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“I think in his heart, Frodo is still in love with the Shire.”
It was not often Gandalf felt old. He had work to do, countless places to go and tasks to fulfill. He had the fire burning in him to do, to inspire, and the ring on his hand to booster that flame inside him.
But with his fingers tracing the old map, watching Bilbo look out the window, he suddenly felt very old indeed. Perhaps even guilty. For many years may have passed, and Bilbo may have stood the ages better than many a Hobbit, but he was old now too, and Gandalf still expected to walk by and see the same young Hobbit that had wished him a good morning.
He dragged a young Hobbit out into the world and the world broke his heart and sent him back.
Huffing out another smoke ring as they sat in the twilight that night, Gandalf tried not to think about the map laid out on Bilbo’s table. It had seen hard days, more torn than when he had presented it to Thorin sixty years ago, worn away at the creases from use, and fingers running over the parchment.
Bilbo didn’t take much treasure from Erebor, and certainly not his fourteen percent. But sometimes Gandalf wondered who had given him that map. The dwarves now had little use for it, having retaken the mountain but it was an heirloom, a treasure from their royal line.
But it now sat in a Hobbit hole, and the Hobbit dreamed of mountains.
Perhaps if he had known, Gandalf thought, perhaps if that day with the sun shining he could have seen what would become of the burglar and the wayward would-be King Under the Mountain, he would have walked away and there would have been no mark on that green door.
He could not change the past any more than he could mend a heart broken for over sixty years. So when Bilbo spoke of leaving, of seeing mountains again, Gandalf thought about the way Thorin would have looked at Bilbo, and the way Bilbo had leaned toward him. He thought of the expression of despair and the physical look of a soul that may never mend and he nodded.
Because though Bilbo still adored the Shire, he did not love it in his heart anymore, the way a good, respectable Hobbit would.
For he had loved mountains and mountains had loved him.