Chapter Text
A few weeks after arriving in Valinor, Bilbo Baggins began to feel young again.
Not all the way, mind you. He was still nothing like the strapping young Hobbit who had raced out his front door huffing and puffing to go on an adventure all those years ago. Nor was he aging backwards, for even the light of Valinor could not reverse the flow of time. But there was a spring in his step that made him feel like a Hobbit of a modest eleventy-five, and he was no longer so prone to nodding off at inopportune times or losing his grip on reality. When he asked Lord Elrond about this curious happening, the Elf smiled and said simply that the land of Aman healed many things. He was still mortal, he had not lost the Gift of Man, but the day of his passing was perhaps a little further off.
Though they were nothing like the gardens in Hobbiton, Bilbo found himself spending a great deal of time in the gardens of Lórien. There he wandered aimlessly among the silver willows and yew trees, letting the birdsong and frogsong wash over him and carry his mind to peace.
As the old Hobbit’s mental acuity returned, strange memories began to drift into his awareness. Memories of what might have been – or perhaps, what had been? The memories were not troublesome (far from it: indeed, in them he glimpsed a lifetime of love and companionship such as he had never truly known in life, though they were shadowed always by some ache of separation), but they… niggled at him.
Bilbo frowned.
“The gardens of Lórien are thought to ease all troubles.” A soft voice emerged from the trees behind him. “Yet you do not seem to have found peace.” Bilbo turned his head to see an Elf in a grey cloak approaching his bench. She inclined her head. “May I sit?”
He looked her up and down. Though her appearance would escape his memory soon after they parted, he would find himself remembering the profound grief in her eyes, and a face shaped by sorrow. “Pardon my saying so, but neither do you. Seem to have found peace, that is, Lady...” he trailed off.
S he smiled, though the sadness never left her eyes. “You may call me Núri.”
He nodded, and shifted to make room on the bench.
For a time, both gazed out at the water, where the willows dipped their branches to glitter in the everlasting twilight. A gentle breeze laden with the smell of cedar and yew drifted closer, and the water trembled lightly with its passing.
“What is it that troubles you, Ringbearer?”
He shook his head. “I don’t rightly know,” he said crossly. “It’s only dreams. I don’t know why I’m bothered by it.”
The Elf tilted her head. “Dreams have power here,” she commented idly, still looking at the pond.
Bilbo let out a harrumph sound. “I’m nearly certain they didn’t start here, though,” he said. “If my memories are to be believed, the dreams have been going on for years now.”
She shrugged, cloak rustling from the liquid movement. Bilbo pursed his lips. He felt as though he were on the cusp of some great realization, if only he could remember. “Oh, confound it all! Enough about me. You seem to have plenty of troubles yourself, my lady, no need for this old Hobbit to go unpacking his baggage onto you.”
The Elf smiled sadly. “I do what I can to ease the burdens, Ringbearer, for grief shared is grief lessened. I weep for all those who would shed their tears in silence, for the sorrows which would pass unacknowledged in this oft-cruel world, for all the sadness that has been and has not yet been and may never be.”
A frog let out a loud chirp and hopped into the water. Bilbo watched the ripples fade away. “Pardon this old Hobbit for his bluntness, but that doesn’t sound like a very healthy way to live.”
His comment seemed to startle a laugh out of her, the sound spilling bright and clear from her lips. At last, she shook her head. “It is my nature, I’m afraid. Do not trouble yourself on my behalf, young one, for I am stronger than you know.”
He chuckled a little at that. “I haven’t been young for a very long time, lady. But I suppose that’s all relative to you.”
They sat in silence for a while. For a moment, Bilbo could have sworn he felt the ghost of a hand on his shoulder. He leaned into the imaginary touch of that broad, calloused hand, his mind filling in the details – the sturdy warmth of the body, the slight tickling of the beard against his face, the faint tang of metal and smoke – until he realized what he was doing, and shook his head to clear it. His eyes filled suddenly with tears. “Oh, I wish – blast! If wishes were fishes…”
He felt a gentle hand on his shoulder. It was not the warm, solid hand of his imaginings, but it was real, if ironically far more light and ghostly. “This is a land of dreaming, Ringbearer,” the Elf said, soft and gentle. “You may wish freely here.”
His hands clenched. He didn’t know why he was so affected all of a sudden. “But it hurts so, my lady,” he whispered around the lump in his throat. He looked up, and saw nothing but kindness in the stranger’s eyes.
