A Better Place - The Hobbit Fanfiction

Ninth Entry - Imprisonment

I sang of worry and loss and a severe wanting to go home. I wondered if the elves would find my music repulsive or intriguing or something else. Gradually the songs began to lift, even if their subject matter didn't, and I felt my mood rising to keep them. Sometimes the songs I chose had no words, because sometimes that's the best way to express yourself. Eventually I did begin to see some wry, tired humor in our situation, or at least ways to make it humorous. I fell into a daze of daydreams eventually, my way of protecting myself from a world that had grown thorns. I even, weakly, laughed to myself at the end of my day's endurance. I didn't know what day it was or what time when we had been taken, but I was too tired now to continue singing, so I reluctantly fell asleep.

I had a difficult time waking. My stomach felt, with the fresh water it had been given the day before, much closer to the state it ought to be in. But my head felt heavy and distended. I was having a difficult time breathing properly so I simply lay on my back and sucked air through as best I could, wincing, my eyes burning as the pain crept in, and wondered what I was supposed to do now.

I may not even have argued with Thorin and Oin over this one. I had back-talked my father this time. I had faced him and shouted back. He had not been forgiving. I had spent a week away from school and away from home so my friends wouldn't see and my father wouldn't touch me again.

I didn't hear the elf-woman coming-I only heard the passage of the elves when they wanted me to. But I heard her, the woman who had saved Kili, stopping abruptly at my prison door when she hadn't expected to, stepping up to them to look inside instead of merely making sure I was still alive as she walked past.

And then she spun and hurried away. I would say she was running but her movements were not nearly as disjointed as mine would be. As quickly as she moved, she didn't flap her arms about or jostle. I heard her voice once, in the distance, and it was perhaps two minutes before she returned. There were two male guards with her, and she had the ring of our keys in her fingers. With a metallic rattle she opened the door and handed one of the men the keys, then knelt beside me. "Who did this to you?" she asked gently, sliding one hand behind the bruised circles in my neck, apparently able to see through the shadows well enough to count the bruises in my face. I couldn't open either of my eyes properly and my lips were swollen. I was glad, suddenly, that the dwarves didn't have to see me like this. It would have pained them greatly to be able to do nothing to help me.

I choked as I tried for the first time that day to speak. There was blood in my throat and I tasted it from my mouth when I swallowed. "My father," I managed at last.

"How?" she wanted to know, feeling down my arms to my wrists, which were also bruised, and finding the scrapes across the backs of my knuckles.

"Curse," I managed out. I tightly shut my eyes, concentrating on not crying. I never cried, from anything. But I could feel the breath in my lungs shivering because it, unlike the rest of me, did want to cry.

"Can you walk?"

I nodded because it was easier.

"Then stand."

Because my neck felt weak and loose all the way through she had to help me sit up without hurting myself, but after that I managed to stand on my own. The elf-woman swirled her dagger on its belt to her other hip, putting herself between it and me, stood on my left with her right hand on my right shoulder led me from the cell. One of the guards outside took up a position ahead of us and the other behind. She spoke a few words of direction to them and we left.

The pace we traveled at today was far kinder than the pace at which I had been dragged the day before, but I hoped the purpose of today's destination was kinder too.