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Nori had been loitering in one of the Great Halls of Mahal for almost a week now. Of all the wonders to be found in the Halls, this particular cavern wasn’t all that interesting, simply a point of convergence for several smaller corridors. He had been in the Halls for a few decades now, and nothing all that interesting had ever happened in this cavern, at least not until now.
Nearly a week back, when Nori had been passing through this cavern on his way back to his own chambers from where he had been visiting Ori and Fíli, he had begun hearing a faint noise, the distinctive clinking crunch of a pickaxe against stone.
It was strange, given that he had been nowhere near the mines.
Latent instincts from his time as Erebor’s Spymaster, and earlier as Thorin’s eyes in the Blue Mountains had him keeping an eye on this development. Perhaps it was nothing, simply a further excavation of tunnels above their heads, but if it did turn out to be something, he would be one of the first to know.
As the noise became louder, Nori began spending more time in the cavern, tucked away in a quieter corner with his embroidery.
Most of the dwarrow passing through paid it no mind, but by the third day, as the noise became louder, Nori had ammased a bit of a…guard, he supposed.
Dwalin had been first, hunting him down after realizing he hadn’t been to bed one night. He too had noticed the noise and thought nothing of it, but trusting Nori’s instincts, had returned minutes later with his latest carving project.
Dori had been next, then Balin when Dori didn’t show for tea, then Ori and Fíli, then Kíli and Frerin (the uncle he had never known, but began to spend more time with as Fíli and Ori began circling one another) and Dís, then Bofur and Bifur and Bombur and suddenly the entire Company of Thorin Oakenshield—bar the dwarf himself—was gathered near Nori, working on whatever craft had caught their fancy.
Thorin had been…well, he had never been particularly upbeat in life, but his death, the manner and circumstance of it, the responsibility he had unwillingly left behind, the deaths of his barely grown nephews, and, the Company theorized, the impossibility of ever seeing a particular hobbit again had been weighing on him nearly as long as the Battle of Azanulbizar had in life.
Nori knew that there was a very short list of things that could potentially drag Thorin up from the depths of the forge where he had spent much of the last century, and most of the ones that had been tried (his siblings and nephews) had not been all that successful.
Of course, if the one chipping away at the stone above happened to be who Nori was beginning to suspect it might be, that maybe changing soon.
When it began to sound like whomever was digging would break through any minute, Dís suddenly spoke up.
“Fíli, Kíli! Go get your uncle!” She ordered.
The boys, who had begun glancing toward the top of the cavern with the same worry as the rest of them, didn’t protest for once and did as they were told, happy to have something to do besides worry.
Nori met Dís’ eyes as they ran, and they shared a smirk. He wasn’t all that surprised to find that she had come to a similar theory as himself. They always had been rather similar, both in worldview and cleverness. If Mahal was supposedly married to the Green Lady, they thought, would it not make sense for their realms to be nearby? Perhaps his Halls dwelt below her fields, and if ever there a was a hobbit determined enough to dig himself down into stone…
Just as the boys dragged a reluctant Thorin into the cavern, small stones began to fall. Nori saw the moment that Thorin made the same realization his sister and Nori had, and when a small figure fell from above, Thorin was there to catch him.
When Thorin’s booming laugh rang through the Halls for the first time in almost a century at the sight of the dust-covered hobbit in his arms, Nori relaxed against Dwalin’s side feeling as if a weight had been lifted from his shoulders.
Bilbo had finally come home.
Nori watched with a smile as Thorin introduced Bilbo to what family the hobbit had never had the opportunity to meet, as Frerin watched his brother transform before his eyes, as Víli—who had not lived long enough to see his younger son and brother-in-law standing side-by-side) realized where Kíli had gotten his smile, as Bilbo greeted Dís like a sister (having written back and forth with her often after her brother’s death), as the entire Company welcomed Bilbo with open arms.
Once much of the dirt had been brushed off him, Bilbo looked older than he had before Thorin’s death, but younger than he had been when Nori had last seen him—golden hair streaked through with dirt and dust rather than the grey of age—and slimmer too, though he supposed that was what happened when one dug for what must’ve been months on end.
“Hello, old friend,” Bilbo greeted him, wrapping him in a hug. “It’s been a rather interesting time since your passing.”
“Oh?” Nori asked as he pulled back, always eager to hear whatever gossip Bilbo had to deliver.
“There was a war. Gloín, your boy Gimli was rather involved in ending the whole thing, along with my nephew Frodo, Gandalf, Legolas Greenleaf, and several of my cousins. As a warning, I’m fairly certain that Gimli and Legolas have gotten together by now, so when they figure out how to escape Valinor, you may want to be prepared. You as well, Dís, if I know Tauriel.”
