Frodo thinks there might be a ghost in Bag End.

He was born too early after the Great Danger to giggle into the bed sheets about Lumbering Lotho, toes curling and laughter shrieking just to drown out the potential sound of a sniff and lurch from the hall.

When Merry was only a baby, Elanor had made up stories about Frodo Baggins wandering the halls in his fevers. Frodo had known that Elanor had been too young to remember the time before his namesake had sailed, back when it was just the four of them - Sam-dad, Rose-mum, Frodo and Elanor - in the house alone.

But not alone, really. Sam-dad never talked about it much, that year with just the four of them, but Frodo has garnered his own view of it from what his mother has mentioned on occasion; a patchwork of memories sewn together in his mind to make a quilt full of gaps and holes, odd-shaped and too bright in some places, too dark in others.

In the study late at night, though - when he's lurched and sniffed his way up the hall to shrieks of horrified delight from the rooms branching off to the side - and his eyes ache from the candle light and the determined stain of black ink on yellowing paper, he hears footsteps of his own.

Thinks he hears footsteps; he holds his breath and looks up, uselessly - the door is closed and there isn't much but darkness beyond the halo of his candles, anyway - but the smial around him is thick with silence. No soft pad or slap of bare feet on bare boards, no creak of wood underfoot or groan of a door swinging open. No squeaking hinges.

". . . You will read things out of the Red Book," he reads, eyes scanning over the carefully printed words; in his father's hand but not as fluent and worn at the edges as it is in the mayoral documents. "And keep alive the memory of the age that is gone, so that people will remember the Great Danger and so love their beloved land all the more."

The candle flickers and it makes Frodo jump, heart pounding until he realises it's his own breath making the flame move, his chest hurting from holding it too long. He smiles a little. The book smells like old paper and there's sand in the spine at a few places - Smaug's lair, Rivendell, Lothlorien - tiny fragments of Elanor's home that stick to Frodo's fingertips; the pages even smell a little like salt if he presses his face close enough.

The smial is silent. The study is deep enough within the hill that the night-sounds - sleepily murmuring birds, crickets, the silvery slithery sound of the mallorn leaves brushing against each other (on a clear night) - don't carry into the small, close room. Frodo knows that he's not the first to make use of this study - and of course, not the last. Rose-mum had spoken of days where Frodo Baggins would bring his book out to write in the front parlour; sunlight dripping in through the window and Sam-dad out in the garden, planting and weeding. But Frodo'd also heard her mention late nights in this room, seen her shiver and brusquely rub her upper arms, looking up from the flames on the hearth to look around at them almost sheepishly, and ask where she was in her story.

Sam-dad had used this study up until the day he left; and Frodo remembers the first time he stepped into it after his dad had gone - papers ordered, ink-pots empty, chair tucked in and fresh quills in the drawer. Frodo wonders if that's what it looked like after Bilbo had left.

Some nights Frodo thinks he can hear the soft scratch scratch of nib against rough parchment.

He wonders if Frodo Baggins was very lonely, after Bilbo had left to stay in Rivendell. He'd had Sam-dad, of course, the steady clip-clip of shears outside the parlour window and raucous visits to the Green Dragon that Sam-dad would recount to his children, behind his hand if Rosie was about, but always with a smile on his lips and a gleam in his eye.

Frodo freezes, page half-turned. He could swear that --

He moves again after a moment, rubbing the bridge of his eyes and blinking at the uneven pool of wax at the base of the candlestick; drips running over and over old drips; red and white and honey-yellow. He slumps in his chair, closing the book; it settles with a rich, stuttered sound of air escaping the soft parchment, and the leather is smooth, almost polished with use under his palm.

Frodo knows Bag End well enough to navigate the hallways in the dark; and as his hand curves around a strand of the great root dripping and curving out of the roof and around a corner, he closes his eyes in the darkness and strains to catch the swiftly fading wisps of a whisper. Bag End is alive around him, heat and cold and breathing with the smell of fresh earth and wood, and smoke and sulphur and skin and sweat.

His eyes flicker open into a darkness less dense, somehow, and it's silent again with only the cool taste of night on the back of his tongue. He starts moving again, taking a step for every four beats of his heart, and as he gets closer to the master bedroom he can hear Firiel breathing, slow and steady and real.

Sometimes Frodo wakes up as the sun rises to the sound of shears outside the bedroom window. Still half-lost to sleep, the sound intertwines with his dreams in the moments before waking, but always gone when he rises.