FIC: FALLING

This is the partner fic to "Rising" - a short vignette, focusing on Frodo's pov. :)TITLE: FallingAUTHOR: IgrainePAIRING: F/SRATING: RSUMMARY: Frodo waits for Sam on Tol Eressea. Hope, patience and a little persuasion are needed to find release. DISCLAIMER: These characters belong to JRR Tolkien - I merely borrow them and promise to return them unharmed. I make no money. WARNING: Gratuitous foot fetishing ... ;-)FALLINGIn my mind there was a light. It came to me the day that I moved through the glass and the world tipped over into wonder and strangeness and beauty so perilous I was afraid to set down my feet on the shifting sand. At first it was just a glimpse, like a slender white line beneath my bedroom door. But the door was closed and there was no way of passing through. I would lie in bed and stare at the light and wonder if behind it there would be a green garden. When the daylight faded the memory of it remained, somehow, for the hope persisted, nonetheless. As the years passed it grew brighter, nearly engulfing the darkness and I knew that time was running fast and either I would pass out of life or he would be coming soon. I sat on the shore and I waited and nothing broke the thin white horizon until the sun sank her gold into the sea. I wanted to walk over the waves and push the door open. I sat and I waited until the birds were silent and the stars put me to sleep. I sank my head on the sand and the waves soothed and troubled me with their insistent promises. But if I stopped the sound of them, I thought that I might close the door and the green garden would all wither away in the darkness. That last night I didn’t sleep on the shore. The sand curled around my feet, rooting me to the inky horizon, but I would not stay. I turned away and walked back to the house, the soft welcoming light of lanterns flickering above my head and the trees swaying back and forth as if they were rejoicing. I looked at them but I didn’t dare to hope. I slept and slowly, inch by inch, the light was greater than the darkness that engulfed it and I found that I could rise and push it wide. I was trembling more than he, even as he twisted his hands in his coat pockets and stared as if I were a thing conjured from his dreams. I touched him hesitantly on the arm and he flinched and bowed his head. I laid my mouth upon his soft remembered curls and breathed in the green air of the garden. I took great gasps of him and I held him in my arms and as I did so, he fell against me and wept until he could barely take a breath. But I could only smile. I was falling too, but it felt light and soft and gradual, like tumbling from a gentle height into the welcoming grass. I took him to bed and I sat him down and took his clothes off slowly, running my hands over his skin and confusing him with elvish words of love and possession. I unbuttoned his shirt and with each unfastening, I voiced a new expression of devotion that only sent his heart racing like an animal, sensing yet uncomprehending. When I had laid aside his shirt, I sat at his feet and I caressed them between my hands and remembered how these feet had carried us to the very edge of doom. I bent my head and kissed them softly. He jumped a little and I looked up to see him looking down at me in surprise, a tentative smile playing about his lips. I raised my eyes, half drunk with exaltation yet reigning myself in, holding back the fire that raced through my veins. I asked him if he would lie with me and hold me as once we had done in the black lands and he smiled and pulled me to my feet. It had been the only time - there in that place of death. Huddled together for warmth and comfort, we had touched and sought out words of desperate love that fell into our open, searching mouths, like food. We tried to forget ourselves, even as the weight of It nearly burned our cleaving skin and sought to wrench us apart, angry, thwarted and screaming. Afterwards, we hung our heads and It tried to teach us the nature of shame. I want to believe that this is what he wanted. I want to see that he is happy, but his eyes are lost and he touches me so gently, it seems he fears that I will dissolve under the weight of his hand. The broad planes of his body fascinate me and I explore them again and again until I begin to rediscover the land I left behind. He is a vessel of secrets. I enclose him softly in my mouth and I try to learn them as he bows beneath me and clutches me as if he is holding me on the precipice, but he doesn’t know that I am already falling. “Are you happy?” I wrap my legs around his hips and speak softly into his ear, first in Sindarin, then in the common tongue, the strange words sounding like riddles to my ears. He smiles and pushes against me and I would grab him and tickle him like a merciless child to hear him speak a work. I am pushing him too fast, too far, he is standing on the brink and I am launching him into the unknown. I lower my lashes provocatively, and I know it. I trace his dumbstruck lips with the tip of my tongue.“Are you happy?”He opens his mouth to speak, but all that he can voice is my old name, again and again, struggling in whispers. I saw him wed. I saw the pride shining out of him as he carried Rose Cotton over the threshold and my heart was filled with pride, even as the pain seared me. He looked at me and I saw the resolution and the confusion in his mind but I smiled encouragingly and I tossed the white flowers over the doorstep, the doorstep to my home. My feet, when they passed over, later that night, were silent as a ghost’s and I remained that way – a spirit walking in the shadows of my old life. Lifeless and a prey to the past. But when I passed through the veil, the passion that filled my body took my breath away and I had to hold back a wail of ecstasy, it was so strong. “Let it go, my love, it will pass…”He is afraid of the future, as I was once afraid of letting in the past. He fears the door is closing once again, but I know that we are holding it open.We lie in bed, tangled in soft white sheets under the stars and he teaches me the words I had forgotten. It is like being a child again and I hear Bilbo in his voice and deeper still, echoes of my mother with the golden hair and the whispering love that ran through me like a breeze in the weeping willow trees. I repeat the words and every time I remember a little more of the life I loved. We share the taste of strawberries and the oak and honey ale; we share the growing year and the library with all of its secret pleasures. He holds me and sometimes he moves in me and neither of us knows where one ends and the other begins. Sometimes it seems it has always been so. We were falling and now we have come to rest.THE END