A/n: I love my angsty Frodo, yes I do.
Disclaimer: I don't own LotR. If I did, I'd be living in a mansion with 500 bedrooms and be served gourmet Skittles 3 times a day.
Hollow
'Here I am' he thinks dazedly, 'in this same little bed in this same old room where I slept as a boy.' Not a child; no he had outgrown baby things by the time he came to live here. Instead of toys and clutter the shelves by the bed had been lined with a modest selection of books: Elvish texts of lore and poetry, volumes filled with detailed maps and beautiful illustrations of faraway lands.
He knows what those places look like first hand now. Knows what it's like to watch an autumn sunset from the balconies of Rivendel, row a boat down the Anduin and stroll the white streets of Minas Tirith. It's not a fantasy anymore.
It is reality.
Of course he's paid the price for such freedom; paid it many times over. He has trudged through the desert of Gorgoroth, scaled unforgiving mountain passes and crawled up the ashen slopes of Sauron's very heartland. He has been wounded with blade sting and tooth, beaten and starved, and all with the weight of a hundred mens' doom round his neck.
Sometimes now he dreams, wrapped in the sweet-scented quilt of his boyhood, tucked in the soft world of warm fires and friends. Sometimes he dreams of the future, sees little Elanor grown and lovely, sitting in the sun with her suitors, riding on the shoulders of her ever-steadfast father or cradling children of her own. Sometimes he imagines Rosie as a mother of many happy babes, surrounded in their love and fair faces, carried on a sea of their joy.
And these things make him smile, glad in his heart for his most deserving friends. But the smile doesn't reach his lifeless eyes. The eyes once so deep and expressive have been dulled now forever. They no longer shine with youth and vigor, nor sparkle in genuine mirth. The dust of the wastelands has leaked inside and scrubbed them to flat stones of blue nothingness. He cannot see the world around him, his glance never perceives what is present…accept in his dreams.
And then there are the times when the dreaming is bad, and he writhes in the sheets as if seeking escape from the prison of isolation It has thrust him in.
Often Sam or Rosie will hear his distress from the room down the hall and come sleepily to his door with gentle concern in their faces. But he always pretends he's asleep, watches them through downcast lashes till they've assured themselves it's all right and crept back to bed.
For when he wakes scared and sweating, clutching the coverlet with a white-knuckled grip. When he swallows back the moan of terror and despair that rises bitter in his throat, it isn't the past that plagues him.
The monsters of his nightmares aren't orc whips or wraiths. They aren't the clinging whispers of the Ring's haunting song. In his dreams he sees himself walking dead through the Shire, cloaked in apathy and deception; making his loved ones think it's really him inside the broken shell. When the truth is he has long departed.
He is his own worst nightmare; the wound that won't heal lies not in the flesh of his body or the winding corridors of his mind. It's his heart, the shriveled remnants of his soul, the tainted shreds of his all-but-gone spirit. It is the stabbing ache where feeling used to be. It is emptiness. It is hopelessness; uselessness.
It is reality.
