Chapter Text
Arda is a terrible, beautiful, wild and vividly unpredictable place. The shires. Oh, how Bilbo missed his smial and his green door, freshly painted when just before he left because he didn’t know that he wouldn’t be home soon. How, Bilbo would miss those confounding dwarves who had all but fallen — in some cases, the majority’s case, had fallen and in more ways by now than just physically — right on through it onto his once lovely floors. Those floors were probably dusty now. Or, he hoped they were.
Bilbo truly hoped that his cosy Bag End was not overrun or bled dry, that the floors were merely waiting for him to return and sweep them clean again. That… tricky Lobelia Sackville-Baggins better not have squirrelled her way in, settling in her rugs and her silver spoons and her own everything. Along with her husband Otho. ‘Tricky’ was not the word to describe them, but Bilbo was far too polite to stoop to foul sayings or crude remarks of tongue.
Oh, how Bilbo missed home.
Home was a long, long way away now. Gone for a year or so and still longer to go. Bilbo was far from the respectable and proper Hobbit he had once been now. He would be a laughing stock of some kind, most likely, if he ever returned home.
It was the ring’s fault.
Of course, Bilbo could blame that beautiful trinket all he desired. He did desire. Yet, what he desired, the ring couldn’t give him. Gandalf the Wandering Wizard couldn’t, the Valar couldn’t, Eru himself probably couldn’t either. Maybe Bilbo was severely underestimating the powers amongst Arda. Middle Earth only offered so much, there was plenty Bilbo could never comprehend about some other parts of the world he lived in.
The Undying Lands for instance.
But Bilbo’s head was swimming with chatter, ceaseless chatter. Only some of it was his own voice. He talked back to it sometimes. Out loud or in his head didn’t matter.
It was already in his head.
The Ring.
Oh, how Bilbo hates and loves that perfect golden band.
Sometimes he liked to tease it around the third finger of his left hand. Or rather, the second, when counting from the outside rather than from the inside; not including thumbs! His left, not his right, because if it were a normal ring and not a leech it would press slightly against his quill whenever he wrote, and he could glance at it and smile to himself. Someone might have given it to him if that were true, someone with a stone-like resolution, stubbornness that echoed the mountain he came from, and dark hair and magnificent regal stature. If only… if only.
It is the nth day of his trial, or his trek, or his march to a dear reunion he had been awaiting for quite some time now. He will face n days more. Anything to see him again, that one he wants back and by Yavanna will Bilbo Baggins do whatever it takes to have his King come back to his burglar.
He never did remember to greet him properly back then, so it was only fair that Bilbo chase him down to the ends of the afterlife and hunt down Death itself, to demand that terrible side of mortality to return what it’d taken too early. Too early, far too early. He hadn’t truly even gotten to say… Perhaps Bilbo would seek out a different spirit, to see it thoroughly tormented for what that foul beast did to his King.
Bilbo Baggins was once a humble and so-merry, respectable, and responsible resident of the Shire. No adventures or unexpected happenings, no drama and no strangers with strange and terrifying missions. Yet now he was little more than something that breathed to see what he’d lost one more time.
His mind was foggy, but that was alright. No suffering along this long procession towards, quite literally, Doom, would equate whatsoever to the pain a pair of souls had felt upon an unforgiving bed of ice. No torment could level to the sickness his King had overcome and fought, just to be slain by his greatest foe, overcome mere moments beforehand. No pain would equate to the breathless agony of that moment, when his King drew his final breath.
Bilbo Baggins, a stray and wandering Hobbit lost in thoughts more often than not; supposedly mad, as the rumours spewed the further his feet carried him south from Erebor. Bilbo Baggins, once a maester in burglary and conkers and polite sass, now a mumbling and bumbling and blinded creature. That was only the word from what made it back to anywhere that mattered, from the strangers Bilbo passed by on this ridiculous and nightmarish hike. He wasn’t truly blind, of course. It was his grief, deep and unending. His head made thick by his tears which he shed often until it exhausted him into fitful rest wherever he found it. Most of all, by that wonderful and warm and loving round band if only he would just put it on put-it-on putiton-
Ahem.
Enough of that, now.
꧁꧂꧁꧂꧁꧂꧁꧂꧁꧂꧁꧂꧁꧂
This is the story of one Bilbo Baggins, and a rather rude Wizard for deciding that any of this was a good idea. Really, it was hard to determine a thing going on in that wizard’s head. Probably the height leaving his head in the clouds, leaving him to drown in their pillowy softness and fill up his ears with airy cotton.