“We’re the most useless race. We cannot do anything. When the camera’s off. I mean, the state of us. We’re all just half baked and dead by the side of the set.”

we’re fighters, all of us

form

tolkienlocked:

I want to see just how many of us are out there. Doesn’t matter if you like the books/movies/just one book…anything to do with Tolkien, reblog.

Hobbit/Lord of the Rings; Thorin Oakenshield/Glorfindel; 29. Forehead touching

judayre:

I have noticed a tendency to have Glorfindel as just another beautiful Elf, but the dude fought a balrog….

~~~

The safety of Elrond’s realm was one of the constants of the world. The sun rose in the east, the seasons turned, and Rivendell was a safe haven. As such, Thorin felt comfortable walking its grounds at night without weapons or armor. The chance might never come again, so he breathed softly and appreciated it.

He came into a moonviewing glade with a pond and benches and thought to lose himself in its stillness. He was lowering himself onto a bench before he noticed another, hunched in a long cloak even though the June night held no chill and not feeling the peace of the glade.

“Forgive me,” he said, rising. “I did not realize…”

“Do not apologize,” the other said, voice rough as Thorin had heard from survivors of the dragon or Azanulbizar. “There is little peace for me anyway.”

That made Thorin pause. “Do not your people have a place to go when there is no rest in this world?”

“For me?” the other asked, throwing back his hood. And there indeed was one who had seen battle. One eye was missing, and much of the Elf’s visible face and threat were marred by burns and scarred over gouges.

Thorin sank back onto the bench. “What battles have you seen, honorable father?” he asked in awe.

The Elf relaxed at his lack of horror and his lips twitched in the hint of a smile. “I slew a balrog once.”

Thorin’s mouth dropped open. “Golden-haired Glorfindel,” he breathed. “Why are you said to have died?”

The Elf gestured at himself, revealing a missing finger and more scarring. “Younger Elves cannot stand to look on me. In these times of peace I am an unwanted reminder of another time.”

“Among Dwarves you would be revered, your scars the outward signs of your courage.” Thorin was silent a moment then moved closer. “Balrog-Slayer, I go to wrest my home from a dragon. There are those who think me mad and the task too dangerous. The dragon has not been seen for years and they ask why we should wake it. What think you? Tell me and I will follow your counsel.”

There was no hesitation. “Evil must always been opposed. Humans may not live long enough to see the dragon come back. It may even be longer than the lives of Dwarves. But it is there and will wake again. Killing it is the only way to stop its destruction.”

“May it be done,” Thorin said, feeling the peace of purpose wrap around him. He stood, ready to rejoin his company. Before leaving, he took Glorfindel’s ruined face in his hands and touched their foreheads together. “When Erebor’s is habitable once more, there will be a place for you.”

Still think this is awesome, after rereading it. And I like the decision to break from canon and have Glorfindel have survived the Balrog with extensive scarring, etc. It makes sense, and it just. *flails happily*

Hobbit: Northern Night: Mourning a Victory

Written for @lferion, for her prompt:

Write me Thorin & Mead 🙂
Or Obi-Wan in M-E and Mead 🙂
Or one of you OC folk in M-E and Mead

Also for @lynati, because this AU.

Fandom: Hobbit
AU: Northern Night
Word Count: 860
Characters: Dazbol (OC), Razul (OC), Thorin Oakenshield

Dazbol is introduced to mead, and shares a mourning toast with Thorin.

“What is it?” Dazbol gives Razul a suspicious look before she peers dubiously at the mug he’s handed her. The whelp is close as a goblin nest to the dwarves, and has been since he was a whelp in truth. She’s not sure she should trust anything he brings her.

“They call it mead.” Razul lifts his own mug, a grin on his face as he takes a long gulp of the contents – no doubt more of the mead he’s given her. “It’s easier to get than Her wine, and tastes better than what Tark brewed back at the First Fortress.”

Dazbol narrows her eyes, sniffing at the mead cautiously. It certainly smells better than Tark’s brew, and sweeter, even, than Cúnessa’s wine had. Not exactly an enticement to try it. Even if it doesn’t smell poisoned.

“Why did you bring me this?”

“Because you’re the General.” Razul rolls his eyes, dropping down onto one of the pelts that softens the ground in her tent. “Because you’re not going to come join everyone else drinking to victory.”

“It wasn’t a victory.” Dazbol sets the mug aside, shaking her head. If that was what Razul thought of what happened at Gundabad, she can’t drink the mead. Cannot toast her own betrayal, however right and necessary it might have been. Cúnessa had gone mad in the years Dazbol had been away from her mistress, and no one had had the strength to pull her back before it was too late. “Get out, whelp.”

Razul frowns, and doesn’t move until she reaches for one of her knives, all but stomping out of the little felt tent. Let him sulk over her refusal to play to his youth and foolishness.

Dazbol leans back against the warm bulk of Shoka, listening to the quiet snores of her warg as she tries not to think too hard about where she is, or why she is here. About what has happened and what will happen.

