Archive of Our Own

Chapter Text

When his stomach is empty and his feet are aching and he feels like he cannot take another step towards Mordor without collapsing into a heap of tears and dust and gravel, Sam thinks of home.

He thinks of the way the dew clings to the rich green grass in the morning, he thinks of the sweetness of his favorite herb infused honey, how the sun filters in through it when he sets the jar in the window, gold encased sprigs of rosemary, of sage. He thinks of the frogs by the pond, conducting their business by lavender dusk-light. Their croaky chorus after the sun sets, and how the whole Shire smells of mouldering hay and night blooming jasmine and woodsmoke spilling out of his neighbors’ chimneys when he’d wander home from Frodo’s after dark. He thinks of the moon and her hazy white halo, spreading around her in the inky blue-blackness on misty nights, flooding out like the fatty oil melting from a pat of butter in a cast iron pan.

He thinks of manure baking in the heat, and the prickle of primrose stems against his calloused fingers as he prunes them, and of the particular sort of loneliness that comes with falling asleep alone, because even his memories of the less savory parts of the Shire still comfort him now.

Sam is realizing more and more that there are so many things he took for granted.

The earth is so much crueler, the further they travel from home. He slips down crumbling rock, grabbing handfuls of dry, brushy roots from which to cling to keep from losing purchase as he watches Frodo scramble ahead of him, the muscles of his back bunched tight beneath his dirty wool cloak.

It’s odd, how death feels so final out here, where it seemed like just another part in an ever-turning wheel in the Shire, not an end but a beginning. Things rotted back home; they became rich and wet and brown-smelling, they gave birth. But here, things simply crisp, and turn to dust. There is ash and dirt under his nails, pebbles imbedded in his palms, and when he grips branches to heave himself up narrow paths through the nothingness of Emyn Muil, he hopes they will hold his weight, and not snap. He never wondered such a thing, in the Shire. Everything felt flexible and supple and new enough to withstand bending, there. So, he pretends every tree is a tree he knows.

Sam follows and follows, and dreams of the thick white foam of The Green Dragon’s house ale, how it would slosh out over his hand when he’d clink his glass to Frodo’s for a toast. He thinks of chewing on buttercups in the summer, and the screaming laughter of children in the spring, and the spicy, citrusy smell of mulled wine in the winter, the crunch of maple leaves under his boots in the fall. And then, most of all, most of all—he thinks of Mister Frodo’s smile, and how easily it was to make it happen, back home. It was a reflexive, simple thing back then: a flash of white, a bubbling sweetness, like water in a fresh brook.

Sam thinks of Frodo’s smile, and Frodo’s laugh, because even though they get to spend every moment together as they travel, he hasn’t gotten to witness either of those things in a long while , it seems. So, they become part of his lost, longing memories from home. Mister Frodo lying in the thicket just outside of Bag End curled around a book, blow furrowed as he read. Mister Frodo glistening in lake water after jumping off the dock, shaking his hair out with his head thrown back, droplets chasing each other down the ditch of his spine and shining on his skin like fool’s gold. Mister Frodo holding Sam’s gaze across the yard in conspiratorial silent mirth while Bilbo went on and on about something nonsensical, the color of his eyes the same infinite blue as the sun-spilled sky. Mister Frodo as Sam remembers him: a far cry from the worn out husk of a person the Ring has made him become.

It’s not the sort of thing that stops Sam from loving him, though. He doesn't think those sorts of things exist, not in the Shire and not miles and miles beyond it, where death is death and wood breaks and crumbles to ash like it’s already been burnt. So at night, as Frodo sleeps fitfully while he claps the Ring in a bloody fist, Sam holds these memories in his own palms like they’re marbles: fragile little glass worlds, warmed by his skin.

——

They are always dirty and they are always tired, and Sam should hate every moment of this journey but sometimes, after they cover a particularly long stretch of cruel terrain, Frodo’s head will drift to his shoulder as they try to sleep and he’ll find himself holding his breath, wishing he could stop time.

Sam loves the smell of his hair, even though it’s changed over the last few weeks. It usually smells like cooking, spices and fried oil. Or sometimes, after he’s been reading out in the willow thicket, it will smell like sun and wildflowers and freshly cut grass. Sam knows this because he has spent much of his life stealing things from Frodo which are not his. Old shirts he will not miss, loose buttons from his braces, roses from the carefully tended bushes outside the kitchen window. But, most of all, lingering inhalations of him. His hair, his clothes, his breath when he laughs too close to his face in the pub, knees notched together under the table like a secret. Sam knows all the ways Frodo usually smells, because he has made a terrible hobby of breathing him in.

But Frodo doesn’t smell like The Shire anymore. It has long since faded, the notes of homemade lavender soap, dried parsley, the chicory in Bilbo’s kitchen, drifting into nothingness. These days, Frodo mostly smells like salt. Salt from tears, salt from fear-sweat, salt from the brackish mist that settles on their skin and seeps into their clothes as they hike miles and miles up the Eastern Shore. There’s salt and there’s dirt, there’s dirt and there’s and terror, there’s terror and mine-silt, and under it all of it is the faint breath of sulfuric smoke, like Mordor is reaching fingers out into the distance to grab at them.

Still, Sam would rather have Frodo close enough to bury his face in than anywhere else, ever. He would rather smell the sadness on him than not have him to smell at all.

This is where we belong, he thinks at night, sucking in lungfuls, and it’s a crazy thing to thing so far away from home, but it’s what comes to him, so it’s the truth. And sometimes, with Frodo’s dirty dark curls tickling his cheek as they lie side by side almost nesting spoon-tight, a chilling wind will whip past and Frodo will frown, and whine, and settle closer.

On nights like these, Sam tries to keep his breathing even as he curls an arm around Frodo’s body and draws him close, so the curve of his spine fits right against his own chest as it should, and there’s no space for even the breeze to force icy fingers between them. In these moments he lets his fingers curl against Frodo’s sternum, and sometimes the ring will graze the back of his hand, stinging line nettles, like fire. But he hardly even notices the distant prickle of it touching him, for Frodo’s heartbeat thuds under the the spread of his palm, and that’s a much more wondrous thing to hold, he thinks.

