Chapter Text
Fucking camping.
Who the fuck enjoys fucking camping?
No one. That’s who. Especially not fucking me.
I stop short and let out a loud groan of disdain as my foot slides in something that I decidedly do not inspect. ‘That is the third pile of shit I have stepped in in the last hour, Amy. I’m done. This is gross as f-’
Amy, my sister, my best friend, the one who decided a fucking camping trip in September would be a swell idea, glances back at me with a wide, toothy grin. ‘C’mon, Robin. It’s mud, not shit. You said you wanted to experience the outdoors more! You can’t get more outdoors than the mountainous wonderfulness of North Wales’.
‘No,’ I mutter, not entirely gleeful. ‘I guess you can’t’. I glance up at the trees above, thick, and green with needle like leaves that were having a jolly time slipping into my Adidas trainers. Beyond that, the dimming sky of late afternoon in Autumn. Beyond that, the mountainous ranges of Snowdonia National Park. In Summer, it was beautiful. In late Autumn and Winter, as in now, it was grey, wet, and muddy.
My sister, Amy, wasn’t really an outdoor enthusiast until she met her hiking loving, super healthy, as in he can’t possibly enjoy eating kale every day, fiancé. Once upon time, when we were kids, I was the outdoor lover. I loved camping with our parents, back when they did such things, whilst Amy would moan and groan about wanting to spend time with her friends over her little sister and parents.
I know Amy has the same regrets as me; the ones that taste like growing out of camping trips and days out with mum and dad. Days like that are long gone, now. I mean, it would be pretty difficult for them to do such things now.
My parents are dead. Sorry. I never know how to tell people that.
Amy is three years older than me, sitting at twenty-five, with a fiancé, a mortgage, and a little cat called Willow, after the Buffy the Vampire Slayer character. Amy was cool like that. I, myself, am twenty-two, in a fuck-ton of student finance debt, three months into a master's degree in psychology, and so cripplingly single that I’ve started to laugh in people’s faces when they ask me if I am seeing anyone.
I like to think that it’s endearing and witty. I’m starting to think it actually just looks mildly alarming and a little sad.
‘I’m being a dick,’ I announce, after ten more minutes of traipsing. And I was, it was true. Amy had put a lot of thought into arranging a holiday for just the two of us, including sorting a playlist for the long car journey and buying the camping equipment, like most of what was in my rucksack. A spare raincoat, a metal bottle for water, and a first-aid kit, to name a few. ‘This is fun, Ames. Really. How long until the campsite?’ I try to lighten my voice, so it isn’t reminiscent of a child asking are we there yet?
And I am excited. I haven’t been camping since we used to go as a family, and I know Amy and I will have fun. We talk on the phone everyday – she is my best friend. With the stress of University, I was excited to relax a little and see more of my sister.
Amy, who stands the same height as me, with brown hair against my auburn, draws to a stop beside me and points along the path. ‘It’s about ten minutes that way, I reckon. I think the campsite will be busy, judging from all the cars at the carpark’.
I nod. During my Reading Week from Uni, I think my lecturers expected me to do, y’know, my thesis or something. Not camping in rainy North Wales with zero access to my laptop, or the internet. Or anything that would be University related, really. Amy and I had even made the effort to leave our phones in the car. ‘That’s cool. Busier the better. Maybe we’ll meet people’.
Amy throws me an amused, sidelong glance. ‘You hate meeting people’.
‘No, I do not,’ I rebut with a snort, nudging her dirt speckled jeans with my muddy trainer. ‘I have loads of friends from my degree and in my MA. I’m the life of the party, Ames. You know this’.
‘Yeah, drunk,’ she points out good-naturedly. ‘Sober you is another story’.
‘I’m shy,’ I defend.
‘You never used to be,’ she shrugs, her tone indicating the end of the conversation. We both know why I became shy. A long and difficult depressive episode following the death of mum and dad, three years ago. Locking myself away for so long knocked my confidence in a big, gross way. At one point, I’m pretty sure I didn’t leave the house for nine days.
The smell of my pokey Uni room was not nice. One of my close housemates at the time, Liam, had been forced to call Amy out of sheer worry for my unwashed, reclusive state. The guilt I felt at the time was crippling. I wasn’t the only one who had lost their parents to a shitty wet road accident on the M11. Amy had, too. Her coming to visit me had been the kick up my arse I needed to realise that.
Since then, coursework, essays, dissertations, and work had been my lifeline. The things keeping me out of falling into a pit of despair. I had my master's degree, I had a little bar job at a local place that sold itself as a nerd bar, and I had friends.
