A/N: Bit of a strange chapter that didn't quite want to come together, but hope it works. Thanks for the reads and reviews!
He made the mistake of showing Frodo his maps once, and the lad's been enraptured ever since. The love of stories must be hereditary too, though he'd like to think in no small part, his prowess with mimicry and grandiose gesticulations had something to do with it.
"Tell me the part about the trolls again," the boy cajoles, fourteen and much too big to be squeezing into the old rickety armchair with him.
Sixteen, and the tween carries on his studies of Rhovanion maps with distinct purpose. He wonders if he imagines it, seeing some hidden spark alight in those summer eyes at the sight of the single Mount, standing proud, with the curling dragonform sketched above its peak.
He turns a hundred years old on Frodo's twenty-second birthday, and it's a big celebration for both Bagginses, filled with the noise and cheer one expects from big parties. Still, come the late hour back in the quiet of their home, the lad who settles down next to him is pensive and almost-sad as they watch the fire crackle in the hearth.
He is drifting off, dozily, when he just about catches the strains of a long-forgotten tune humming around the edge of his sleep. Blinks, half-awake and bewildered, and only sees his boy staring silently into the flames.
It will be another five years before Frodo comes of age, but his nephew is already master of the house if the market whispers are to be believed. The hobbits watch as the boy dutifully fills his baskets with village produce every Highday. See the lad out in the garden, cheerily chatting away with Gaffer Gamgee as they work the turnip patch. Hear the younglings, Frodo among them, carouse at the Inn, dancing on table tops and upsetting the pints - and customers. All the while, while his uncle shuts himself away and buries his head in his maps and his books.
Seems there might be a respectable Baggins at Bag End after all.
And while Frodo is still unable to maintain the usual Hobbity paunch, being all gangly limbs and angular features, his legs are slender and smooth, his palms soft and free from callouses, back unmarred and unmarked. Shoulders light and heart joyfully free and it's getting harder each passing day to see the similarities for that which is not.
Strange thoughts in a strange head, and who knows why. Grief, he thinks, for if he's truthful, he'd say he is still grieving.
The boy smiles like the other had never before, and he is certain now (as if he never had been before) that no, his boy will not know of the other life, will not live the other life of pain and loss and madness.
He watches his boy grow up, and wonders about another, who had once been a boy, who grew up a prince, who never grew to be a king.
Perhaps he could have been, in a different life. He could have been young and bright and beautiful too.