Chapter Text
When Bilbo first steps back into Bag End, the first thing he does is take a long hot bath with actual soap and water. He sits in his tub and lets the heat leak slowly into his muscles, scrubbing until he thinks his skin won’t get any lighter. When he’s done, he makes himself a cup of tea. He chooses a bundle of tea leaves and lights a fire in the hearth and sets his kettle over it until it whistles.
A whole year’s worth of morning papers is stacked in neat piles at his doorstep; Bilbo chooses the top edition off one pile and sits in his armchair to read it, taking appreciative sips of his tea at intervals. The big news is printed on the cover in shock font:
LOCAL FARMER GROWS TWENTY-POUND ONION
Halfway through the third page Bilbo folds it up neatly and sets it beside him. He tips his head back, a smile growing on his lips, and then his eyes flicker open when he realises something new.
It’s quiet. A bit more quiet than he remembers. He can almost hear his own heart beating (had it always been that quiet before?). Bilbo pours himself another cup of tea and continues to listen to the silence.
“No, no, I didn’t run away. Heavens, no,” Bilbo explains to his neighbours. “I just…took a vacation, that’s all. For my health.”
His neighbours regard the shiny bruise on his forehead and healing cuts on his cheek and give him a look that plainly says that they think he’s bonkers. “For my health,” he calls after them as they walk away.
Bilbo feels for the ring, tucked away in his waistcoat pocket, and makes a mental note to use it whenever he sees them coming around.
Late one night he accidentally knocks his sword belt off its peg in the hall whilst sweeping his hobbit hole. Sting slides out of its scabbard slightly, only just so that Bilbo can see himself in the shimmering metal, his round face bisected by the whorl of Sindarin curving around the base of the dagger.
During supper, he uses Sting to make ham slices, and much later, pretends to be fighting giant spiders in his bedroom. Bilbo trips on a mat and ends up tangling himself in his blankets, impaling an unfortunate pillow through the centre and sending goose feathers everywhere.
He sleeps with Sting sheathed in his hand, and dreams of seeing the elven realm of Lothlorien.
He wakes up on a bright Monday morning to the sun in the sky and a room full of buttery light. Seize the day, his mother used to say, so he goes out and restocks his larders using a little bit of his now-considerable fortune. After lunch, he bakes a cake with pineapple cream between eight layers, each one smaller than the last. When he’s done, Bilbo takes a step back and scratches his head and wonders why the whole confection sort of resembles Erebor, even without squinting.
On Trewsday, as is with every Trewsday, the Sackville-Bagginses dutifully send him a legal notice in the post, rejecting his claims to the Baggins estate of Bag End on grounds of you ain’t him, he’s dead. Bilbo always makes sure to send a reply, usually consisting simply of addresses, names, and his rebuttal yes I am, and no I’m not, because he knows that it’ll tick off Lobelia like no tomorrow. That’ll show her to take his lovely silver spoons; he honestly doesn’t think he will ever get over that until the day he dies.
After Heavensday is Mersday, then comes Highday, except Bilbo can’t really tell the days apart too well; he’s starting to notice that they all kind of look alike.
He’d never thought he’d miss the non-taste of cram sticking to the roof of his mouth and camping under the stars with thirteen snoring dwarves and the itch of pony hair scratching its way up his nose, never mind his blasted allergies. He looks out his window at the Shire, seeing none of it but the blue, blue sky stretching down to meet the earth far beyond the cresting hills.
The sunblasted fields of the Shire turn out to be his new favourite place to be, now that he’s not on the road anymore. Bilbo goes there daily with a picnic basket in hand and a mat folded over one arm and a song humming in his throat. It always smells of spring and heather there and the grass is lush and clean enough to sit on without getting stains on his pants. Linnets sing in the trees, amid the rustling leaves and heated herbs on the wind and the gurgling rush of brook water over the hills.
He loves it there, though not as much as he thinks he ought to. The tranquil, he appreciates an awful lot, make no mistake about it, but some days he falls asleep bathed in light and wakes to the silvery moon peering down on him. The fact that his life has more or less reasserted the norm pleases him, but only to a certain extent; there’s only so much he can make of sleepy hours and hollow minutes every night in retrospect.
These are his afternoons now, reclining luxuriously against a tree as he pushes pipe-weed down the rim of his pipe, taking deep puffs until his lungs tingle and something warm and fuzzy lights itself deep within his heart. He sucks homemade treacle out of freshly-made tarts and studies the movement of the clouds overhead, sometimes bringing out his sketch pad to practice landscape art. When he tires of pencilling verdant knolls and clear skies, he writes poems about dreams and summer and life and love.
Far over the Misty —
Bilbo pauses and blinks, confused as to where that had come from, and strikes out all three words with a single slash of ink before crumpling up the parchment and starting fresh on a new one.
On a whim, Bilbo gets out his map of Middle Earth and unfurls it over his dinner table and pores over it, making a conscious effort to keep his gaze from sliding eastward over the Mirkwood, past Laketown, to finally settle on Erebor.
He fails anyway.
