A Better Place - The Hobbit Fanfiction

Alternate Entry Ten - Travels and Minor Troubles

“Do you usually wear tunics?” Fraeg asked me one afternoon as she sat on a box in the back of their wagon, her legs dangling, crossed at the ankles, over the hatch. She had a loop of embroidery in her lap.

“Usually,” I affirmed. “I don’t think it helps me blend in though.”

She chortled. “That it does not. I don’t suppose anyone has found you any dresses that will fit though—you’re too thin.”

“Human clothes might fit,” I surmised. “They would be the wrong style then though wouldn’t they?”

“To tell you the truth whatever you’re wearing isn’t the right style either, and it fits too well to have come secondhand from any dwarven family. Where did you get it?”

“The elves gave it to me. My clothes were basically ruined when I was staying with them, so they gave me some of their spares. They fit better than anything else I’ve come across yet.”

Fraeg’s eyes widened at my mention of elves, though Gloin must have told his family I’d spent time with them. “That makes sense,” she said. “They’re thin too. Will you have some proper clothes made up when we get back to Erebor?”

“Oh assuredly,” I said with a grin. “If I keep running about in elven clothes people will start to doubt if I’ve got any dwarvish blood in me at all. I’m not sure I want to commit to dresses though; I didn’t wear them where I was from.”

“Didn’t wear dresses?” she gasped. “At all?”

Amused by her reaction, I shook my head. “No, my world is very different from yours.”

“Well you can’t keep going about in trousers like you are,” she asserted practically. “I understand it out in the wilds, especially with the way you bob about and run all over the place like you do, but it’ll be seen as indecent in Erebor, especially as you get older.”

“Nobody mentioned it to me while I was there,” I countered.

“Well there was hardly anybody there, was there? And even fewer women. What a woman wears is up to a woman to correct—typically her mother or her aunt, but since you haven’t got either of those I wonder if Bofur was working up to it. Chances are they were just so taken aback by your strange story they didn’t get around to it.”

I groaned theatrically, rolling my head onto the backs of my shoulders with the terrible weight of this realization. “This is awful. I don’t want to wear a dress. I want to continue bobbing and running about like an absolute heathen.”

“Well you’ll certainly never attract the right kinds of attention with that attitude,” she assured me. “I don’t see why you can’t—maybe—wear them still on occasion, or under your dress, but for the most part you really do need to wear women’s clothes.”

“Gah. I cannot believe I was revived only to have to live through the horror of proper women’s clothes.”

Fraeg clucked her tongue, grinning and shaking her head down at her handiwork. “You are an utter fool sometimes, you know that?”

“I am not. I can be very clever.”

“I mean fool as in foolish.”

“Oh. Well that, yes. That I can definitely be.”

Another day I asked Gloni to talk to me about bows. He started by telling me how they worked and I rolled my eyes and interrupted him. “I know how they work, I want to know why they all look different.”

“Well they’re all made of different woods—”

“You are being purposefully obtuse! I know that—”