How long she’s all but dozing, she doesn’t know, though she rouses when there’s a tap at the pole next to the door.

“Who comes?”

“Not the youth you sent running with his tail tucked.” The deep rumble of Thorin’s voice comes through the wall, and Dazbol feels her lips twitch with amusement.

“Then you may enter.”

Thorin ducks through, a mug in hand, the little warg that had taken a liking to him following on his heels. He waits for her to flop on the far side of the tent from Shoka, before echoing Dazbol in leaning against her. A piece of manners that does not fit with dwarven ideals, but that makes Dazbol’s lips twitch again with a smile she isn’t willing to show.

“What brings you to my tent, Galnaunda?” Dazbol shifts her position slightly, giving Thorin an equal space in her tent. It is only polite.

“I would not leave anyone to grieve alone, Commander.” It is a title she does not wish for, but cannot refuse. No matter how empty it seems when she has wrested it from a corpse that she did not kill herself. “Even an uneasy ally.”

“Not an enemy, then?”

“Should you be?” It is a wonder that he does not, for all that they had been allies against Cúnessa only a month past now, and that she had seen to it that he and the other three had been delivered safely to the Dragon-Mountain, and those who awaited them.

“I am uruktar, and I am the Commander of the Northern Night, General of the Second Fortress.” Dazbol bares her teeth, though she doesn’t make any more of a threat than that. Bluster and bluff, for all that it is empty and Thorin cannot fail to know it.

“Perhaps we will be enemies again. But not tonight.” Thorin glances over at the mug that sits alone, untouched, where either of them could reach it. “A drink, to those lost?”

“The whelp called it a drink to victory.”

Thorin smiles, if the bitter amusement in his face could be such. “For him, it is a victory. His friends are no longer under the lash and leash of a woman he feared and hated.”

Friends. Dwarves who should have been killed or imprisoned properly, and not made into whatever it was that Cúnessa had done. Twisting Cúnessa as much as it had those dwarves that Dazbol has yet to meet. “They’re just pups howling because they’re out of the den.”

That draws a snort and a less bitter smile from Thorin. “They’re not free yet. It is no victory when not everyone is free.”

Dazbol feels something relax inside her, a tension across her shoulders easing and only then announcing it had existed in the first place. “A drink, then. To those lost and those not yet freed.”

Thorin’s mug is lifted in salute as Dazbol does the same with the abandoned mead. The drink is as sweet as it smells, with a faint bitterness that any proper drink has. Enough, perhaps, even to allow Dazbol a little of the effects that she so rarely indulges, and kinder in the doing than Tark’s brew.

Notes: Dazbol rarely calls people by the name they bear, using instead epithets that tend to say how she thinks of them. It’s also because for uruktar, it is not polite to use someone’s name unless you’re kin, and even then, it’s rarely used once an uruktar is of age.

Galnaunda is a epithet meaning “Steel-Heart”, in the mix of Black Speech and Quenya that the uruktar learned from the orcs that were in Gundabad and Cúnessa who finished their creation/twisting.

AO3 | DW

Dialogue prompt #30 “I’m fine.” Immortals of Arda Verse. Characters: Fili, Kili.

For this prompt request, from this set of prompts. I am still taking more.

This story is connected to It’s Too Quiet, though it’s not necessary to read that first.

Fandom: Hobbit, Highlander, RPF
AU: Immortals of Arda
Word Count: 100

Fíli and Kíli have a chance to visit Erebor in their latest lives.

Fíli doesn’t bother opening his eyes when Kíli pokes his shoulder, enjoying the heat, and the quiet hum of the stone beneath him. It’s different than he remembers, though whether that’s because he’s older than the last time, or some change in the world, he’s uncertain.

“I don’t think you’re supposed to soak this long in a hot spring, Aiden.” Kíli is sprawled next to the pool, grinning when Fíli opens his eyes to look at him.

“If Erebor was going to kill me, I’d already be dead.” Fíli reaches for the edge to get out anyway. “Really, I’m fine.”

Prompts

Since I’m frustrated with getting longer fic done at the moment (and there are so many to get done), I’m up for prompts. I am planning on writing drabbles, so 100 words of fic per prompt, because then I can get them each done fairly quickly.

Give me a fandom & AU (see below), and a character (or two or three) and:

Unfilled prompt from this list of single words.

Unfilled prompt from this list of dialogue prompts.

Five single-word prompts (and get five drabbles).

A short prompt of your choice (no romance or smut).

Current fandoms/AUs:

Lord of the Rings/Hobbit

Flame of Durin
Gaearon Rhûnen
No Shield For My Soul
Northern Night
Road to Mundburg
Time and Valar
Immortals of Arda
Gray Ships

MCU

Ofinn Börn
Heroes Are Villains
Red Snows and Winter Winds
Holding Onto Each Other
One Night In Moscow
Fosterfar

CSI: Miami

Moonlit Miami
Loki’s Children

Harry Potter

Friends and Brothers
Tarnished Silver
The Avery Women
City of Magic
Magic and Mischief
Turncoat Wizards

Star Trek: Deep Space Nine

A Galaxy Away From Home
Children of the Order
