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The Hobbit FanFiction
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Published:
2018-12-27
Updated:
2025-01-29
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34,880
Chapters:
6/?
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Not The Same Hobbit

Summary:

Nineteen years after a cautious Bilbo Baggins left his home to follow a king across a continent, the world-weary hobbit finds that he can hardly bear to be in his home for a week. He has spent almost two decades traveling across Middle-earth, chasing the elusive feeling of belonging that died with the King Under the Mountain and his heirs. As he prepares for yet another journey, Bilbo makes a painful decision to leave behind his awful, lovely golden ring. And everything changes.

A time-travel fix-it where a hardened Bilbo Baggins is offered the chance to change a tragic story, perhaps at the cost of his sanity and his life. He doesn't even hesitate.

Edit: Newly updated in April of 2025. Thank you for all the support. Your comments and kudos mean the whole world to me.

Chapter 1: A Change of Company

Notes:

(See the end of the chapter for notes.)

Chapter Text

The longer that Bilbo Baggins stared at the innocent looking gold ring on his dining table, the more he came to the conclusion that he didn’t like the thing very much. In fact, he disliked it almost as much as the look on Lobelia’s face whenever she found him back from his travels, as if she’d stepped in hog manure. The ring was, arguably, more useful than Lobelia, but it was almost as upsetting when it chose to be.

“Well?” he challenged, raising an eyebrow. His voice and the brief clinking of silver on china as he stirred his tea were the only sounds filling Bag End on this warm afternoon.

The ring was suspiciously quiet.

“If I didn’t know any better, I’d say you were sulking,” the hobbit informed it, removing the tea leaves from his cup.

The answering silence was rather loud.

Bilbo shrugged, sipping his tea. “Be that way, then. Goddess knows I’ve had enough of your foul commentary.” Since the Shire folk had recently taken to calling him “Mad Baggins” as though he had no other first name, he wasn’t terribly concerned that he was talking to an object.

He had been rather concerned when it began talking in the first place, but he had long since grown used to it.

Turning his attention away from the troublesome ring, Bilbo washed his cup and put it away, then returned to the dining table to shoulder the pack that waited there. “Well,” he reflected, patting his coat absently. “I do believe that’s everything. Let’s see, what have I forgotten? Instructions for Hamfast in his mailbox, threatening note to Lobelia on the door, poem for Erestor packed in with the note books … aha!” He’d spotted his traveling cloak on the back of his old armchair. He’d had to replace it after a wolf got ahold of its predecessor last summer. That predecessor, Traveling Cloak IX, had been retired to a chest in the spare room rather than broken down for materials in thanks for providing the wolf with something to grab that was not hobbit flesh. Smiling at the memory of the expression on the tailor’s face and the way he’d sighed, “Again, Mister Bilbo? Ye sure is hard on yer clothing,” Bilbo secured the cloak around his neck.

Everything else was packed snugly in the saddlebags slung over his pony’s back. Buttercup was a temperamental thing, but she had served him well for two years now and he liked to think that they had an understanding between them. He provided food, refrained from riding unless wounded or exhausted, and dried her off well after asking that she walk through the rain. She in turn refrained from biting his unsuspecting person when she felt mischievous and puffing full of air like a pompous rooster when he tried to saddle her. And the apples he spoiled her with likely didn’t hurt their relationship.

Yes, he was as prepared as one could be for the Road.

That only left one final item.

He hadn’t deluded himself into thinking this would be easy. Bilbo took a deep breath, then another. He tapped his bare toes against the floor, reaching for memories of his strong-willed mother, his steadfast father -

Dead, the ring reminds him, clipped, cruel, precise. The ring whispers that everyone is dead, that he may as well be, but that he will feel so a l i v e if he would only slip the thin band over his finger -

Finger nails biting into his palms, he thinks of Thorin.

Thorin who fell, who was weak, the ring sneered. Thorin who would have let you fall.

Thorin, who had come out of his madness for his people, Bilbo thought resolutely, lashing out at the foul thoughts. Thorin, who brushed the braids out of his nephews’ faces in the morning before waking them. Thorin, who once confessed, voice heavy with shame, that he saw two dwarrow when he looked at golden-haired Fili. Thorin, who only wanted to be enough for his people, who had thought for so long that he could MAKE himself into what they needed through sheer will alone. Thorin, who looked at the Elvenking and saw what he would rather die than become.

Thorin, who was dead too, and Bilbo prayed that he was happy in Mahal’s Halls of Waiting or wherever he had chosen to reside. He hoped that the king didn’t blame himself.

Bilbo knew him well enough to know that he would blame himself anyway. He can only pray that there are enough dwarrow who love him in the Halls to comfort him and make him see sense since the hobbit was not there to do it himself.

So he pushed his old grief away and focused on the thought of Thorin as he had been when alive. Fearless, intense, dedicated - the Thorin who had taught him how to be brave.

Bilbo fixed the ring a firm look as moments stretched into minutes. His hands curled where they were tucked into his coat pockets, wishing for it, for the blessed nothing that enveloped him when he put the ring on his finger. How all the noise and pain and loneliness would fade away like it had never settled in his heart to rot. He felt rooted to the spot, the sun beginning to sink slowly from its noon height. He was trembling now, and he swallowed against a dry throat. He wanted it. He loathed it. He needed it.

