The Hobbit, but the Multiverse Does the Macarena (Workshop Cut): Chapter 3
The Measly Boat Crosses the Lake Very Quickly in this Timeline
Hello! Deepest apologies for the delay in posting: depression struck. with a bat.
I am back with a chapter, as well as a reminder that I can afford to take breathers and also elope to Venezuela with my fanartist lover if you click this fun button:
And enjoy the chapter
Bard’s opposition is quickly overwhelmed by twelve dwarves, an elf, a pirate, a metalbender, and a guy with a gun (Bard doesn’t know what a gun is, but John is doing his best and pointing it in the right direction and everything). He sits quietly in the boat while everyone else climbs in and holds onto something at Erik’s request, and then they scream through the sky much more quickly than anyone is comfortable with. Well, Will is doing alright, but that’s mostly because his life consists of impossibility after impossibility thrust upon him by the illustrious Captain Jack Sparrow and his bullshit shenanigans, and at this point a man floating a boat through midair using the metal in the keel and the nails and in some parts of the hull just is no longer that shocking to him. Everyone else, however, screams in undignified trills of fear unbefitting their various backgrounds.
Out of respect, and as a partial thanks for the use of his boat, Erik leaves Bard’s boat at the edge of Long Lake, once they are on the other side of it. Everyone advises Bard to go back to Laketown and disregard their presence– and John reminds him that it is very likely that none of this is real, which earns him a slap on the back of the head from Will– so Bard returns home and hugs his children and doesn’t even get that mad when Alfred jeers at him. Alfred hasn’t been recently threatened by twelve dwarves, an elf, a pirate, a metalbender, and a man with a gun… whatever a gun is.
Over in the ruins of Dale, the dwarves realize they now have around 36 hours to progress the last half a mile to their destination at the door to the halls of Erebor.
“Now will you thick-skulled idiots listen to me,” John grumbles, “and let me treat this man– Kíli, was it?”
Fíli nods viciously, and Tauriel is quick to second the motion.
“He’s right,” Fíli insists, “Kíli needs help.” Even the man in question has realized the frailty of his protests, his bravado.
Several of the dwarves still look hesitant to comply– after over 150 years of waiting, they want to find the damn door and take back their home– they want to finish this quest just to pry that mountain open so they can focus on getting their burglar and their wizard back and then enter Erebor together, as a company, as they began this quest.
But Balin heaves a hefty sigh. “Since when were dwarves the first to leave behind their kin and countrymen?” he demands, “Be ashamed and rest the night. We’ll go up the mountain tomorrow.” And so the dwarves set about their normal camping routines. Bifur goes for firewood and Bofur sets up tinder and Bombur prepares a simple meal. The other dwarves scatter, obeying Balin’s instructions to the letter.
Balin, Thorin, and Fíli linger nearby, worried for Kíli’s fast-fading consciousness. Tauriel insists that she can be of help to John, and so John advises her to absolutely help him, please, for Christ’s sake he’s not even sure if anybody here is the same species. Will and Erik also stick around, for the same awkward reason that one clings to the person they showed up to a party with for the duration of the night.
“Alright,” John addresses the dwarves and elf, “what did this to him? The flesh is bordering on necrosis at this point.” This jargon gets no response from them. “It’s poison,” he clarifies flatly.
“An orc’s arrow pierced his flesh,” Thorin intones solemnly.
John wonders, under his breath, what in Christ’s name an orc is, and why Thorin has to speak like he’s auditioning for Hamlet.
“Great, well the poison has likely reached his bloodstream by this point, even though no major veins or arteries were hit, because you lot decided to leave him like this for so long and made him run all over the bloody country.”
Erik is the only one present with even the slightest knowledge of modern medicine, as they know it, and so he asks, “What can we do for him?”
“It was a morgul shaft,” Fíli tells them mournfully, “nothing can be done.”
John grumbles, “Nothing my arse,” and he takes Will’s belt (he does ask first, which Will is grateful for, since Jack and Elizabeth have both stolen his belt without permission quite a bit) and uses it as a tourniquet around Kíli’s injured leg. “That’s gonna slow the poison as much as it can be slowed,” he tells those gathered, “I don’t suppose anyone’s got any antivenom laying around? He’ll be down for a week with it, but it’s all I know that works for poison, except a specific antidote.”
