#she called my mum afterwards and was so happy telling her my grandpa appears in like the first scene lol

[jackredfieldwasmyjacob]

by the way i forgot to say it here!!! if for some reason you feel like watching this new documentary about mari trini that just came out, my grandpa is there in one of the clips as a photographer and there's also a photo of his (idk if his name appears, i want to believe it does) 🥰

[fromtheboundlesssea]

What We Became Chapter 8

Ro – 44 (looks 21)

Kíli – 54 (looks 23)

Fíli – 59 (looks about 24)

—

“Grandpa,” Ro looked at the old hobbit. He appeared almost dwarvish. He reminded her a bit of Uncle Balin in a way. His beard was thinner though. “I have a question.”

“Ask away, Rose of the World.”

He called her that sometimes. Apparently, her hobbit parents called her that too when she was a baby. She didn’t remember them. As far as she had been concerned growing up, her mum and da had always been her mum and da. She had been about twenty-one when she found out differently.

Her parents had tried to explain it to her, but all she understood was that she wasn’t theirs and they weren’t hers. She’d run away and actually made it outside the mountain. She’d curled up under a bush and cried. That had been why she was so small. That had been why she looked so different from everyone else. That had been why some of the other pebbles in her class thought she was a freak.

Running away had been a terrible idea. It was an even worse idea considering it was the middle of winter.

Fíli had been the one to find her. It had probably been the first time she had ever heard him yell at her. He was livid. This had, of course, only made Ro cry again. That calmed Fíli down and he opened up his winter coat and pulled her to his chest. He closed the coat around her and carried her back to Ered Luin. He had been so warm. Kíli, who had been searching near the same area, found them next. The brunett prince actually started swearing and, for the only time since, Fíli hadn’t gotten after him for it.

The three of them had gotten the flu and had been forced into a shared bed rest for three days.

Ro shook herself from the memory.

“I’ve been having… dreams.”

The Old Took paused in his work. He had been writing a draft for another treaty with the dwarrow and Ro had been helping. Her mum mum and da would be coming to visit to pick it up in a few days time. The old hobbit looked at Ro and she glanced at her feet, a nervous habit she’d picked up somewhere in her childhood.

“What happens in your dreams?”

She definitely wasn’t going to tell him about the more… intimate… ones. Those had been right embarrassing when they first happened. The flashes of them, Ro was fine with. The longer ones felt painful. Some of them were sweet and Durin made her, Völva, feel as though she were being worshipped. Some of them were violent. Durin’s eyes were clouded over and he would chant ‘mine, mine, mine’ as he rutted into her. He didn’t seem to care about her at all, only the pleasure she could give him. And oh how she had wanted to give him enough pleasure to pull him from whatever madness had taken its hold on him. She’d always wake up before it was over. If she were honest with herself, she was glad that they did.

“I dream of being another person. She… she’s lonely. She misses her O… Other.” The term was strange in her mouth still. Hobbits didn’t have Ones. They had Others. Where Ones were relationships built stone by stone as the years went by, Others grew and made a bed for themselves in the hobbit’s heart. Others were the home of their hobbit’s heart.

“Do you see anything else?”

“I see children sometimes. Sometimes I’m pregnant. Sometimes I’m traveling. Sometimes I’m…” Sometimes she’s simply kneeling over a dwarf, with his head in her lap, and her heart swells and she thinks ‘oh, there you are, I’ve been looking for you’ as the snow flutters about them like falling stars. “What does it mean?”

Her grandfather sighed. He turned to her fully and his dark eyes stared into her pale ones. “Do the dwarves have a belief in the reincarnation of the soul?”

Ro nodded. She was an adopted daughter of the Line of Durin. Of course she did. She was raised in the stories of Durin the Deathless and all the Durins after him. She never understood how they all happened to be named Durin. Her Uncle Balin had shrugged and suggested they might have been named that afterwards, their original names lost in time.

“Some hobbits believe that the soul of Móðirin will be reborn in order to find her fairy husband,” he told her.

Fairy? Ro thought back to her history lessons. She had to, very forcibly, hold back a snort. Mahal, hobbits think Durin was a fairy.

“She is supposedly going to be reborn in one of her descendants, like you or me.”

“The Baggins and the Tooks.”

The old hobbit nodded. “Descended from her daughter and son.”

Ro’s mouth opened and then promptly closed. Her eyes widened.

They were descendants of Durin.

She was a descendant if Durin.

“Do you believe in it, Grandpa?”

He sighed. “I believe that the Valar are kind. Móðirin suffered a great deal in her lifetime. She was the first of our people. I’m sure Yavanna would want her to be happy.”

“Do you think,” Ro paused. Durin had been reborn multiple times. If Völva had been reborn in Ro for the sake of finding Durin, wouldn’t she have been reborn before? “Do you think Móðirin has been born before?”

“I’m not sure,” the Old Took said. “I only know that she will have a great destiny regardless.”

Ro nodded. “I have to go back and clean Bag End. My parents will be coming soon.”

“Of course.”

Ro returned home and laid down instead of cleaned. If she was Völva, who was her Durin? He hadn’t come for her, so what if he didn’t want to find her. Besides, Durin had always gotten married in his other lives. If he didn’t, her family wouldn’t be alive. Ro’s stomach churned. What if he didn’t want her?

That night, Ro dreamed of a dream that wasn’t her own.

She was sitting in a home, an ancient smial of sorts, as two small pebbles, a boy and a girl, played at her feet. They babbled in a strange mixture of Hobbitish and Khuzdul. This part was a memory, what came next was not. She heard a knock to her door and she went up to open it.

Durin stood before her. He looked half worried, half relieved as he saw her. Tears began to slide down her cheeks and he quickly pulled her to his chest. “I found you,” he whispered, his lips caressed the shell of her ear. “I will always find you.”

Then, he was gone and she was alone.

A dream within a dream.

Ro woke up and curled into her knees. Her chest ached.

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