—-

Sam is not sure they’re going to get out of this mess alive, but he has to hope they will, in order to keep traveling. He’ll lose momentum if he loses hope, and he has to stay strong for Frodo, strong enough to protect him. To hold his heart beat at night when the ground freezes.

So, he promises himself once it’s all over and they’re back in the Shire, he’ll tell Frodo everything: that there’s a reason he’d rather drown that watch Frodo disappear into the horizon line like a bird flying south for the winter. That he’s loved him his whole life.

He knows it’s the sort of secret best kept locked away for an eternity, but this is not the first time Sam has convinced himself he could tell the truth. He’s gotten so close before, so many times, twisting his hands in the hem of his shirt, cheeks burning red while Frodo peers at him with a sweet, tilted half-smile and asks, Samwise Gamgee, what is it you’re blushing about?

Sam has invented so many false secrets just to avoid telling this one, and he realizes that was such a mistake, now that it’s too late.

The night of Bilbo’s party, Sam came closer than ever before. And now, with his feet bleeding and his stomach in knots and his heart heavy with the sort of grief that comes from watching good men die, he wonders if he could have avoided this whole mess, if he’d only bucked up enough courage to tell Frodo then and there, when he was drunk and longing and felt like he wouldn’t survive one more day trying to contain such a vast sea of yearning. His love was going to burst up through his throat like a flood that night, so, he’d thrown down a shot of brandy sometime after he and Frodo parted, and set off into the night to find him again, to tell him everything.

He remembers every moment of it. How giddy and wild and desperate he’d felt. The scalding, stone-heavy liquor in his gut as he stumbled down the path between his house and Bag End, the way his hands stung from the memory of Frodo’s tunic bunching between them as they’d held onto each other while they laughed, while they sang, while they celebrated. He remembers rehearsing his speech to the rhythm of his footsteps, everything he’d meant to say when he got there: Mister Frodo, I wish I’d told you sooner, or never at all, but— but I can’t stand it any longer. It’s not Rosie who I fancy, it’s not her at all. I only told you that so you’d have someone to think of whenever I said something romantic-like, something about beautiful blue eyes, or soft smooth skin perfect for kissing, hands I wish I could hold. But the truth is, all of that is just meant for you. You’re the prettiest thing in the whole Shire. You’re the one I think of when I think about getting married. It’s you, you, you, it’s always been you, and I know m’not the sort of person you’d ever think twice about that way, but I can’t keep it from you any longer, Mister Frodo. I can’t. And I’m sorry, I just. I had to tell you the truth.

But once he was there, in the very yard he painstakingly pruned just the morning before, he lost his nerve. The urgency drained out of him in favor of fear and all he wanted was to see Frodo again, to smell the ale on his breath, to watch the incredulous, exasperated tilt of his brows. He wanted to make him laugh, he wanted to catch sight of his slender pale neck backlit in moonlight, he wanted to—he wanted—

Instead of any of those things, though, he spotted Gandalf through the window. So he crouched in the rosebushes and waited, feeling foolish, and hearing too much.

And it’s a stupid, selfish thing to do, to wonder if your own cowardice brought about the end of the world when you are nothing but a small hobbit too frail to contain a vast love, but still. Sam wonders if things could have turned out differently, if only he’d said all he wanted to say that night.

—-

It doesn’t seem fair that such a vile, hateful creature should get to touch Mister Frodo so much.

Gollum always has his bony clammy hands on him, though. Petting his cloak idly, twisting into the dark curls of his hair like Sam dreams of doing.

But he’s not jealous of Gollum, not exactly. It’s more that it feels wrong, for Frodo to endure such a thing when he’s so weak and exhausted from carrying the ring. Wrong for evil to continue to leave fingerprints all over the snowdrifts of skin when he’s already got so many terrible pink scars around his neck from the chain forever hanging from it. Wrong for him to think of someone else’s pain when he’s so consumed by his own, his shoulder so stiff in the morning when he wakes up wincing and red-eyed and still so pretty Sam has to look away to keep from grinding his teeth together in resentment.

All he wants is to protect Frodo. Keep massive burning eyes from sweeping over his body, keep fishy wet fingers from fisting needy and pathetic in his clothes. He wants to protect him but it’s an impossible thing to do, when Sam doesn’t know the way to the Black Gate, and is just as guilty of wanting to touch, just as needy, just as pathetic.

Perhaps he hates Gollum so much because Frodo keeps him closer, needs him more. Perhaps buried deep inside Sam, there’s the ugly fear that he is being replaced by something insidious, something which lies. And he can’t even say anything about it because he’s been lying, too. He’s lied to Frodo as long as they’ve known each other, and maybe that means he’s no different. That he’s a vile, hateful creature himself.

It’s easier to pin all his hate on Gollum, though, than it is to press on the ways in which he holds a grime-streaky mirror to all Sam’s most shameful parts. So, he simply hates him. He hates his hands, he hates the way they are always reaching for Frodo, the way they cling to him, pull at him, drag him down, weigh upon an already impossible weight.

Don’t touch him Sam thinks on a frantic loop but does not say, because there are only so many times he can scream something before his throat becomes irreparably raw and hoarse, when blood comes up with every useless word.

——

The ring is gone, but they are going to die all the same.

They’re mired amid a sea of molten earth ever encroaching, sitting side by side struggling to breathe burning air and waiting for it to overtake them when Sam thinks, this is the last chance I’ll ever have to tell him I was in love with him. I am in love with him.

He inhales sharply and turns to Frodo, who is spread out on their island of volcanic rock, eyes the brightest and palest blue, peering from a mask of dirt, clearer than Sam has seen them in weeks. Unburdened. At peace. The shine of them reminds Sam of that very last night they spent in the Shire celebrating Bilbo’s birthday, Frodo’s incandescent smile and twinkling gaze as he goaded Sam into dancing with Rosie because he thought—because Sam let him think that was what he wanted.

And even now, lit up in flame, Frodo is still as breathtakingly beautiful as he was that night, as blissfully unaware, and before Sam can stop himself he starts to cry, because—because he cannot ruin Frodo’s last moment of remembering home with such a confession.

So, he does not tell him the truth. He lies to him about Rosie instead.

