much too perfect on the surface, a facade constructed from the outside in. He goes to his councils, receives ambassadors, and sets himself to no less than four hours of holding court a day. There is nobody brave enough to ask why he’s stopped entertaining people past sundown, and why little has been seen of Bilbo recently.
Sometimes he can almost feel the reason to both unasked questions building in his throat like a scream trying to break free, and then he has to swallow it back, keep it imprisoned someplace deep down where his voice cannot reach.
He worries that one day it will find a way to escape.
***
The worst part is that everyone constantly tells him that none of this is his fault, like it’s something he needs to be reminded of on a daily basis. Dwalin does it when he sees Thorin in the mornings, Bombur when they share the same table during lunchtime. The rest of the company slip in their share as and when they run into him, and Thorin eventually learns to avoid all of them for most of the twelve hours a day that he’s awake. Balin generally says nothing, but the look in his eyes makes Thorin want to throw things, a course of action he only averts by thinking of what Bilbo would have to say to him if he actually did.
Then again, he’s not so sure what he’d actually say; he hasn’t heard Bilbo speak in weeks, after all. Not since the day they both fell into that river on their way back from the Mirkwood and came out soaking wet, with a drowsiness about Bilbo that only worsened until it was nighttime and Thorin couldn’t stay awake to see if he was catching a cold or to ask if he was alright regardless of how hard he tried.
They tell him it’s not his fault, but that doesn’t stop the rage from building when he sees Bilbo during the day, the hobbit’s face pale and slack and unresponsive in sleep. A small part of him wants to believe it, too, but he’s got no one left to blame for this.
***
The rules to their new lives together are simple, once Thorin gets the gist of it. Bilbo figures everything out before he does, writing it down on parchment mere days after the incident at the river and leaving it next to Thorin for him to read the next time he wakes.
I think, Bilbo had written in painstakingly neat script, you can only be awake in the day, and I, at night. I think it must be magic.
Magic? Yes, yes, of course. They’re most definitely not doing this by choice, and Thorin has never known of any poison that could have this effect on a single person, let alone two. He’d sent a rider out to the Woodland Realm to seek help shortly afterwards, only to be answered with confirmation of what Bilbo already suspected. It was then that he’d found out that as well-versed in magic as the wood elves were, they knew little beyond the names they had for the many enchanted rivers that meandered through the Mirkwood. The Forgetter's Spring. Poison Water. The Sleeper.
When they tell him that those who are submerged in the waters of the last one normally never awaken from the oblivion it induces, Thorin almost laughs. He supposes he should be grateful that they have this, at least. It should feel like an act of mercy.
It doesn’t.
***
As it happens, Balin is the one who frequently stays up to keep Bilbo company through the nights that Thorin spends trapped in slumber. Thorin is initially leery at first, but this is before he realises he doesn’t trust anyone else as much with looking after the hobbit’s welfare. He feels like he needs this as much as Bilbo does, just to have the peace of mind that he's being taken care of.
It helps to connects them, if in the most tenuous of ways. Sometimes he’ll be able to resist, and other times he will fold and ask Balin after Bilbo, if he’s taking all his meals, if he’s keeping well when the day is his to live. Just general pleasantries, and the infrequent probing question. There is almost always a ruefulness floating in the weary smile Balin gives him right before answering, “It’s all rather the same, Thorin. He wants me to tell you that he’s doing just fine.”
They both know it’s a lie.
***
Frequently, there is food from Bilbo waiting for him at the break of dawn. These days it’s not uncommon to wake to the smell of some baked item in his bedchamber — a baker’s dozen of lemon biscuits; a tray of buttered scones; a whole raspberry tart, Thorin’s favourite. Whatever the product, it will always be hot as if fresh out the oven, because it is; he officially doesn’t hear it from Balin, but Bilbo will usually wait until his last waiting hour to start preparing to cook, something he neglects to mention in the good-morning notes he writes before his time of day comes to an end.
