Chapter Text
Everyone’s got something to hold onto
In strange times and dark days
It’s hard, too
Make it up as we go along
Who’s to blame when nobody’s wrong?
The streets of Esgaroth at night were generally empty whenever he’d gotten the opportunity to walk them, but tonight they feel beyond that, they feel as if the entire fisher’s town-turned-city is devoid of any and all life, the houses sitting abandoned and barren, none of the alley cats or the handful of stray dogs kept in shape by the local butchers in sight, the wet asphalt and old brick walls only echoing the sounds made by himself and by the gently rolling waves of the Lake in the distance, mostly calm in the late Spring time, following in his footsteps even as he marches onwards and further inland, dazed, tired, and cold, hopefully still heading in the right direction to the Police and Fire Stations, both of them closer, and more useful, than the new clinic.
The windows of the buildings look down on him like the judging, belittling eyes of giants, and he knows, rationally, that he could, should go knocking on doors to ask for help, for someone to at least call the police for him, but he can’t shake off the all-encompassing belief that he’s all alone in this world of dreams and nightmares come to life.
After so long, he’d almost forgotten what the Long Lake, south of Erebor, looks like, hazy in the morning mist, the evergreens huddled in clusters wherever they haven’t been brought down for their wood or to make more space for the growing urbanization, the water that decants from two rivers to it cleaner than it has been in years, according to miss Hilda, the city of Esgaroth itself made up of a lot of wet asphalt, dark wood, and red brick.
For him, the Lake almost looks like a dark, open wound pointing towards the Lonely Mountain, or away from.
“As you can see, the house is rather on the small side,” Miss Hilda, a tough woman with loose dark brown curls, a washed-out face, and a strong Esgaroth accent, shows him to his prospective new house, opening doors and windows as she goes along. “I know the application form included a question or two about spouses or children, all that family stuff, to narrow down the candidates, but I suppose it wouldn’t hurt for an extra mouth to tell you, mister, that this house barely has two decent bedrooms and a sorry excuse for a showerhead. If you want to receive visits, you go on ahead, but Jackson, one of the former keepers, would gladly tell you a thing or two about how bad of an idea it’d be to set up shop and make a family here, if the poor sod were still alive, that is.”
Thorin nods in acquiescence, only half listening to her, in all honesty, “consider me well informed then.”
It’s just a house, really, and unless there’s something terribly wrong with it, like some busted pipes or faulty wiring, there’s very little reason for him to worry, and he barely plans on hosting Fíli on the occasional weekend, if he genuinely wants to come around, maybe Dís and Kíli too, sometime before the two years lease is up.
“Still,” Miss Hilda continues. “Pretty good place to live in, sturdy thing that it is.”
She says that, but he’d caught a glimpse of the look she’d shot at the light station when she’d greeted him in the driveway, and it hadn’t been the kind of look one would give a good house to live in, but rather the kind of baffled stare one would point in the direction of something utterly unexpected, baffling. What, the light station ? That had been the sole reason they’d met there in the first place, why he’d spoken through the telephone with the Mayor’s assistant the week before, even if in the end, neither the Mayor nor his assistant had made it to their appointment there. Something about sick children and guide professors.
“So, here begins the lighthouse,” Miss Hilda says when they reach the short passageway that connects the house with the building of the beacon, all beyond a wooden frame next to the kitchen backdoor. “I’m afraid this corridor here might be a bit tight for you, mister, but you shouldn’t need to bend over or squeeze in either. Just a bit claustrophobic, ‘s all.”
A small awning window on the northern wall gives them enough light to see the corridor while it’s day out, but when he glances out of it in passing, he only sees the nearby tree line and a sliver of sky.
“Welcome to the North Point Lighthouse,” she introduces when they both walk past the door at the other end, stepping into the ground level of the building. This time, her face remains neutral.
“It’s the oldest of our four lighthouses, been running since the 1810s, and ‘s one of the three that still does so, unlike the fancy little museum the old Harbor was turned into by the Council. I understand it’s pretty standard, for a lighthouse, whatever that means, and there’s talk of getting it nice and automated in a few years from now. That’s why the lease is only for two years, but you’ll have the chance to renovate it after that if it’s available.”
He turns his head from the woman to take a look around the level ground, with its lockers and power generator, then up into the empty space framed by the steel staircase, at the wood flooring just below the lantern and the lens making room for an extra, small floor, housing a radio setup, a telephone line.
They walk up, the echoing of their shoes on the metal steps certainly loud enough to be a bother at first, but he will get used to it, with time.
