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Fire light flickered in Nori’s eyes as he watched the flames and their specks of ash rise toward the sky. The night was uneventful and boring, the dwarf looking around himself at the sleeping bodies sprawled across their camp. They looked like caterpillars. Very large, lumpy, snoring caterpillars.
He jerked his head at the noise of clothes being rustled and a bedroll being shoved away. It’s only Ori, grabbing his journal and quill sleepily. He shuffled close and sat in front of Nori. Nori laughed quietly, nodding toward the already moving quill in his little brother’s hand.
“Never let it rest, do you?” he teased, leaning over the low flames of the fire to catch a peek. Ori shook his head, but Nori could see the corners of his lips raise.
“Couldn’t sleep.” Ori said simply. He tilted his journal toward the redhead so he could get a proper look. The figure on the page looked like a rougher, more angular version of Nori. It was only a few minute long sketch, but it had already begun to take shape. The outlines for later shading made Nori tilt his head. Him? In the fire light? “It’s you. And the fire, I suppose.”
“S’real good.” Nori grinned slightly, more genuine than he had since they started this god-awful journey. It was nice to be around Ori again; he had missed him. “It’d been years, it felt like.” Ori just nodded and continued his ink strokes.
The silence was heavy and awkward. It felt like an eternity’s worth of unanswered questions and indifference simultaneously. The longer he watched Ori draw, the more he realized he knew next to nothing about his not-so-baby-anymore brother. In fact, this was the first time he had seen him actually do a piece.
“So, which is your favorite… book?” Ori glanced at Nori upon hearing his question, then turned his attention back to his paper.
“Ascension with Vigor.” he sighed, and Nori furrowed his brows when hearing how inexpressive his answer was. “You were the one that got it for me.”
Oh, yes. How could it have slipped his mind? Years ago, tens of years ago, he had come home with an arm full of fiction books he had stolen from the next region over. The leather was new, and the cover had been carved into a grand symbol that Nori (at the time) wasn’t familiar with. He wasn’t too keen on the name of it, but now that Ori had said it, he could picture the letters indented to the material, and his fingers tracing them blindly.
“Right. I remember pickin’ it.” Nori lied, and smiled wryly. Ori looked at him again and frowned.
“You don’t,” Ori had told him a false title. Nori had never paid attention to his interests, had he? He had always brought all these things for him every few years: quills, books, his own slingshot — but never did he think to ask Ori what he might’ve actually wanted. It wasn’t that he was ungrateful, but that his brother never spared a moment to get to know him.
“I do!” Nori said in a hushed whisper-yell, but when Ori set his quill flat on the page, he looked sad. Nori’s expression fell and for a second, he thought to cross the little fire and attempt to comfort him, but Ori opened his mouth to speak again.
“Y’know,” He began, clutching the ends of his journal, his fingertips pink from the cold air. “I’ve looked up to you ever since Dori told me you were off travelling the world. You’re so free, you got to go anywhere you wanted, whenever you wanted to, and I was at home… with my books and Dori.”
Nori wanted to reach out and tell him it wasn’t like that. He wasn’t free when all he ever did was run from guards and hide in the dark because he just couldn’t keep his hands to himself. Ori was at home with his books and Dori, but at least he was at home with his books and Dori and safe.
“I believed all those stories you told, and kept all of your gifts; I wrote some of them down so I could read them when you weren’t there to tell them. I used to say to everyone— to the princes,” Ori gestured to the two filled bedrolls several feet away from them. “That I had the best big brother in the world.”
Now he had laid everything out for Nori to see and hear; false expectations built on a raft of lies he had told Ori for years.
“You used to have this gleam in your eye,” he said softly, staring into the dying fire. “Like all of Arda was at your fingertips.” Ori met Nori’s eyes. He was tense and frozen in place, pathetically unwilling to come to terms with how much he had wronged his own brother, both directly and not.
“I used to want to be you.”
Nori was quiet for a long time. He studied Ori’s features and saw a completely different dwarf in front of him. He hadn’t looked at him - really, really looked at him, since before signing on. He was so different than what he last remembered. His beard was growing in, thin as it was, and his nose had grown with a bump that must’ve come from his father. Ori’s fingers always looked like they’d been dunked in ink; even now, when he had only been at work for several minutes.
Nori was too afraid to ask - too afraid of the answer to get it out of his mouth. Ori used to want to be him. Nori, of all people. Not Durin the Deathless, not big, strong Dwalin, not Dori, not anyone, but Nori.
“But now?” Nori’s voice cracked as he spoke. Ori had gone quiet, the end of his quill frayed from how much he had been touching it through the entire conversation. Nori had not even noticed until he took the full image of him in. He was grown now, but still looked so small.
“Are you…” Nori swallowed, “disappointed?”
“It was a long time before I found out. Dori didn’t want to tell me, but I found out after seeing your portrait in the paper.” Everything clicked into place after that. He finally began to understand why Nori would leave for such long periods of time, how he always had what he needed, even when they struggled for money, and why Dori was so adamant about accepting Mister Balin’s apprenticeship. But surprisingly even after all of that, realizing why he had to leave a window unlocked instead of the door must’ve been the most devastating part.
Ori didn’t tell Nori how much it hurt him; he didn’t need to. It wasn’t like Nori would acknowledge it.
“I know you only came along for the money…”
No, no, no. That wasn’t it. That wasn’t all of it—.
“But perhaps…” Ori stood up, steadying his hold on his journal. “If we live,” he tore the page he had been drawing on from his book and stepped over the side of the fire.
“You could visit more often.” The paper was pressed into his shoulder as Ori left, his lips had been quivering for a while.
Nori took the page and stared at it for a long minute, then turned to see Ori back in his bedroll.
...Facing away from him.
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