Two weeks pass like this — days of basking and nights of map-reading, and Bilbo finds himself tracing the marked tracks weaving throughout Middle Earth, making annotations here and there next to towns, routes, landmarks. Thankful for his impressive anthologies, Bilbo transports a dozen thick books down to his study and reads up on cultures and languages and places of interest, man and dwarves and elves alike, meticulously copying the most fascinating bits onto the corners of his map in neat, minute words.
Before he goes to sleep every night, regardless of whether he has worked on it or not, Bilbo looks at the map, written over in his own hand. Sometimes, a wild, impulsive feeling blooms in his gut, one that proves resistant to negative thinking, and he only manages to calm himself after a trip to the larder. He’s not about to go running off into the blue or anything — once is more than enough by any decent hobbit’s standards, especially so for a Baggins.
Still, it’s an idea that he toys around with, considering the possibilities, telling himself that it’s all purely academic and nothing more, but when he says it out loud it’s not as convincing as he thought it would sound. He keeps the map under his pillow anyway, and as always, sleeps with Sting keeping him company.
The opportunity presents itself subtly — a small band of gypsies, a circus troupe, stopping just across the Shire to set up camp for a couple of days. After some consideration, Bilbo goes to take a look, spending a few pennies on popcorn and spun-sugar candy and whatever saccharine treats they force upon unwitting visitors.
Between shows and exhibits, he speaks with the carnies, asks them about life on the move. Bilbo gleams a set of varying answers that boils down to most of them being thankful for their travelling, and thinks about it himself. “There’s that saying about a rolling stone and some moss, I think,” a human firebreather muses. He puffs a short tongue of flame two inches into the air and blows smoke through his nostrils. “Some wiseman or wizard once said. I dunno.”
“Indeed.” Bilbo fingers his belt, absently longing to feel the hilt of Sting press into his hand as he watches the man exhale a whole fireball.
Back at Bag End, Bilbo rolls up his sleeves and dons an apron and begins an intense session of spring cleaning even though firstly, it’s the middle of summer, and secondly, the entire place is literally clean enough to eat off just about any surface. But cleaning occupies him, makes him feel busy and productive, and making his time in Hobbiton worthwhile is probably going to be his last-ditch attempt at convincing himself to stay.
He scrubs in dust-free corners and washes clean dishes, willing himself to think about dinner and painting, and not about dashing out the front door and getting wrapped up on another seemingly endless journey that could take him hundreds of miles from home, or worse, to his grave. Up to his elbows in soap suds, Bilbo remembers the countless times he had thought of his hobbit hole out in the wild, back when he’d stupidly signed on to burglarise a dragon’s den, and finds himself determined not to get himself trapped in a similar predicament again. Life’s short enough as it is; he may as well enjoy it from the safety and comfort of the Shire, and there’s no shame in choosing that, is there? At least not for a humble little hobbit such as he.
Just for the heck of it, Bilbo decides to change the sheets in his room as well. When he flips the mattress over, the lower piece of the contract from nearly two years ago flutters out of the lining and floats to land at his feet. He can still see his signature over the line, along with Thorin’s trademark scrawl and the inky curves of Balin’s name above it. Looking down at it with a pillow trapped under his chin, Bilbo groans. It doesn’t help one bit.
Opening his fob watch, Bilbo is struck at the amount of time that has gone by. Has it really been eight months since he returned from Erebor? Bilbo almost cannot believe it. He’s fifty-three years old, on the brink of fifty-four now, and it bothers him to be bothered that he’s only got one life-changing adventure to his name. How he doesn’t find enough satisfaction in that is something that eludes him completely, especially when everyone around him would proudly tell them that they have absolutely none at all to boast about.
Sometimes, Bilbo honestly wishes that he hadn’t been born half a Took; wouldn’t that make life so much more tolerable?
He changes his mind no less than thirty times in a span of a day and night, packing and unpacking and repacking until he hits the middle ground where his hobbit hole is a considerable mess, and there are underpants in his oven and teacups on his shoerack. “Listen here,” he tells himself sternly after deciding against it for the eighteenth time. “You are a Baggins of Bag End. You belong here. Not out there. In here. At home.” Bilbo breathes out heavily and stands upright, glad to have straightened out his priorities, and sets out to tidy up the place.
Five minutes later, he’s all packed again and ready to go. He wails, utterly at a complete loss, and flops on his bed to stare at the ceiling as though as he might find the answer plastered across it. No such luck.
He very nearly missed out on the journey of a lifetime; what’s to say he’s about to miss a second?
Eventually, when he contacts his attorney so he cannot change his mind and finalises a document leaving everything he owns in Bag End in trust, to be renewed by himself every five years if he wishes, Bilbo finds himself on a mad dash through the Shire, daring himself not to look back. He has a pack on his back and a wallet fat with gold and Sting by his side, no contract this time but he has remembered his hanky, and the ring leaping about excitedly in his pocket. The day is bright, and the grass is warm under his bare feet. Someone calls out to him, bewildered, “Mister Bilbo! Where’re you off to?”
He doesn’t bother to turn around as he yells, “I’m going to see the world!” and runs and runs until the fields shrink away and the trees swell above him like they did the first time round he stepped out of Hobbiton and springboarded into the world.