Work Text:
It starts with one little girl who trips outside his stall. He has just set up a little shop to sell his toys, has found enough mind to get back to work and help support his cousins who have done so much for him.
This young thing, a human girl of maybe four or five, is chasing after her older brother and his friends, who tease her and run away, trips on the harsh cobblestone of the town alley. She skins her knee and sits there on the cold and dirty road and sobs for her brother to come back and get her but the boys are too far to hear and none of the passersby help her up.
It sparks something in Bifur, whose own son was about her age when he was killed, and he steps away from his stall and scoops her up. The little girl yelps, startled enough by his appearance and sudden touch to stop crying momentarily, but she starts up again when he settles her on a stool behind the counter and looks over her knee.
He doesn't say anything, cleans the scrape and patches her up wordlessly while trying to look as harmless as possible so as not to frighten her further, and although she winces and whimpers when he touches her wound, she doesn't seem afraid.
In any case, to further soothe the child, he plucks one of his toys, the least gruesome from a line of dragons and orcs and demon beasts, a bear that would have once been kindly and wise, twisted by his own wound into a snarling menace. But the little girl holds it close and offers him a watery smile.
Bifur tries to make gestures that would make sense to the child, to ask after her house so that he may take her home, and she points sleepily toward the top of the hill, and doesn't protest when he picks her up and cradles her close, thumb slipping into her mouth and fingers still clutching her bear.
She is asleep by the time Bifur has made the short trek to the house, and the woman who answers the door, her mother, looks frightened to see her baby in the arms of the berserker dwarf her husband had warned her against. But her little girl is asleep, with a fresh bandage on her knee, and the dwarf seems harmless enough, so she takes her daughter and thanks him, sends him on his way with a loaf of hot bread with her gratitude. And Bifur returns home warmed with the meal and the thanks of the little girl.
The next day, she appears again outside his shop, older brother in tow, and shows him the bear, needles him to buy a toy, and although he claims to be too old for some baby things, Bifur sees his eyes light up when he catches the dragon.
After that, all the children swarm his shop and he is barely able to keep his counter stocked. When word gets around that fourteen of the dwarf children in the village are his kin, Bombur's children, the rest start to call him Uncle Bifur as well, and it even spreads to some of the adults.
It is the children, with their innocent eyes and hearts, that leads to his acceptance amongst the rest of the villagers, and when he starts work each day, heart full and warm, he always looks for his little first customer.