A Better Place - The Hobbit Fanfiction

Alternate Entry Eight - Reparations

I elbowed Bofur in the stomach and he released me, not because of my elbow though—he was too tough still for my elbow to have done him any discomfort, and he’d seen it coming too. He let me go because we were following Lord Elrond now, and he couldn’t well expect me to stumble along while in a headlock. “Behave yourself!” he said sternly, standing staunchly at my side as though I would take off and pout in some hidden corner at any moment. I stuck my tongue out at him.

“Imagine how you’d have felt,” I muttered.

“Felt if what?” he demanded. “Someone had saved my life? You poor thing.”

“If a powerful stranger had saved your life when no one else could have and hadn’t even permitted you to express your gratitude nor had he explained why he’d done it.”

“Oh is that what you call what you did back there? Expressing gratitude?”

“Grand people like him don’t just step in on the lived of people like me!” I insisted. “I’m nothing to him, why would he go to the trouble of bothering?”

“Didn’t you already talk to Gandalf about this?” Bofur wanted to know, catching my globe when I tripped because I hadn’t realized we’d reached another set of stairs. He gave it back to me.

“Thanks. And yes, I did, but you know how he is. He said they did it as a favor to him, but that leaves the question of why he bothered and he barely answered that, and that still doesn’t properly explain why this fellow chose to get involved, even when asked.” I gestured ahead of us, toward where Lord Elrond and Gandalf were walking side-by-side wherever they were leading us.

“Lass, has it ever occurred to you that some people are just kinder than others?” he tiredly asked. “Not everyone needs to take a tangible profit from something to have the incentive to do it.”

“Since when?” I muttered. “Thorin let me stay with you because he knew how it would look if he’d left me behind; Thranduil accepted me because I manipulated him and because I have skills and memories that are useful to him; Dain lets me stay because of the associations I’ve made.”

“Then what have I got to earn by letting you live with me, eh?” he demanded. We crossed an open hall that looked out over a waterfall but its beauty was temporarily lost with me.

I shot him an irritable glare. “You would never have turned me down, not in front of the king.”

Bofur stared at me, shocked by my assessment, and at once I felt the plunging darkness in my gut that reminded me how awful a person I became when I was mad at someone and determined to make my point. This point had been festering with me for months now, and hadn’t gotten any easier to manage.

“Is that what you truly think of me, Mabyn?”

My throat closed in, and I neither looked at him nor answered.

“Well….I hope that someday you’ll change your mind.” He walked ahead of me and rejoined the others, for we’d been traveling a little separate, and I walked alone. It wouldn’t be the first time I had been the one to isolate myself, by one means or another.

We ended up at a round balcony with a wide overlook of the stream-threaded valley. Gloin and Bilbo sat on either side of me, though I’d tried to sit away at the end, and Bofur sat out of my direct line of sight. A number of elves came with shining platters balanced on their palms and laid them out. The dwarves weren’t eager to return to a vegetarian diet, and normally I wouldn’t have minded it, only today I found I had no appetite at all. To be polite I put a few greens and a roll on my plate, but I barely touched the greens and wanted nothing to do with the roll. Gloin ended up relieving me of it. I sat silently at the table with my head down, staring into my lap and lightly stroking the silky fur of the rabbit I’d chosen to save.