He chokes it out through his tears, and Frodo sits up to hold him, to pull him close and in this moment, his hair smells like it used to: fresh green and sweet tea leaves and home, and home, and home.

It’s better this way, Sam thinks. He doesn’t want their last moments to be stained with his dirtiness, he doesn’t want the long festering filth of his want to kill Frodo’s pure, untroubled memory of their home. It should remain preserved, he decides. Packed safe and sterile in the very best herb salt from the Shire, which Sam has carried with him so carefully all this way.

Chapter Text

It is strange, to be in Gondor.

To eat rich food, wear clean clothes, lie alone upon a vast bed between fresh linens.

Sam suspects he won't be able to sleep tonight, no matter how bone-deep his exhaustion is, because it’s all just so different from the persistent discomfort and threat of danger he's grown used to. So different than having Frodo by his side, drifting off to the sound of his labored exhalations, sending wishes to the stars that they both wake still breathing.

So, he very nearly thinks he’s imagining things when he hears a soft rap on the door. But then there’s Frodo’s voice, soft like a tattered ribbon tied around the familiar beat of his name. “Sam?” he asks, knocking again. “Are you awake?”

“Yes, Mister Frodo!” he calls, scrambling out of bed to unlatch the too-tall, too heavy door. It swings open with some difficulty, and Frodo looks so small on the other side. Scarred and moon-light pale.

“I couldn’t sleep,” he murmurs, gaze skirting unsteadily over Sam’s face. “As it turns out, I cannot be away from you.”

‘I couldn’t sleep either,” Sam admits, heart leaping. He reaches for Frodo, steers him inside. “You can share my bed, if you’d like. I reckon it’s big enough for five hobbits.”

Frodo smiles a watery smile and climbs in, curling into a tight, defensive shape as Sam clambers up beside him. “Thank you, Sam. You must…you must think I’m foolish,” Frodo murmurs, frowning. “After all we’ve been through, after all the pain and danger, that I’d be able to do something as simple as sleeping alone.”

“No, no. I think nothing like that,” Sam promises. “Why, it’s precisely because of all the pain and danger that sleeping is so hard. Come here,” he says then, reaching out into the nest of sheets Frodo has buried himself in. And all he means to do is reassuringly squeeze his hand, but Frodo does not let go, he tugs him closer until they’re sharing the same pillow and Frodo is pressed flush and trembling up against Sam’s side.

Having him this close without the guise of protecting him from some concrete threat makes Sam’s breath catch, his heart speed up under the weight of Frodo’s cheek. He wills it so steadiness, and marvels at how warm he is, how solid and real. Sam realizes in this moment that it has not yet sunk in as reality, that they’re both alive. That Frodo is ok, that he didn’t tumble into the fire after the Ring, that they didn’t get swallowed up together, still flanking Sam’s final lie. And oh, Sam wants to touch him. He wants to touch him so, so badly, feel every inch of him, prove to himself that he’s really here. So many awful, evil things have touched Frodo since they left the Shire, and Sam wants, more than anything, to scrub him clean of their filth. Restore him back to the way he was before, remove his hurt like a splinter, clean the wound in vinegar. It’s too much, though, for this moment, and he thinks he might crush Frodo to dust were he to try, so he settles for just holding him, counting his breaths, tracing his ribs through his sleep tunic. “It’s over now” he says, because maybe if he keeps saying it, it will start to feel true.

Frodo makes a sudden sound, muffled against Sam’s shoulder. “Oh, Sam. Sam I’m so, so sorry for the ways I treated you.” He sobs, voice raw with regret. He tightens his fists in Sam’s tunic, pulling him close. “The ring—there’s no way to describe to you, what it does when you have it. The terrible weight. the things it makes you think.”

“Mister Frodo,” Sam mumbles, heart refusing to slow, to still, beating so hard he’s terrified it will give him away. “You don’t need to worry about that no more, the ring is gone.”

But maybe Frodo can’t hear that now, maybe he doesn’t believe it in full, either. “You must know—my trust in you, our friendship? They are the most solid things in the whole universe, to me,” Frodo says fiercely. The hot wet of his tears is sticky on Sam’s throat, and it makes his skin prickle, his stomach swoop. “But the Ring made me question even that, and—I’m so terribly sorry. I said things I didn’t mean, treated you ways you didn’t deserve. And to have you here still means the world, and—I can only pray you’ll forgive me.”

Sam shakes his head, pushes a hand up into Frodo’s hair and razes blunt nails over his scalp, making him gasp softly. “You don’t need to apologize for nothing,” he promises. “And you don’t need to pray, I already forgive you. None of it needs forgiving, all you did—it was because of the Ring. I know it was the Ring, not you.”

Frodo shakes his head, grinds his cheek into the meat of Sam’s shoulder insistently. “But the ring, it was me. It made me, shaped me, like I were clay. And I’m still…wrong, somehow, broken from it. And Sam, I’m so—I’m so frightened,” he hiccups, eyes scrunched shut tight as he rocks in Sam’s arms, pressed so flush it’s hard for Sam to tell where his body ends and where Frodo’s begins, like his tears have adhered them together, bound them in salt, in an unspeakable patina of shared memories. “What if I cannot go back to The Shire, like this? It seems impossible, to return somewhere good when I’m no longer good.”

And all of this stings, but that pierces Sam right in the heart, so startlingly painful, so completely untrue he gasps as he hears it. “Mister Frodo, you listen to me,” he says firmly, finding Frodo’s hot, sticky face in the dark, cupping it between his palms, inhaling his brine-salty breath. “You are so, so good. You are the very best there is, and the Shire is lucky to have a hero like you.” He takes a sharp breath, heart pounding in his chest as he adds, “Folks like me are lucky to know folks like you. The Ring—it’s gone. It didn’t break you. And even if it did, I’m here to fix you up.”

Frodo softens, melts into him like ice in the heat of a closed palm. “Sam,” he murmurs quietly, sniffling as he wipes his eyes on the hem of his tunic. “It is you who are the very best there is.”

And for once, Sam decides he won’t argue the matter. After all, Frodo is settling against him, still warm, still solid, still alive. He curls his arms tight around him and inhales from his hair, and like that, they both stumble into the unfamiliar fold of sleep.

