A Better Place - The Hobbit Fanfiction

Alternate Entry Thirty-Eight - Unravel

Gimli's rare letters provided me with small quirks of amusement. He moved too much, and too quickly, for me to ever be able to write him back. And as time heaved onward, his letters became fewer and farther.

I sometimes can't believe the nerve of this princeling, he wrote to me once. Suggesting that we are the lesser beings. Just because he can walk on snow doesn't make him any better than the rest of us. Do you know I've never even seen that elf sleep? It's unnatural. You can't trust a creature that doesn't sleep.

I chuckled and wiped tears out of my eyes every time he wrote.

At least he fights well, for all he's far too aware and far too proud of that fact. It's been nice to have something to thrash of late. Lets a dwarf work off steam. I can't say I appreciate the running though. The running is utterly wretched.

And then less decidedly cheerful things.

Our Fellowship is splintered. The Hobbits have gone in two separate directions, two by choice and two by theft. We must follow those we believe wish to be followed, because the others we must trust to take care of themselves. I doubt I'll be able to write much unless we pass through a town and happen to not be accosted, but I don't hold out hope. Trouble surrounds us like a swarm.

And yet here we lay safe, with no trouble to jostle our waters, as if half our population had simply vanished and no one questioned why.

The last time I heard from him my bones began to turn to ice I couldn't let anyone see. He wrote and told me that Aragorn had died, and that the city he and Legolas had found shelter in was in such a disarray he couldn't take what little parchment they still had to send further letters.

I didn't know who Aragorn was, but when I wrote to Thranduil, he told me I was lucky to not have loved him, if he no longer lived. I told him I was sorry he had lost a friend. He said Legolas had known him better. I promised to give Legolas my condolences when they all came home like they were supposed to.

"It's getting worse, isn't it," I said one day to Dain.

He heaved a great sigh, and sagged in his mighty chair. "Yes, lass, it is. You've been reading the reports as much as I have though, why bother with a second opinion?"

I was sitting at my desk organizing aforementioned reports. "I don't know much about war."

"And I pray soon your education on it will end," he murmured. "War has no place for old men like me or young ones like you. War is unnatural. No creation of the gods or ghosts, that's all the doing of sentient creatures who don't understand that this world is the only one there is. There are no second chances, just bad things that decide to give us a break for once." He set his quill so gently aside then eased his head into his hands, elbows on the edge of his heavy, whorled desk.

I eased past my own aches and came to stand beside him, rubbing his shoulders as I'd rubbed Bard's. Everyone was getting old. As I worked the knots and cables out of his own aching self I read the lists he'd had before him—lists of the dead and wounded coming home. Well, the dead didn't come home. Sometimes bits and pieces of their lives could. Sometimes only bits and pieces of our people came back, even though they still lived, and some even wished they didn't. Some were only missing a leg. Some had lost an arm. But some had lost their eyes, their hands, their faces, to fire or blades or worse.

Some of the ones who came home died in our arms. Some of them had lost the only family they'd had in the war we hadn't seen until the ones we loved started coming home, and we realized they'd come home with more missing than bone and skin. Pieces of their hearts had been ripped out too.