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:Â Hobbit
AU:Â Northern Night
Word Count:Â 860
Characters:Â 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 CĂşnessa’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. CĂşnessa 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 CĂşnessa 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 CĂşnessa had done. Twisting CĂşnessa 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
There's a Mirror on the Wall 