“The staircase and the flooring are less than ten years old, I think, and the building itself has only had a few minor repairs along the way.”
“Except for the fire of 1912, yes?”
His voice sounds rough, like sandpaper, even to his own ears, but she hardly seems to care about it.
“Not even then, actually,” she shrugs. “The house burned down to the ground, but the flames had barely touched the corridor by the time the firemen showed up, so the lighthouse itself was mostly intact.”
When they make it to the upper floor, he’s greeted by the lantern first, because that’s what he’s looking for, and the view beyond the windowpanes and the gallery second. The upper end of the staircase faces north, of all damned things, and he can catch glimpses of the Lonely Mountain between the greenery of some tall trees in the slope of the promontory now that the mist’s mostly cleared out.
“You said in the application form that you had some previous experience with lighthouses?”
He nods, stealing one last glance towards Erebor, far in the distance, before turning back and adding, “I worked at a pair of them when I was young, uni age, then again about ten years later.”
Miss Hilda hums. “Well, I’d suppose this lantern can’t be all that different from whatever you worked with back then, but Bard asked me to hand you over the guidebook; it’s this bound journal with annotations from former keepers and a few schematics, stuff like that, so that’s what I’m gonna do, you can skim over it in the meantime, I suppose, and then Gery, the keeper from the Mooring Lighthouse will reach out to you once you settle here.”
The idea of just skimming over the handbook alarms him, but he was told over the telephone that his background check had come through. Maybe the Mayor would’ve had more to say, but, then again, maybe he would’ve been just as clueless or careless. He’ll have to trust in Gery , then.
Thorin decides to show some initiative and help Miss Hilda shutting and locking everything up on their way back out, only taking a small detour through the kitchen door to show him the back of the light station and the edge of the promontory overlooking the abrupt northeastern shore of the Lake. Looking at the squat, cylindrical, stark white building, he thinks that it’s short enough that he would very likely survive a fall from the very top of its dome unless he injured his head or spine, a morbid thing to consider about his new residence-slash-workplace, sure, but still probably true. He also comes to the understanding that the station as a whole is very much like any other lighthouse he’s ever seen, and for as long as he has it on his sight through the rearview mirror of his rented car, he can’t find anything that could be considered baffling about it either, less so in the eyes of anyone who’s most definitely seen any of its brethren before.
On his flight back, the last journey back to a semblance of home he will be making for the foreseeable future, he lets himself doubt and despair, think circles around the nonsensical idea that is moving out of Dís’ house when he’s closer to his fifties than his forties, and there’s no need . But he only lets himself chase his own tail during the bulk of the flight, just a few hours between the Esgaroth Airfield and the International Airport just south of Ered Luin.
Once the plane has touched down and he’s disembarked along with the other passengers, he leaves all of those thoughts behind and starts focusing on the many, many preparations he’ll have to make in the upcoming weeks to move back east, after over two decades.
The thing that really gets to him isn’t the move itself, or leaving behind the home of what remains of his closest family and all the anxiety that comes with it,it’s not the several days spent driving from Ered Luin to Esgaroth, or even the awkwardness of staying at Bilbo’s house for a night, convinced he’s being an utter nuisance.
“Thorin, you remain one of the most dramatic men I’ve ever met,” Bilbo tells him the following morning while they eat breakfast, just the two of them since Thorin’s getting back on the road right as Frodo, Bilbo’s little cousin, is meant to wake up for school.
“And you’re still a thorn on my side,” Thorin replies, gruff and rubbing sleep off his eyes, drinking his scalding coffee like it’s spring water.
Bilbo snorts into his mug, amused. It’s kind of funny, to look back to a time when he’d been madly in love with this delightful bastard and only think yeah, we work better as friends, actually .
“Remember to phone me to let me know you’re doing alright,” Bilbo bids him goodbye and good luck, in his own way, from the steps of his driveway. “Unless you want me to hunt you down when I hear nothing from you.”
“Thanks, but no thanks,” he grumbles and sends a final gesture to Frodo over the open window of his car, the boy too awake for this early in the morning. He almost misses being that young.
Thorin doesn’t even dislike the roadside motels all that much: none of them are half as bad as he’d feared they would be, and the concierges and his temporary neighbors all turn out to be rather unobtrusive and nice, friendly even. The horror .
What gets under his skin is the house itself.
