Bilbo never meant to write the damn thing at all.

He isn't a writer. No Baggins has ever done more than dabble in the literary arts and, for all that he has thrown a great deal of tradition to the wind in this wild venture, Bilbo does not mean to begin such an unusual pursuit.

But he goes home to Bag End, and has to fight to keep his home, after every other fight he has already won (and, mostly, lost), and then it is just Bilbo and his memories, rattling around in a great empty house. He writes in self-defense, to keep his sanity.

He writes the story six months after leaving Erebor, when the first throes of grief are still battering his heart. He is caught unawares by them, sometimes, until a sound or smell or twinge of pain brings memories flooding over him, until he is bent over in pain that is as much physical as emotional. The story he writes flows from his pen like blood. It is an elegy.

He writes of virtue and loyalty and sacrifice, of noble kings and doomed families. He writes of jokes shared over fires and meals, of reckless bravery, of kindness that tore his defenses apart before he realised they were being breached. The story he writes tears his heart out, and he hides the draft away like the guilty secret all Hobbiton reckons it must be.

Bilbo burns it a year later, unable to read it again, but it does not rid him of his ghosts in his horribly empty, quiet home.

He tries to learn to draw, next, and it is a dismal failure. It is the way Hobbits memorialise the dead they have lost, and it seems to Bilbo in a deep part of his heart that if he had their likenesses captured on paper, he could deal better with the loss. He tries with pencil and charcoal, with ink and paint and even dirt, and the attempts bear no resemblance to the memories he bears. There is no way to capture the kindness of Thorin's eyes, nor the deep sadness of him. The lads are even worse, because what they are in his memories is life itself, brilliant and flawed and alive. He cannot put that to paper.

Bilbo hides all of his aborted attempts when Frodo comes to live with him, and resigns himself to never being able to look on their faces again. He doesn't quite remember everything, anyway.

And so he tries again to write the story of his adventure. It has been several long decades filled mostly with quiet and solitude, only recently broken by the liveliness that young Frodo brings to Bag End. He gets the basics down - the unexpected party, the encounter with the trolls, Mirkwood, the dragon - but then he stops. He begins to doubt his own memory. It all happened in such a blur, really, and he had been so panicked half the time.

He reads over his partial draft a few weeks after putting it down, and frowns down at the page. He has written that Fili was sent to scout ahead, being the youngest of the Company, and possessed of the sharpest eyes. Had Fili been the youngest? It seemed like he had been sent to scout, but something did not make sense.

Bilbo digs out the notes he had made years ago, when he had tried to straighten out as many of the details about his odd friends as he could. No, it made no sense. Fili had been older than his brother by almost five years, going by the genealogy he still possessed in rough form. He put the paper down slowly.

"Of course he was older, you old fool," Bilbo whispers to himself. "How could you have forgotten?" Forgotten how Fili had always kept two eyes on his brother, intent on providing what protection he could? Forgotten how Kili had taken such reckless chances, grinning with careless brilliance, and tossing off quips about being the spare heir, and so dispensable?

He puts the years of their births and deaths in an appendix to the work, but leaves his mistake in print, to accuse himself. He is letting their memory fade, slip between his fingers like dust. It is not to be borne.

The next time Bilbo attempts to write his book, he is an old man in all but body, grown tired and grumpy and cynical. Frodo accuses him of becoming unsociable, and he does not have the heart to tell the lad that he has been unsociable since he left behind all the people who had mattered. The story is not the same, now, as the one he had told in his youth.

Bilbo writes of greed and loss, now, and of the nobility of the Elves. He writes of the faults of the Dwarves in great and accusing detail.

"Dwarves are not heroes," he writes, and ignores the way his quill shakes with the force of his emotion. "But calculating folk with a great idea of the value of money." He closes his eyes for a moment, seeing shabby old Bofur burying gold in a troll-cave. Bofur had a cousin to look after, and had never had enough to see to the comfort and medical care of his family. He shakes his head, and writes on. "Some are tricky and treacherous and pretty bad lots; some are not, but are decent enough people like Thorin and Company."

He has not personally known bad Dwarves. He has known Dwarves who risked their lives for his, and welcomed him into their midst. He has known the gigantic hands of a Dwarf, wrapped around his throat, threatening to throw him down to the rocks.

Bilbo lets his pen drop to the desk as he rubs at his eyes, which suddenly sting. He has known Dwarves who throw themselves into danger after him, and who risk their lives for family and home and honour. But those Dwarves hired him as a burglar and then stole something from him. They left him alone and sent him home and he can never get back what they took from him, so he will write of every fault they ever had, and try to forget their virtues. He carries ghosts with him that will never leave him alone, and he buried his innocence and part of his heart there in the darkness of the Lonely Mountain, and he will never be the same young Hobbit who left Bag End without his handkerchief.

