#my fanfiction recommendation column
thunder and the riversong by wraithwings
thorin oakenshield / bilbo baggins, the hobbit
I would have liked to show you the sun, my dear. I would have liked to lay in the grass on the hillside with you, and look at the sky, and smell the change in the air when springtime came. To read to him, or let his own fumbling fingers be taught how to weave through dwarven hair, or wander through the garden and show him how to ask the plants to grow. To slide their fingers together against each other’s palms, for he had never, not once, gotten the chance.
As with all the ships dear to my heart, I rarely find bagginshield that I actually like and can believe in. It wasn't a story I reread for years (The Riven Crown was), but it will certainly become one. It was my unexpected, amazing find last month, and it's such a good, beautiful, moving thing that it feels like the only right ending to the story of Bilbo Baggins' life, and I believe it with all my heart. And although it's a story that contains many happy years, it's melancholy; a quiet sadness, a grief that's been carried for so long in the heart, and a guilt that hasn't let go for so long fill it, reminding us that happiness and sorrow always go hand in hand, that there's something we lose and something we find, and that the only thing we can do is live our lives with all the goodness in our hearts.
I love this story for the language of flowers and the garden Bilbo grew in memory, and how, having experienced such a terrible loss, he forced himself to get up and live on, and how he had raised Frodo, and how he had loved him, and how heavy was his guilt for the burden he had placed upon him though he had not wanted it, and how it mingled with his guilt for those he had failed to save, his dear lost heart, one unbreakable tangle of grief, which step by step he would have the opportunity to unravel and mend. I love this story because it talks about family and home and loyalty and love, and it's the closest thing to what The Hobbit is to me of anything I've read.