It never quite felt like enough. It didn’t matter. Who was truly happy, nowadays?
‘Rob, where are you going?’
‘Going for a piss,’ I tell Amy, already traipsing off the path and over a pile of wet, orange leaves. They slide underneath my feet. ‘Gimme two seconds, I’m suddenly bursting’.
‘Delightful!’ Amy calls back.
I go a safe distance, just in case some other sodden hiker makes their way up the path, and crouch down behind a thick, twisting tree trunk. I lose my balance once, only because of the sheer weight of my backpack, hurriedly drip and dry, and yank my jeans back up my waist, round the tree-
I walk straight into someone. Someone absurdly tall.
They huff. I scream. There had been no one around when I had crouched down, I was sure of it, and how in the world someone so big could creep up on me was something I both wanted to know, and really, really did fucking not want to know.
‘Well, hello there, young wanderer!’
I gape.
Before me stands an elderly man with a long, grey pointed hat and a heavy robe around his shoulders. He smiles at me, mouth tugging kindly at the corners, and leans heavily on the staff in his right hand. He spreads his arms, as if to say yup, it’s me, but falters when I take a stumbling step back and yell,
‘AMY!’
‘Oh,’ he says, a little put out. ‘What odd noises you make. Are you quite well?’ I splutter. He listens in intent interest. ‘Quite. Now. I am Gandalf the Grey. What is your name, and might I ask, what is a lady such as yourself doing so close to the boarders of Bree?’ He squints at me. ‘How odd, that you might be exactly the thing that drew me to this patch of land at all. From where do you hail, my dear?’
Gandalf. Bree. From whence do you fucking hail?
I stare at him. ‘…What’.
His brow twitches with concern. ‘I am,’ says the old man, ‘Gandalf’. He says it as if talking to a frightened, cornered cat. Or a child. Either or. ‘And you are?’
I begin to hyperventilate. It seems like the smart thing to do.
‘Gandalf,’ I gasp, wide-eyed and terrified. ‘Like…like Middle Earth?’ I shake myself from that thought. Perhaps I truly had gone mad with grief, when I was so sure I was beginning to deal with my parent's death in a normal, healthy way. Then again, my dad was obsessed with Lord of the Rings, and I can think of nothing more insane than conjuring up a fucking make-believe Wizard as I take a piss in the woods.
Either I had gone mad, I was being pranked, or this was real. Any of the three options scared the shit out of me.
‘Amy!’ I wail, a little weaker this time.
‘Amy is a person, I am beginning to think,’ Gandalf muses, long fingers tugging at his beard. ‘Hm. They are not here’. He is more serious now, his blue eyes twinkling as he looks at me. And yeah, this guy fucking looks like the famous Wizard in the films that my dad would force us to watch when Amy and I were little, the ones I loved in my youth and, with all things, grew out of. Revisiting them, the last few years, had been too painful. ‘I fear she may be very far from here. Your name?’ He asks again.
I swallow tightly and decide that answering may help my situation. ‘Robin. Robin Bates’.
‘And where are you from, Miss Bates?’ He is using that voice I am more than familiar with. It’s the one the Doctor at the Hospital had used when he told me and Amy that mum had died first, from the collision with another car, and that dad had died of internal bleeding just as he arrived in the ambulance. It’s the voice all of my friends used with me for nearly a year following this. It’s the voice of keeping the distraught person within control; to stop them from falling over the edge.
‘England,’ I whisper, looking up at the tall man in fright, because this was starting to feel real now. It was like every fanfiction I had read in my early teens, when I had the time to do such things, when I cared to cling onto a life of fantasy and adventure. Gandalf nods, watching me. ‘Am I…am I really in Middle Earth? With like, Hobbits, Elves and Dwarves and everything?’
Gandalf continues to nod, though it changes just slightly. He watches me closely and flattens his mouth. ‘My dear, it would appear you are a Dwarf’.
The despair appears in the form of a loud, snorting laugh. ‘No, I’m bloody not!’
And then I remember how fucking tall he is, and I gape.
Fucking Christ – half of the stories I would blush and squeal over as a child were centred around a certain yellow haired Elf, meaning whatever girl was thrown into Middle Earth would arrive as an Elf. Or, sometimes, remain Human.
But no. I’m a fucking Dwarf.
Gandalf tilts his head. ‘Though, you do not have a beard’. My hands fly to my face at his words, and I feel only smooth skin. No beard. Right. That’s good. ‘And you are rather slight for a Dwarrowdam. But your feet…hmmm, no, not a Hobbit at all. And your ears are quite rounded-’
The hyperventilating begins again.