Thorin has every intention of telling Bilbo to stop doing that, because they only have twelve hours apiece and the last thing he wants is for Bilbo to waste any of his time on needlessly pampering him. He decides against it, in the end. Instead, he dutifully eats everything down to the last crumb and washes up, makes sure Bilbo is safe and comfortable in his bed before going off to court, and reads to him whenever he can. If his heart is feeling particularly full and he holds Bilbo’s hand, strokes his honey-brown curls, then, well. It makes him feel marginally more deserving of the sweet taste in his mouth in the mornings, makes it easier to keep it down afterwards.
***
He has his bad days just as he is sure Bilbo has bad nights. For all the extra sleep he’s forced into, Thorin finds himself profoundly tired a great deal of the time. He’s acutely aware of the fact that he looks more and more haggard with each passing week, and makes no effort to address it. His clothes feel considerably looser, like he’s slowly shrinking away from them. Figures. He hasn’t been eating very well, either, despite Bilbo’s endeavours to keep him well-fed. In some way he feels like he’s letting Bilbo down, and this is usually all it takes for the guilt inside Thorin to rupture anew, like stitches pulled from an infected wound.
Some nights he dreams of thunderstorms. Other nights, he’s wandering about the Mirkwood again, lost and alone and desperately searching for someone whose name never seems to form on his lips. Very rarely, he will dream of Bilbo, and while these dreams are usually the shortest, he always wakes from them with the hobbit’s quiet company a short distance away. In a chair across the room or curled up at Thorin’s bedside, Bilbo will be asleep, his tawny head pillowed in the crook of his arm, the rhythm of his breathing slow and steady.
Thorin wonders if Bilbo being there equates to him having better nights, if he even has them at all, now.
***
On more occasions than one, the frustration and anger of feeling so helpless all the time gets the better of Thorin, and he will unleash the entirety of his pent-up fury on the closest person regardless of who it is and what they’re doing. He apologises when he’s composed once more, because if he doesn’t then Bilbo will find out one way or another and write to him. Balin told me you scolded Fili the other day for juggling apples in the corridors. That was very beastly of you, Thorin.
Getting these notes from Bilbo puts him closer to panic than anything else nowadays. For the subsequent few times Thorin wakes, there won’t be a plate of cinnamon shortbreads set out on his table with a handwritten message wedged under the plate. When he goes to seek Bilbo out, his room will be locked from the inside without fail. He won’t see Bilbo up till the point he does whatever it takes to make amends, and it’s the thought of being isolated from him for anything longer than a day that always compels Thorin to choke down his pride, bite by bite, no matter how bitter the taste or how long it takes.
It’s always worth it, though. Immediately the next day he’s greeted with a steaming apple tart — because Bilbo’s brand of humour is just like that — and a neatly-folded note waiting to be read:
You really must try harder to control your temper, Thorin.
***
He does try. He’ll try anything, for Bilbo.
***
He forces himself to write back after some time because it’s one of the few things keeping them afloat, now. It’s not at all the same as talking to each other, but they’re still communicating this way and that’s better than anything else they can do or think of given the circumstances.
Good evening. It’s cold today — dress warmer tonight.
You were right about the cold. Thanks for the warning.
Thank you for the strudel. I enjoyed it very much.
You’re welcome.
Tell me if you need anything. Anything at all. I’ll see it done.
I’m alright. You should take better care of yourself, too.
I take care of myself just fine.
Promise me, Thorin. Promise me you will.
I will. Promise.
***
He would feel much worse about lying, but the content coming from both Balin and Bilbo’s notes don’t change weeks into their predicament, and in some sense this makes him feel he’s allowed his own small untruths, somehow.
***
Contrary to Thorin’s best intentions, he doesn’t use every minute of when he’s available to keep vigil by Bilbo’s bedside. It's so quiet, sometimes. He can almost imagine what it would sound like if Bilbo were to wake and sit up and speak to him, but other times it gets much too difficult to sit there in the silence and just watch. There are more and more days where the weight of Bilbo’s limp hand becomes a reminder of how there’s virtually nothing he can do about this, that they’re still not anywhere closer to figuring this out than they were from the beginning.
