AUTHOR: shoneaugen
EMAIL: cparkerho@hotmail.com
DISTRIBUTION: Ask and recieve.
FEEDBACK: Please? Pretty pretty please?
DISCLAIMER: Sam et al are Tolkien's. I just bring them out to play.
SUMMARY: Frodo's been gone for a year. Sam wonders.
NOTES: *brainspaz* Okay. So I've been a writer on ffn for almost a year! Woo! And this would be.. um.. a commemorative piece, or something like. Yeah. Enjoy.
---------------------------------------------
One year really was much too long to sustain memory, even such grand memories as warranted legends and stories that stretched long into the night. Particularly in the Shire. Only a year had passed, and already Frodo's presence was almost forgotten; some ill-tended specter that hovered in dark corners, ready to pounce and bestow recollection on someone at the most unexpected times. More often than not, that someone was Sam.
He was crouched on the ground beside the new Party Tree, little Elanor toddling unsteadily at his side as he tried to teach her the importance of weeding and mulching. Contrary to what Rosie said, he didn't believe that one and a half years was too young to learn such things. After all, if a year was enough time in which to reduce his master to faded remembrance, it had to be enough time for his darling daughter to have matured just a little.
"Y'see, Elanor, these little ones you can leave - they'll like as not be flowers next spring, not weeds. These, though..."
Little more than a year, and Galadriel's gift had bloomed into the centerpiece of gardens, the magnificent mallorn that had already replaced the old Party Tree in most hobbits' minds with its leaves as gold as Elanor's hair and opulent silver bark, unlike any of the stout little apple trees or even the scattered oaks and willows found through the Shire. The sight soothed his heart, as the feel of good rich soil under his feet did - better by far than the jagged stones of Emyn Muil, or the chilling damp of Shelob's lair, or even the foreign grasses of Lothlorien and Rivendell. Rivendell, from whence he'd already been gone a year when Frodo left. Another year gone. Another memory lost.
Sometimes he thought that it would do him some good to forget Frodo, too, just like most everyone else in Hobbiton. Merry and Pippin had gone off to take over Buckland and Tuckborough - whether by their former risible mischief or in newfound graveness, Sam did not know - and with them gone and everyone else Frodo was connected to gone as well, there was nothing left to remind him. He hated that he could not find the right words to tell Rosie the turmoil in his heart, and instead he would go out to tend to the mallorn and leave her with Elanor in Bag End with only their questioning looks; but the mallorn was all that he had left that had lingered through the year. Even Frodo's home had changed, shifted so it was now truly Sam's and Rosie's, rightfully hobbit-like, no more Baggins foolishness in that hole.
"Careful, Elly. Don't step on them flowers, or they won't grow back next year."
And he wished that Frodo might have left him some easier task to bear. 'Look after the mallorn tree, Sam,' or maybe 'Don't let Merry and Pippin burn down the Shire when I'm gone, Sam.' But no, of course it had to be 'Keep alive the memory of the age that is gone,' which had to have been the hardest of them all because who else but him would remember it properly? What was he supposed to do, regale the younger hobbits with fireside tales of running through the countryside at the heels of his master in the company of seven others? The older hobbits would probably roast him alive if he planted such notions in their heads. After a year, they would like as not think he'd made up the whole affair in his head after a few ales.
"Da?"
"Hm."
"Home?"
He'd told Frodo that he would, though. And even if he'd broken his oath to Gandalf - for he had, indeed, lost Frodo now - he would try and keep this one. Keep alive the memory of the age that is gone. . . as long as your part of the Story goes on.
"All right, Elanor. Let's go home. I'll teach you more later."
Maybe a year wasn't quite long enough, after all.