"Decent enough people," he reads back from his notes, and picks up his pen and goes on, "if you don't expect too much."

He leaves Bag End, and something precious, behind him, and travels with Dwarves again. He is old, now, and feels his age more with every step, but the memories of his first journey start to come back as he walks the same route he had taken with Dwarves so long ago. It comes back to him, what it is like to travel with Dwarves - loud and joyous, lacking manners and delicacy and almost all hints of common sense. It is madness, but he has not felt so alive in many long and stretched out years. He wishes, for a long time, to retrace the whole journey. Mirkwood and Laketown and, more than any other, the Lonely Mountain seem to call to him across time, beckoning him home.

But he gets as far as Rivendell, and he is too tired. Old Balin is gone now, and Ori with him, and Bilbo finds he does not have the heart to continue. The Dwarves he knew are scattered far and wide, and a stranger sits on the throne of Erebor, and Bilbo is far too old for such nonsense. Only the dead wait for him in Erebor, and he can not go to them.

Gloin comes to Rivendell, in the end, and it is a joy beyond any Bilbo has expected to meet him again. Gloin is pleased to see him, and more pleased to brag about the exploits of his hearty son Gimli - but he is gently sorrowful that Bilbo never came back to them.

"We looked for you, you know," he tells Bilbo in the blunt way of his folk. "Always thought we'd see you wandering along with your funny little bare feet, or you'd just pop up out of nowhere beside us, as you always did."

"Yes, well," Bilbo says helplessly. He waves a hand a bit, unsure what to say. "There always seemed to be things that needed looking after. They tried to sell my house away from under me when I first came back, did you know? Puts a bit of a damper on future travel plans, I must say."

"Aye, laddie, I know," Gloin says gravely. "But we didn't think you'd be able to stay away. Not without saying a proper farewell."

Bilbo closes his eyes and tries to breathe around the tight weight of that in his chest, to manage the sudden stab of grief that wells up in him. How can a few Dwarves, whose acquaintance he made briefly so very many years ago, have such a hold of his heart?

He had said goodbye to Thorin - a better farewell than he could have expected, given the circumstances, and Bilbo is grateful for that. But Fili and Kili?

He was asleep when they died - knocked unconscious by a heavy stone that had ensured he never had a chance to do anything to help them. He had heard about it far too late, and Bilbo had not had the courage to go and see them laid out. Despite their great height, and the skill with which they fought, Bilbo had always known they were far younger than the rest of the Company. It had taken seeing their birth and death dates written out to make him understand how young they had truly been, for Dwarves. He is older now than they ever got to be, and they will forever be young and bright-eyed and laughing in his memory. There is no room in that for solemn graves, for joyous life hidden away under cold, unfeeling stone. He will not go to see them now. He can not.

Bilbo does not return to the Lonely Mountain.

Frodo comes to him in Rivendell, far later than he had hoped, and now his beloved lad has had adventures and a Company of his own. Some of his companions are wise and experienced, and some are far too young and merry and unwise - too loyal, too willing to take risks. They stir up memories he had thought long buried, and he sees Gandalf watching them, too, with similar trepidation. Bilbo had thought his heart too old and tired to ever hurt again. He was wrong.

He reads over the draft of his book, and it might have been written by a stranger. There is truth to many of the events he has written out, and he has inserted corrections for some of his most egregious failures of truth in storytelling. (The problem of his story of the finding of the Ring is a puzzling one, as Bilbo cannot quite remember what had possessed him to write out the lie he had originally told his companions of how he came by it. He writes the true version and puts it in place, wishing it were so easy to overwrite all of the past.) It is not the book he meant to write. It is not the book he should have written.

He is too old to write another.

Bilbo tells Frodo he has thought of an ending to his book, and Frodo seems impressed enough by it. Frodo, for all his good qualities, seems to have a startling lack of understanding of Bilbo himself, some days. He has never understood what Bilbo has carried with him for so many years, and why he will never be at peace.

The Ring was the least of his burdens.

The ending he has written is a lie, blatant and terrible as any of the others he has written, but Bilbo can see no other conclusion to such a work. He will end the way he began, and it is less condemnation than he deserves, for who can read the book now and see the falsehoods he was worked through the material? Who is left to remember but Bilbo? He has managed that very badly indeed.

"And he lived happily ever after, to the end of his days."

He hadn't deserved it, anyway.