Title: Hands
Characters: Frodo, Sam
Rating: G
Warnings: None.
Feedback: Would be highly appreciated.
Summary: Frodo's hands are not as they used to be. Post-quest.
His hands are so dry. Were he to pinch the skin on his knuckles, it would pucker like rotting fruit, and not become smooth again even if he stroked it, coaxed it to lie flat. The palms are rough and calloused, and score against each other with a harsh, grating friction when they are rubbed together in delight, or wrung in sadness or concern. Other times, they seem to be wearing away at a terrible layer that has settled over them, one that makes them shake and creak in pain occasionally. On quiet nights, the sound is nearly deafening, as if the world were being torn asunder, crashing and clashing and eventually cleaving in a sickening scrape. There are splits and cracks across his fingers (but none compares to the gaping abyss between two of them), tiny rivulets that are always, always empty, barren creeks which flow to nowhere. Sometimes, a stray drop of water will mercifully fall upon those hands, and it will trickle down endless valleys, searching for a place into which it can be absorbed, but it will only tease the desert-veins and invariably slide off the tip of a finger, perhaps to be greedily soaked up by the ground, which can always fervently drink such moisture. It is not foolish enough to deny such a needed thing. Not that these hands willingly allow such precious sustenance to pass by so easily; they twitch in agony every time another rainfall is thwarted. It's gotten so they will even stubbornly hold onto an ink stain, which are far more common these days. No wonder he cannot clean his hands even after scrubbing them with soap and water and rough cloth.
He believes that only one surface could round out the jagged canyons, one smooth surface that shines like the sun but is twice as cool as the Moon in winter. He longs for nothing more than to roll its iciness across his marred skin, to insert each miserable digit into that rejuvenating pool until the scars froze off and disappeared, melting away into plains, the only rivers lying beneath them.
There was a time when his hands had never wanted for water (and his throat, for that matter, but that is another tale altogether). His skin was soft, smooth, untried. His hands had never known the feel of the wooden shaft of a shovel, the mossy slide of wet rocks, the spongy warmth of dark earth. Nor had the sun heated his skin to a boil; a few sprinklings of freckles appeared in the summers of his childhood, but he had never suffered from any burns. During the winter, he was fair; some might have even called him positively pale. His hands were especially so; their shocking whiteness stood out under the bright smears of ink and paint, making them a strange sort of canvas. He had his mother's hands, the long, tapering fingers that moved so deftly, seldom erring. Many thought those hands had the perfect build for playing an instrument, but his main instrument had always been his quill, the melodies his words. It seemed that those hands could make beautiful whatever they touched (but in truth, there was another for which this was true, and had more to show for it). Many a lass, and perhaps a lad or two as well, wondered what it feel like to have such hands touch her, brushing away any uncertainties, cajoling pleasure out of any crevice in which it was hiding.
But no one wants those hands on his or her body anymore, and no one will even attempt to touch them, save for one, who will not only hold them lovingly between his own, but bring them to his own flesh, cradling them as if they were garments of the finest silk. It is he alone who will hold those hands still at night when they shake with cold and worse, tracing the stark valleys and filling the hole which one graceful finger once occupied with his own. The hands that touch his are like his own, and not like his own. These are the hands of a gardener, one who has loved the Earth for many years. The same rough calluses are there, but they somehow do not scratch and tear at skin; perhaps because he holds everything within them as if it were made of spun glass. These hands have gone through as much as the pair they caress so gently, but they have survived. The other pair has not.
Frodo sometimes wonders if there is water wide and deep enough to bring life back to his thirsty hands.