Granted, the house is well furnished save for the bedrooms, which is hardly a problem for him, and everything works perfectly well, too, the electricity, the plumbing, the kitchen, even the telephone with which he quickly calls Dís and Bilbo, mindful not to give them the slightest opportunity to band together against him. He'd made sure to check everything himself when he’d been shown around, and it all seems to have been well kept during the two weeks in between, the only real sign that anyone – the Mayor himself, according to what Miss Hilda told him when he’d stopped by the city proper to get the keys from her – had dropped by the house being the lack of dust anywhere, and the sheet of paper with all kinds of relevant phone numbers, the house’s included, weighted down by the device itself.
And he has no complaints about the beacon either, so far; he’ll have more to think about on that front once he sees it in all its squat, blinding magnificence, but he supposes that if anything were to have happened with it in the meantime, someone would have already fixed it, or, at the very least, tried to tell him, left him a note along with the phone numbers.
The problem is that it’s not his home, plain and simple.
The argument could be made, of course, that maybe he hasn’t had a home since his family left Erebor behind, with all the moving around he’d done for a decade before settling into Dís’ house. But if there’s one thing life has taught him is that the proverbial “home is where the heart is” isn’t just pretty poetry.
He gets used to his new routine soon enough, though, and Dís teases him endlessly about it, proclaiming that it’s because he’s a very organized and responsible man, and twice as stubborn. He just rolls his eyes from the other side of the phone line and lets her mock him for a moment before he steers the conversation towards the boys and her work.
She might be right, of course, about his stubbornness, but no amount of tenacity helps him feel more at ease in the small house as the days go by, the tower only marginally better, and likely because it reminds him of his summers during university, only now he’s doing the job alone and liable to a midlife crisis. If he isn’t simply having one already and that’s why he’s here now.
One evening, before his first week’s up, he hears the crunch of car tires on the gravel roads that lead to and away from the promontory, and, sitting down on the short step down the backdoor with a mug of coffee in one hand and a book on the other, he assumes it’s someone either heading further south, likely towards the city, on a road that isn’t just compacted dirt and tire tracks like most around here, or wanting to appreciate the landscape – quite lovely from this area, if anyone were to ask him.
His breath hitches, and he nearly chokes on the hot beverage when there’s a firm knock on his front door, droplets of coffee and saliva landing on the yellowing paper when he coughs his airway free of obstacles. It takes him a moment to get back to breathing air instead of liquids, long enough for the knocking to repeat itself, just as firm as before but the rhythm a little faster, more urgent, perhaps the person on the other side having heard his coughing fit. He unceremoniously drops his now almost empty mug and the book on the kitchen counter, scrubs at his face with the sleeve of his sweater, and walks in long strides to answer before his unexpected, unwanted visit gets any ideas, loose boots loud and heavy on the wood flooring.
Throwing his door open with more force than entirely necessary, he asks a slightly wheezy, but still deep and demanding: “Yes?” He’s glad he’d tied back his hair earlier, or he would be looking a lot wilder and meaner in the face of the startled man looking at him with wide, brown eyes. Doe eyes.
“You must be Mister Oakenshield, I presume?”
He narrows his eyes at the man, about his same age and height, only a little slimmer, less gray in his dark brown hair and none in his mustache, more laughter lines on his face than signs of stress, it seems, his voice raspy and clear.
“Yes. And you are…?”
The man smiles, not brightly, per se, but honest nonetheless, friendly, the crow’s feet by the outer corners of his eyes standing out a tad more.
“I’m Bard,” he introduces himself, extending his right hand for a shake. Thorin takes a hold of it automatically before the name fully registers in his mind. “Pleasure to make your acquaintance.”
“You’re the Mayor, yes?”
The local man scrunches up his nose in a somewhat juvenile manner that catches Thorin off guard.
“Yeah, I am. But please, just call me Bard; the only people who call me by my last name or my position are those who want to chase me off City Hall with a broomstick.”
“Is that so,” Thorin wonders, vaguely concerned.
He doubts Esgaroth politics are anything like Erebor’s are, or at least were back in his grandfather’s last term, but even if all he gets are mean spirited caricatures in the local newspaper, eggs thrown at the front of his house, or the occasional cold shoulder from a council member, that still can’t be a pleasant experience, he reckons.
Bard simply shrugs.
“It is what it is, and it could be a lot worse, but that’s not why I came by. How are you faring all the way over here, Mister Oakenshield?”
He hums and relaxes a bit now that he’s better footed.
“You should just call me Thorin, ‘s only fair.”
The man’s smile widens slightly, a little glint in his eyes.
“Thorin, then.”
