I’m tired, he would tell himself, early, early in the mornings.  He would lie in bed, wait for the sun to rise and think of opening the curtains to see if his star was still there.  But he never did.  The thought of his eyes meeting only darkness was too daunting, too much like the memories.  Memories…he had gone farther than any of the Fellowship.

Sometimes, as he waited for the dawn, Sam could see it all, feel it all again.   Frodo had been lucky in the end; he had forgotten almost everything past parting with Faramir.  Of course, Frodo had been with him in body, but Sam knew the truth—he had been alone in Mordor.  Alone and afraid, terribly, terribly afraid.  He remembered watching his master changing, seeing his cheeks hollowing and his eyes burning in the tower…and in the mountain.  All that was in Frodo’s book, of course.  And, Sam supposed, in the tales told in Gondor and Rohan and everywhere else by now.  

But…he had lived so much more.  More than he told the remnants of the Fellowship, more than was written in the book, more, more, more.  That was why he couldn’t sleep, why he froze in place, the skin on his arms and legs going cold with sweat whenever a cloud passed over the sun, why he could barely hear over the sea roaring in his ears whenever the leaves began to change.  No one, not even his dear Rosie, and certainly not Merry or Pippin, suspected he went to the Havens again and again to hear the sea. 

They didn’t know and Sam would never tell.  Frodo’s book would never hold the worst details—Sam choking on grit and ash till he vomited blood and bile; the spider’s black ichor soaking his cut hands and making them sting so badly he could barely move them without crying out; watching Frodo nibble on lembas and forcing himself to turn away, memories of Gollum’s slavering filling his head.  The ring’s voice, huge and mocking, laughing when he stumbled, or worse, mimicking Strider, Gandalf, and even Frodo, and cursing him till he wept with self-hatred and misery. 

But sometimes, in those mornings he lay in his soft bed and waited for the sun to rise, Sam remembered the worst thing of all.  Frodo’s voice, cracked and almost unrecognizable, whispering in the tent that first waking night in Ithilien,

“Sam, I wish…”

He knew what his master wanted.  It was his own desire, the one no one must suspect.  The longing that everything had ended there, on the fiery slope of that cursed place, that they had not been rescued and they had died together.  After all, the quest had been finished, why not?  Why not peace at last? 

Tears trickled from Sam’s tightly closed eyelids.  He was tired; why could he not rest?  He wished the sun would rise.  He could always pretend during the day and in the evenings, in front of his beloved children and Rosie.  Pretend he didn’t hear the waves strike the shore or the gulls cry.  The sea called, but he could not answer.  Not yet. 

“I cannot leave them,” he whispered.  And far away, the ghost-voice of the sea rose and fell, calling endlessly, as it would for over sixty years.