apr.3.22

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"Tell me something," Kili said then, breaking the silence between them; the Company had stopped for the night in an open meadow at the edge of a tree line, and had already brushed the ponies and had dinner. Some of the dwarves had gone to bed, while others stayed up and were smoking their pipes. Kili and Fili had their blankets rolled out on either side of Lullaby's; the Durin boys felt protective of the human.

Lullaby took a sip of her now-cold cardamom tea. "Sure, what's up?"

Kili met her eyes. "If we were to have met in another time – if Fili and I had come to your world, for example, and we didn't know anything or anybody, and you were the one who chose to help us – would we be well off, or shunned?"

Lullaby held Kili's hand. "I don't think you could ever be shunned by me, even if I'd met you in my world. But, in my world, I know that people would shun you. They do it to their own people; they find faults in them, and find that as a reason to abandon them." She looked from Kili to Fili, who'd been silently listening. "Maybe that's what happened to me. I got shunned. I wanted a way out. But I got sent here, instead of my world's version of "a way out"."

Kili smiled slightly at her. "Your world is more cutthroat than Middle Earth, than our way of life has been."

"I agree. I never want to leave Middle Earth."

"And we don't want you to leave." Fili took Lullaby's hand.

She held both of their hands. "My world is a scary place that I do not like thinking about. I like to escape from it whenever I can. And if I could live here, and never have to deal with it again, that would just be heaven for me."

"We will do our best," Kili promised.

Fili nodded at his brother's vow. "You have our word."

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