‘I don’t understand,’ I gasp, stepping toward him. My trainers don’t sink into the ground like they had been doing earlier, and I see dry, grassy dirt around me. The trees too were different, now leafy, and full of life, nothing like the needle like ones before. Such a sight was enough for me to have the crashing realisation that this was real. ‘Why am I here?’
‘Well,’ says Gandalf cheerily. ‘I am on my way from Bree after meeting a fellow about a dragon, and I tell you this only because I have the slightest inclination you know of what I speak, and as I walked, I had the calling to venture just East’. Gandalf tilts his head and nods to me. ‘And then I found you, Miss Bates’.
I stare at Gandalf. Gandalf the Grey. A Wizard. My mouth pops open. I swallow tightly. ‘A dragon,’ I ask, a little hysterical. And then, I whisper, knowing and aghast, ‘Smaug?’
Because whilst I had not been as much of a diehard fan as my dad, mostly including not reading any of the books minus The Hobbit, I was well versed on the world of Middle Earth, or as much as one can be having only watched the films. And listened to a fair few of my dad’s ramblings, and whatever I picked up from my avid fanfiction days. So, really, I was hardly the best person for…whatever this was. Whilst I loved the world, my knowledge was above average, at best.
Gandalf’s face grows sombre. ‘How do you know this?’
I gape like a fish for a moment, not even slightly knowing how to begin to explain that. ‘There…there are tales, in my world, of this one,’ I croak. ‘But-but they’re just stories’.
Gandalf squints and nods. ‘More than just the tale of Smaug?’ I nod again. His brow cocks. ‘Who did I just meet in Bree?’
I swallow dryly again. My backpack weighs heavily over my shoulders. ‘Thorin Oakenshield. You’ve convinced him to reclaim Erebor and gather a Company. I…I think you want Northern Middle Earth to have another stronghold’. I bite my tongue and stutter on a breath. That would mean…I was in the events of The Hobbit. If my knowledge of the film that I had not seen in a good few years was true, I was somewhere around a year or less before the journey to Erebor.
Gandalf harrumphs. ‘And this Company is gathered? Thorin agrees?’
I hesitate, face still slack with shock, until finally nodding.
Gandalf squints. ‘You were brought here for a reason, Miss Bates. A reason that perhaps you know more than I, or perhaps you know nothing of at all! Or maybe, just maybe, it is something you will learn along the way. Now, Miss Bates, the question stands, do you wish to take the tasks you think might be in your destiny?’
I gape at him. ‘What do you mean what I want to do? I want to go home!’ Destiny? What could I possibly do here that would help at all? ‘You’re a Wizard, can’t you do that? Can’t you send me home?’
Sympathy clouds his expression. I hate it. ‘I do not think that is in your path, Miss Bates’. And then, ‘I know not the magic or will that sent you here, and haven’t an indication on how to mimic such a feat’.
I’m sorry, Miss Bates, we did everything we could. Your parents injuries were just too severe-
‘Please call me Robin,’ I whisper, my eyes watering, now. The shock and confusion was wearing away, and in it’s place a bizarre, fuzzy feeling of not quite believing what was happening to me. Of being outside of my own body.
My chest pangs as I think of Amy. Had I disappeared from her sight? Would she think someone had stolen me?
And then I think of where I am. A year before the story of The Hobbit would begin. A year before the Quest to Reclaim Erebor. Sixty years before the events of The Lord of the Rings, if I remembered correctly.
Gandalf the Grey was telling me that I was brought here for a reason. That neither he, nor I, knew what was reason was. I had also apparently transformed into a fucking Dwarf. As in bearded, vertically stunted, hairy, axe wielding Dwarves.
Fuck me, I was in a fucking fanfiction.
Gandalf tells me that he left Thorin in Bree just two days before, and we were currently two days in the opposite direction he would have taken.
‘I think it best you stay with your own kind, Robin dear. Now, now, I know, you have told me, you were once of the race of Men. Yes, yes, I know. But here in Middle Earth, if you expect to help in the way you wish, then you will need to learn, will you not? And I am quite sure if you wish to accompany Thorin Oakenshield to reclaim his home of E-’
I splutter as we make our way over a bubbling creek. ‘Who said I was doing that?’
Gandalf casts me an almost disappointed look. ‘So, you wish not to?’
It was only then, with the Wizard’s know-it-all fucking look, that I realised that was exactly what I was planning to do. I was in Middle Earth, a fictional fucking place, but even I knew the end to The Hobbit fucking sucked. Durin’s Dead. Erebor taken by some guy called Dain. Everyone fucking sad.
