Remembrance [Featured]

Remembrance

Spring always came with a sting of pain for Bilbo. The pain of loss, and of roads not taken. Yet, on that particular spring, of the year 3000 of the Third Age, the pain was a little sweeter. Perhaps it was because Bilbo had plans for a new journey, one from which he meant to never come back.

It had been spring when Thorin Oakenshield and his Company of merry dwarves had shown up at his door more than half a century before. It had been that exact day of the year, April 24th, only later, in the evening. They had come to take him on a real adventure, beyond the borders of the Shire, employing his services as burglar in the quest to steal a most precious gem from under the belly of a fire-breathing dragon and thus help Thorin and his companions take back their long-lost homeland. He had gone, expecting to return a changed hobbit. You will not be the same, Gandalf had warned him, and, indeed, he was not.

It was no secret that he was different since he had returned from his adventure. The other hobbits thought him strange at the very best, but there were holes burrowed deep within his heart that no one knew about and that had not been there before. He himself did not go into them very often. But in April, they called to him. Whatever it was that lay in those holes stirred and burst its way out, much as the seedlings in his garden shot out of the dark ground, looking to bathe in the warm sun.

Bilbo stood over the writing desk in his study, sorting through letters that he had received over the previous season. He always cleaned his study in spring, and he was almost done for that year. As he finished stacking the letters that he wanted to keep and tossing the others into a bin, to put into the fire later, his eye was caught by the small chest containing his most prized keepsakes of the quest. He had placed it on the desk that morning, meaning to look inside at some point. Its lid was open, showing the weathered paper edges of the portraits that Ori had drawn for him, of himself and of the dwarves.

Bilbo sat down in his chair, and picked up the stack of drawings with a sonorous sigh. He smiled as soon as his eyes lay on the first portrait - the ingenuous Ori himself - and his smile grew as he leafed through and remembered each of his friends as they had once been. And then there were the last three - the young Fili and Kili, and, finally, Thorin. His smile faded into a shadow of regret as he held on to that last portrait.

It was in colourless crayon, but nothing could have erased from his memory the splendid blue eyes of Thorin Oakenshield. He only wished now that he had not had to watch the fire in them go out, until they had become but glossy, lifeless orbs of pale grey-blue, in the falling snow, on that day of winter when Erebor had been reclaimed. Yet, he was glad that he had been with Thorin to the very end. They had started on that journey together, and it was fair to end it side by side.

As Bilbo pondered the past, the front door opened and closed without ceremony, and the sound of light steps filled the silence of Bag End.

"Bilbo?" came Frodo's young voice from the corridor.

"I'm in the study, Frodo," Bilbo called, his voice a little raspy from not having talked the whole morning. He placed the portraits back on his desk.

"Oh," said Frodo, as he came in, a bit breathless and red in the cheeks, no doubt from having run all the way home from one of his usual sprees around the woods of Hobbiton. "You said you wanted to go to the market today."

"Yes, yes," said Bilbo, standing up and straightening his shoulders as if he wanted to set his whole being back into place. "Give me a minute and we'll go." He smiled to Frodo a bit nervously and feigned attention to a pile of books that he had already arranged moments before.

Frodo had inherited the inquisitive mind of the Tooks, and, as Bilbo expected him, he advanced towards his writing desk. He stopped at his side and looked down at the stack of portraits, topped conspicuously by Thorin's. He picked it up in both hands and studied it for a few seconds.