Mad Baggins, they say, and poor ol' Baggins, when he returns to the hills and hearth of his home, and his name carries along on the murmurs and outright stares. The looks burn and the whispers sting, but- it's not them, Bilbo, it's you that's changed after all, and they're quite harmless, they don't mean to hurt you (anymore than you've already been).
Company, he comes to decide, is best shared with himself. It could have been a lonely life, if he let it, but he learns to befriend the silence and fill it with unspoken words instead - in his head, and on the page, with the maps and letters scrawled onto parchment as much as they had once been drawn on his heart.
Good morning, he tells himself each new day, and smiles when he hears no reply. He hums the tone of a travel song, one to which he'd never quite learnt the words for, as he potters around his quiet kitchen. The pantry is stocked again, in neat rows, the broken shelves thrown out and it does leave the larder that much more spacious, almost too much.
Bread and cheese, and porridge for second breakfast after. He nods approvingly, and lays out a table setting for one.
The morning comes and goes, just like every other morning. Afternoon finds him at his desk, quill in hand and ink staining his fingers, reading over words he's not quite sure were written by his own hand. He wonders if he should worry about these lapses, the gaps in his awareness, or that he seems to be tracing the same rune patterns into every page over and over and over again.
Evening brings little clarity, and his head is still muddled with unfamiliar scripts, except for when he turns a page and suddenly stops short, hands clutched around a crude sketch of a proud profile crowned with a diadem, dark blue ink turning its eyes almost black.
It goes into the fire. He watches the parchment crinkle and char, the face staring back at him through the flames.
He goes to bed with same thought, as he does every night.
Perhaps they're right. Perhaps I am going mad.