Bilbo took a deep breath, steadying his shaking hands. “I wish – I wish we had more time together,” he admitted finally. He swallowed. “Once – once I would have cursed his name until my lips turned blue, for the hurt he did to me and to his people. How the very pride and strength and will that I – that I loved so much turned sour, turned to arrogance and brittleness and greed.” He closed his eyes. “But in the end – he came back.” His eyes opened again, and they were clear and unclouded by age or grief. “It was dragon-sickness, it was the madness that had taken his father and grandfather before him that made him turn against me, and yet he won against it in the end! And I was hurt, and angry, and betrayed – but in time, I would have forgiven him. We would have built something new and lovely and good… But he died, and I couldn’t forgive him for that.” He chuckled bitterly. “Oh, I think I hated him as much for that as for the madness, to be perfectly honest! I couldn’t bear that he fell. He was supposed to be good and strong and wise and just, he was supposed to be everything I wasn’t, and I couldn’t bear that he failed us. How awful of me!”
The hand stayed there, on his shoulder, in quiet reassurance.
He sighed, leaning back against the bench. “I don’t know when I figured all that out,” Bilbo said. “I suppose it just took time for me to sort through that whole confounding mess of feelings. But the other day – it was years ago, now, back when I was in Rivendell – I realized that I wasn’t angry anymore.” He shook his head. “I had been angry because he wouldn’t admit his weaknesses, but I had mostly been angry because he had weaknesses, and that’s just not right. Everyone has weaknesses, I know, it’s not fair to…” He trailed off, lost in thought. “But once the anger was gone, all that was left was the grief.” He let out a breath. “No wonder I dream about him.”
“In many ways, grief is the hardest pain to bear,” the Elf said. “The mind will twist itself every which way to transmute sorrow into anything else. But a wounded heart is like any other injury – if left untreated, it will fester and infect everything it touches. To heal a buried grief requires peeling back layers of scarring to reach the sorrow underneath.”
Bilbo nodded thoughtfully. “I suppose you’d be an expert in that, lady.”
Part of him couldn’t believe he was telling all this to an Elf he had only just met. But something about her invited him to tell her all his troubles. And wasn’t it better, to spill his heart out to someone he would likely never meet again? There was something freeing in confiding in a stranger.
He sighed. “So now we’re back to the beginning. I wish we had more time together. I loved him, I’ll probably always love him, and I forgive him. But it’s too late, and he’s gone forever.”
The Elf looked up as a nightingale hopped from branch to branch. “No soul is gone forever,” she said, watching the bird flit into a hollow at the base of a cypress tree. “And certainly not here.”
Bilbo blinked. “I suppose that’s true.”
He once again had the maddening sensation of a thought just out of his reach. He worried at it for a time, but when nothing came to mind, he eventually gave up. Perhaps the thought would come back if he just let it be for a while.
In the meantime, here he had a perfectly comfortable bench, and all the time in the world to rest. Bilbo leaned back in his seat, clasped his hands across his lap, and let the birdsong and frogsong carry him to sleep.
Thorin Oakenshield watched his beloved with his heart in his throat. Did Bilbo’s waking self know? Was there anything he could do?
Bilbo’s dream self popped into being next to him, and he turned to the Hobbit with questions in his eyes. Bilbo opened his mouth to answer – then his eyes widened, staring in shock at the scene on the bench before him.
“What is it, dearest?” Thorin asked. All he saw was the old Hobbit asleep on the bench, the grey-clad Elf sitting next to him.
“You’re – you’re no Elf,” Bilbo squeaked to the figure on the bench.
:Indeed I am not:, came the amused response. Her voice sounded like the deep tolling of a mourning bell, like a thousand voices wailing in grief, like the silence of a tomb and the rain on a deserted battlefield.
He gripped at his Hobbit’s shoulder, resisting the urge to kneel. From the way Bilbo’s legs shook, he could tell his love was doing the same.
“I suppose I have you to thank for all this, then?” Bilbo asked. “My dreams?”
The great head shook, the grey folds rippling with the motion. :Not I, little Hobbit. The wanderings of dreaming minds fall solely within the domain of my brother, Irmo, in whose gardens you now find rest.: Those two great eyes turned to Thorin, and he shuddered to glimpse the unbearable sorrow that flowed from them. :It was Aulë who was the first to meddle by granting his creation the Gift to reach the sleeping mind. My brother merely strengthened that thread, allowing one particular sleeper to reach back.:
“Then – what is your role in all this?” Thorin asked, recovering his voice. “Why are you telling us these things?”
:My role is that which it has always been:, came the answer, the whisper of wind over empty ruins. :To weep for what is lost, to counsel the grieving, to bring strength out of sorrow… and perhaps, to grant some small measure of mercy.: