A Better Place - The Hobbit Fanfiction

Alternate Entry Forty-Five - Where We Began

All of my children ended up coming early. Gidron, Maryn, and Millya. Eydis teased me once that I was now hailed as being a particularly fortunate mother, having three daughters, and two by birth. Many women didn't even have one.

Irony flourished in my life, that was for certain.

But it was beautiful.

There were days when I rushed to Freda for help, begging for assistance or advice on this or that or eight other things.

There were days when I couldn't seem to find any such thing as a solution or get one of the children to stop crying or even to understand why they were crying in the first place.

There were days when I was confused and overwhelmed and had to beg a friend to come over and help me because my own children were too much for me.

There were days when Gimli came home to find me crying too, because of some inane thing or something I'd thought I'd done wrong, and he was good enough, after ensuring the health of our children, to ask them to find a different room while he sat with me and let me use his arms because mine were too weak at the moment to do anything more than hang.

There were days when I came home from work with Thorin, utterly wrought and wrung by what we'd discussed that I'd wished we never had to, and had collapsed to the floor beneath the warm weight of my children and felt their bright pieces filling in the pieces of mine which I feared I'd lost forever.

And it was beautiful.

The chaotic mornings and chaotic days filled me with an entirely different purpose than any I'd ever before had.

*

"Have you seen the tax records for last year's potato harvest?" Thorin asked, peeling back layers of his own stacks of papers.

"No, not recently." I paused to rub at my eyes, which now ached with age. I had a few wrinkles now, too. "When did they arrive?"

"A week ago."

"Oh gods, you're never going to see them again." With a final scrub, I adjusted my seat in my desk chair and carried on summarizing his letters in the journal I kept now for his correspondence, so in case we ever lost the letter, we'd know what it had been about and, most importantly, when it had arrived, in case anyone should fuss about delayed replies. While less dramatic about it than his father, Thorin still did not respond well to 'fussing'.

The great doors began to heave inward, and from the corner of my eye I caught Thorin looking up with a frown, so I turned to look up too.

A woman whose husband Gimli worked with entered first, and hauled Essiny in after her, fingers pinched tightly about her ear. Following them, slouching, was the woman's son with a kerchief pressed to his bloody nose. Essiny's eyes immediately went to my desk—I'd brought her to work with me on a regular basis, when she'd been younger and easier to entertain.

I stood, and folded my hands demurely before me. "Unhand my daughter, Mistress." I remembered far too many names on a regular basis to recall the name of a woman I never willingly socialized with.

Thorin's eyes slid to me, ascertaining that I did indeed wish to handle this myself. His spotted dog—a granddaughter of Shield's—sat up from where she'd been seated beside his desk and gave a single huff of disapproval. She was fond of Essiny, as Essiny frequently snuck her treats.