Could I change that? Did I want to?
Yes, a voice whispered, a voice of a child who loved books and her dad and wanted to have adventures like the ones he spoke so fondly of. Like the ones that lived only in books and fairytales.
It is a memory of dad, of his wonky glasses and his nerdy, Lord of the Rings memorabilia, that forces my decision.
‘I suppose I do,’ I grumble. ‘But I’m – Gandalf, my world is different. I know nothing about Dwarves, I know nothing about fighting, or swords, or dragons, or even Middle Earth, really-’ I cut myself off. ‘My dad loved the tales of Middle Earth. It’s only through him that I know it. What if I mess something up?’
He doesn’t say anything. It is only on the second night of trekking that he looks at me over the campfire and says, ‘You will tell no one of your knowledge without prompt. If they ask, you are a seer-’
‘Oh, God,’ I groan, miffed about a night sleeping in the floor with nothing but my raincoat. What I would not give for a tent. ‘Not the seer trope-’
‘And of your, well…your appearance – you know nothing of your heritage, and you were raised amongst Men who found you as a small child in a land far from here. We do not need to tell them just how far, of course,’ Gandalf adds, with a meaningful look at me. I nod vigorously, eating up the lies and knowing that I would have to tell them. ‘You have been told you have Dwarven blood, and so you see yourself as such. For your placement in Ered Luin, you seek the King under the Mountain, for your visions told you to find him amongst the Blue Mountains’.
I bury my face in my hands and groan out, ‘What a crock of shit’.
‘You never know,’ Gandalf says brightly, puffing on his pipe. ‘He might just believe it. I’ll be with you, after all’.
Days pass. We cross fields and rivers, and Gandalf tells me when we are on the boarders of the Shire. I look longingly over the rolling hills as we do so and tug my backpack higher, my feet aching and my skin sweaty.
I longed to see the Shire. My dad always joked of how he would retire there, if such a thing was possible.
I grow oddly used to trekking Middle Earth with a Wizard so famous that his name lives in two worlds. Gandalf is easy to talk to, never bats an eye at my odd comments, and welcome any and all of my questions.
I find myself oddly…enjoying the rough sleeping and the constant walking. It was excitement mixed with nerves.
‘Will I live in Ered Luin? That’s the Blue Mountains, right?’
‘Do you think someone will teach me how to fight?’
‘What if they think I’m, like, incredibly stupid and don’t let me come on the Quest? There are a lot of things I don’t know about from this world, Gandalf. Obvious things’.
‘I’m wearing freaking jeans; Big G. Jeans don’t exist here. They’re going to think I’m weird’.
I rub my palms over my wet jeans. The rain had started hours previously, and though I was pleased to have my raincoat, my legs were sodden. That being said, I was eternally grateful for the backpack that Amy had prepared for me. Things like a hairbrush, lip balm, and even my toothbrush were my saving grace. ‘Gandalf, can you tell me about Dwarves, please?’
He tells me what he can, though I think he withholds some information as not to frighten to me. He tells me, around puffs of smoke, that Dwarves were stubborn, hardy, and loyal beings, with a penchant for making. I knew this already, my minds eye conjuring images of bulky, bearded men surrounded by forges and bearded little women.
‘Gandalf,’ I ask slowly. ‘Are they going to totally freak out when they see that I don’t have a beard?’ Gandalf makes an odd grumbling noise around his pipe and gives something like shrug. ‘Great,’ I mutter. I then ask about how I should present myself.
‘Grateful,’ he mutters, with an ounce of knowing. ‘Thorin is not an…easy man to converse with, especially to strangers. He trusts me little. Though,’ he squints at me. ‘I think you already know that, Robin dear. And perhaps keep the language to something a little more…’
He wavers and I scoff. ‘Gotcha’.
What shocks me, is how Gandalf stating that that I may have been brought to Middle Earth for a reason changes everything. Changes how I see the world. Changes how I deal with the shock of it. Changes how I speak with Gandalf, once distress wears away and I am able to appreciate the beauty of Middle Earth. Because that’s where I am.
Middle fucking Earth. What the fuck.
Gandalf affirms that we’re going to Ered Luin. I know little of the place, only that some or all of the Dwarves from The Hobbit are from there. Gandalf says I will be safe there, and that Dwarves protect their own, especially women, with a fire envied by the one we sit around each night. I think for a moment on the word safe on the fourth night of travelling, and that’s when I realise.
I knew things that could change everything, beyond even The Hobbit. I knew how the War of the Ring was won, how Sauron was defeated, how the Fellowship would prevail.