“Tauriel?” Kíli was practically bouncing by now.
“Mm. Pined after you for decades. She’s traveled all over Arda by now, stopped in to see me a few times, then we all sailed together with the Elves of Imladris—or Rivendell, to you lot.”
Nori felt a smile stretch across his face. That was the tone Bilbo used when he’d done something interesting, usually to scandalize the elder inhabitants of Hobbiton, though in this case…
Well, it sounded as if it might be the Valar he was scandalizing these days.
“You went to Valinor?” Kíli asked excitedly, “What was it like?”
Bilbo smiled at him. “Beautiful, of course, if a bit boring.”
“Bilbo ,” Thorin asked, immediately picking up on the mischief in his voice and already sounding fondly tired. “How in Mahal’s name did you manage to leave Valinor?”
“Well, I walked, didn’t I?” Bilbo snarked. “I thought to myself, well, there must be something beyond all these trees, and wouldn’t you know it, there were fields! The fields of the Green Lady! And I wondered, see, if Aulë might perhaps live nearby his wife, and so I found a shovel and started digging, and now, a few weeks later, here I am!”
Thorin wrapped his arms around Bilbo and sighed into his hair. “I don’t know why I am surprised. You stole from a dragon, why would something like being in a separate afterlife bother you any?”
Bilbo hummed. “Not all that sure the afterlives are all entirely separate, but I suppose I will take that as a compliment.”
“Does this mean we could visit the Fields of Yavanna?” Ori asked, ever curious.
Just as he asked, a rope came falling through the hole that Bilbo had only minutes before: one end secured somewhere above, and the other coiling a bit on the floor of the cave. Soon after, there came a hobbit lady sliding down.
“Bilbo, darling, next time you’re about to fall through a hole in the ground, I’d prefer a bit of warning,” She told the hobbit. She looked rather similar to Bilbo, a bit slim for a hobbit, like she got more exercise than most, and with similar eyes and hair, though hers was braided back out of the way. Most interesting however, were the knives Nori could spot concealed on her person, the small bow and quiver on her back, and the worn leather trousers she wore.
“Mother, I told you I would be fine,” Bilbo sighed.
“If you found your dwarves,” she—Belladonna Took, Bilbo had told him once—replied. “How was I to know that one of the Valar wouldn’t snatch you for digging too deep underground?”
“And so you came prepared to fight them? ” Bilbo asked incredulously.
“Well, what else was I to do?”
“Not fight the bloody Valar?”
“Oh, so you’re allowed to run off and provoke a dragon but your dear old mother can’t simply have a polite conversation?”
“The last time you had a friendly conversation with someone, you were nearly killed by a hoard of goblins!”
Behind her, Nori caught Dis’ approving eye and suddenly understood how Bilbo had become such fast friends with her, if this was his mother.
“Belladonna, love,” came a voice from the hole above them. A gentle-hobbit wearing clothes that reminded Nori distinctly of Bilbo the day that the Company had arrived at his hobbit-hole slowly lowered himself down the rope into the cavern. “Are you interrupting Bilbo’s reunion with his friends with your bickering again?”
Belladonna gasped in outrage. “I am doing no such thing!” She protested.
“Yes she is!” Bilbo told him at the same time.
Belladonna grumbled something that sounded an awful lot like “bloody tattletale” under her breath, causing her son to huff and husband to snort.
“Love, I thought we agreed to hold off on the interrogation for at least an hour or two,” the gentlehobbit chastised.
“An hour?” Bilbo asked, aghast. “Have you so little faith in my judgement?!”
“Bilbo, love,” Bungo—Nori thought—said gently, “You remained friends with Lobelia Bracegirdle for nearly a fortnight after you discovered she was stealing from you.”
“Well I wasn’t going to go around accusing her without proof, was I!” Bilbo exclaimed. “The pair of you act like I never learned, not to mention it’s been a damned century since then!”
This was apparently an uninteresting argument to Bilbo’s parents, however, who were eyeing the rather large gathering of dwarrow shrewdly.
“You’ll be his king then, I reckon,” Belladonna told Thorin, causing Bilbo to go bright red. “Near ninety years and he can still describe you with excruciating accuracy!”
"Oh?" Thorin asked, eyeing Bilbo with a twinkle in his eye that Nori didn't remember seeing since Fíli and Kíli were pebbles. "What all has he said about us?"
Bilbo buried his face in his hands as his parents went about embarrassing him lovingly in front of the entire Company, and as he looked on, Nori couldn't help but think that this was exactly the sort of shaking up the afterlife had needed.