Title: Shoemaker's Children: Bilbo
Fandom: The Hobbot
Rating: G
Length: 215
Content notes: Goes with 'Shoemaker's Children: Thorin' but should stand alone.
Author notes: Thanks go to Zana, Morgynleri & Icka for encouragement & sanity-checking.
Summary: Bilbo contemplates the need for foot-coverings


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Bilbo was surprised, one evening after an early supper when there was still plenty of light in the sky, to see Thorin unfasten his boots after collecting a rolled bundle from his pack. Boots were rather a mystery to the Hobbit, and while he would certainly have denied worrying or wondering over the nature of Dwarf feet, seeing a toe peep through a hole in the odd bag that went between boot and foot — sock, they were called socks — was a relief. Not so very different from himself in that regard. When Thorin put his mended boot down and tugged off the sock to attend to the hole, the need for such things as boots and socks became clear to Bilbo. For all the wealth of hair on their heads and chins (and chests, backs and thighs too, judging from inadvertent glimpses of various of them attending nature's call or making ablutions) Dwarf feet apparently had no more hair than a new-born faunt, and as for the soles…. Well, Thorin's were certainly broad and shapely enough, but no thicker than the skin of his palms it seemed. Oddly vulnerable in fact.

That night Bilbo dreamed of knitting gloves for feet, out of yarn every color the hoods and cloaks of his companions came in.