Work Text:
1919
It was not death precisely that Frodo thought about so regularly in that bright shining afterwards year. The process of becoming dead, the methodology of dying, was of only faintest concern and had been quite demystified besides. The prospect of deadness in itself, however, was in some ways very compelling.
Some nights—very early mornings, perhaps—Frodo lay awake in bed with Sam asleep beside him, Sam’s heavy arm over his chest, Sam breathing his hot living breath on Frodo’s neck, and Frodo would turn his head and whisper into Sam’s hair: why doesn’t it hurt you? why aren’t you sad and frightened? how is it that you can go on? Only when Sam was very deeply asleep, mind. In the days before Elanor as well, because after she was born no one in the house slept very deeply.
Sleep often eluded him, as did rest, the distinction between which he had not fully understood before his and Sam’s ordeal. When he did occasionally manage to sleep, he woke somehow more tired than before. Long days seemed to pass in a fearful grayish haze, as though the despair and evil that he had carried with him for so long had left a film over his eyes and heart. Like his soul was a mug washed in hard water.
Frodo spent those days writing in a dizzy fury, words pouring out of his pen and into Bilbo’s red-covered book. If he could get it all out on the page, he thought, it would no longer be sitting still and heavy inside of him. But the purgation did not seem to work as it should; it was as if the parchment were his own skin, the words tattooed over him for all to see his fear and loss and longing. It weighed on him, no matter what.
Sam was, naturally, a balm. He had warm hands and broad shoulders and an unstudied accent, and for some brief and beautiful moments he filled up the whole plane of Frodo’s vision. That was the thing about Sam: the sheer thereness of him. There in every possible kind of sickly darkness, there in the light.
Frodo liked to sleep with the windows open to let in the damp and moonlight and quiet. He felt more of a human being in the night air, in the dark. On nights when Sam slept elsewhere Frodo would get up and skulk about the house. But many a pathetic midnight-morning hour he’d passed awake since his return to England, in bed with Sam’s head on his chest and waiting for the dawn.
1913
Frodo had been, as a small child, quite frequently shunted about between the fine homes of distant and disinterested family members before Bilbo decided to keep him, and thus was afflicted by both a rich lad’s ignorance of material consequences and an orphan’s glum acceptance of every possible worst-case scenario. Therefore when Bilbo departed, it had somehow not occurred to Frodo that Bag End (alongside Bilbo’s other many and varied holdings) would be left in his name and given over to his stewardship. After all the initial fuss had gone on and all the relatives had departed, Sam was the one to find him in Bilbo’s study attempting with shaking hands to rearrange the incredible piles of paper there into something that made sense.
“It’ll keep, Mister Frodo,” Sam said.
“I ought to—it’s my duty to—” Frodo stuttered, unable to articulate exactly what his duty was, aside from maintaining a sense of self-punishing urgency. “It’s all got to get done, doesn’t it.”
“Well I didn’t say it would keep forever,” Sam said, “and it does have to get done at some point, sure, especially as the deed to my gaffer’s lot is somewhere in that pile if I’m not wrong. But the sky won’t fall if you take a day or so to rest and breathe and eat summat.”
Frodo let out a breath which he would not permit himself to call a sob.
Sam laid one broad and comforting hand on the join between Frodo’s neck and shoulder. Frodo, in a fit of sartorial carelessness which Bilbo would have derided had he been present, had foregone a necktie when dressing that morning and so the side of Sam’s hand pressed warmly into the thin skin over his pulse. Sam’s hand at the very junction of his lifeblood: Frodo wasn’t too far gone in his distress to find something poetical there. His heart in Sam’s hands.
“I won’t say that supper’ll cure all, but it certainly won’t make anything worse,” Sam said. And he fetched Frodo a hideously ugly and very warm shawl from Bilbo’s as yet un-pruned collection, wrapped it about his shoulders, and shepherded him into the kitchen where it was sunlit and already smelled heartily of leeks and bone broth. In reciting the litany of Sam’s virtues, one could not forget that chief among them was his cooking ability.
In an ordinary house, Frodo might never have set foot in the kitchen, not unless something had gone terribly wrong. But Bilbo had been a queer sort of householder who hadn’t like to keep servants beyond the absolutely necessary. Bag End hadn’t so much as a live-in housemaid, only a cook and a scullery who came up from the village. And Sam, of course, for the outdoor work. Always Sam.
