@lynati, this is still your fault. Ok, and last night’s work was the fault of the person who made me want to write stompy things.

A snippet from last night’s work on one of the unfinished pieces of the AU. Current working title is “Ambushing Thorin”.

---

The flames that blaze through the trees were enough to see better the pair of riders who’d harried them from the south, and who’d picked off orcs who’d tried to sneak around them, or wargs who’d come too close to snapping a dwarf up. Dwalin is glad that Thorin was not conscious to see for himself by the time they could be seen, or to see the pale little warg who had pulled at the tail of Azog’s white warg when she had clamped down on Thorin. Who’d stood over him while Bilbo had tackled the orc who Azog had commanded to kill Thorin.

He thinks the little warg must be kin to those that Fíli and Kíli ride, to fight so fiercely against her own in defense of a dwarf, but he still won’t trust her. Even if she is now carried in the claws of the same eagle who’d scooped up Thorin, whimpering and terrified but alive. Dwalin isn’t sure what to say later, when Thorin does wake – and he will wake, if Dwalin has to threaten Gandalf himself to help.

How does he tell his king that the sister-sons he had thought lost were alive and in the hands of orcs? That they rode as if they were orcs themselves, and had tried to get to Thorin to take him, if Dwalin had heard the shouts between them right. To take Thorin back to their mistress, whoever that might be, as they had been bidden.

How does Dwalin tell Thorin that he had seen his own death or worse in the eyes of the boys who had grown into vicious fighters, and it had only been the arrival of the eagles that had driven them back?

Dwalin turns his face into the feathers of the eagle he rides, taking deep breaths as he tries to sort it all in his mind. This will wound Thorin as deeply as the loss had the first time, and Dwalin doesn’t know that he wants to be the one to speak it. To speak it to Dis, if she had not seen herself – and Dwalin cannot imagine she failed to notice her sons armored and armed as if orcs, riding wargs with a skill born of years.