Shell shock, they called it, and sent him back to the front after a couple of months in some rehab hospital room that had stank of vomit and old bandages. Sam had found him again, though Frodo wasn't sure if he'd ever left his side; dinted helmet a bold line against his forehead. Sam always smelt of tobacco and a welcome kind of sweat, familiar as the dull green of their uniforms that seemed to wash out Frodo's world but for the flicker of gunfire or blood in the corner of his eye.
Sam's eyes glittering in the reflected starlight, the only way Frodo saw it for months, half-buried in the trenches, helmet muffling the world around him. And late at night when the gunfire stopped enough that they could hear foreign voices raised in guttural laughter from trenches barely a stone's throw away, the dead silence within the trench was only broken by the ringing in Frodo's ears and the soft crackle of Sam's cigarettes.
Those were the moments he remembered, and came awake late at night almost as if he hadn't been sleeping at all, with the smell of sweat and tobacco in his nostrils. And he would roll over and bury his face in Sam's hair, feel Sam's breath and the shifting of muscle under warm skin, and feel Rose shift behind him and press close, flinging one soft arm limply over his side.
Rose, sweet Rose who had surely had as bad a time of it as they had. Something he didn't envy her of, for the thought of being left at home, cut off as surely as if she were in constant blackout, was not something he would have preferred to Sam's reassuring murmurs, low and thick in his ear even as the shells shrieked above and around them.
But they'd come back. A elderly cousin of Frodo's - quite the globetrotter in his time - had left him a townhouse big enough for the three of them, and as big a family as they could wish for. It had taken little convincing on his part for Sam and Rose to lodge with him - a house to big for him alone, surely, and after all the loss he'd seen he couldn't let this go to waste . . . And little convincing on their part for him to share the master bedroom with them.
Shell shock wasn't something he could be rid of so easily, though, some nights coming awake to find he'd been awake all along, or awake but still in some dark dream that stank of blood and gunpowder, the tattoo of the machine guns still in his ears, body aching as if it were pierced with shrapnel. His own breath gasping dully and echoing as if the percussive helmet still muffled his ears. Sometimes he'd find himself somewhere in the city, backstreets somewhere perhaps, smelling like damp stone and urine, his shoulders aching from the strap of his rifle, left long behind him now. Many miles, many years.
~