wip /// sam returns from the war of the ring. hamfast sees that he isn’t truly home yet.
Hamfast sees death in his son’s eyes when he returns proud and sitting upon a pony named Glory. It is dreadful—that sickening, twisted fear in his boy’s gaze, once that face peered up at his and held only piety. Take my hand, child. Hamfast would say, wiping the salt and soul from Samwise’s forehead. My darling boy. My son.
Sam sees the fear in his father’s look—when he returns, to a razed garden and a house that seems smaller. His father, too, looks smaller. Unfathomably tiny below him on the ground, a far cry from the Gaffer he left him as. That is, in itself another death that quickens in Sam’s heart.
“My grave son,” Hamfast says, it could be a joke if either of them smiled. Instead, the father of this returning soldier blinks as the sun cradles Sam’s new armor. You were made for garden beds, Hamfast thinks. Not…not this.