It’s always this feeling that burns the most. It doesn’t so much overwhelm as it seizes him with self-loathing so vengeful that it becomes impossible to stay put. He gets up and walks about Erebor because he must, taking on affairs of little consequence just to have something to do with himself. Restocking the larder. Commissioning a new flower garden out by the back parlor. Ordering in new books from Dale, the works, and he shelves each and every one by hand.
Then, there are also the moments he spends in the spaces Bilbo must occupy when it is night. It’s easy enough to figure out his pattern, after some time. Thorin finds his chair in the royal library and runs a hand over the creased leather of the seat, as if to seek whatever warmth of his that remains. In the pantry, the bench is wiped clean more often than not, the baking equipment washed and set out to dry. These are the things Bilbo has touched, these are the things he has handled while conscious. They are all Thorin has left, now.
***
When Thorin first falls asleep next to Bilbo in the hobbit’s own bed, he honestly doesn’t mean to. But he’s just come down from just under nine hours in court with little to no breaks and he’s so hungry he could eat a cow, only he’d paced past the pantry as fast as he could in favour of seeing Bilbo just once before he crashes for the night. By the time he’s at Bilbo’s bedside there is barely enough light in the sky and he’s addled with lethargy, and Bilbo’s bed does appear to be large enough for the both of them, something Thorin has always had at the back of his mind but is only thinking about now that he’s close to dozing on his feet.
The covers about Bilbo look so tempting, his pillows invitingly soft. Struck with an impulse, Thorin kicks his shoes off and lets his thick furs tumble from his shoulders, clambering into Bilbo’s bed and curling a hand into his. They’re close enough such that when Thorin breathes, he can feel the warmth of his air reflecting off Bilbo’s forehead. It’s the last thing he remembers before the night drowns him completely.
When he wakes, he doesn’t expect anything beyond the smell of biscuits and Bilbo’s space in the neighbouring sheets. Which is why the plain morning air comes as a surprise, though not quite nearly as much as the small arms around him. He doesn’t open his eyes just yet, fearful of the possibility that he’s still asleep and dreaming, but eventually the breath billowing down his chest becomes far too real to ignore.
It’s Bilbo, fast asleep next to him. Thorin hesitates, then turns his head slightly. Bilbo’s eyes are shut, his features still and erased of expression. Thorin brushes his trembling fingers against Bilbo’s fringe, stroking gently. His forehead is smooth against the curve of Thorin’s palm, the skin soft and warm to the touch.
This is how Thorin ends up spending the whole morning, in bed with Bilbo snugged close like a hedgehog in winter, taking in every last bit of him while he can.
***
Gandalf arrives in the dead of night, so Thorin doesn’t get to speak with him until early the next day.
“There must be something you can do.”
The wizard frowns. “It’s a very powerful enchantment; I don’t think —”
“Please.” Thorin’s voice stumbles, threatening to crack. He has to think of Bilbo to keep himself level. “If not us, then…just him. Just Bilbo.”
The look on Gandalf’s face makes Thorin aware that he’s given the game away, but he can’t rise above weeks of exhaustion to care. It’s not like he himself knows exactly when his whole life had come to balance on their little burglar. “I’m so sorry, Thorin,” Gandalf says. “Truly, I am.”
Thorin looks down at his feet, hands fisted and shaking. “What did he say?”
“Hm?”
“When you spoke with him,” Thorin continues, because Gandalf is not Balin and he’s never known the wizard to sugarcoat anything at anyone’s expense before. “How is he?”
It seems to take ages for Gandalf to respond. He leans down, just a little, and when he speaks it’s hushed and smoothened over with unerring empathy.
“He misses you, Thorin,” he says.
***
After that, he has to write it.
I miss you, too.
Thorin crushes the note into a wad and bins it. After a long while, he puts the ink-soaked tip of his quill to the parchment and tries again.
You shouldn’t have to do this alone.
***
The next morning:
I know. I’m sorry.
