A Better Place - The Hobbit Fanfiction

First Entry - The Goblins' Mountains

{I have come back to dedicate this chapter to She Keeps Changing Her Name because she was the first person to express enthusiasm for this story, and it filled my fan-heart with joy to read her comments. Thank you!}

*

I had known that I was dying for quite some time. I already knew that none of this was real. But somehow my long stretches of induced unconsciousness were better spent in a knowing fantasy than wandering through the dark empty places of my mind. I was sure I would wake up again, dragged back into the world by people who didn't realize that I wasn't the one that needed saving, and that I didn't want it, that I felt saved already just to be unconscious.

You see my father was not an accepting man. I look very like the woman who used his heart to scrub her dishes, and when his family tendency toward alcohol crept back in after she snuck out, he often forgot I wasn't her. He rarely struck me directly-I took physical aggression from him perhaps once or twice a year-but violence isn't the only way to kill someone. Sleeping in a mold-encrusted house with a man you don't know if you're afraid of, eating perhaps once or twice a day if you're lucky, working two jobs on top of school, and always lying to your friends-that will kill you.

As it was I was nearly happy now. Or at the very least I was calm. My body was in a hospital, in a thin gown, with tubes in my arms, a clip on my finger, surrounded by monitors, with a cup of oxygen over my face. I was safe there. But I was so very tired. My mind went elsewhere while my body did its very best not to let me down like everything else had. I couldn't convince it that it was okay to just let go....

After all, sepsis was a nasty infection, and could infect in multiple different ways. I happened to have it in two. In my lungs and in my blood. I had known something was happening to me but I'd relentlessly convinced myself it was something smaller. I'd thought I was just tired, or I had a cold. But then I'd collapsed and that had been the end of my pretending. And my friends had been better than I gave them credit for, because they had taken me to the hospital against my wishes.

And then a coma had opened up beneath me and I fell down inside.

*

I knew it wasn't real when I opened my eyes. I was wearing a blue knit dress-short-sleeved-that reached down to my mid-thigh. It was average clothing for most people, but was also more than I could afford. Underneath were plain black leggings. I was wearing plain black flats. My dark brown hair wasn't tangled anymore, and hung neatly just past my waist.

And I was in a dungeon. The stalactites stretching down for me were damp and left brown smears on my palm. I was in a tiny cave, with crooked bars stiffly keeping me from leaving the corner. I felt trapped and afraid, hearing the chattering and squeals of beasts unknown out of my sight somewhere.

The smack of damp feet preceded the arrival of my apparent jailer, who rounded a long corner at a back and forth stomp and approached my cell, grinning. He rapped the bars with a jagged length of iron with a sharp cackle. "Soon have a few more sneaks like yourself in here with you, won't you? Might be a little tight."

"I'm not a sneak!" I insisted, even approaching the bars by another increment as though my willingness to walk toward him would convince him of my honesty. "I was lost, I had no idea where I was or where I was going-"

"Lies!" he snapped, and stabbed his weapon between the bars and against my stomach, shoving me back even as I stumbled. I wouldn't have expected it, but his control was such that even with the speed of his jab, the tip of the blade didn't even tear the weave of my short dress.

"And soon you'll have a jumble of other liars piled in here on top of you, so stop your squalling and we might put the fat ones in another cell." He licked his teeth, eyes gleaming. "Wouldn't want you to crush and spoil too early, now, would we?" He chortled again and stomped away, chittering to himself.