Thorin insists on setting Bilbo up with a nice set of rooms while they start to get Erebor up and running again, and Bilbo is like 'no you don't have to...' but gives in because he really, really has missed sleeping in a real bed all this time. The rooms are pretty sparse but spacious, and have an open air balcony where Bilbo is already starting to make mental plans for a few flowerbeds and vegetable plots - before he reminds himself that he really can't stay, he'll only be here through the winter, just long enough to see Erebor restored and all the Company members recovered, this is a dwarven kingdom after all, and no place for a hobbit. Bits of furniture slowly start to appear in his rooms while he's away, though, a big writing desk and a hulking wardrobe and end tables and bookshelves and then, finally, a big giant overstuffed armchair in front of the fire in the sitting room. And as these pieces gradually start to fill up his rooms – always when he’s away, they’re just sitting there waiting for him whenever he comes back in the evening – Thorin will ask him all casual-like how he likes his rooms, if he’s comfortable, etc. And Bilbo is grateful of course and always expresses his appreciation for dwarven craftsmanship and Thorin seems pleased by his responses. But then that armchair – it’s big, alright, but a bit too big: he practically has to jump to get into it, he jokes. But really, he appreciates it, he rushes to add, not wanting to offend. But then the next evening, he comes back to find a different armchair in its place, not as tall, wider, not quite so plush… This one, he finally admits, after a bit of surprisingly intense interrogation, isn’t quite as soft as he’d like – and then the next day, it’s gone too, replaced with another one. Then another, and another. Every time Bilbo admits to any sort of flaw in the furniture, it is immediately whisked away and a new one takes its place. Bilbo is at his wit’s end by now, and he finally tells Thorin that he hopes at least the carpenters and upholstery shops of Erebor are being paid well, because if he’s quite honest nothing is ever going to replace his lovely old worn-in armchair from Bag End, but he feels so terribly ungrateful and he really doesn’t mean to complain but Thorin keeps asking—

Thorin goes quiet at that and then nods once and leaves him be. A few months go by and spring arrives at last, and with it the first caravan of dwarves traveling from Ered Luin, Thorin’s sister Dís among them. And with them, she reveals with a smirk, are a couple of wagons full of some very familiar things: trunks of clothing and dishes and Belladonna Took’s hope chest and, of course, Bilbo’s well-loved old armchair. Thorin, it turns out, had sent a raven to his sister and asked her to stop off in the Shire on her way east. (Dís figures this can be her engagement gift for whenever her idiot brother finally gets his head out of his arse and actually asks the halfling to marry him.) Bilbo is understandably in shock, especially since Thorin hadn’t talked to him about it at all before ordering a raid on Bag End, and they haven’t once since the end of the war discussed how long Bilbo will be staying in Erebor, and Thorin is just sort of slowly realizing that what had initially seemed like a grand romantic gesture in his mind might actually be a big, bad, high-handed, controlling kingly thing to do… But then Bilbo just turns to him and asks his opinion on building permanent gardening plots out on the balcony off his rooms, all while directing the movers where to put his things. And the two of them can’t stop grinning at each other because he’s staying, he’s really staying.