Burning Bridges

Highlander

Immortals of Arda
Fosterfar
Magic and Mischief
A Galaxy Away From Home
Death’s Gifts
Daughter of the Forest
Herald – Soldier – Priest
The Priest, the Goddess, and the Scholar
Valföðr
A Cave For a Tower

Highlander/Tolkien: Immortals of Arda: The Remaking of the World

Fandom: Highlander, Hobbit, Lord of the Rings
AU: Immortals of Arda
Series: Fireside Tales
Word Count: 661
Characters: Boromir, Haldir, Methos, Thorin Oakenshield

“A remade world waits somewhere for us.” He sounds so certain, and Boromir has no reason to doubt the dwarven king.

They know the end is coming long before the flames reach them, standing defiant on the walls of their home. Their weapons are no longer swords and axes and bows, but chattering guns that spit silent light and great cannons that belch projectiles that shatter among their enemies to deliver death. No longer are their enemies orcs and dragons, not even Men who follow the banner of a Darkness that is the great Enemy.

Now their enemies are humans who cannot accept who and what they are, fear the nature of their homes, hidden by magic older than the world. And so they gather, those who remember the world before the world, standing proud and steady in the face of fear and darkness.

Thorin, flanked by his nephews and his Company, daring the changing world to destroy them when they cannot stop the magic. Cannot stop what he and his have built to carry their legacy away from a world tearing itself apart, and cannot travel aboard it.

Haldir, with his brothers and the guardians of the Greenwood and Imladris, working effortlessly in the amalgamation of magic and technology that is the creation of the dwarves they have not always counted as their friends.

Boromir, who had seen the first signs that the magic is unraveling, that the world might once more be remade, and pressed his friends for a way to leave, as humanity sought to leave a world they were steadily destroying.

And working beside him, mind still half-shattered and healing, Methos, the oldest of them all. The great survivor, the one who would fight the gods themselves for his life. Shedding friends who were born after the first remaking with an ease that makes them gape and protest, as if that would change him.

“This is not my world,” Methos had said simply to the most persistant of them, his expression the same faintly mocking one that Boromir remembers from countless years in the great barrens of Harad, or the deep forests of the furthest south. “You are not my kind.”

Thorin had closed the gates of Erebor soon after that encounter, standing upon the new-raised heights of the mountains that cradled their beloved home in their depths. Defending his home as the magic hiding it unravels, as his kith and kin build the great ship that will take those who cannot die into the stars, and cradle new life for those who return again and again.

“A remade world waits somewhere for us.” He sounds so certain, and Boromir has no reason to doubt the dwarven king. As there are things which he can know and do that they cannot, so there are such reserved for them. The Making of the World, and it’s Remaking. Ragnorak, and here they will watch it again.

Haldir is at the controls when the flames begin to scorch the great gates of the mountain, and the dwarves must work to free the ship for its flight. They will die together in flames for the sake of a new life, and a new world.

“We travel the straight road.” Haldir lips twitch in amusement. “Though it is not the road to Aman. We are still barred the uttermost west.”

It is not because of the defiance of the elves who travel aboard the ship, nor because it carries Boromir and Methos, that they are not allowed that journey. It is not even because they will have dwarves aboard again.

“What need have we for the Undying Lands of the west?” Boromir braces himself against the rail that overlooks the banks of controls, knowing that he will only get in the way if he tries to help now. “We have each other, and the world we shall find at the end of this road.”

The roof of the mountains is shattered by the might of the dwarves, and the ship rises on a column of fire born of magic freed from all bonds.

Originally Posted: 8 February 2014

AO3 | DW

Northern Night

So, I’m prodding at two potential complications of working this out into the future past events of the Hobbit and just after.

One is a plot sort of question – does Bilbo ever return to the Shire? (Which of course needs to know if he survived the battle – yes – and where the fuck is Gandalf at that time – ???)

If Bilbo does return to the Shire, than Frodo is the one bringing the Ring to Rivendell for the Council of Elrond, and the rest of the complications of plot are from other directions.

If he doesn’t return to the Shire, how is the Ring discovered? When is it discovered? And who is the one to carry the Ring to Mordor, because Bilbo is getting old and may not be up to such a journey. Or it would possibly be a one way journey for him.

The other is more a world-building question, but does effect plot – for the purposes of numbers of the Fellowship, do wargs count as people or beasts? Because if people, then no wargs. If beasts, than at least two wargs, and do either of those who have wargs and send people to the Council of Elrond send packs with riderless wargs?

