Chapter Text
The air that moved across the frozen planes of Ravenhill gripped his skin like cold fingers, chilling him to the bone.
It was like nothing he had ever felt before. The Shire was never a place so ravaged by the pure lifelessness of frozen waterfalls and outcrops of grey rock.
His head throbbed. Bilbo could feel where it had impacted the ground, and there were certainly bruises blossoming. Faintly, he reached back a hand to brush his fingertips over the lump forming, and cringed to feel his grimy hair matted with blood.
It was extremely unpleasant.
Where's Thorin?
His limbs hardly seemed to want to move as he stood. He swayed for a moment, and was uncertain if he would remain standing. There were bodies of Orcs several feet from him that made his heart race painfully.
He listened for the sounds of war - for clashing blades and the shouts of mighty Dwarves and the commanding, oddly quite shouts from the Elves. He expected to hear them, expected to hear something.
But all was silent.
Unnervingly so.
Bilbo turned his head to look around. He had to hold onto the rocks to keep himself upright. There seemed to be no signs of life, and for a frightening moment he thought that maybe everyone he cared for had been killed.
All at once, he realised that he could have been killed.
And no one would have found him, not quickly, maybe not for days. No one would have come looking in this direction, it was too far from the battleground.
He would have died completely, utterly, irrevocably alone.
He swayed on his feet again. His life - his placid, secure, little life could have ended without anything coming from it.
And that was true - what had he done with his life? Doilies and silver spoons and prized tomatoes didn't seem like much in the way of accomplishments anymore. He hadn't managed to burgle the mountain, either. He'd woken Smaug, brought fire onto the people of Laketown, and he hadn't been able to help Thorin - he'd lied and given over the Arkenstone, the most treasured item for all Dwarves, over to Elves.
Death was unforgivable, and so was he.
It was a struggle to breathe, but somehow his lungs expanded and contracted in a fairly rhythmic pattern as he started making his way down the rocky slope.
He tried not to let his eyes linger on the pools of drying blood and the lifeless bodies of enemies and the heavy stench of cold and metal and bitterness.
He didn't realise he was crying until he tasted salt on his lips.
And it hurt. Not just because the salt made his wounds burn, or because his eyes felt raw and red. No, it hurt because he was crying - crying because maybe his friends were dead before he got to tell them how he truly felt, because Thorin might be dead, or his heirs might be dead, or maybe Bilbo himself was dead, and this was the twisted world his soul had ended up in.
It was too quiet. So deafening it was loud. The silence made the ringing in his head sound muffled and faded, as if everything that had happened was a dream trapped under the frozen surface of the waterfall.
He forced himself to stop and breathe for a moment. He would be no use to anyone if he worked himself into a panic and collapsed where he stood.
After his knees stopped shaking, or he stop feeling it, he continued down onto the flat surface of the waterfall. It was cold, cold enough to chill his thick-skinned feet. It made him cringe.
The top of the hill was just as barren and lifeless as where he had woken up. His eyes scanned the frozen surface, and he was startled to see the ice broken and the White Orc's body half-submerged. It certainly wasn't alive anymore.
"Bilbo. Bilbo!"
At first, he didn't hear it, or he didn't register it. The shout didn't sound like it was calling his name, but with a physical start, he realised it was.
He turned to see who it was, and felt his expression crack and twist when he saw Thorin.
The Dwarf was holding his side, where the fabric of his coat was darker than usual, and his face and any visible skin was smeared with dirt and flecks of blood. He carried an air of power dampened by exhaustion and an intense desire for something he'd never been able to attain.
But it was Thorin.
Somehow, he found himself running towards the Dwarf. He threw his arms around Thorin's waist, colliding with the Dwarf hard enough to make them both stumble.
He couldn't really hear it, but he was sure he was sobbing into Thorin's dirtied armour.
Thorin gripped him tightly, scrounging up enough strength to hold both of them up. His arm was a heavy weight around Bilbo's waist, and his hand cradled the back of Bilbo's head tight enough to make his wound throb a little.
"Hush, Bilbo." Thorin soothed, stroking his waist firmly. "You're alright."
Bilbo's breath hiccupped as he held on tighter. Even though it was cold, and Thorin's armour was cold, and he was cold, he could feel the warmth pulsing off Thorin's skin, and fogging out of his mouth.
Warmth meant life, and Thorin was breathing vitality.