He invites the man in, and he ends up staying over for almost a full hour, the two of them talking mostly about the light station itself, and whether or not Thorin is in need of anything. Of what he could possibly be in need of, Thorin is polite enough not to ask the frankly kind seeming man. It’s not bad company, regardless, the Mayor of Esgaroth a simple person who doesn’t fall into the temptation of senseless chatter just to fill the void of silence, something he can appreciate, a man of few words himself.
“I really am sorry for not dropping by before today,” Bard apologizes once again, the third or fourth time in their brief dialogue.
Thorin shrugs, crosses his arms over his chest while standing in the threshold of the house, relaxed, as much as he gets in company that isn’t his family or his closest friends. Bard peers at him with keen eyes, and Thorin wonders whether he looks imposing with the way he stands or incongruous with the small structure at his back.
“There’s hardly any need to worry about it,” he settles on, giving the conversation for done. Bard seems to get the hint.
“Well, it was nice meeting you, Thorin, and thank you for the coffee,” he throws over his shoulder as he walks back to his station wagon – about as beat up as Thorin’s truck, just in a dark forest green instead of maroon -, and he thinks he can guess the shadow of a boyish smirk on his face. “And remember to call me if you want a night off.”
Thorin stares as the man starts up his car and drives down the road that leads back to town from where he still stands on the doorway, keeps on watching for a long moment after he’s gone before finally turning around and back into the house.
Eventually, Gery does show up, almost two weeks after he arrives in Esgaroth and takes over the light station.
“Sorry, Mister,” he has the same accent and polite disposition Thorin has encountered so far, and shows very little curiosity. “‘s been a nasty bug going ‘round some of the kids, gotta keep that contained, y’know?”
Thorin grimaces in sympathy, a small thing, really.
“That’s one way for them to spend the Summer.”
Gery snorts, affable. “Sure is, Mister, sure is. Now, let’s get down to business, shall we?”
Thorin can certainly appreciate how down to Earth and pragmatic the locals he’s met so far seem to be. Esgaroth, more often called Laketown before, had always been a small fishing town, rundown and poor for the longest time, for all that much wealth passed through it from Erebor to the South and the West, and back. It wasn’t until a couple centuries before that one of the last Lords of Dale had made all kinds of deals and agreements with the people here that they’d been given the chance to grow from a humble village.
And then, of course, there’d been the so-called Masters of Laketown.
He supposes that for most people, hard work was still how they’d managed to get through the rougher times. And it was paying off, it seemed, without them having to sell their souls to the rich and powerful of Erebor and Mirkwood.
“Thank you kindly, Mister,” Gery keeps up his light-heartedness and doubles down on it when Thorin offers him a steaming cup of coffee, blowing on it with a full-faced smile and rosy cheeks. Thorin manages to ground out a low y ou’re welcome without too much gruffness and grit in it.
This is going to become a habit for whenever he receives visits, isn’t it?
They skip the house entirely, since that’s Thorin’s realm unless electricians or plumbers are necessary, and go on their way to the beacon, Gery shooting one question after the other like a particularly keen inspector from the moment they step through the second door of the corridor and into the ground level of the building. It goes on for the next hour and a half, even after the local man mentions how he clearly has a hang of things.
“Better safe than sorry, won’t you agree?”
He bids the man goodbye after a second mug of coffee, and thinks that maybe he could brave a walk around town sometime within the next month instead of the next year, if everyone’s even half as welcoming and unobtrusive as the folks he’s met so far have been, previous forays notwithstanding.
He takes a nap before he has to start any work.
One of the first, starker differences he notices within the first couple of months, is the quietness, or rather, the changes in ambient noise.
Dís has a good, decent house, big enough for all four of them to have an individual room, and then another room for guests in the refurbished cellar, two bathrooms, spacious kitchen and living areas, a garage; nothing like some of the places they’d lived in after leaving Erebor, and then when Víli’s death had still been fresh and things had gotten difficult. But it was still small enough - the corridors hardly long, the inner walls a bit on the thinner side, the rooms just a tad narrow -, and the interior insulation was subpar enough that he could hear the snoring, and the shuffling, and the huffing of the others whenever he was awake late at night; and likewise, the rest must have heard him exist in the wee hours from time to time as well.
There’s none of that at the light station, obviously, and it drives him a little mad at first.
He hadn’t noticed just how accustomed he’d been to the minute signs of other people living under the same roof, how expected those details were. To be able to hear them singing along to the radio somewhere else in the house, to bump into them in the hallways, to find soaking dishes in the sink and discarded shoes in the living room.