I knew things that could change the tide of the War.
And Gandalf, whilst carefully asking me nothing, whilst not knowing what I knew, was aware I might hold such knowledge. So, hidden in the Blue Mountains was the safest bet for me for now.
On the fifth night, I cry for Amy.
On the sixth, with my clothes sticking to my skin and my red hair a congealed nest of grease and dirt, Gandalf nods and says, ‘We have almost caught up with Thorin’.
I had a suspicion that we could have caught up with him days ago, but Gandalf had made the effort to slow down and allow me time to adjust, to ask him questions, to calm myself before being thrown into a world of Dwarves.
Which I, apparently, was.
Minus the beard.
Thank God.
The world changes from green hills and spacious woods, to forests, rivers, and the beginnings of mountains. Mist coats the air that morning, hiding the peeks in the near distance, and Gandalf ushers me when I groan and moan about the pain in my thighs and butt.
‘I’m in fucking agony,’ I growl, quite pleased that Gandalf seemed to ignore my foul mouth. I was more than aware that such a thing wasn’t great here and swore to reign it in a tad in the face of Thorin. If the films and books were anything to go by, dude was kind of a square. Sometimes. ‘You’re, like, a thousand years old, how are you so sprightly?’
‘It has been quite a while since I have been referred to as sprightly, Robin dear,’ Gandalf answers in amusement. The best fucking thing about being thrown into a fictional world, was the fact that one of the coolest characters in said fictional world seemed to like me. He always called me Robin dear, as if that was my full name.
I grumble and slip over a mossy rock. My trainers, as expensive as they had been, were fucked. ‘How old are you, anyway? I can’t remember. My dad used to know’.
Gandalf passes me with a twinge at his mouth. ‘Quite a bit more than a thousand, Robin dear’.
That afternoon, as we pause and Gandalf stares into the distance, perhaps using his nose to find Thorin, I think hard as I stare at the river a ways away. It rumbles and swooshes, deafening should I have been nearer to it, and blurt out, ‘Gandalf. Do you think I can change big things?’
Gandalf leans on his staff and considers me from a few feet away. ‘You were brought here, my dear. I believe that is reasoning enough to assume that your choices should be trusted’. He squints and tilts his head, expression becoming a little severe. ‘That being said, I would go forward with caution and care. This is not a tale, Robin dear, it is very much real’.
I think of dead Durin’s. I think of Thorin, who, by the sounds of it, I would be meeting either today or tomorrow, and who I knew would die. I think of Bilbo Baggins crying over a dead King’s body. I think of Fili and Kili, the nephews of Thorin and the most heartbreaking deaths to read in a book and see on screen. I think of all these fictional characters I was set to meet, and, pending my acceptance into said Quest, know. I think of ones beyond the Quest. Boromir. Haldir. Théoden.
I nod to Gandalf silently, and vow to myself that I would spend the next year plotting.
Amy lingers more strongly that day, though. I think of her, alone in North Wales. I think of her crying for me. Searching for me. Alone in the world, without me, mum, or dad. And, as I had learnt to do so well, I push the grief and the upset to the furthest parts of me, and I lock them away for later.
I ask Gandalf if he thinks I will ever go home. Perhaps when my task here was finished.
His eyes do not twinkle when he considers me. ‘That, I do not know, Robin dear’.
As the sky darkens, and Gandalf appears with a rabbit of which he promptly begins to skin, he waves me over with a lazy hand.
‘It will be expected for you to know such things,’ he comments, eyeing me carefully with blue-green eyes that hold a sparkle that was certainly magical. ‘Am I wrong in assuming catching and eating your own food is not commonplace in your world?’
I shake my head, and eye the blood seeping into the rabbit's stiff, short fur. ‘Do you even need to eat?’
As with all of my comments about him being more than what he appeared to be, Gandalf smiles secretly and says nothing. So, he teaches me how to skin and gut a rabbit, and it is fucking rank. It stinks, it’s sticky, and I almost hurl about four times. But I don’t. And I think that’s what counts.
Later, with my belly full of rabbit, I creep down to the creek as Gandalf pokes the fire, and I wash my hands in the cool water and gaze up at the star speckled sky. I squint, and then I feel a pang of confusion mixed with longing as I stare into the sky, clearer than any sky I had ever seen.
The stars were the same as home. Every single one. Every constellation. My dad had taught me a few, long ago,
The sight throws me, and I wonder what it means. Was Amy staring up at the same stars? Was I somewhere between worlds? Was I ever, ever going home?
I don’t have time to cry that night, because we find Thorin.