A/N: Written for Tris (TrisanaChandler13) for hitting (and sinking) one of my ships in the Battleship Challenge! Three hits, so the prompts were: Gollum speak, sunshine and "We shouldn't be looking for heroes, we should be looking for good ideas."― Noam Chomsky
When the Grass Grows Gold
Words were once great things, with great meanings, but that was in the days where the sun shone on bright green grass and there was nothing brighter. When all they did with their days were fish…and there was a "they", instead of him all alone with only his precious ring in the dark caves.
Words were great things when the sun didn't burn and blister his skin, leaving him thin and frail and weak and hiding in the cold dark cave, because that was the only place he could stay while his body and mind were slowly eaten away.
Words had no meaning anymore. They crumbled away, were forgotten in time and replaced with other, nonsensical sounds. Sounds that gave him his new name, that rumbling "Gollum, Gollum" in his throat that echoed through otherwise frozen walls and into the ears of passer byes in the sun beyond. And they learnt to stay away from that cave and those strange sounds that echoed, that cave that hid a creature called "Gollum" whose words were the same as his name, those scratchy noises forcing their way past the back of his throat.
But they weren't entirely correct, because this Gollum still hung on to a few words. Enough to keep the bare brunt of communication within his grasp, to those fishes that swam into the stream, to the shadows that climbed the words and the empty echoing voices that kept him company in those other, lonely, nights. Words that let him talk with Bilbo Baggins when he came, let the pair of them banter and game…
But why had that been a necessity at all? Gollum never did wonder that, but Bilbo did, afterwards, once he had escaped with his wits and his life and that little gold artefact that had decayed Gollum into the closet ghost he now was. He wondered why Gollum had let him live long enough to toy, long enough for Bilbo to have a chance to sneak away. Why had he entertained a conversation, and a game – a game of chasing prey who could so easily slip away.
Maybe, Bilbo found himself thinking, the Gollum was a lonely thing, tucked away in a haunted corner of the world where the only company he had was his prey and the thing he'd sunk into seclusion for – that small moment of greed when he took that innocuous ring in hand and killed his future in the sun.
And though it was a story not known to Bilbo, Gollum still remembered. Though he lost the words to tell it and the company to tell it to, the walls that had been there when he'd first come to that cave remembered: remembered those mad whispers that had escaped from his then all too loose tongue. Remembered the stumbling river-man who'd come, half-starved and beaten but carrying that little trinket with him, that "precious" thing that was enough to kill a friend for, enough to paint the green grass red, and then a dead-like yellow. And now the grass was gone entirely: just grey and black, like the stains of ash that would never leave.
Just like all the company and light in the Gollum's world. And perhaps his identity as well, for all he was to most was a shadow in the caves they dared not cross – and to the more distant travellers, the voice in the wind, rumbling in the darkest corners. They don't hear the few words that have withstood the test of time, and the nonsensical sounds that have replaced them. They don't hear the whispers of "my precious" late at night, as though there was a man and his lover within the jaded walls. They don't hear the rumbling sound straining to break loose, that "Gollum, Gollum" before the fish were caught in a splash of ice-cold water and swallowed whole. Even Bilbo who was perhaps the closest of all the travellers to see Gollum's cave and his life did not see it all, though he heard the enraged yells of "Precious!' through the empty nature-fashioned halls.
And there were things that not even Gollum saw, now: true conversations, like the ones he'd had on his little boat on those old days where there was no greener grass to be found. True company, like the friend he'd killed for gold, the other friends who'd beaten down on him until he turned underneath their hands, twisting and striking like a snake until one body became two, then three, then five, then an entire village on the river painted red with a speck of gold. Dreams like that sparkling sun he had taken for granted before it burnt him, before he'd been forced to flee from it and into the dark caves where that sun could never reach. Words that no longer had grand meanings but were just fragments of the past that remained trapped in his skin like the instinct to walk and breathe and feed.