Sam is spared nightmares, most nights. When they do come, they are difficult to remember--glimpses of Orodruin, or the desecrated wastes that lie before the Black Gate, filthy barrens which no hand can make green again. He dreams of Gollum's teeth in his shoulder, and of the voice of that wretched, wracked creature whom he loathed so completely. Shelob, too--her soft, monstrous weight crushing him to the earth in the pass of Cirith Ungol, the acid ichor of her wound scoring his hands.

In the worst dreams he relives that awful time, short though it was, when Frodo was taken from him, dead as he thought. And he does not know which is worse--to believe that his master has passed away from life, or to discover that he lives yet, and is alive in the hands of the orcs. And so those dreams seesaw back and forth between the two realities, and when he wakens, he is sick, sick in his soul and his stomach, with the nauseating passage between grief and rage.

Rose does not ask what is wrong when he wakes from these infrequent visitations. She holds him close and smooths the hair back from his clammy forehead, and rocks him like a child when he weeps, as sometimes he does.

It took him a while to understand that his tears do not distress her. His Gaffer would have hard words to say about a fool who went and placed himself in such passes and then suffered nightmares about it. To the Gaffer who lives in Sam's mind, his tears smack of self-pity, and if there is one trait which Sam's Gaffer--and Sam himself--cannot abide, it is self-pity. And so for a long time, Sam choked back his sobs and turned away from Rose in their large bed, hoping not to waken her.

Then one night he felt her warm hands run gently across his back, and he turned to her and buried his head in that welcoming place between neck and breast and wept. He was ashamed, after, but she brought him sharply up when he muttered and ducked his head.

"Oh, my dear Sam," she said. His heart gave a twinge at this echo of the words, heard so often from his master's lips.

"I, I'm sorry," he said, rubbing his swollen eyes and red nose.

She handed him a kerchief, plucked from the table by the bed. "Don't you dare apologize to me for that," she said, and he looked at her surprised. "I got no right to carry on so, Rose," he said.

She lay back on her pillows and gazed at him, blue eyes puffy with sleep, curls tumbled over her shoulders. "If not you, then who?"

Stung, Sam replied without thinking: "Mr. Frodo, that's who!" The room was dark, the hole quiet around them. Sam thought of his master, sleeping somewhere down the hall and always silent, never calling for him. He spoke low, then, but with feeling. "If he don't carry on in the night, then it's the better for him and I'm glad. But then again, if he don't carry on in the night, why must I? It's no good saying I haven't seen awful things, Rose, but he's seen worse, so he has, and felt worse things, too."

She pulled him down beside her and then spoke. "You think he has no nightmares?"

"I never hear him," replied Sam honestly.

"I do," she said simply, and restrained her husband from jumping up right then and there to check on Mr. Frodo. "I hear him sometimes, just barely. Maybe talking in his sleep, maybe crying, I don't know."

Sam bit his lip and his eyes filled with tears again. "Why don't he say anything?"

"Why do you think, Samwise?" asked Rose. "I think of going to him, but he says nothing during the daytime hours, and so I think he wants to be left alone with it. I do not know what happened there at the end of your journey, but I know it must have been bad, for neither you nor he will say anything beyond the barest of facts: That that Gollum creature attacked you and then him, and they struggled for the Ring, and then Gollum fell into the fire with it. And I know Mr. Frodo lost his finger that day, which makes no sense unless he wore the Ring on it, which makes no sense unless, unless, well, I'll just say it makes no sense." Sam, struck dumb by her shrewd guesses, could only stare at her shadowy face on the pillow beside his. "I'll just say, I think Mr. Frodo is sad, sad and maybe shamed, and so I leave him be."

"Rose," said Sam haltingly, but then had no words to continue.

She did, though (as he would discover she often did throughout their long years together): "I won't take my pity and my ignorance in to shame him worse." She raised an eyebrow at him. "But you, you have no shame in you, only grief, and nothing wrong with it. So don't you worry if you wake me up with your crying, Samwise Gamgee. I am here for your tears as well as your joys, and you for mine." The matter apparently settled, she kissed him.

He smiled back at her, and they did not speak of it again.

And so even as her belly grows and the unborn babe becomes a sweet, awkward interference between them, he still turns to her on the nights when he awakens, frightened or angry or grief-struck, and her arms are always there, strong and safe and needed.

And if he thinks he hears Mr. Frodo in the night, he gets up and makes some small clanking in the kitchen, so that Frodo can come out in his dressing gown with his black curls standing up in corkscrews all over his head. They sit with tea or warm milk or spiced wine, there in the small hours of the night. They might talk of their travels, or some small jest of Mr. Merry or Mr. Pippin's; or they might say little, just sit companionably together in the comforting warmth.

They went on past where words can help or harm or heal, and now they are back, but still words are often unneeded between them. Certainly Sam never says a word about his master's red eyes and nose, or his pale thin cheeks. He hands him a ginger biscuit and they wait for the dawn together.