Title: Nails
Fandom: The Hobbit
Rating: G
Length: 100
Content notes: N/A
Author notes: Thanks go to Zana, Morgynleri & Athena for encouragement & sanity-checking.
Summary: Nails can hold different things together.

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Tiny, repetitive work — nails, rivets for mail-work, hinge-pins — the same thing over, over and over again was either soothing or utterly maddening, Thorin found. As an apprentice smith, such work was necessary, useful and practical. As a mastersmith, usually it galled. Sometimes though, making a double-gross of nails was precisely the thing for working out frustration. Each nail an insult or enemy or other stone in his boot, heated and hammered and shaped into use, and that use to be hammered again soundly to join things together. Making, not marring.

Some days it was the nails that held him together.