Title: Shoemaker's Children - Bofur
Fandom: The Hobbit
Rating: G
Length: 400
Content notes: N/A
Author notes: Thanks go to Zana, & Morgynleri for encouragement & sanity-checking. Part of Iron and Light. This goes with Thorin and Bilbo.
Summary: Bofur saw Thorin's toe peeping from the sock



Bofur saw Thorin's toe peeping from the sock, and his imagination went to an entirely different and more carnal place than Bilbo's cozy domesticity. It provided quite unexpected fuel for fantasy. Thorin was as safely unattainable as Dwalin, after all, and nearly as tall, if not quite so broad. Little matter to imagination if legend regarding relative sizes of hands and hammers, toes and tools had any truth to it. Blunt, tender (red) flesh peeking out of a darker sheath.... Bofur did not allow himself to squirm at the heat that bloomed in his groin and stiffened his own hammer, the quick clench of want that gripped the entrance to his mine, as he was seized by a sense-picture of black hair spilling over his shoulders, the tickle-scratch of short beard against the back of his neck, nether-beard against his nether-cheeks, being split by that thick imagined hammer and pounded into ecstasy. (A wonderful fantasy that he would be very happy to exercise, especially since there was no chance of it ever becoming reality. Kings didn't stoop to tupping miners, and Thorin didn't tup anyone at all, so far as Bofur had ever seen or heard.)

And at the same time the frayed twist of yarn unravelling against red-rubbed toe snagged in Bofur's mind. The King had a hole in his sock. Thorin son of Thrain, King in Exile, was mending a split in the seam of his boot with ordinary waxed thread and a curved steel needle he had likely forged himself. Simultaneously distant and immediate, arousing and invoking a feeling Bofur was hard put to even name.

There was a crease of concentration between Thorin's brows as he set his stitches, the Company settling down to industry around him. Bofur's own hands had found the corner of his tunic where he'd torn off the piece for Bilbo to have as a handkerchief, fingers teasing out thread from the weave to bind over the edge of the tear. He had a needle too, though his was bone, not steel. He'd been meaning to get to it. Was it deliberate, then? A 'leading by example' on Thorin's part? It didn't feel deliberate -- or not the kind of outwardly on purpose with a point to prove that was the province of schoolmasters and pedants -- it felt ... chosen but unforced, as if the Company was family somehow, Longbeards and Broadbeams alike.