A Better Place - The Hobbit Fanfiction

Alternate Entry Forty-One - The Reasons We Cry

"Soviel is the one who told me to come be with you," she said, rising onto her elbow. "What did the healer say?"

"He said to stay still for the next couple hours because he wasn't sure how much blood I had lost or how hard I had hit my head, but he said I got 'a good bump'. He said to wait for someone to come get me or tell me I could get up."

"Well, I've got you then," she said, and rose with me held against her chest. It had been quite a long time since I had done this, but being carried because of some state my body was in was far more familiar than it ought to be.

"Thank you," I whispered, balancing my head on her shoulder with my eyes closed because I didn't want to see what had become of Bard's beautiful, empty house, or to all of its staff who I happened to so love.

It took longer than usual to walk home from Dale, as we had to skirt bodies and war machines and wagons and broken stone. Some streets were entirely impassible, Luviel being unwilling to play hopscotch with corpses with her leg in whatever state that it was. When I felt the tilt of her gait I felt bad for asking her to take me home, but when I said we could just go sit with Soviel she said nonsense, I ought to go stop Bofur's worrying. I was too selfish to fight her on it.

My desire to see Bofur being my primary interest in going home, I directed her to his house instead of mine, and had her set me carefully on my feet before we knocked. "Best not worry him too deeply," I said, as though afraid to raise my voice in Erebors shadowy halls. Some were sparsely lit all through the night, this one included, but everything felt darker now. We had walked past rows of dwarven dead on our way here, too.

We had to knock twice, Bofur not having heard us the first time. The second time he scrambled to the door, likely expecting some terrible news, and when he saw my bandaged-up self all the air went out of him at once. "Mabyn!" He stumbled forward and wrapped me tightly into his warm arms, and tears welled in my eyes again as I wrapped my left arm as tightly around him as I could too.

"Da," I choked. "I'm okay. I'll be just fine, I promise."

Luviel bent to murmur her goodbye to me and kiss my hair, and I briefly grasped her hand in gratitude and my own goodbye before she slipped back into the darkness.

Bofur drew me inside and sat me in my armchair, kneeling to revive the fire. "Mabyn, what happened? You weren't in the fighting, were you?"

I weakly smiled. "Only a little. We were on our way back across those two hills when Luviel noticed their army coming up right behind us. We started running, and barely made it inside Dale before the army did. We couldn't make it to Erebor in time. I holed up in—in—" I made some strange high sound as I remembered whose house had saved me. "Da," I cried. "Bard is dead. I went to his house, and we locked everything up while he was out fighting, but the orcs got in anyhow and now most everyone there is dead too." I sniffed, scraping at my eyes with my one available hand. "I don't know what's happened to Bain, or Sirai, or Sigrid or Tilda or any of their families or my other friends." I gasped, breath hitching. "Is everyone here I know okay? What happened? All I know is what I saw of it."

Bofur stroked the tears away from my cheeks, into my hair, and I saw the most horrible thing in his eyes then. They looked just like Luviel's eyes had. "Darling, I'm so sorry. Dain died, too."

I broke into proper sobs and crashed forward into his arms.

Hollow-eyed and exhausted as I was the next morning, I did my best to make use out of myself. Anyway I couldn't sleep anymore. I drank nearly a gallon of water before leaving Bofur's house, then he and I had to go our separate ways. He went down to the main hall to help dish out food for the healers and builders and everyone else who was trying to put things back together in case another army came for us and we weren't prepared. Erebor had closed its doors and suffered very little internal damage beyond what the trebuchets had managed to do to the front face, but whoever we had left who could fight had taken up arms and bolted down to Dale the moment the horns began to ring, so we had casualties, too. Just not as many. If we'd had more warning we could have had virtually none.