Frodo sat in his habitual seat at the kitchen table—not the head, that was not for him yet, or ever—and let Sam serve him a deep bowl of hot soup. Sam only stood on ceremony when he judged it necessary and so didn’t hesitate to sit across from Frodo at the table with his own bowl (though he had given Frodo the second-best china, and himself old ceramic.) And they sat together and ate in pleasantest silence until the weight Frodo imagined on his shoulders had sloughed off a bit.
“How bad is it likely to be, Sam?” Frodo asked. Estate management wasn’t the sort of thing a person might think Sam was good at, from the look of him. One might look at his broad hands with the dirt under the nails and one might make uncharitable assumptions of his capabilities. But Sam was a jack-of-all-trades and nosy besides, and could always be relied upon for a perfectly accurate summation of the social and financial situation of any individual in the county. This, to Frodo’s mind, was easily over half the work of it all, and why he could only ever be hopeless at land stewardship and would most likely supervise the ruin of the Baggins name.
“I don’t like to speak ill of the—well, I don’t like to speak ill, but I’ll be honest and tell you that Mister Bilbo weren’t never the most orderly nor dedicated landlord,” Sam said.
This was not surprising news. Bilbo had many fine qualities, but one couldn’t name a talent for systematic organization among their number. Frodo nodded for Sam to continue.
“He let us all do mostly as we liked, collected the rents and whatnot when he felt like it. Which was maybe less often than he ought’ve, per se.”
“When you say ought,” said Frodo, trailing off as he balanced his spoon very precisely on the rim of his empty bowl.
Sam sucked his teeth thoughtfully. “Ought in the sense of what the average, ordinary landlord might do. I never heard anything about Mister Bilbo having terrible debts or whatnot, and believe me that’s the kind of thing you do hear of. So—Lord knows how—I think he was solvent.”
This was the best news Frodo could have received, and he slumped into the shawl.
Sam laughed, and the kitchen warmly absorbed the sound. “You’ll be alright, Mister Frodo. I’ll make it so.”
Having forgotten his posture, he buried his face in the hideous puce fringe of Bilbo’s shawl and found, wretchedly, that it still smelled of Bilbo’s tobacco. Bilbo had always smoked an unusually harsh blend, for which he said he had developed a weakness in his misspent youth. The scent made Frodo sneeze and then it made him bury his head in his hands and cry.
He heard the scraping of Sam’s chair on the hygienic tiling which Bilbo had installed only last year. Warm arms came around his shoulders. Frodo burned with diverse shames.
“I’m sorry, Sam, I am sorry,” he said into his palms as if he could press the awful sucking sobs back down into his own lungs. “Ignore me, please. I am sorry.”
“Hush. Sorry for naught,” said Sam.
Frodo wept. Sam held him, his heart beating steady beneath his worn cotton shirt. The wet miserable convulsions eventually ceased and the horrible grip of sorrow eventually loosed on his diaphragm and thus Frodo, weakened by strong emotion and entirely helpless to do anything else, leaned up with eyes closed and kissed the corner of Sam’s mouth.
“Aw, alright,” said Sam, and kissed him back hard and wet with the taste of leeks in both their mouths. Nothing Frodo had ever done had felt so proper and correct.
1919
Frodo’s days, in this house which he haunted as Sam crafted a beautiful living family around him, were long. There were predictable interruptions: Frodo could divide his days into periods before Sam woke, after Sam left to work for the day, after Sam returned and Elanor and Rosie had gone to bed. And, every day at two exactly, tea. It made Sam happy to have the whole household together for tea each afternoon, cheered him to see their three faces and make sure they were all eating well. Frodo adored and dreaded teatime equally.
“—Only, y’see, she had took up with Isidore while he was gone. Imagine that,” Sam said.
Rosie chuckled knowingly, shifting the weight of Elanor at her breast.
“Imagine that. Isidore, really?” Rosie said.
Frodo tried, half-heartedly, to remember who exactly Isidore might be. His memory for names and faces, dismal before he left, was entirely defective now he’d returned. Sometimes he thought he could hardly hold a thought in his head from moment to moment, much less any memory of other people’s lives and small dramatics. He’d become selfish, the sucking void at the tea-table.
It made Frodo feel as if he was listening at doors sometimes, listening to Sam and Rosie talk. As thought he was catching a forbidden glimpse into the closed world of genuine neighborliness, the sort of butter-borrowing, gossiping orbit which Frodo knew existed around him but could never be permitted to join. He supposed if he was lonely there were some university fellows he might have called upon. Frodo had gone to Cambridge, of course, King’s, because it was where Bilbo had gone once upon a time, and where his dead father had done the same slightly more recently. But a return to those strange, foolish days seemed as impossible as a warm entry into the Gamgees’ interior neighborhood.