***
A week passes and their notes start to become longer, their correspondence more detailed. They live with each other through letters, the things they deign to share, and it turns out to be the best thing ever since all of this started. Bilbo writes about what he gets up to in the night and Thorin does likewise, throwing in funny stories whensoever one presents itself and on the fly anecdotes that don’t really amount to anything significant.
(It matters not that it doesn’t matter, honestly — what does is that Bilbo tells him anything and everything and in some measure they’re acknowledging the existence of secrets between them. It’s infinitely easier to breathe with that knowledge tucked away at the back of his mind, and Thorin actually learns not to despise mornings as much as he used to.)
With all their newfound frankness, there are still notes that he finds difficulty responding to, in one way or another. I dream of you awake all the time is the first of them, stashed under two mince pies, and Thorin holds back until he is about to run out of time before hastily scribbling I always dream of you, too on the other side. It takes much shorter to think of a reply to I wish it was just me who fell in, sometimes — You mustn’t say that. Never say that.
The shorter ones are the toughest to receive. They don’t come as often as the long, rambling letters about gardening and star-gazing, but that just makes them all the more harder to answer. The one about nightmares of drowning in the river, Thorin finds a way to address eventually — I had a dream where I jumped in to save you — but it’s a note on top a tin of raisin biscuits that throws him:
Do you think we’ll ever see each other again?
Thorin doesn’t reply to this immediately because he doesn’t quite know how. Doing so would be confessing his deepest, darkest fears — that this will go on and on and on for the rest of their lives until one of them is gone, and what exactly would happen then? He can’t shake the uncertainty no matter how hard he tries, and manages to keep from replying for two more notes and a letter before Bilbo asks again, and even then Thorin can’t fathom his own daring when he lifts his quill to write back:
Yes. Of course we will.
***
There is one particular note that has never been read lying in scraps at the bottom of the pantry bin. If anyone were to piece it back together, the crossed-out message scrawled on it would be steeped in grease but otherwise still legible in the right amount of light: I never told you that I’m in love with you, but I am, and I’ve always wanted to say it except
***
I think I might be forgetting what your voice sounds like.
Almost immediately Thorin regrets writing it, but he doesn’t discard the message. It’s true, much like many other things he doesn’t tell Bilbo, but this one feels especially real for some reason and it’s been rolling about inside of him for weeks, unsettling and unwieldy as a paving stone. He leaves the note where Bilbo will find it once he’s had a whole day to mull it over, then settles down next to him and goes to sleep.
When he wakes up, written on the back of the note he has left is I think I might have forgotten what sunlight looks like.
Thorin reads the words over and over again, clutching the piece of parchment so hard his hands shake, threatening to rip it.
***
By the next rotation Thorin has everything planned out and he takes half the day off to get everything in order. He gets his hands on every last stimulant he can wheedle out of Oin and chokes it all down with strong black tea two hours before the sun goes down; when the sky has been burned orange, his heart is racing and he’s whirring with so much energy that failure doesn’t seem at all likely, only he knows better than to let any of that fool him. It’s not like he hasn’t tried to force himself awake before, with disappointing results.
With half an hour to go, he heaves Bilbo onto his back and sets off for the highest of the western towers. On the tenth flight of stairs he’s panting with the exertion, but Thorin doesn’t stop to rest. There’s absolutely no room for error here.
The sun is already halfway set when Thorin kicks the doors open and shuffles out onto the dusty balcony. He lowers Bilbo gently to the floor, lets the unconscious hobbit’s lagging weight slump against him while he scans the skies anxiously. He’s not sure how much time he has left but he’s willing to bet that it’s in the minutes, and he props Bilbo up, holding him by the shoulders. “Come on,” Thorin mutters, turning over and over again to check the fading light. “Wake up. Open your eyes.”
Bilbo’s head lolls forward heavily, like a puppet’s. A sudden desperation grips Thorin. He shouts, “Come on, wake up! Bilbo! Please wake up!” It doesn’t take him long to realise that he’s virtually begging, and he’s never begged for anything in his life but he’s past caring because nothing has ever been so important before this.
Bilbo doesn’t respond. The seconds tick away; there’s only a sliver of sun left on the horizon. Thorin lays Bilbo back down and cups his face in his hands. “Please wake up,” he says. “For me. Please.”
