A Wilderness of Warding

Author: Permilea
Rating: PG
Characters: Frodo, Samwise
Category: AU
Status: Incomplete, and that's how it will stay. If you keep reading, you mustn't complain when you reach the last bit.
Disclaimer: Middle-earth and its denizens belong to the Tolkien Estate.
Summary: After Mount Doom, an exhausted Sam does his best to tend and protect an injured Frodo despite a bewildering change in their circumstances. AU, non-slash.

A/N: This story is pure self-indulgence. Riding a ski lift during a snowfall one day, I looked down at the snow-cloaked firs and pines and imagined exhausted Sam looking after injured Frodo in such a mountain forest. That's it. It's AU. It's hurt/comfort (mostly comfort.) It's space/time travel. Why am I posting it? Because I had fun writing it and maybe you'll have fun reading it. For those who share my love of h/c (emphasis on the 'c') and can't get enough even when the story isn't canon or complete: Here's to you!

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Chapter 1

"Frodo? Frodo!"

Sam Gamgee braced himself against the biting wind and squinted through the whirling darkness. They'd been together just moments earlier, watching the lava creep closer, struggling to breathe the poisonous hot air. Frodo had slumped against him, his hand going limp in Sam's, and Sam had felt his own legs collapse, seen darkness cover his vision and heard silence slowly fill his ears.

But now he was in a world of freezing night. One moment blasted by heat and fire in a desert, the next gasping in a blizzard in a forest. His throat, burning from the sulfurous acid air of Mordor, now choked closed against a chunk of frigid air.

Bewildered by the sudden change, Sam put thought of it aside when he realized the hand that had clasped his own so desperately was missing. A sudden gust felled him to his knees and he floundered in snow over waist-high.

"Frodo!"

The wind ripped his words from his mouth and whipped them to nothingness in its howling. He lurched forward, arms flailing through the nearby drifts, searching. His eyes watered as he tried to see through the wind-driven snow, sharp as needles. Tall shadows shivered in the night before him and he lurched into the frost-scoured sides of trees and boulders in the sloping ground. Only when he barked against their rough solid shapes did he know they were not his master.

Then beneath a snow stream writhing like a snake, something dappled the drifted surface. He touched it with one shaking hand. Blood. Fresh blood. And the nearby snow was disturbed, as if something – someone—had lain there just moments before.

"Mr. Frodo!" Sam shouted, cupping his hands around his mouth. "Frodo!" He looked around wildly, but the darkness and the blizzard defeated him. Frantic he plowed his way downhill, where something had crawled or rolled before him. Frozen droplets made dark smears in the broken snow. He stumbled and fell over something soft and still. Sam fought the snow, to reach his master's side.

"Sam—" The whisper was faint, but Sam had heard that voice through an erupting volcano. He had no trouble hearing it now through a howling blizzard. He felt Frodo shudder and heard him cough. He was on his front, face half out of the snow, one hand buried beneath him, the other curled above his head. He was struggling to rise, his free hand scrabbling at the snow, when Sam caught him around the shoulders, grabbed the twitching fingers and stilled them.

"Master, don't. You can't—"

"Must." The single word was gasped. Frodo's pain-glazed eyes held Sam's, but then they clouded over from cold and shock and exhaustion. With a shudder, he collapsed. His hand went limp in Sam's and his eyes closed.

"No!" Sam grabbed him, shook him, his eyes filling with fearful tears. He looked around frantically, desperately peering through the darkness and the snowstorm. There! A shadow, not far off, wide and tall, promising shelter of a sort if he could reach it. But it would take all his strength to break through the drifts. He had to leave Frodo behind.

Gently Sam laid his friend down and tugged the hood of the elf cloak over his face to protect him from the driving snow. He pulled out the elf-rope, tied it around Frodo's unwounded hand, and, with the other end around his own, he began to push and fight his way toward the tall shadow.

It was just a few short feet before he found it, a tree, huge beyond any outside Lothlórien. He stopped, panting, the icy air like needles in his chest, the flakes of snow stinging in his eyes. There had been no such tree on the slopes of Mount Doom. He wouldn't think of that now. There hadn't been snow either. He squinted back along the silvery trail of the rope. It vanished into the dense snowstorm--the other end, and the person tied to it, hidden by the swirling darkness.

Sam gulped, panic shooting through him. It left him gasping, but he fought it off, and turned toward the tree. Inexplicable or not, it was a giant, a great swooping spruce, whose lower branches were deeply buried in drifts. Grimly, Sam began digging, his numb hands flinging snow away in frustratingly small chunks. Sam dug faster. Frodo would not survive long exposed as he was now, and neither would he, for that matter. Whether they could survive for long even protected from this blizzard, without fire nor food, Sam thrust from his mind.

His hands left red streaks on the snow, but Sam forced himself to keep tunneling, pushing aside the great flat swathes of evergreen that the fierce wind whipped back against him. His hand broke through to nothingness. He pushed through to widen the hole, then he tied the rope to a branch with stiff fingers, and groped his way back along it to fetch Frodo.

There wasn't much room under the spruce, giant though it was, but there was enough for two small hobbits to lie between roots and trunk on a thick mat of fallen needles. The dense foliage of the lower branches held back the snow and the wind, and formed a slanting ceiling. To smial-dwelling hobbits, its closeness was cozy and comforting. Sam spread the elven-cloak over them both as much as he could and curled himself and Frodo up together, trying to still his master's fierce shivers with his own body warmth, such as it was.

"Don't know what good it'll do," he muttered, his teeth chattering and hands shaking as he clutched the unconscious hobbit close to him under the cloak's thin gray weave. "But it comes from the Lady, and she gave it to us in her Woods. Won't do no harm I reckon."

And when he stopped shivering and his eyes closed, Sam didn't struggle. He smiled, held Frodo's icy hands in his, and let himself sink into sleep.

So long as we're together, Mr. Frodo, he thought drowsily. Funny. Didn't think it would be so warm, somehow.

-TBC-