—-

Upon returning to the Shire, Frodo lets Sam move in with him and together, they haunt the round echoey hallways of Bilbo and the Ring’s old home.

It makes sense for Sam to be here, since Frodo can’t sleep without him close enough to reach out and brush searching fingers against in the dark. But still, Sam feels guilty about it. Like he’s getting away with some strange blessing not meant for him.

When his old neighbors ask when he’s returning, he tells them he doesn’t know. I’m staying with Mister Frodo in Bag End, until he gets back on his feet. He gets nightmares, you know. And that alway prompts a whole new host of invasive questions: everyone wants to know what happened on their journey. Or, they think they want to know. They expect whimsy and mystery and adventure, dragons and goblins and giant gold eagles. They expect Sam and Frodo’s story to be like Bilbo’s story, and Sam doesn’t know how to tell them it simply was not. That people died in numbers he still can’t comprehend. That there was blood, and fire, and long lonely stretches of dead land, and more than once he thought he was going to die. That he thought Frodo was going to die, join the fetid corpses in the bog, or bleed out at Weathertop. Their stories are not fit for children, or firelight retellings over ale and broken bread. Frodo’s nightmares are not the sort of thing Sam could ever share in passing, so just shakes his head.

I’ll let him tell you, when he’s up and about, even though Sam’s not sure he knows when or if such a time will come to pass.

—-

Sam finds himself wondering how long he can live this way, loving someone who still carries so much pain, someone who struggles day to day to carry out the simplest tasks. He feels unrelentingly helpless, so he does what he can and busies himself with small, practical tasks.

He plants things, nursing seedlings in the kitchen until they’re strong enough to be planted outside. He cooks stew even if Frodo cannot always eat it, and he brews wormwood tea to help him keep it down, when he does. He rubs homemade herb poultices into the whorled scar on his shoulder, and tries not to look at how lovely Frodo is as he does it, forcing his eyes away from the pale curve of his stomach, the elegant line of his neck in its ribbon of pink scar tissue, where he watches his pulse shudder while he sleeps, because otherwise he worries too much that he’d dead. Sam tidies Bag End, and organizes Bilbo’s old parchments, and every morning, he reminds himself it’s a new day.

And every night, even if his eyes are heavy, he lies awake as Frodo fitfully dreams against him, because he thinks that if he must lose sleep, it should be for Frodo’s nightmares, not his own.

—-

Frodo grounds himself in touching Sam, and Sam’s not sure what to do with that. He wonders if his stupid heart will ever quit stuttering and racing the second Frodo fits himself into his arms, or if he’s doomed to fruitlessly want this impossible thing for the whole of his life. It’s unstoppable, though. Frodo is always entangling their fingers, or sagging against him with a sigh as they smoke in the yard together on the nights that he feels strong enough to venture outside Bag End.

And it’s strange, because this is something Sam’s wanted so desperately for so long. To touch Frodo whatever he desired, For Frodo to need him as profoundly as he needs Frodo. But now that he has a fraction of this life he’s spent years longing for, it doesn’t feel like a prize, it feels maddening. Because it’s not everything he wants, it’s not how he wants it.

Just thinking that makes him feel ungrateful, so he tries to silence it. Tries to be satisfied with the fact Frodo presses close to him, sleeps in his arms, thumbs idly over the bone in his wrist when their hands brush in the kitchen.

Still, it’s a particular sort of pain, eating the crumbs from a crust of a pie, when you are hungry enough to swallow the entire thing whole and still not be sated.

—-

One night they’re lying in bed, Frodo’s head on Sam’s chest, fingers idly smoothing over a button on his tunic when he pauses, inhales shakily and asks, “Sam…do you think things will ever go back to the way that they were?”

And Sam, who survives on sheer, stubborn optimism most days wants to say yes, yes of course they will. Crops will die and rose bushes will freeze over in the winter but come spring, there are always new buds, aren't they? Haven’t you ever built a fire when there’s nothing but a bed of ash in the wood stove?

But he stops himself, because he’s worried it seems like an insensitive thing, after all that Frodo’s been through. After all the truly terminal death they’ve both witnessed. So, after a while he murmurs, “No, but that doesn’t mean things have to be bad, do they? This isn’t so bad, is it?”

And Frodo settles closer, exhales long and slow before he answers, “No, they are not so bad.” And then, he inches his hand up Sam’s chest, so the very tips of his fingers slip into the collar of his sleep tunic to touch skin. “You’re here.”

Sam is hot all over, his stomach is in knots but he manages to say, “And I’ll always be here, Mister Frodo. I’ll look after you forever.”

Frodo makes a sound like a quiet, strangled sob. “My dear Sam. I don’t—I never deserved a friend like you.”

“Why would you say something like that?!” Sam sputters, because it’s the craziest thing he’s ever heard. Frodo deserves the world, he deserves so much more than Sam’s pitiful, dutiful, dirty, stupid love. He deserves someone he wants. Someone who he loves, not just someone who loves him. “You deserve a friend much better than me, Mister Frodo,” he declares, squeezing him close at the mere thought of losing to him to a more honorable hobbit.

Frodo’s laugh is breathy, humorless. “No such friend exists.”

And they lie quietly then, Frodo’s warm fingers against the blood pounding in the hollow of Sam’s throat. Sam keeps very still, and thinks about all the things Frodo still does not know about him, all the silent poison lies, here in the sheets of his very bed they share.

—-

Sometimes, Sam will start to think things are looking up. That the world is back on its way toward the fractured semblance of the past that is their new normal.

Rose bushes thaw, the orange trees blossom. Sam gathers kindling in baskets and dries it out beside the stove, shows Frodo the best ways to start a fire even when all the coals have died and gone cold. He clips armfuls of mint for tea, and rosemary for honey. On good days, Frodo will follow him out into the garden and gaze up at the sun with stunned, blinking, eyes like he cannot believe something so bright still exists, and Sam will let the flutter of hope in his chest stretch its wings, feathers rustling against the edges of his ribcage. Maybe, he thinks, grip tightening along the weathered handle of his rake. Maybe soon, he will smile again.