It makes him want to go back, it makes him consider getting a dog or a cat, it makes him hear noises from people that aren’t there at night amongst all the little creaks and cracks of the house.
He’d occupied the same space as the rest of his family – his parents and his siblings, his grandfather too, after his grandmother died – up until they were driven out of Erebor, when he’d been a few weeks shy of starting his second year of university, where he’d shared a room in the dorms for as long as he was there, biting down on any complaints and grievances as to not get himself, and by extension his family, in any trouble or tight corners, and whenever he’d gone on to work at the lighthouses along the Western coast during the summers, it’d been as a helping hand, only spending a few nights on his own if the keeper wanted to go visit family or friends at a nearby town. Then there’d been his brother’s and father’s deaths, and his grandfather losing his battle against time and old age, and sharing a flat with Dwalin for a couple of sad, frozen years, and Víli and Dís, and the boys.
This is, without a doubt, the first time in his life he can say he’s living on his own, and that’s kind of a disconcerting realization to have.
If only the floorboards would stop creaking at random moments of the night, at least.
Summer crawls to an end, and he gets the chance to have Fíli stay in the house for a few days before he moves into the dorms at Erebor. He seems to like the place, staring wide-eyed at the beacon, and the Lake beyond, and all the forestry around them, even at the distant peak of the Lonely Mountain. There’s only one, say, issue…
“It’s kinda chilly here, isn’t it?”
Thorin blinks at him, dumbfounded.
“Is it?”
Fíli snuggles into his fraying denim jacket, hands tucked into his armpits, with a faux innocent expression like the little boy he no longer is, making him roll his eyes, with his whole body.
“Just get a coat from the hanger, lad. I’ll make us some coffee.”
He brightens up immediately. “And cookies?”
Thorin snorts, roughly, but doesn’t try to lie to himself, nor make up any excuses. He supposes this is what he gets for spoiling his nephews rotten since before they could walk like there would be no consequences. And yes, Dís did warn him.
But now that Fíli’s brought it up, Thorin realizes that the house is a bit chilly: the promontory it sists on gets a lot of sunlight during the day, and the buildings are well insulated, he’d made sure of it on his first visit, and yet he’d just spent the summer wearing sweaters and long socks indoors, and the more he thinks about it, the more he convinces himself that the house is considerably cooler than the beacon.
He finds Fíli outside most of the time he’s there, enjoying the warm days and the cool nights, walking into the woods only as far as he can still see the station. Fíli is the more independent, outdoorsy type to Kíli’s social butterfly, so he doesn’t worry too much. At least there aren’t any bears or wolves around these parts, not for many, many more miles, only beady eyed ravens.
When Fíli’s in the station with him, he’s either reading one of the several history books he’s brought with him under a blanket on a patch of sunlight, or trailing behind Thorin, watching as he works, also under a blanket that he wears like a cape or a cloak.
“It’s not that cold,” he grunts at some point, seemingly bemused for all that he’s starting to get genuinely concerned.
Fíli shrugs.
“I suppose, but this blanket’s nice and I don’t want to dig through my case for the one sweater I brought with me.”
And that's that, he guesses. Nephews can be truly odd creatures.
Then it’s the Wednesday the week before term begins and off Fíli goes, with his suitcase, and the blanket Thorin thrusts onto him inside a canvas bag, and his presence like bottled sunshine. He drives Fíli to the bus station, and the ladfinds his spare glasses in the glove box after two months away, and Thorin leans against the walls of the building under the awning until he loses sight of the bus his little nephew - who isn’t little at all anymore - is in, off to Erebor and university.
Then a week goes by, and another, and yet another one, and he has to hand it to Fíli, because back when he’d started uni, he’d been unable to stay away from his family for that long, or any longer than two weeks, neither had Frerin or Dís, for that matter. Sure, the circumstances are different, but that just means Fíli has all the liberties, and resources, to visit home at least once a month, not to mention Thorin or Balin who are living nearby.
He goes to the town center once or twice a week, mostly to get groceries, or books from the library, and he finally caves and goes through the ordeal of eating at the pub Bard had recommended to him. He meets Gery and his wife, Lori, there, having a night out, and they’re nice enough to ask after him and the light station without much insistence but with genuine attention, and the food turns out to be very good, he even gets himself a bottle of the local made stouts proudly displayed behind the bar to take home, maybe to accompany next day’s lunch.
People hardly even stare at him.
