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Late afternoon in Bag End was peaceful. With golden light shining through the round windows and the air pleasantly warm, it felt almost like home again. Almost like it used to.
Sam stood in the kitchen doorway, trousers muddy with garden soil and one hand full of dark, nubbly berries. Frodo was at the stove, though he wasn’t cooking. He looked a little tired, Sam noticed. Perhaps he hadn’t gotten enough sleep again.
The night before, they’d met up with Merry and Pippin at the Green Dragon. Pippin had been out traveling, just as far as Bree, and Merry had been busy with Brandybuck family matters. They’d started up a song after a time, and at their urging, Sam had danced with Rosie Cotton. He’d seen her now and again in the months since they’d returned, but something had held him back from doing more than exchanging polite words now and again. He was busy at Bag End, restoring the garden, helping Frodo with his book. Frodo had been quiet the night before, especially once Sam had come back to the table and shaken off Merry and Pippin’s suggestion he ask Rosie for more than a dance. Frodo was often quiet these days, but it had seemed as though there was something in particular on his mind. Sam wondered if it was the peaceful haven of Rivendell, or the fires of Mount Doom.
“Brambleberries,” he said now, proffering the fruit. “Just a few growing in the garden, still. Managed to coax them back to life.”
Frodo took them and put one absently in his mouth. “Thank you, Sam.”
Sam hummed and began readying the kettle for tea. “We’ll have more next year. Along with fresh herbs, of course—the ones at the market just aren’t up to snuff. I was thinking, is it too much to hope I could get ahold of some of those little white flowers we saw in Lothlorien? The elanor? Course it’s much too far to travel, even for Pippin, but maybe when Gandalf visits he could bring some. Thought they might brighten things up. I know they picked up my spirits, though there was nought else to be happy about—”
“Sam.”
Sam turned. Frodo was looking at him with something very like regret in those blue eyes, and yet not only regret. If Sam had not witnessed Frodo at the end of the world, bloodied and bruised and dying as Mount Doom erupted around them, he would not have recognized the other thing he saw there. But he knew what Frodo looked like when he had given up a struggle and was, in some strange, sorrowful way, relieved.
He opened his mouth to ask what was wrong, but Frodo raised his hand and put it on Sam’s cheek. Not understanding, Sam stood wordless as Frodo’s thumb caressed his skin, gently, tenderly, and then Frodo bent toward him and kissed him on the mouth.
The kiss lingered, warm, on Sam’s lips. Frodo’s breath smelled faintly of brambleberries. His lips were firm, pressing with certainty against Sam’s, as Sam stood shocked, only his mouth knowing how to respond: yielding, accepting the kiss.
Frodo pulled back. He looked, if anything, more regretful; but he kept his hand on Sam’s cheek and it was warm and sure.
“Frodo,” Sam stuttered. The “mister” had almost made it out again for the first time in months. He might just have been brained on the head with a saucepan for all he was unable to string two words together. “What—but—I—"
Frodo was so serene, those blue eyes far too wise. Now there was fondness there, too, such fondness Sam felt himself flush.
“You—" Sam swallowed. He found that his eyes wanted to well up, his throat wanted to close. Oh. “You don’t have to—"
“I do,” Frodo said simply.
Sam shook his head. “I’m all right, Mist—Frodo, I swear to it, I never meant for you to—I never would have even asked—"
“No,” said Frodo. “I know. I am sorry, Sam. You have asked me for far too little, and—and in all honesty, I am grateful to you for that. There were times, when we were—when it was so clear you would have done anything for me, and expected nothing in return, and I—I knew I could take it from you, ask anything of you, any comfort at all, but—I couldn’t give it back to you. Not enough. Sam, I have kept you at a distance—"
“No,” Sam broke in, unable to stand it. “No—"
“I could not give you what you needed. What you deserved. And I am fairly certain I cannot give it to you now.” He smiled, and the sadness was back, a heartbreaking shine of regret in his eyes. “But I have come to see that you want what little I can still offer, whether it is good for you or not. And that it would be selfish to hold it back.”
Sam still couldn’t think of what to say. It was hard to absorb Frodo’s words. He couldn’t quite make them fit with what he had thought, what he had believed, about the two of them.
He had to try. “But I never felt—even at the worst of it—I never felt—"
“I know.”
“I never felt that you owed me,” Sam pressed on. “I—in fact, the very idea!—I didn’t do anything because I thought you owed me—"
Frodo kissed him again. And again, it was gentle, firm, and quite certain.
“Please don’t,” Sam said, voice breaking, “please don’t, if it’s only out of feeling obliged—"
“No.” Frodo shook his head. “I would have done this long ago if I had felt I could. You ought to have a happy life, Sam, full of flowers and songs and a wife and children, and I never wanted to stand in your way.”
He had not known Frodo had felt this way. He had not known much, it now appeared. He had followed Mister Frodo because that, he knew, was what he was for. He had slept by his side, nursed him when sick, fed him, cajoled him, and finally carried him. Because Sam belonged to him.
The rest, if there had been more, had been immaterial. He had never expected…this. This was…confusing.
Two male hobbits? It just wasn’t done. Whatever nameless things he had felt far away from home had no place in the Shire. Well. As soon as Sam thought it, he knew it wasn’t quite true. There were Ted Boffin and Falco Roper, who’d shared a hobbit hole since they were in their tweens, and Arabella Hogg and Gilly Hayward over at Mill Cottage, and old Mister Banks and Mister Proudfoot, from whom Sam had gotten boiled sweets from as a child when his Gaffer had sent him over to buy eggs from their chickens. Hobbits who’d never married, who preferred each other to a life of family and children. But those hobbits had been each other’s family, of course; Sam had always known it even if he had never consciously thought it.
His relationship with Mister Frodo had been different, though. Mister Frodo was an odd duck, a Baggins, a solitary dreaming hobbit who needed someone stout and sturdy to look after him. And Sam was stout and sturdy, and good with a trowel and a handful of seeds, and then, well, he hadn’t quite meant to follow Frodo to the ends of the earth and back, but he had, and now…now the prospect of living without him just felt—wrong. Unnatural. And besides, Mister Frodo still needed him. His shoulder still ached. He still had nightmares. And sometimes a shadow crossed his face that only Sam could understand.
And Sam’s desires? Sam’s needs? His stubborn determination to remain always by his friend’s side? It had given his life purpose. More purpose than a hobbit’s life could be expected to contain, and then some. And as for what he had wanted from Frodo…?
Frodo, who was still looking at him steadily and fondly with just a hint, now, of worry.
“Oh, Mister Frodo,” Sam blurted out, and then he was crying. He sagged with a weight suddenly lifted, a burden set down—or perhaps with the relief from a wall all at once having vanished, before he had ever really known it was there.
He was in Frodo’s arms, then, and Frodo’s calm was broken now with Frodo’s own tears, and they clung to each other with a ferocity perhaps neither of them would have predicted. After everything, Sam at least had assumed the great upheavals of his life were past.
Yet it was not such an upheaval: they had their tea, and took their evening walk, and when they slid into bed together it was no less natural than if they had been doing it for years. “All that time on rocks under elvish cloaks,” Sam muttered, and Frodo murmured a question, but soon they were asleep.