There are more bad days than good, though. Sometimes Frodo will struggle to leave bed for weeks at a time, refusing to eat, clutching a Sam’s tunic saying he should have died back at Mordor, he shouldn’t have burdened him so by coming home. Sam’s heart breaks in these moments, and as hard as he tries to hold his own tears back in favor of mopping up Frodos, it always makes him overflow to see him like this. So sad, so broken, so lost. As if tossing the ring off Mount Doom was his last moment alive and he’s just a walking ghost now, wandering empty halls and trying to remember what there is in the world worth fighting for.

Still, Sam keeps collecting things. Herbs, fire wood, oranges, the new roses to put in a vase so they don’t get killed in the morning frost. He keeps holding Frodo at night, and talking him down when he spirals heavenward. Even when he loses weight and his eyes become sunken and gaunt and in the most fleeting seconds he looks like Gollum, and Sam’s blood ices over with grief.

—-

One evening in the midst of a thunderstorm, Frodo watches the rain from the kitchen window as Sam chops onions for a soup, so he has an excuse for why he is weeping. Frodo has not spoken for hours, so Sam is startled when he murmurs, “You hated him so much.”

“I hated who?” Sam asks, shielding his eyes, wiping his nose on his tunic.

“Smeagol,” Frodo clarifies. “Gollum. You thought he couldn’t be saved, you told me so and—Sam. I’m so afraid I’m turning into him,” he explains, dropping his gaze, tears shining on his cheeks. “ And I don’t think I could survive becoming someone you couldn’t love.”

Sam drops the knife, and it clatters to the floor. Then he’s sweeping across the room, falling to his knees in a panic where Frodo is sitting at the kitchen table. “Mister Frodo, there is nothing in the whole world you could do to make me stop loving you,” he swears, taking Frodo’s cold hand between both of his own and squeezing it, trying to rub warmth back into him with friction. “I hated Gollum because he hurt you,” he whispers fiercely, holding fast even as Frodo sways too close to him, close enough their brows press together, and he can taste the stale sadness on his breath. “Because he tricked you, and touched you and—oh, I’ve been a fool, haven’t I? I never meant for you to think—“

“I saw myself in him,” Frodo whispers. “I still do.”

And Sam doesn’t know what to say, because he sees Gollum in Frodo, sometimes, too. But it doesn’t make him hate him, it does nothing but make him love Frodo all the more powerfully. I’d love you like that he thinks, squeezing his hand, licking his exhalations from his own chapped lips. I’d love a ribcage and a sour belly full of raw fish, Mister Frodo, as long as they were yours. But it’s too terrible a thing to confess, so instead he reaches up with a tremulous thumb, and wipes the sticky tear-tracks from Frodo’s sunken cheeks.

“Come,” he says, tugging him unsteadily to his feet. “Let me run you a hot bath. I’ll put some lavender oil on your scar, after that, and you can eat some soup, and tomorrow, we’ll try again.”

But as he steers Frodo down the hall to the washroom, he realizes he’s not even sure what they’re trying anymore.

—-

As it turns out, it is amid the darkest darkness that Sam finally finds a foothold in the surrounding shadow.

He is dead asleep when he hears it. Frodo sometimes whimpers in the night, or gasps amid indecipherable murmuring, but this time it’s a full-bodied, bloodcurdling cry. Sam sits bolt upright and finds Frodo, grappling for him in the warm tangle of sheets, only to find the fabric drenched in sweat. “Shh, Mister Frodo, it’s a nightmare, s’not real,” he promises as he grips his narrow shoulders and shakes him awake.

A moment of two passes where Frodo’s eyes are hazy and confused in the moonlight, and then he awakens fully and realizes where he is, throwing himself into Sam’s arms so solidly it knocks his breath out of him. And there they lie, face to face and Sam locked in the cage of Frodo’s arms, unable to move or wiggle away or put himself in a less compromising position. He relents instead, lets Frodo pull him closer, gasping as he twines and interlocks their legs. He struggles to catch his breath, but he just ends up inhaling the smell of Frodo’s hair in frantic lungfuls, the taste of his breath everywhere and it’s too much, it’s too much. Sam makes a choking sound, and allows his hand to push reflexively up under the hem of Frodo’s sleep tunic to touch fever-hot skin, fingers spreading across the lower-most dip of his back, rubbing over the dimples there that frame his spine

At that, time slows like honey left out in the snow.

“You know what I wish?” Frodo asks after a moment, his breath still coming in fast, terrified bursts, hot against Sam’s pulse.

“What?” Sam asks, wondering, wondering, still half-asleep, still drunk on the maddening smoothness of Frodo’s unobstructed skin. There are so many things he would wish, were he granted such a thing. That he could take back every cruel thing he ever said about Gollum Frodo felt reflected back on him. That they’d somehow never left the Shire. That they’d quit their quest in Rivendell. That absolutely none of this had ever happened, that there was no evil in the world to corrupt kind, good, pure people like Frodo at all. “What do you wish?”

Frodo pulls away and his eyes flicker, hard and resolute like he is deciding to plunge head-first into ice water. Like he is making the sort of decision he won’t come back from. “I wish that instead of telling you to go dance with Rosie at Bilbo’s party, that I’d have done what I truly wanted.” And then he wavers like a flame, his eyes shifting up to Sam’s mouth.

“And what’s that?” Sam whispers, squirming with disbelief.

“Pulled you into a dark corner,” Frodo murmurs after a thick swallow, voice the quietest, frailest thing. He uncurls his fingers from the back of Sam’s neck, joints softening, stroking, trembling. “Put my hands here,” he adds, smoothing one down to Sam’s chest over the wild thunder of his heart, and using the other to gently cup his cheek. Sam cannot breathe, Sam cannot speak. He lies frozen between Frodo’s searching palms, the whole of him on fire. “And done this,” Frodo breathes before he kisses him.