Neither of these questions is necessarily relevant to anything until after I’ve worked out what happens in the aftermath of the Battle of Erebor. (I have some general ideas, and plans, but I kinda want to have things written before I try to plot heavily about things in the time period of Lord of the Rings.)

@lynati @poplitealqueen and @ anyone else who’s interested in Tolkien and/or my massive set of connected AUs with shared world-building.

Tolkien: Time and Valar: Warrior Son, Part 12

Still not out of Rivendell, probably won’t be through Rivendell for another 1k words or more, because they’re there a month, there’s more with bitty!Aragorn to do, there’s an ancient and snarky ass of a sword to transfer ownership of, and there’s research on dragons for Boromir to do.

@deadcatwithaflamethrower @norcumi

“You will need supplies to get that far, and I do not know that I will be able to supply you enough, though I shall do as I can.” Elrond has a small frown of his own, a crease between his brows that makes Boromir silently wonder what troubles him. “Have you a map for your journey?”

Thorin hesitates, but nods. “We have a map of Erebor, at least, one which has been passed to me from my father.”

“A map which we could use your assistance with, just a little thing. Maps of this sort are known sometimes to have hidden writing, and I had hoped to gain your aid in finding any that might be present upon this map.” Gandalf smiles a moment, though whether he’s trying to appeal to Elrond or placate Thorin, Boromir cannot tell. Though he thinks it likely the former, for all the tension that is rising between Thorin and Gandalf.

“If you would have me look at the map, I will gladly offer my assistance.” Elrond directs his own words to both Thorin and Gandalf. “It will take some time to prepare what supplies I can provide you, enough to be certain if the map has any hidden text, and determine if it can be read.”

“If it can be read?” Thorin raises his eyebrows, and Boromir leans forward a little, curious himself why Elrond would not simply read the text if he might find it.

“There are some means of creating hidden writing that can only be read under certain conditions, and while they can be found to exist, and perhaps too what those conditions are, we may not be able to recreate them sufficiently precisely to render the writing readable. Or there may be a need to wait for a precise time.” Elrond picks up his goblet, taking a sip of wine. “I do not know how swiftly you wish to reach Erebor, and thus how much time you have to wait if it is needful, so I cannot know if I will be able to render any hidden text readable before you depart.”

“What aid you may render in this will be sufficient, even if all you may tell us is when and how it may be read.” Thorin nods in thanks, speaking before Gandalf can interject his own words into the conversation once more. “And you have my thanks for it.”

Before anything more can be said, there is a commotion at one of the tables where the rest of the company was sat, and a thump that makes Boromir turn to catch the beginning of Bofur singing, and see the first flung bit of food. He grins, taking another bite of his own food while he sits back to watch, mindful of not participating. Just another rowdy group, and while they might not be his soldiers, he can recall similar scenes with his men. Perhaps with less flung food – his men had always been too aware of the noble birth of their captain to dare do that in his company even when he’d convinced them he was as willing to sing the dirtiest songs as they were – but it reminds him of days and companions he doubts he will see again.

“Elven-made clothes to go with the elven cloak?” Fíli joins Boromir on the balcony he’s sitting on, watching a courtyard where a boy is practicing with a bow.

“They are well-made, and all of mine were lost save those on my back after the encounter with the trolls.” Boromir glances at the prince – not spoken of as such, not in this company, and he has followed their lead in that – studying his face a moment. “Will you turn such down if they offer?”

“If they offer, no, but I do not expect them to offer.” Fíli shrugs, leaning against the railing. “Who’s the child?”

“A boy under the protection of Lord Elrond.” Boromir doesn’t know what name Aragorn has now, and doesn’t dare use the name he knows the man as for the boy he is now. He hasn’t asked after him, either, not wishing to betray knowledge he should not have.

“Do you know him?” Fíli watches Boromir, raising an eyebrow at his swift shake of his head. “Then why do you watch him?”

“He reminds me a little of someone I knew.” Boromir shrugs, looking down at Aragorn to see Aragorn looking up at them in return. “I doubt I will see him again. It is a long journey and I do not know what the future will bring.”

Fíli gives him a sympathetic smile before leaning over the railing on the balcony, looking at something. Giving a satisfied grunt, he climbs over, and down, as Boromir comes over, jumping the last short distance into the courtyard.

Aragorn is staring at Fíli, eyes wide, a grin creeping across his face that is more cheerful than anything Boromir had seen toward the end of their journey. He hopes he can find a way to see that smile remain more common than it had become – if the Ring is destroyed sooner, perhaps there will be no need for Aragorn to forget how to be as happy as he is now.