Thorin shoots up dramatically from where he’d been sitting, which brings him to just about eye-level with John’s kneeling height. “Morgul blades aren’t poison,” he spits derisively, as if John is just the biggest idiot for not knowing, “the blades break off inside the flesh itself and make their way to your heart.” The fire leaves his eyes some as he explains, “You die in agony, gasping for breath and delirious.”
John’s doing his best to stay composed and doctorly here– Kíli needs it, he’s whimpering in his fever dreams and too weak to toss with their malice– but he heaves a sigh anyway, “Yes, that’s just a convoluted way of saying ‘poison,’ please shut up.”
Thorin looks severely affronted, and almost hisses a reply, but Balin settles him back to a sit with firm pressure on his shoulders and murmurs about something about “Bilbo.”
“Alright, does anybody who is not a dwarf have some input?”
Erik nods to the negative, “That was always more Hank’s specialty than mine or Charles’.”
Will looks contemplative for several moments before confirming, “Are we sure that this is not some kind of curse? I know how to handle curses.” He doesn’t mention that his usual method involves killing the curse-caster, because that hardly seems relevant. “Or, is it a type of magic? I think I remember a time when magic was involved, but Jack got us out of that one.” Will really is doing his best to be helpful– he doesn’t want this young man to die, but he also has never even considered healing damage done to a body, since he prefers to deal it.
But his words strike a cord with Tauriel nonetheless, who gasps with recognition and shouts “Kingsfoil!” which rouses the dwarves’ singular collective brain cell and they all run about in the hills and cracks in the decrepit old buildings of Dale, pulling weeds.
“What’s, uh, what’s kingsfoil?” Will asks.
Tauriel is busy setting up a small mortar and pestle out of two interestingly-shaped rocks, but she answers, “For humans, a weed. For dwarves, a potent healing herb. If I can supplement it with my magic–”
“With your what?” John cries.
“I knew this place had some magic in it,” Will grins.
“– then it might be enough to heal what the Morgul shaft has done to him.”
“What can I do?” John, Will, and Erik all ask.
Already, Tauriel is gesturing to the rocks she’s got, and each man scrambles to find a few that will serve as the dwarves return with handfuls of leafy sprigs of plant, damp with early-evening dew. “We need to mash these into a paste,” Tauriel instructs, “If he can swallow some, that’s best, but we need to let it soak into the wound as well.”
So everyone over five feet tall works in tandem, grinding the leaves to draw out the juice and then rubbing it into Kíli’s wound. John says he’s got an idea to get Kíli to swallow some of it, and Tauriel gives him free reign while she sets Kíli’s head in her lap and begins a slow, lyric incantation that makes Will feel like something finally makes sense, even so far from the ocean. John snags a waterskin from Bofur, shoves some kingsfoil paste through the opening, and shakes it all up like a gym buff with his protein shake. Luckily, Kíli’s conscious enough to swallow instead of choke, and John has him drink as much as he can while Tauriel’s incantation picks up in intensity and John, as the only one from a universe where magic is not a conceivable outcome to medical distress, mutters once again that he must be having a seizure in Baker Street as Tauriel’s hands begin to glow.
But by the next morning, Kíli is fine. He’ll be limping for several days, but he’s alive and not collapsing and he gives Will his belt back and thanks all of the interdimensional leap-froggers (who then shoo him off to thank Tauriel, who did much more than them and who made googly-eyes at him the whole time, through the drool and the muttering gibberish and the really unflattering faces Kíli made while mostly-unconscious).
“Gotta love magic,” Will says with a sheepish smile and a long-suffering sigh. Really, he does not love magic, as it is the reason for almost everything that has ever gone wrong in his life.
Erik is pondering, “I wonder if this is a type of species-wide mutation? If only I could tell Charles…”
John is thoroughly exhausted by all of it, and expresses once again that he would like to be back in bed.
i love them all. they’re simultaneously so smart and so dumb.
i hope y’all’re enjoying this one! I’ll see you back here tomorrow for Cinnamon Muffins as well!!
Scream at me in the comments please! Nothing brings me more joy!