It’s sweet, and chaste, and searching. After a fragile moment he pulls away, laughing hollow and sad, leaving Sam there, gasping. “I—I didn’t know it at the time, but that was the last chance I had to do it before…” he trails off, voice whittling into a strangled sob. Sam does not know what he was going to say, but he doesn’t care, he cannot care, because he refuses to believe in last chances, now. They don’t make sense. Not with Frodo in his arms, lips tingling with the memory of him. There is nothing but this: the feel of his body, his hot skin, his unimaginable softness, the rush of his tear salty exhalations huffing over Sam’s lips. He needs more, he needs it, so Sam doesn’t even think as he murmurs, “wait,” and leans in, suffocating the last remaining breath between them. He kisses Frodo again and again. Hungry, desperate, trembling presses of his lips, like the world might end in any moment, like Frodo might disappear, turn to smoke against him.

Instead he pulls away wheezing, mouth the most lovely part of the night, glistening in the half-darkness. “Sam, please, don’t. I am so tired of people feeling sorry for me,” he says. “Treating me like I cannot endure pain, or loss, or anything now that I’ve come back alive and I—I cannot have you acting that way too. You are my only friend. The only one who sees me, who knows, and please, you must not let the way I feel change that.”

Sam can barely hear his voice over the insistent thud of blood roaring in his own ears. Still, he pulls him close, he thumbs the lovely pouting corner of his mouth, rolls him onto his back and palms over his throat, down to the persistent ache of his scar. “Mister Frodo,” he prays. “When Gandalf found me outside your window that night? I was there because I wanted to see you—to touch you once more before I went to bed. To look into your eyes, to hear you laugh. I thought about telling you then, because, you see, I thought every day about telling you, but I was—I’ve always been too much of a coward,” he confesses, every word rushing out of him like blood from a wound.

“Oh Sam,” Frodo murmurs, shaking his head on his pillow, dark hair spread out like a halo around the pale moon of his face. “You are the least cowardly person I know. You are—you’re everything I couldn’t be. All that kept me going.” His eyes are getting hazy and hooded, and he notches their legs together, the whole of him so close and warm and crushable Sam feels like he’s falling apart, like he’s dreaming. “What would you have told me that night? if you—if you had told me?” Frodo asks, like he still doesn’t know. Like he’s not sure he’s dreaming, either.

Sam lets himself bleed, he forgets his tourniquets, his truths he dare not even speak to the end of the world. “That I didn’t want to dance with Rosie,” he admits. “That I followed you home that night. That—I followed you all the way to Mordor, after that, because it’s what people do, when they’re in love.”

Unshed tears glitter at the corners of Frodo’s eyes, and Sam bends his head to kiss them away, hands pushing down to Frodo’s narrow hips, holding him there, soaking up the soft, willing bend of him. “I wanted to kiss you,” he clarifies in a hush, in case Frodo still doesn’t understand. “That night at the party, and the week before that when we fished in the creek, and the week before that when we chased the Took’s chickens back into their coop. And I wanted to kiss you in Moria, and on the Dead Marshes and again, in Emyn Muil, even when you sent me away and broke my heart and—Mister Frodo, I want to kiss you now,” he murmurs, stomach plummeting, cheeks so hot they burn. “I want to kiss you every moment from this one until the last one there is. I always have.”

And Frodo sobs gratefully as he pulls Sam in, and then they’re kissing again, fierce and messy and tender-hot all at once. Eventually Sam gets bold enough to flick his tongue over Frodo’s lips, and he’s terrified it will scare him off but instead Frodo just whines high and soft in the back of his throat and opens up like the mouth of a river, splitting into one hundreds of tiny deltas for Sam to lick up, one by one. And then, they’re truly kissing. How Sam has always wanted to kiss Frodo, how he thought he’d never get to kiss Frodo. Tasting him, sucking his tongue, inhaling his breath, tangling his hair, feeling his pulse speed under the hungry press of his thumb. Wet and rough and sweet and desperate.

The whole time, Frodo kisses him back. He surges against him like warm summer wind, fitting his vacancies, pressing him flush, chasing his lips when Sam pulls back to breathe. “Don’t stop,” he pleads, dragging Sam close by his shirt again, like he cannot stand more than a few seconds without their chests flush enough Sam cannot tell one heartbeat from another. “Please.”

And Sam can hardly believe Frodo is begging for anything from him, but of course, he is more than happy to oblige. He kisses him until their lips are swollen, until their chins are slick with spit, until he’s dizzy with the burning heat that’s been building low and yearning in his gut for so many years. This is where we belong, he thinks, and he doesn’t seem so crazy a thing to think, now, that he’s home.

Chapter Text

They don’t sleep much, that night. Sam is too worried he’ll wake up only to find he invented the whole thing out of want, that Frodo will still be cold and miserable and mired in his thoughts of death on the other side of the bed in the cold light of dawn, but. Even after Sam drifts off for moments at a time before coming to, he finds Frodo pressed into him again and again. And as he’s jostled awake he’ll touch with the same frantic awe he recognizes from his own clumsy hands, pawing up Sam’s chest, into his hair, cupping his face to drag him down to kiss. “You’re still here?” he’ll force out onto Sam’s lips, voice a small, worried, stunned thing.

“Yes, yes Mister Frodo. I’ll never leave,” he promises before he drowns, before bare skin and a wild, messy pulse fill his ever outstretched palms.

And well into the morning, as the sun crawls up over the horizon and slips through the cracks between the curtains, Sam gets to kiss all the places it touches Frodo’s body, trace over them with reverent fingers. Eventually they end up tucked together, and for the first time in weeks. Sam can actually sleep in this position instead of lying awake tied up in anxious knots, wondering if Frodo would still want to lie here, if he knew the ways Sam wanted to touch him.

He closes his eyes, and lets out a long, shuddering, grateful sob into hair that smells like home all over again.

—-

Sam is more than willing to take things very, very slow with Frodo.

After all, he’s waited this long already, and on top of that, he still can hardly believe any of it happening, let alone that he might deserve it. There’s still so much yet to catch up to him, so he has no expectation of what might come to pass. Only hope.

So far, they’ve done nothing more than feverishly kiss all night, rubbing against each other with enough heat and friction Sam has finished more than once, gasping into Frodo’s mouth, wondering if noticed, wondering if he’s done the same, if he’s also shamefully cleaning up after he excuses himself to the washroom. And there are so many more things he wants from Frodo, ways he wants to touch him, ways he wants to be touched, but. He can wait. He will wait, even if it takes a lifetime, because this, here, what they’ve built… is enough. Frodo’s lips swollen from kisses, their lengthy shared meals, the dappled pink marks Sam feels with tender fingers along the plane of his own throat, the ever brightening light hidden in the blue of Frodo’s eyes—they’re all so much more than enough. So much more than he ever dared to hope for.

