The Hobbit Imagines

27 ~ Thorin

PROMPT: You're a human healer and Thorin is discovered and brought to you after the Battle of Five Armies, battered but alive (so basically ignore the end of BotFA). For Olivia (04olivia04)!

When the smoke and ash of the Battle of the Five Armies settled, all was deathly quiet. The stench of rot and blood spread like dragon fire, and it was carried through the rubble of the Kingdom of Dale. No one quite knew what to do. The inevitable part of any battle came; you helped retrieve the bodies of the dead.

After having to fight the orcs that pushed into the Kingdom of Dale, you were thankful for something familiar. Death was never something you hoped for and causing it was the exact opposite of your duties as a healer. Dressing the bodies of your fallen comrades for burial was akin to coping. You only wished that the death toll hadn't been so ghastly.

The battle was barely even finished when a group of war-worn men carried in the half-dead body of a dwarf. "Found him up on Ravenhill with dead Orcs all around him," one of them said, his face red with the effort of carrying the burly man.

You rushed over to where they were. No groans of pain and misery echoed from the body, so you assumed the worst. "Is he dead?" You hadn't known that you were meant to be preparing the bodies of dwarves as well as humans.

"No, but he's nearly there," another man told you.

Your brows furrowed, "Then why bring him here? Aren't there dwarven healers out there?" You didn't want to sound rude; any life was valuable, but you already had so many people coming in with worse and worse wounds by the minute. You barely had time to think.

"Bard found him," proclaimed the last of the men who had carried in the dwarf, "'said to bring him to the first healer that we could find in the Dale. You're supposed to do your best to heal him." And with that, they heaved the dwarf's body onto a nearby slab of rock that would work well enough for a table. You hunched over the dwarf.

One ghastly wound dug into his side, and blood almost completely covered his face. Frankly, you found it hard to believe that he'd survived long enough to make it to you. Though you didn't like to be pessimistic, you couldn't help but sigh. "I don't know if I can—" The men were already gone.

The least you could do was your very best.

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At first, nothing you did seemed to work. Death came closer and closer with each passing hour. Then, by the mercy of all things bright and beautiful, came hope. The wound didn't look so garish. The bleeding stalled, the cuts on his face closed with the help of a healing paste, and the dwarf's shallow breathing evened out.

There was still a long road to recovery, but he wasn't on the edge of death and that was what was important. Bard came in after several hours passed, but he refused to tell you who the dwarf was and why you were healing him. In the end, you supposed that it didn't really matter.

When you weren't kept busy with the wounded filtering through your makeshift infirmary, you readied the already dead. As the days went on and there were no more dead to arrange for burials, much of your time was spent by the bed of the slowly healing dwarf. Each day you hoped he would awake, and each day that he didn't brought more hopelessness.

There was a crooked bookshelf in a forgotten corner of the building you had adapted to be your temporary place of residence. It held long abandoned texts and beautiful prose in a language you could just barely understand. On the quiet nights, you sat by the dwarf's bed and read the words aloud. After all of the chaos of the past week or so, it was more to fill the silence than to comfort the dwarf.