Renacida || Fili x MGIME OC ||

Homemade Salsa

It rained.

I sat on the farmhouse's backdoor steps, absently munching on a small apple packed with flavor and enjoying the cooler temperature. Beorn had left four days ago. He said he might be gone for a while if the orc problem worsened. Part of me knew he was going to be okay. The other part naturally worried.

But I could handle being here without burning the entire place down. The animals and I hung out, and when I wasn't distracting myself outside, I tidied up the farmhouse as best I could by focusing on the low areas the tall skin-changers wouldn't normally notice. I ate meals alone, picked the garden alone, and fed the animals alone.

I was never the type of person to enjoy being on my own for long periods of time, though. It drove me up the wall to not be interacting with others or just having people near me.

Besides, being alone meant I had time to think about all the ways I could fuck up this entire thing.

On the dinner table, written in splotchy Spanish, was a list I looked at for too long.

-Make it to Beorn's.

-Go to mirk. G leaves bc bad guy.

-Get lost in mirk.

-Spiders.

-Get captured by elves. Lego. Tiffany? Tara? Redhead.

-B frees everyone. Invisible.

-Barrel ride down river. Orcs show up. K poisoned.

-Laketown. Lake Town? Bard sneaks us in. Get caught somehow.

-K and F stay. Others go to mountain. Redhead heals K. Dragon wakes up. Attacks Laketown.

-B gets the white stone.

-Bard kills dragon. Laketown displaced. Go to the ruined city.

-T goes crazy over gold. B gives stone to elf king and Bard. G comes back?

-Orcs attack. Big battle. Battle of the Five Armies.

-F, K, and T die near tower thing. A dies.

-B leaves with ring. End.

I had no idea about the timeframe of this whole ordeal or the events of the Fellowship. If I knew I needed to be nerdier with Luis, I would have paid more attention to his factual interjections during the movies. Looking at the lame list reminded me how woefully uninformed I was.

But somehow, somehow, I'd see to it that the three dwarves lived by the end of the battle.

Exactly how that would happen, I still didn't know. But I was okay with improvising! I thrived in high-stress environments. And hey, it didn't hurt that if I died doing something stupid, I could just pop back up in in a few hours and try again.

I bit into the apple. Something crunched between my teeth. The bitter flavor of its seeds bloomed in my mouth, and I realized that I had eaten it down to the core. With a huff, I spat the seed out from the protection of the farmhouse roof and into the mud. Two pigs, Nan and Pan, were the only ones willing enough to sit out in the rain in the hope that they'd get some treats from me.

Well. They wouldn't wait for nothing.

Snapping the apple core in half, I tossed the pieces to them. They caught the cores mid-air and snorted in delight.

I smiled and grabbed another apple from the basket next to me. Summer thunder rolled in the sky, like the gentle hum of a half-remembered song. Nothing at all like the storms of the Misty Mountains, where each lightning strike was a death threat.