Frodo finished crumbling a bit of toast into his saucer such that both he and Sam would be able to pretend that he’d eaten something. He smiled at the Gamgees, handsome and splendid and shining all three of them, and departed the room in silence.
There were birds singing, noisily melodious, in the hedge outside. Frodo could hear them through the open windows when he passed through the foyer. It was the season for it, where the birds returned in force and made one realize all at once that they had vanished for an entire quiet winter. Frodo had no ear for bird calls, couldn’t say whether it was a robin or an albatross in the garden. But it was nice to hear all the same.
1913
It was far too beautiful a spring day to stay indoors, so Sam and Frodo had removed to the removes of Bag End’s grounds. There was a particular hillock which Frodo liked, out of the sight of the house, where a stately lovely willow had been planted long ago in memoriam of some relative or another. On a day like this, with the new grass green and the sun bright enough to burn off the mist and the wind finally warm, it was a heaven. They curled together on the damp soil beneath the tree, Sam’s head on Frodo’s shoulder and Frodo’s arms around his chest. Frodo’d brought a book but didn’t open it.
“We ought to go away, Sam-dear,” Frodo said. “We’ll go somewhere no one knows us and we can be free. Morocco, or the south of France. Some warm and lovely Riviera.”
Sam laughed a hot breath into the underside of Frodo’s chin. “And what would I do in France? Can’t hardly grow English roses in that type of soil. Too hot, I’m certain.”
“You’re my English rose,” Frodo said, and he could feel the flutter of lashes on his neck as Sam rolled his eyes.
“Atlantis, I say. Ought to be damp enough there for a good old Somerset garden.”
Frodo sat up a bit, pushing Sam off so he could look him in the face. “Stop it, Sam, I’m being serious. I honestly mean it—we could go tomorrow.”
Sam rolled away from him with a rustle of the grass. “Frodo—“
“Well, not tomorrow. I know that. But soon. I want to. I almost think we must, if we’re to go on like this.”
“Must nothing,” said Sam. He curled up a bit in the grass, his back still to Frodo, and when a beetle buzzed close to his ear he swatted at it diffidently and missed.
“Oh, what is it,” said Frodo, trying not to be cross. He hadn’t known what he was going to say even as he said it, but the whole plan seemed terribly possible the moment it left his lips.
“I’ve responsibilities. People who’d miss me.”
Frodo stayed quiet. The willow danced shadows across Sam’s face.
“Or people who wouldn’t miss me so much, if they knew where I’d gone and for what.”
“Sam—“
“No, let me think aloud a bit. You know you’re family to me, you must know that,” he said with a beseeching glance. “I do know that we’re family to each other.”
There was a pause, in which the only sound was
“But my Gaffer and sisters and brothers, they love me, Frodo, they do. Only it’s easier, for them to love me and me to love them, if—well, if I’m normal. They love me better if I do what I ought, and I can’t stop loving them. Or I don’t want to.”
Sam sighed. Frodo took Sam’s hand in his own.
“Maybe that’s childish in it’s own way, sure. But I’ve things here I’m too afraid to give up.”
Frodo brought Sam’s dear hand up to his mouth and pressed his lips to Sam’s knuckles.
“We can love each other just as well here. We must, so we shall,” Frodo said.
1919
Rosie was lovely, straightforward and kind. But there was nothing, could be nothing finer in the world than Elanor. Frodo had never had much cause in his youth to spend time with either women or young children; if Rosie was a benediction unto Frodo’s life, Elanor was an epiphany.
Her tiny hands, curling and uncurling around nothing, grasping so cleverly whatever was within her reach. Her bright hair, which surely must be the softest and yellowest thing in the world.
He did not like to hold her, because to do so might mean pressing her tiny cheek to the cold numb place on his shoulder or cradling her delicate neck with the gruesome fingerless hand. But he traced the shape of her wee chin as she lay swaddled in her cradle in the kitchen, and she sometimes smiled at him when she was old enough to do so with meaning. She knew only the shivering craven Frodo he was now, stripped of the genteel carapace with which Sam had fallen in love. And still she smiled.
“You’re too good, aren’t you,” Frodo said to her. “Too sweet for me.”
