* A/N: Thank you so so much to everyone who read/reviewed/helped me out with this, I hope this first effort of mine (insane amounts of downtime aside) was enjoyable ^_^ *

Frodo rubbed his eyes with one hand, while setting up another candle with the other. His stomach roared, but he ignored it. It was late, and he hadn't left his study all day. The red leather bound book lie silently on the table in front of him; he reached out to it, laying his fingertips against the smooth cover gently. There it was, finished at last. He had gone over it a countless number of times, trying to find that one out of place word, that one smudge of ink that needed fixing, but there were none. What did he do now that he had completed his own life story? It had tethered him to this world for a year and a half now, the only excuse he had to stay.
'So now the time has come. It has been so little time... or was it too long?' All the events of the last year he had either half heartedly attended, or missed entirely, came to mind. It was as if he had spent that last year in a glass room, looking out at the world, but unable to experience it. He could see everything, and remember when he felt those emotions: love, joy, happiness. Those emotions lay on the other side, however, an arranged display of the past that seemed futile after the harsher lessons he had learned, a blanket that kept the world's monsters from those who refused to see them. It seemed that once the blanket was ripped away, it could not be a comfort anymore. The monsters were real, and Frodo could not see past them.
His friends had noticed, surely. The knowing looks they gave him were evidence of that. They had probably known something was going wrong with him before he did himself, yet again. For all the times it had happened, he should have learned that lesson: to trust the judgment of those close to him. Just as he looked out of his glass cage to view the world around him, they could look in, and know better than he what emotions were storming within, waiting patiently for him to notice them and give them a name, give them a face; waiting for him to drop his control of them.

He had finally lost that control, and been consumed by a feeling in the pit of his stomach, that said if he were to turn around nothing would be the same. The world he knew would melt away and become a nightmarish reminder of the past, a horrible promise of future pain. He rarely left the confines of his study; the fear of his home being so foreign was too much of a deterrent. If anyone knew, if he had the nerve to tell them, they would not hold him back from leaving. No one could live with the thought that their world was just a façade covering some hell that no amount of rationalization could destroy. It was the worst at night. When he would lie in his bed, trying to sleep, and his own words would chase in circles through his head again and again. "... I do not choose now to do what I came to do..." (Return of the King, p. 924 paperback). The knowledge that for a time the small voice that spoke absurdities in the back of his mind, the one that had then screamed for him to stop, was his own, and that he didn't care. The screaming of his sanity as he gave it away for something he knew was a lie. And still now the feeling that it may still be there, that corruption in his mind. Any out of place thought, any unfounded doubt, was cause for alarm. It was almost impossible to know which was worse, hearing horrors in his head from another source, and knowing the power it wielded, or hearing that same horror, with its same message, and knowing there was no one in his head but himself. No one could face that night after night.
He sighed again, and sank back into the chair behind him. He needed to stop lingering on this, and, honestly, now that this burning need to commit his experience to paper had greyed to ash, he had no clue what to do with himself. He was not tired, would probably be awake for a few hours at least, and was reluctant to leave the study, for fear of feeling out of place in his own home. His hand went by habit to the quill on the table, and he turned it over again and again in his hand, the soft lower portion of feather brushing the hollow where his missing finger should have been. He shuddered and dropped the pen to the desk, willing the feeling of the soft feather against the stump of his finger to stop. He did not need the reminder.
A touch of cool air from the partially open window stole his attention. From where he was sitting, Frodo could just barely make out the gentle movements of the new trees. They were beautiful, of course, but seemed unable to replace their predecessors' rightness. 'Years from now they will,' he thought, 'if they do not surpass them. But I will not see it.' In a way he was glad. The newness of so much of the Shire made it foreign, another unknown stop on a long adventure. In a way, that was right. It took living here again to understand that it wasn't the same, and neither was he. He had somehow split, taken a different road from everything and everyone he once knew, and he could not find his way back. His thoughts went back to the beginning of all this, of his dreams of the Sea, and wondered if there had ever been another path for him at all. No more of the journey was his to tell. He let the last words dry fully, closed up the book, and got up to begin packing.