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A harmony was all the farewell Sam could ever give him. The road beckoned Frodo to the farthest shore, and yet here was Sam. His wonder still in the Shire.
Sam couldn’t say a single word when he first held his firstborn son. He stared into his tiny eyes and the tiny little creature stared back at him.
“What was it Mr. Frodo used to sing about you?” Rosie asked, smiling at them from the bed. “That you were holding his life in your hands?”
“That’s his name.” He murmured.
Rosie laughed. “What is?”
“Frodo. He’s called Frodo.”
She smiled wider, and dropped her head back on the pillow. “Of course he is.” She said, eyes drifting shut. “What else could he be?”
“What did the Ring tempt you with?”
Sam looked up from his writing. “The Ring?”
Rosie sighed. “I don’t know why I thought of it. I haven’t for years. But it seems like the kind of thought that I shouldn’t keep hidden away in my mind.”
He slowly closed the book - the third volume, and she knew he must be near the end of their story by now. “It showed me a garden.”
She chuckled. “Of course it did.”
He reached out his hand, and she took it on the arm of her chair. “It showed me a wonderful garden, spreading across Mordor, with leaves and flowers blooming where ashes flew on the wind.”
“And was that so easy to resist?”
“At the time, it could have shown me a single potato and I might have given in.”
Rosie turned his hand over in hers, tracing the lines in his palm. She paused over the third finger on his right hand, where the Ring had so briefly been, leaving a white band behind.
“And what did it really show you?” She asked.
He cleared his throat, and looked away. She let him. “It showed me you. You, sitting there, with your silver hair and your beautiful wrinkles of a life well lived.”
“Flatterer”, she said, blushing. “It showed you the future?
“No. It wasn’t - it wasn’t showing me today. It was showing me what would happen, if I didn’t take it. It showed me old Mr. Bilbo, sitting in Rivendell with the elves, his years sprinting to catch up with him as the Ring walked away. It showed me you, in the Ivy Bush, grey in your hair, and Mr. Frodo, walking beside me as his back hunched in on himself. It showed me what would happen if I didn’t keep the Ring.” He covered her hand with both his own, and tried not to hold on too tightly. “I’m so sorry I couldn’t keep it.”
Rosie pushed aside her blanket and knelt down in front of his chair, pulling his face around to look at her. “And I am so, so sorry you were given the choice.”
He stared down at her, tears in his eyes. “What do you mean?”
“No one else was given a choice. We all have what we are given, and we’re sad, and we’re guilty, but it never could have been our fault.” Sam pulls his hand from hers to wipe at his eyes, and she pulls at her hanky to dry hs face. “My becoming old in a good and proper time is no fault of yours, Mr. Gamgee. And you can’t thank me for your grey hairs.”
He sniffed. There was a resounding crash from somewhere deeper in the smial. “No. The grey hairs are all Frodo’s fault.”
“Which one?”
He sighed, and helped her up from the floor. “Both of them.”
Rosie’s bones creaked too much for them to get much further than the party tree, nowadays. She wasn’t as steady any more, but she swore the day she couldn’t sit and see the view over Hobbiton was the day she’d lie down and die. She only ever said that to her children, after Sam had gone pale as Mr. Frodo when he overheard her morbid joking.
The sun was just coming up over the horizon as they climbed up to the roots of the great tree. She tripped over her own two feet just before they reached the bench, and she felt but a moment of fear before Sam’s strong arms caught her.
She laughed into his shoulder. “That’s my life you’re holding in your hands, Sam Gamgee, careful you don’t drop it.”
He wrapped her shawl tight around her. “I’ll never let you fall.”
Sam came huffing into the smial, but Rosie wasn’t in the bedroom. Tolman ran back in from the kitchen.
“I can’t find her, gaffer!”
He turned and left the Hobbit-hole by the round green door, and shielded his eyes against the sun as he got his breath back. He was too old for running like that anymore, and Rosie was too old to scare him like this. Looking across the fields, he saw a slow-moving shape just reaching Woody End.
By the time he caught up with her, huffing and puffing his way along, she had sat herself down beside the trodden path, looking Westwards towards a sea she had never seen. Sam fell to his knees next to her, and she leaned on his shoulder without saying a word. He gently petted her hair. Sam would support her weight any day, but before now she had held herself up most of the time. Her head came to rest in his lap. She raised a hand to his cheek, but the effort was too much for her and her arm dropped back down. She laughed at his worried frown.
“You need to get your strength back, my love, don’t you waste it on laughing at me.”
She giggled again. “Just beyond the far horizon,” she sang, so quietly he strained to hear it. “Lies a waiting world unknown….”
“Rosie?”
“He’s waited there for so long, Sam. Take the road,” she smiled up at him, “Wherever it runs.”