She cooed and gurgled in return, sounding like nothing so much as a little bird.
If he were to vanish now, she wouldn’t remember him at all. He’d be an Uncle Frodo, or more likely a Mister-Baggins-Who-Your-Father-Was-Friends-With-In-The-War. Perhaps they’d keep a photograph on the mantelpiece, like other families who had lost a lad or two. She wouldn’t miss him, not much.
1913
“What are you reading there, then?” Sam asked. He tapped a casual finger on the spine of the book as he passed Frodo’s armchair in the library, and Frodo—as he always did when Sam evinced such a casual inclination to nearness as no one else had ever seemed to do—melted a bit in the shoulders.
Frodo rested his own finger just where Sam’s had touched, and answered: “It’s the Symposium. Plato.”
Sam sank into another chair opposite Frodo with a hearty old-mannish sigh, one of the unconscious mannerisms he’d adopted from his Gaffer.
From his pocket Sam withdrew a pocket knife and a bit of wood he’d been carving into the shape of a pony. Sam disdained idleness in himself and distrusted it in others, though he had kindly expanded his definition of employment to include most of the useless ways Frodo spent his own time.
“And what’s Plato on about?” Sam asked, shepherding the shavings into a small pile on his knee.
“He says that each person in the world is actually only half of a person, that we were all split in two and must constantly search for our other half. And the feeling of fulfilment and joy when you find the other half of yourself is what we call love.”
“That’s nice, I suppose,” said Sam in the not-listening tone he adopted whenever he thought Frodo was piling it on a bit too thick. “Romantic and all.”
“And he says,” said Frodo, “that some of these split-apart people are two men.”
Sam looked up. “You joking?”
“I’m not. I mean it is comedic, a bit, but he’s serious about that. About men being—being in love. Men who are meant for one another.”
Sam looked down at the trinket he was whittling for a bit, fidgeting with it rather than carving, and when he raised his head again he was crying.
“Sam-dear?” said Frodo, setting aside Aristophanes and half rising from his chair.
Sam sniffled and wiped his eyes with the back of his wrist.
“No, no, I’m alright. I just think it’s good someone wrote that. And I’m glad you read it, and I’m glad you could tell it to me.”
1919
That night was the second night in a row that Sam slept in Frodo’s bed. Frodo, pretending to sleep, was worried. Sam was ordinarily very diligent about a fair rotation. Diligent to the point of occasional awkwardness. But that night, Sam slipped into Frodo’s bed after he’d already slept for the length of one miserable nightmare and woken again.
“I’ve asked you to do so much for me,” Sam said, his breath lifting the hair on Frodo’s sweating forehead. “It doesn’t hardly make sense, what all you’ve let me make you do.”
Frodo kept his eyes shut and his breathing steady. Sam knew him inside and out; it was Sam, after all, who’d held him down in the shell-hole and pressed a field dressing to his shoulder, who had seen the sour seething mess beneath the skin and beside his heart—he must have had some sense that Frodo was awake.
“And if there was a way I could do more for you and ask you to do less for me and keep it all together and moving as it ought—well. But I’ve thought on it and I don’t know what I can do.” Sam clutched at him with warm, shaking hands. That wasn’t right. Sam oughtn’t shake.
“I’m sorry, Frodo, and I’m afraid, and I hate to be happy when you aren’t. I make myself sick sometimes.”
Frodo, unable to stand any more, surged upwards from his sweat-soaked tangle of sheet and nightshirt and Sam’s arms.
“Stop it, stop! It’s not you, Sam, it’s never you.”
He turned over to look Sam in the face. Sam’s eyes were sad in the moonlight, and Frodo surged forward to kiss him, his mouth and cheeks and eyelashes and brow, so Sam might stop making such a terrible face.
“Sometimes I think you’re the only perfect thing that’s ever happened to me, and I’ve never earned anything less than all the good you’ve done me,” said Frodo.
“Hush,” said Sam, kissing the tip of Frodo’s ear. “It can’t be about earning, buying and selling and deserving and all that.”
“I used to be so happy. I don’t know what happened to me. I used to be happy with you, and for you, and I do so want to be again.”
Sam slid a calming hand over Frodo’s shoulder, tucking him once more under the sheets. “You will be, I think. I hope. But even if you aren’t, I’ll be here, and Rosie and Elanor and this house around you. We can all do good to each other, I suppose.”
And Frodo was tired, so he went to sleep with the cool night air on his neck and Sam’s mouth on his forehead.