He wakes up, foggy and alarmed, to firm yet polite knocking on his door. He looks at the clock on his bed stand and is caught between grunting in frustration because he’d still had a couple dozen minutes left before his alarm, or being relatively grateful that whoever it is didn’t decide to drop by any earlier, instead.
Autumn is still a couple of weeks out, and the days continue to be sunny and warm in Esgaroth, not a single turning leaf on sight as of yet, but it definitely feels like the chill has arrived earlier in his corner of the world. Still, he’s too old to be self-conscious when all he does is put on an extra, slightly more presentable layer of clothes on top of what he wears as pajamas to answer the door. He hardly bothers to tame his hair, his lion’s mane like his sister likes to call it, as if she didn’t inherit the same genes as he did.
“Thorin,” Bard greets with a brief, steadfast nod of his head, hands in the pockets of his jacket, the same borderline boyish smile he’d worn the first time they’d met, and then on the occasion they’d crossed paths at the grocery store, only slightly pulled back in something like a contrite grimace. “Woke you up, didn’t I?”
Yes, you did , he feels like grumbling, but even he’s capable of some deference, when the mood strikes him, and Bard’s been nothing but polite and thoughtful so far. Thorin shrugs, gestures for the other man to follow him on his way back in and towards the kitchen, in dire need of some coffee now that he has a guest.
“Only a few minutes before my alarm was going to, anyways.”
“Still, sorry.”
Thorin almost sighs, or groans, before reminding himself to be somewhat civil.
“Don’t mention it.”
Bard, surprisingly, doesn’t for the rest of his visit. Instead, he gives him a hand around the kitchen, clearly knowing how to navigate both such an easily cluttered space and this room in particular, accurately finding everything he searches for.
Thorin’s never been a particularly curious creature, but he itches to inquire about it, now, even when he probably already knows the answer to his question.
“Brought something to eat, least I could do for taking some of your time.”
Thorin hadn’t noticed the bag Bard had been carrying until the other man retrieves it from where he’d left it hanging from the back of a chair. Huh, he must be more tired than he’d first thought.
They eat at the small table that can barely hold him on his lonesome, the fact that it can face against more people being a true wonder. They’re mostly quiet, or rather, Thorin’s mostly focused on his food, actively trying not to scarf it down like some ravenous beast in the presence of company, esteemed company too, while Bard looks around the kitchen and the living area, or at Thorin himself, not hiding the action very well, if he’s even trying to do so at all.
“I heard you had a visitor a couple of weeks ago, I hope this old thing was good enough accommodation,” he starts just as Thorin’s finishing his food, warm and filling, savory, likely from the pub.
He eyes the Mayor carefully. The man simply smiles back at him, takes a sip of his coffee.
“Word travels fast around here. Was he your son?”
Fair enough , Thorin shrugs it off, gulps down the rest of his own coffee so he can refill his mug.
“One of my nephews, Fíli. He was on his way to university in Erebor and dropped by for a short visit.”
Bard hums from his seat where he seems so at bloody ease, not quite like he’s at home, but almost like he’s at a friend’s. Not that much better, but he will tolerate it so long as the other man doesn’t take any egregious liberties.
“You’re close with them, then? Your nephews.”
Thorin considers him further from the safer distance of where he sags against the counter. Is this going to become a habit too, the contemplation on top of the coffee?
“Yeah,” he grunts, his voice scratchier than he’d expected, not that Bard seems to care, or notice. “I helped raise them, I guess.”
Bard lifts an inquiring, slightly mocking eyebrow at him. “You guess ?”
Thorin doesn’t roll his eyes, but only just so, leaning to his side with an unimpressed look on his face.
“Fine, I helped raise them,” he grumbles, and it doesn’t escape him the way the Mayor, the highest authority in town, hides a smug smile behind a sip of his coffee. He ignores it, though. “And I used to live with them and their mother, so yes, I’d say we’re close.”
He doesn’t mention that he’d done so until only about two months ago, that he’d seen them grow with a near parental eye since Fíli was two and Kíli only a handful of months. Bard must’ve already made his impressions, and they’re likely not too far off if the way he’s looking at Thorin, soft and understanding, means anything.
He stirs the conversation away, maybe a bit rougher than necessary. “You didn’t come here just to ask me about my visits, did you?”
Bard nods and sets his mug down on the table, keeping his hands around it to soak up whatever little warmth it still gives off.
“Now that Summer’s ending, I thought I’d come around and give you a fair warning about our Autumn weather.”
“What about your Autumn weather?”
“It’s shit ,” he replies without skipping a beat and with a shit-eating grin. Thorin can’t help but give an amused snort in answer.
“Alright then, tell me all about it.”
Turns out the fogs he’s seen so far are nothing more than child’s play compared to what awaits him in October and November, not to mention rain and electric storms every other week, sometimes stretching for several bloody days.
“You’ll be working overtime, I’m afraid, all I can really do is offer you my help here and there, and Gery’s, too, I called him before I came here to make sure of it.”
Thorin grimaces.
“Gery has his own lighthouse to take care of.”
“Sure,” Bard shrugs easily. “But he also has his wife and his older son to give him a hand with it, while you’re here all on your own. You already look a bit tired, because of the drastic change in your schedule, yes?”
Thorin narrows his eyes. He already has a suspicion that Bard’s worked the beacon himself, maybe lending a hand in the last year it sat without a keeper, but…
“Alright then, I might take you up on it, when the time comes,” he finally settles on and drinks more coffee.
“Alright,” Bard accepts easily and hurries the contents of his own mug.
Bard’s very good at picking up his moodiness, or maybe he’s just cautious like that with people. Thorin’s curious about how he interacts with the Council members, especially those that remain from the previous Mayor’s term.
“And don’t forget you can call me if you need any other help,” Bard throws as they make their way through the house and out the front door. “I get it that I’m a stranger, but shit happens, and Erebor’s still hours away, unless you’ve got some other family ‘round here.”
“I’ll consider it.”
Thorin keeps his place in the awning of the door, much like he’d done the first time the Mayor had come around, and watches and waits until Bard reaches the side of his car and turns back around with the swing of his door before giving him a stern nod in goodbye and entering back into the house. No staring after Bard’s retreat this time around, he has to get some work done, and he’s dying for a shower, first.
Two days later, he wakes up vaguely foggy and alarmed, a couple of dozen minutes before his alarm is set to go off, with the echoes of knocking on his door bouncing around inside his skull. He throws on a sweater, buries his feet in his boots quickly and without lacing them, and ties his hair back as he walks down the corridor with a not so faint feeling of annoyance, footsteps heavy both to get some warmth moving through his limbs and to let go of some of his frustration.
But when he reaches the door there’s nobody there, no Bard, no Gery, not even a car in sight. He takes a good look around – maybe it’d been someone with car problems and they’d moved along when he took his time to answer -, but he can’t find signs of anyone coming up from the road, or walking away, or anywhere by the tree line. Thorin even checks the sides and the back of the station, but it becomes clear that the sound was nothing more than a trick of the mind, maybe something he’d been dreaming about that broke through the surface of his subconscious as he was waking up for other, unrelated reasons.
He groans, rubs his hands against his face in irritation, and turns towards the kitchen and the trusty kettle. There’s the temptation of going back to bed for a while longer, but he’s already wide awake by now, and it’s almost time for him to get up anyways, might as well go with it, he can take a bloody nap later.
It happens the next day too, but from then on his brain seems to have let go of whatever had kept the sound banging around inside his head to begin with.
Thorin can give it to Fíli: he’s much more independent and persevering than he ever was at his age. The lad fidgets in the copilot seat, picks on the loose thread of his ripped jeans, when Thorin mentions it vaguely as they make their way to the lighthouse, a little over a month after the beginning of term.
“I cried an embarrassing amount anyways,” he mumbles. “I’m pretty sure my roommate heard all about it and told his friends.”
Thorin snorts and rolls his eyes.
“I’m sure he did, but I think almost everyone cries some in uni, unless they’re already dead inside.”
He sure did his fair share of crying, his personal losses hadn’t helped with that, and he remembers catching a few of his classmates sniffling or rubbing at their eyes in the library or in little out of the way corners of campus, too.
Fíli smiles, something small but relieved, and Thorin makes sure to crank up the heat some more when they make it to the station. The kid deserves better than the chill that’s been slowly but steadily creeping up into the house the closer they get to the beginning of Autumn.
He can admit to himself that he’s a bit more guarded against Bard by virtue of him being the local Mayor, much like he would be with anyone in the Council, more than he’s been with other people he’s met so far – he is yet to acknowledge the fact that Miss Hilda has dropped the Mister entirely and treats him just as if he’s always been a fixture of Esgaroth, as much as the light station itself.
But, he thinks, it’s also that he can’t quite put his finger onto what Bard’s intentions are: they’ve already met three times - four if he counts when they ran into each other at the grocery store -, and in each and every one Bard has tiptoed just beyond the line of simple politeness. And it’s not like Bard has an overabundance of time, either, between working his ass off revitalizing the town, and the children Thorin’s well aware are waiting for him at home, and whatever kinds of events he must show his face at. He’s even heard about his widower state by now, little comments about how sad it’d been, about how he should get himself someone to help him at home, since his eldest is at uni, how inconsiderate of her .
