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With a sudden, sharp intake of breath, Sam jerked awake.
He nearly sat bolt upright before he remembered that he was not alone. Consideration for his bedmate led Sam to lie still, trying desperately to slow his rapid breathing and to fight the panic that still gripped him. Nightmares had become commonplace to Sam since he and his friends had returned from the Quest of the Ring, but this had been worse than any of them.
In dreams, Sam had seen what he was sure had to be every way the Quest could possibly have gone awry. Frodo had pressed the Ring upon Gandalf until he could no longer refuse it, and he had gone mad and wild with its power, casting Saruman down without a thought, crushing the whole of Rohan and Gondor before him as he moved irresistibly toward Mordor. The whole of the Fellowship had fallen to the Balrog in the Mines of Moria, seared by its lash, falling into the pit and then burning, burning, burning until Sam woke and ran right down the hill to plunge his face into the Water. The treacherous creature Gollum had slit both their throats in their sleep, tugging the Ring from his master's neck and slinking away into the night with his prize. Sam himself had failed Mister Frodo in a thousand different ways while they struggled alone through Mordor, losing him to orcs hungry for hobbit-flesh, to wild beasts, to falls down mountainsides, to the Eye itself.
But never before had Sam lost his master to his own treachery. Never before had he seen himself corrupted by the Ring.
What had happened had been terrible beyond comprehension, and that made it seem all the more sickeningly plausible. Sam could recall the ideas that the Ring had put in his head at Cirith Ungol, and the voice then had been identical to that which he'd heard on this night. As for the means by which it had tempted him, Sam knew that when he had seen Mister Frodo slain, he had been unable to walk away and give him up for lost. He could not say what he might have done to restore him, had it been a true death. He was unsure whether there was anything he would not have done.
And so, as often happened after one of his nightmares, there was a small but insistent part of Sam that told him that he hadn't been dreaming. It was real, all of it! He saw the viscous, pungent blood of Shelob on his hands; felt a stiff, icy body stretched alongside his own; heard the gurgling death-cry of an orc who came too near; saw Frodo's empty blue eyes before him, staring at nothing...
Finally Sam could bear it no more. He turned on his side and shifted closer to the sleeping form next to him, calming at last when he had Frodo, warm and living, in his arms. Frodo stirred lightly and buried his face in Sam's neck, murmuring his name against the damp skin there.
This, this was real, Sam told himself, no matter the tricks that his mind played on him in the night. He felt sometimes that part of each of them would always be stuck back there in Mordor, but this was all that mattered: he and Mister Frodo, holding each other in the darkness. Love could not erase the horrors they had lived and dreamed, but it could keep them at bay. That was enough.