From behind closed lids, the faintest stirring of Bilbo’s eyes arrests Thorin’s attention. He watches, hanging on to his breath as stirring turns into lashes fluttering, and then on the last splinter of daylight, impossibly, he catches sight of just the barest, most crucial flash of green-grey —
He doesn’t even hear the soft flop of his own body on top of Bilbo when he falls forward in a faint, sound asleep.
***
When he next wakes he’s lying in bed with Bilbo swaddled against him in the sheets. There are neat braids in Thorin’s hair and beard that he doesn’t remember having the day before, and Bilbo’s hand is in his, their fingers clasped and bunched together. Between their palms is a bit of parchment that has been folded into quarters; Thorin opens it without sitting up, careful not to crinkle it as he reads:
Thank you. Thank you so much.
Though he feels that he might, Thorin will not let himself come undone, merely returns to Bilbo’s latent presence beside him to press a shaking kiss to his forehead.
***
He tries his hand at cooking something for Bilbo and burns his way through three mackerel pies before Bombur finally intervenes. The final product is a mushy, fish-smelling confection that fractionally resembles what Thorin had in mind, so he leaves the pie in the usual place and manages to feel absurdly proud about it as he turns in.
Daylight delivers unto him one sleeping hobbit and a fresh mackerel pie, baked to perfection in unmistakably the same dish Thorin used the day before. He already has a good idea of what the accompanying note will say before he sees it, stuck into the peak of the crust like a topping —
You tried.
Note in hand, Thorin stares down at it, dumbstruck, and then laughs and laughs until he’s clutching at his sides, wheezing for air.
***
Afterwards, he says in writing, I saw you again. That one time on the balcony. Did you see me, too?
Yes, I think so. I’m very sure that I felt you afterwards, though.
Thorin laughs at this and feels just the teeniest spike of guilt for it. I will fix this for us, somehow. You have to trust me.
You know I do.
He carries the last one around in his pocket for days, finds himself fishing it out and reading it whenever he can. Only Bilbo's trust in him has ever kept him fighting for this long.
***
Increasingly more often than not he can’t resist kissing Bilbo’s dozy eyes as he wakens. It makes the last seconds of every day the most vital of moments — the feeling of lashes flickering on his lips before he drowses against Bilbo is always the last thing he remembers, fleeting and intimate as the whisper of a name against his skin. This is when he is at his boldest, when he feels like he’s finally able to protect Bilbo once more, just as he used to, when he doesn’t have to think that much about the eons it’s been since their lives together were normal. Otherwise, it takes everything he has to gasp back the sobs, and then all he can do is kiss Bilbo, and hold him close, and kiss him again.
***
On the first morning of autumn he slips his ring onto Bilbo’s finger before he wakes and finally gets himself to put it down on paper before he can lose his nerve.
I love you.
The days are slightly shorter, now, so he doesn’t have to wait all that long to get a reply.
Well, how very peculiar indeed! I was just thinking the exact same thing about you.
***
He has just over ten hours a day mid-winter when he staggers into bed, almost crushing Bilbo under his own weight, and shifts to bury himself in the swathe of blankets piled on top. It’s been very chilly as of late, the coldest winter they’ve had thus far. There’s still snow melting on his brow and slipping down in icy trickles along the lining of his fur robe, but he doesn’t care, he doesn’t care — his mind has been on Bilbo the whole day and he’s finally here, with him, and that’s all that matters.
What matters is that it’s enough. It’s been enough for a very long while.
He reaches out to touch Bilbo’s face, turns it towards him and brushes his lips with his own. It’s conventional, now, that they’re the first things the other sees when they take turns to wake. Thorin smiles when the exhaustion rolls in, right on schedule. He summons a slow breath, closing his eyes, and murmurs, "I feel like pie, tomorrow."
Before he drops off, he swears he hears Bilbo mumbling back, "Apple or blueberry?" and Thorin smiles, already too drained to respond.
He dares to dream, though — perhaps someday, he'll be able to.