Work Text:
It came down from the ceiling, such a little thing: tiny and black, falling in slow motion scarcely larger than a speck of dust, floating before his eyes on invisible thread. Frodo reached out a hand above it and lo! it stopped: suddenly it swayed from his finger instead, though he could not feel its touch. Too soft and thin was its thread.
And yet, so strange: that it touched him and he could not feel it. There were things he would never touch again that he felt all the same, floating invisible in the void between his fingers, known only by their remembered shine: by that unbending circle of gold and its wraithlike strength, enfolding skin and air alike.
The spider hung from its perch as if thinking, wondering if friend or foe. Frodo wondered the same.
“Hullo, little one,” he murmured, and his breath made the thread sway. The creature began a slow, unworried descent.
And look how the light came in through the window and made its round belly even rounder as it spun its thread with its black legs like hands! It moved like all who wished to live: earth and water and a little warmth, a speck of moving dust in his home, just like he had been: a speck of dust in her home, so easy to crush and remove from sight, never to be thought of again. Just as easy it would be for him to crush it and remove it, this intruder and no more thread, he thought, as the warmth spilled from his eyes – no more sunshine tracing the circle of its belly, so soft and fragile and round.
So precious…
“Mr. Frodo?”
He started. Sam, eyes wide, already reaching –
“Let me –”
“No! Don’t kill it, Sam – it is lovely.”
The spider stopped and looked up, as if it had heard.
She had not been lovely.
Oh no, she hadn’t been.
“Look how the sun shines upon it,” Frodo said, voice breaking. “It is so fair and alive: it should live out its days. As many as it can.”
Sam’s stricken face softened.
“I was going to take it out into the garden, with your permission, sir,” he said gently. “I dare say that way we’ll all be more comfortable. Including this little friend of yours, as it were.”
Frodo wiped his eyes with his free hand.
Sam frowned at the black speck.
“We’ve been through some troubles, Mr. Frodo, but hard-pressed would I be if I was tasked to remember a bigger one than that,” he muttered. “Begging your pardon, sir,” he added, and glanced at his hand.
Frodo smiled wryly.
“Still,” Sam continued. “I suppose a little thing like that can hardly do much harm. I’ll set it into the mint and it can catch the greenflies.”
Frodo shuddered.
“Little things can sometimes do a great deal of harm,” he said without thinking, in a voice that sounded distant, and remembered: the blade, and Gollum, and that golden circlet that had contained worlds. All gone, gone to fire and darkness: never to harm again, never to be seen on this side of mirrors and of dreams…
He breathed in through the cold. He’d forgotten to, for a moment.
“But I don’t suppose this one will, no,” he said wearily.
Sam gave him a tender look. Gingerly he took the invisible thread from Frodo with his own finger, holding a cupped hand below. The tiny body swayed upside down with folded legs as if on a swing, as if not minding, despite not being asked, this second change of surface to hang from at all. Frodo’s hand, suddenly empty, trembled. He lowered it.
Then he thought better of it: he placed it on Sam’s shoulder instead.
“Come, Mr. Frodo,” Sam murmured. “Let us find a nice sunny spot for it, shall we?”
And Sam took Frodo and the spider into the garden, into the soft light of a fading spring afternoon. As they left the house, Frodo was amazed to find the sun shining on all of them: the living, and the dead, and those lost in between.