My thanks to She-Wulf, for the beta-ing
2. NOVEMBER THE FOURTH, 1919 (S.R.): EARLY MORNING
As a shadow swimming in the shadows dropped by the cold light of the Autumn moon, Frodo's silhouette wandered next to the Water.
The Shire seemed immersed in a shivering silence. The other Travellers were all sleeping, exhausted: Sam, with his family, and the others, in the Cotton's Farm.
But Frodo no longer needed very much that kind of rest... It was among the many changes that the painful experiences of the last year had worked in him, for good or ill: that he obtained refreshment enough if he was surrounded by the breath of the trees and the water, under the light of the stars and the moon. And his sleep hours were scarce.
So, the Ringbearer slid along the river like the mist, and blended in the darkness when he stopped to watch the uncertain sparkling of the waves, draped in his grey cloak.
And this night, his heart was full of sorrow...It was as if again he bore a cruel weight, but a very different one than the overwhelming obsession of the Ring.
That one had left a strange hole in his soul, sometimes hurtful as a wound, sometimes bleak as an abandoned house. And in that hole was lost his ability to experience the intense joy of living of any hale hobbit...as if the everyday and homely pleasures were for others to enjoy, words spoken in a language that he could no longer understand well. However, this uninhabited inner space seemed to serve as a resonant body that enhanced Frodo's sensibility to the surrounding life, to their mysterious subtleties and to the feelings and emotions of friends and foes.
And so, the suffering from which he could not save hobbits and ruffians, the anger that contaminated the Shire and the vile deaths of Saruman and Gríma, drowned his spirit like a blood-tide, and submerged him in the ocean of guilt and hopelessness where, sometimes, he got wrecked.
He patiently let the familiar murmur of the river and the whispers of the wind in the naked poplars assuage his anguish, as the cool hand of a mother upon the feverish forehead of the child.
...After his return from Ithilien to the living people world, he had had to confront over and again the torture of his memories, and he had made a difficult covenant with them, thus obtaining an uneasy peace. He had come to terms, without pride nor shame, with his defeat in the Sammath Naur, realising that it had occurred only after fighting to his last limits. And, with some astonishment, he too got to understand that he had been granted the grace to be freed of the slavery of Evil: deeply hurt and with terrible consequences, but free and alive to watch the triumph of hope in Middle Earth.
Because of this, he didn't regret his own fate, but felt an irrepressible pity for all those that, like himself, had been corrupted, but had moved away from the reach of any salvation... Sméagol, Gríma, Saruman...and these wild and desperate men and half-orcs, excited in their greed by the revengeful destitute Wizard, until they were unable to choose other than kill or die.
Frodo breathed deeply the cold air of November, and the humid smell of the soil and fallen leaves soothed his sadness...
To kill or to die, he thought, is a terrible choice, one from which nobody returns unscathed.
However, that choice no longer existed for him. He would nevermore handle a weapon. "I do not wish for any sword", he said to Gandalf in the Field of Cormallen, and it was only truth. Because, incomprehensibly, in the tower of Cirith Ungol and in the bleak plains of Gorgoroth; among the overwhelming terror and pain and with his mind devastated by the Ring of fire, a loathing to harm any kind of living being took shape inside of him, not even to defend himself.
And, after the destruction of the Ring, the conviction that he would never again take up arms to fight, only grew.