Sam still cannot believe he gets to kiss Frodo, so he tests reality every chance he has. He kisses his pale face that is only just beginning to fill out again. He kisses his messy curls. He kisses his soft pink lips, the jagged shape of his scar after he’s rubbed herbs into it and it’s shiny with oil.

Now, he gets to tend to that aching scar while straddling his hips in bed, Frodo spread out under him shirtless, as pale and soft as the newly washed sheets. Sam keeps blushing when Frodo catches him staring, and after the second or third time he drops his nervous gaze, he forces out a clipped, “M’sorry.”

“And what are you sorry for?” Frodo asks, trailing his fingers down the drawn tight-plane of Sam’s thigh, careful and light. His eyes flutter closed then, twitching beneath the blue-tint of his lids. “Is it easier to look at me if I don’t watch you do it?” he asks, settling into the pillows, letting his arms fall loosely to his sides in surrender, like he wants to be looked at, like there is no safer place than burning up in the heat of Sam’s adoration.

“It is,” he admits, oily fingers trailing down from his scar to his sternum, his stomach. It’s been hollowed out for weeks, but it’s getting a soft little paunch again, and Sam loves it so. He spreads his palms there tentatively, before sweeping them up, down. With his breath stuck in his throat, he touches Frodo all over, thumbs over his nipples and watches them harden, brushes his knuckles over the bobbing swell of his Adam’s apple. Frodo lies passive with his eyes closed, breath steady even as his pulse picks up, speeds visibly in his throat like the flutter of soft white wings. Sam feels dizzy, so he clambers off and lies down beside Frodo instead, still touching reverently, bending his head so he can feel the hard points of his nipples under his lips, Frodo’s heartbeat right there where he can lick it. “I know this is the sort of thing you’d usually say to a lady, so I hope you don’t take no offense,” he murmurs against warm skin, stroking Frodo’s ribs gently. “But you’re the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen, Mister Frodo. So beautiful it makes me want to—I don’t know. Say a prayer.”

And then, something miraculous happens: Frodo laughs.

It huffs out breathy and sweet with incredulity, and Sam doesn’t know the last time he heard something so perfect. His heart clenches, and he squeezes Frodo’s waist, drags him close and tight and possessive into his arms because he wants to bottle that sound up, hold it in his palms, press it to his ear like a shell and listen to it when he grows scared and cold and hopeless again. “I was being serious,” he tells Frodo, pressing kisses in a haphazard trail up his chest to the hollow beneath this collar bone “Honest.”

“My sam,” Frodo says through the reckless slant of the prettiest, most impossible smile. “You don’t have to pray. You can just. You can do whatever you please.”

And Frodo is what he pleases, every inch of him, every place on his body Sam has yet to kiss, so. He gets to work, the sound of that laugh echoing in him like he is a church bell, like birdsong, like the whole entire season of spring.

—-

Things get better.

There are still nights Frodo struggles to sleep, days he can do nothing but sleep, mornings he awakes tear-slick and trembling and Sam has to hold him and murmur ceaselessly in his ear until the nightmares fade, chased out by the rising sun. There are still moments he’ll be startled by a loud, unexpected sound and so suddenly become the dead-eyed and stricken version of himself Sam remembers from Mordor.

But. There are also days he laughs, now. Days he takes a well-worn book up to his old reading spot by the willow thicket and gets lost in another world. Days he rolls over and straddles Sam, kisses him deep and holds onto him fiercely and begs “Please Sam, touch me, touch me inside,” and Sam’s heart will race with longing as he rolls him over and makes his fingers slick with spit and the olive oil they keep on the bedside table, and he’ll do as he’s told and find that spot up inside Frodo that makes him gasp, and shudder, and come apart.

“You don't like this because it hurts, right?” Sam asks one time, knuckles crooked into the hot, perfect clench of Frodo’s body. It reminds him of planting things. Of rich, black, fertile earth swallowing up seeds. He’s not sure there’s anything more beautiful but—he wants to know. If this is one of the ways Frodo still seeks pain to punish himself for his perceived sins, or one of the few indulgences he allows.

“Sam, my Sam,” Frodo whimpers, reaching down and encircling Sam’s flexed wrist with his fingers, backing himself up onto him with a sharp inhalation. “It doesn’t hurt,” he promises, eyes so blue as they catch Sam’s, wet like the sea. “It’s the only thing that feels good, sometimes. The only thing that’s just—you, and me, and no memories. Just this. Just you.”

And Sam knows what he means, here with Frodo’s heartbeat tucked hot and pounding against his fingers. He knows. A broken wordless moan escapes his lips before he bends down to kiss Frodo, pushing his tongue into the searing slick of his mouth, matching the rhythm of his fingers. “Just you,” he whispers as he pushes deeper, loving the way Frodo tightens around him, hips lifting off the mattress hungrily, his flush spilling all the way down his chest.

“I want all of you,” Frodo murmurs, palming over the front of Sam’s trousers, curling his fingers around him through the shift of fabric. “Please.”

And oh, there is nothing better, nothing more pure or or absolving that the feeling of pushing into Frodo with his knees bent to his chest, his own hand curling around a narrow ankle to steady himself. Nothing better than kissing him when he’s like this, tasting the raw, metallic bite to his exhalations, feeling the vice-tight squeeze of him, counting his breaths until he cannot count them anymore because he’s crying out, spilling inside with a haze of static eclipsing his eyes.

Nothing better, except perhaps the aftermath. Sliding out in a mess and rubbing the pearlescent shine into the pink of Frodo’s thighs. Shifting down onto his stomach so he can fit his mouth over this place it’s meant to fit, sucking and licking and thinking of summer, the joy of biting into an over-ripe segment of orange and feeling the sticky juice roll down his chin. And then—then—the hot, pulsing finish, Frodo’s fingers in Sam’s hair, the curve of his spine arching up off the sheets like a vine stretching towards the light.