“Bunch of busybodies,” Miss Hilda had scoffed once, throwing an unimpressed glare to a woman who may or may not be in the Council. “Bard’s been doing a damn good job.”
And there’s the thing that Bard’s very well liked in town, maybe not the kind of social butterfly that can make friends with a bright enough smile, like Kíli or Bofur, but not someone desperate enough for social interaction to look for it in the gruff, reclusive new lighthouse keeper who barely sets foot in town and speaks to a grand total of five, maybe six locals.
But it’s not like he can just dump all of that – he’s not even sure he could properly explain it, either – onto Fíli like passing down the torch of paranoia, much less when the man is just standing there on his gravel driveway, what passes for one, leaning against the side of his station wagon, relaxed, soaking up some of the last summer warmth with his arms crossed and face pointed towards the lake… or the lighthouse, he’s not entirely sure from where he’s standing.
The man straightens up, just a little, and greets them with a smile, almost as if he was there for the sole purpose of welcoming them home. Fíli eyes him, and then glances towards Thorin, suspicious and not subtle at all, but he doesn’t say anything and is just as well-mannered as ever. He quickly makes his way into the house with the groceries they’d gotten after eating at the pub, quiet and likely already planning to sneak up on him later on, unlike his less patient brother. Thorin can’t wait to find out what’s cooking up in that clever, curious, overactive head of his.
“He seems like a nice lad,” Bard comments lightly once the door has shut behind his nephew.
Thorin shrugs. “He is, though I may be biased.”
Bard turns his smile at him, then. “We’re all biased when it comes to our children, it’s inevitable.”
He doesn’t correct him about Fíli not being his own, what would the point be, simply watches as the Mayor leans into the rolled down back window of his vehicle instead, stretching to reach something on the seat, then pops back out with a manila folder in his hand. Thorin, stubborn to the very end, looks anywhere but at the man when he shakes loose strands of dark brown hair away from his face in a smooth motion.
“The last of your papers - reviewed, signed, copied, and archived.”
Thorin opens up the folder, gives its contents a quick look, and sure enough he finds precisely what was promised. He shuts the folder again, choosing to go through it later that night, when he’s alone and can give it all his attention.
“You could’ve just dropped these through the box,” he needles Bard with a pointed look.
He’s getting tired of suspicion if he’s honest, but curiosity persists, less unsavory. Bard shrugs easily, both his hands digging into the pockets of his jacket now. Thorin frowns: the promontory is rather sunny today, but he supposes the man could very well have cold hands.
“I rather do these things in person, that way nothing gets lost and there aren’t any misunderstandings.”
Thorin gives him a dubious look, hopefully nothing too hostile. He still remembers all the little tricks his grandfather used to give them about public relations when they were children, but he’s never been the most approachable individual in his family, even before, and only rivaled by Dwalin. At least Bard seems to understand, more or less, his smile turning a little more bashful, a little more mischievous.
“And it’s a good excuse to avoid socializing with certain people at City Hall who keep inviting me to a drink at the fancier gastropub people will most definitely glare at me in.”
Thorin snorts a rough spell of laughter despite his best intentions, surprising them both by the looks of it, pleasantly in the case of Bard.
“I can give you some coffee and an extra half hour if you’re willing to put up with my nephew’s very polite and painfully conspicuous scrutiny.”
Bard’s smile brightens just that bit more.
“Of course! It can’t be all that bad.”
Except it is just that bad, what with Fíli having to work overtime in the absence of Kíli, his attention nearly as intense as Dís’ in a good day, only watered down by his youthful manners. Bard seems to weather it just fine, and he leaves with a smile as honest, if softer, as the one he’d greeted them with.
He thinks he hears the sound of heavy tires on gravel as he eats something light on Monday afternoon.
He’d sworn he’d heard some gentle knocking just under the blaring of his alarm a little earlier, but nobody had been there at the door, and when he goes to the little window next to the front door to check who’s coming up the road, there’s nothing, and his car is right where he always leaves it, next to the stump of some poor old tree that was cut down long before he’d arrived in town.
Thorin doesn’t think of it as eerie or, gods forbid, ghostly , because he considers himself old – and therefore, hopefully, wise – and rational enough to dismiss those kinds of farces.
It’s why his first thought is the early onset of dementia.