San rubs his cheek into Frodo’s heaving stomach and together, their breath eventually slows. He lies there between Frodo’s legs for a long time after the fact though, lost in touching, in the sacred task of mapping him out in soft, lingering presses of his lips. Just you, he thinks on a messy, helpless loop. Just you, and you, and you.

—-

The roses bloom. So much so the branches of the bush bow under the weight and a few of the buds are too crowded to fully expand, so Sam clips them off and gathers armfuls. There are so many he manages to fill one, two, three of Bilbo's old cracked mugs. He sets them on the kitchen counter in a line, and when Frodo wakes up and finds him there brewing their tea and toasting their bread, he curls an arm around Sam’s back and rests his head on his shoulder to admire the bounty. “They smell so sweet,” he says after a moment, eyes shut and fluttering, lips the same pretty pink as the rose petals like he is something Sam grew in their garden.

He thumbs over the smiling apple of Frodo’s cheek, and feels very pleased with himself. “You smell so sweet, Mister Frodo.”

And things should always be this easy, he thinks. They should always fit together neatly and solidly, in love the way any two hobbits could be. It shouldn’t be a fragile mess held together with wheat paste and rainwater and whether or not it is sunny that day. They deserve something soft, stable, and enduring.

So, Sam decides to build a tiny one room structure in the garden.

He’s not sure what purpose it will serve, really, because it’s not about the end-result for him, it’s about the process. The steady, comforting routine of aligning boards and hammering them together, ensuring the foundation is solid and stable and up off the ever-wet earth so the base-boards don’t rot. Frodo watches him do it, sitting beside sunflowers which tower above him, an empty notebook on his outstretched knees. “Is it a gardening shed?” he asks, combing his fingers through the grass in the same tender, idle way he strokes Sam’s hair at night. “A chicken coop?”

“I don’t know yet,” Sam tells him, shielding eyes from the sun as he stands back and admires the beginning of something distinctly theirs. “It’s a place, I suppose. For whatever we want to do with it.”

And that makes Frodo untwist his legs and draw himself up clumsily, rubbing at his shoulder as he approaches Sam from behind and buries his face in the sweat-damp ditch of his neck. “I love you so very dearly, Samwise Gamgee,” he murmurs. The corner of his notebook digs into the small of Sam’s back, and Sam is not sure he’s ever been happier in the whole of his life.

—-

Sam finishes the little garden-shed-chicken-coop a few months later, shoulders aching at the end of it in that satisfying sort of way they are after you’ve made something real with your hands. It’s beautiful, solid and well-built, and Sam knows it but it helps that Frodo tells him so, over and over again as he trips around the perimeter, touching the walls with outstretched hands and reminding Sam he’s brilliant.

It has a bench inside, and a built in desk, and Sam thinks he may have subconsciously put those in because his mind’s eye is never truly empty: Frodo is always reading in some corner of it, hair catching sunlight, brow knit and focused with a line between his eyes Sam forever yearns to thumb over, to kiss. Perhaps he was always sort of imagining Frodo in this little structure, so he built him somewhere comfortable to sit down.

It turns out Frodo loves it there. It gives him an opportunity to be out in the garden but protected from the glare of the sun, which he’s become more sensitive too since returning from their journey, skin growing pink and irritated if he doesn’t cover up. He brings the books that don't fit into Bilbo’s old shelves and turns it into a little library, stacks overflowing, encroaching out into the mint-patch, the oregano, the begonias.

Best of all, (and it’s hard for Sam to even imagine there could be a best when so many things have become wonderful, but if he’s learned anything it’s that the world is filled with small miracles scattered between long stretches of boredom and bursts of unbearable pain but it’s always, always worth it to stick out the brambles in favor of the blossoms at the end), Frodo begins to use this space to write.

He sits with the door open all day long, chewing idly at the end of a quill, ink spots on his trousers and parchment spread out in a mess on the desk. Sam will steal glances at him as he trims the bushes, wondering what he’s thinking. What he’s writing. If it’s poems, songs, diary entries, letters, adventure stories. If he'll get to read it all when he’s finished, or if there are some things Frodo still needs to keep to himself, some burdens he will always bear alone.

Regardless, Sam is just so happy to see him create. To see him smile outside the warm, honey tangle of their sheets. So he clips and rakes and prunes and plants until the sun goes down, and then he follows Frodo inside, wondering, kissing the new writing callus on his index finger and thinking about how lucky he is to witness such a small, important thing grow.

—-

Eventually, Frodo shows Sam how good it feels to have something inside of him. He was skeptical at first, guarded and tight, but he learns he was wrong and now it’s one of one hundred things he craves. Eggs sunny side up with flake salt and freshly ground peppercorns on top, eaten out in the garden with Frodo’s feet propped upon his lap, the buttons of his sleeping shirt done up all wrong because he didn’t actually sleep in it. Seeing their friends alive and well and thriving, meeting Merry and Pippin at the Green Dragon for ale sometimes alone, sometimes with Frodo beside him, when he feels up for it. The smell of bear clover and pine when he walks around town in the evenings, because he’s taken to strolling the Shire lately to remind himself of every little thing there is to be missed, every little thing there is worth protecting. The bitter-sweet taste of red wine on Frodo’s stained lips at night, when they lie side by side on the grassy knoll out back and watch the stars, hands clasped together, books strewn about them like islands in the sea.

The wonderful ache and burn of Frodo stretching him open, pushing inside, their brows pressed flush as they gasps into each other’s open mouths. The strange glory of reaching down between his thighs when it’s all over, and having them come back sticky and white. And then, more often, Frodo under him, knees on his shoulders and his face a mask of bliss as Sam tries his hardest to keep from spilling into him, if only to see him like this a little longer: lost, pleasure-drunk, unhaunted.

There are moments Sam wishes they got to have these magical things before Middle Earth was nearly lost and regained again, before Mordor, before he left home and was changed forever. But they are only moments, and they always pass in favor of other things: Frodo’s sleep breathing tucked against the thud of his own heart. Rose buds sprinkling bare branches after the first thaw. Warm crackling fires made from nothing but dead piles of ash.