He might have stared indefinitely, caught in a tug-of-war between his will and the ring’s own, had Buttercup not chosen to whinny loudly from the yard, voicing her impatience. The sharp sound, and the journey it implied, jolted Bilbo from his musings. Before he could think any more about it, the hobbit scooped the ring up, ignoring how right it felt against his palm, and started for his bedroom. The ring’s pull was gnawing at his mind but he shook his head resolutely, taking longer strides. He felt a sudden pulse of heat from the ring – alarm? he wondered with a cruel smile curving his mouth – as he dropped it, no, hurled it into the opening beneath the floor board he had loosened. He bit his lip until he tasted blood at the wrenching agony of letting it go (you will never escape your pain without me!), but he did not allow himself to pick it back up. He viciously stomped the board back into place over it and shifted the dresser until one of its legs rested over the board. Panting with exertion, though the dresser had been quite light, he slumped back against the wall and gasped, “There, monster! You stay here this time. Useful you may be, but Buttercup will make far better company.”

Indeed, the ring’s occasional hateful comments and voluble approval of violence in all forms was all the hard evidence Bilbo needed that the ring was poor company. But it was the … the other thing, the drain that made his temper flare and his footsteps drag, that he could not attribute to the ring with certainty. Not yet, at least. He aimed to find out soon.

Bilbo took a few steadying breaths before leaving the room, closing the door firmly behind him. He did not allow himself to linger, not with it still so tantalizingly close. He felt confident that his friend and gardener Hamfast Gamgee would enforce his rule that no hobbit be allowed to enter Bag End while he was gone, only draw water from the well outside to tend his plants. His letter to Lobelia, in which he threatened to go to the Thane himself if there was any noise at all about her maneuvering to seize his home, should be sufficient to scare her off for the duration of his trip.

Satisfied with the security of the ring’s hiding spot, Bilbo paused with his hand on the doorknob and allowed himself a lingering look at his home. It looked much as it had when he’d left it behind for the Lonely Mountain almost nineteen years ago, save for scattered mementos of his recent outings like the battered goblin’s shield serving out its second life as a general catch-all of uninteresting letters, bills of sale, and irate diatribes from the Sackville-Bagginses.

No, nineteen years hadn’t changed much in Bag End, except how easy it was to leave behind.

Suppressing a wince, he closed the round green door and murmured apologies to the unimpressed Buttercup. Her demeanor improved when he produced an apple, the pony’s ears perking forward with interest as she munched away. Bilbo rubbed the white star on her face affectionately. She was an attractive animal with a reddish mane and a rare grey roan coat. A friendly man he’d met while passing through the Gulf of Lune had sold her to him for a pretty sum despite his initial plans to keep her for breeding. He’d had a change of heart after seeing the warmth in Bilbo’s demeanor as he cooed over the pony, a decision helped by the memory of his potential broodmare nearly breaking his favorite stallion’s leg with a kick when he’d gotten a little too familiar. Bilbo understood perfectly. He’d taken many a soul to task for poor manners.

“Well, girl,” the hobbit said wearily, taking her reins loosely in hand, “what do you say we go see the elves?”

The mare snorted, as if querying him about what took him so long. But she butted her head gently into his hair, snuffling as if he was a foal that needed checking on. He managed a laugh through his cracked throat – had he been screaming? – and forced his legs to move.

The hobbits he passed only offered a nod or a wave, if that. No one attempted to stop him these days. They were used to his comings and goings, though they judged him for it. He cast a careful eye about for a familiar riot of dark curls but sighed in relief when Lobelia was nowhere to be seen. His steps felt heavy as he put greater distance between himself and his door, the ring a piercing shriek in the back of his mind. Every time his steps faltered and he almost turned, he would feel the tug at his hands as Buttercup trudged ahead without him or have her tail flicked at him in irritation, urging her daydreaming foal to keep up.

Somehow, he managed. Though his heart was hammering and his hands were clammy and he felt rather faint and in need of a lie-down, he managed, and was almost startled to find that he had reached the Road. Unthinkingly, he curled his toes into the familiar worn earth. It felt more like home than the floors of Bag End these days, and his soul relaxed just a bit.

The ring’s shriek grew fainter in his mind as he passed the farmer’s fields and climbed the rolling hills, but he felt a familiar something growing taut, like a wire stretched too tight. He ignored it, as he had for years. He had no energy for that old nonsense right now. He shook it away, like Buttercup would a fly. It coiled ever tighter, insisting that he pay attention because something was happening, but he pretended it was no more than the wind whistling past his ears. He had just passed the spot where, in another time, Sam Gamgee would hesitate, voice soft and scared at the sheer scope of the world, because it was the farthest from home he’d ever been, when, to Bilbo’s great surprise, the insistent, tightening, fraying something-

- snapped.

Bilbo dropped the reins in shock, his ears ringing. The air left him as if he’d taken a blow to the gut. He didn’t know that he’d fallen to his knees until there was a worried muzzle nuzzling into his curly hair, but he didn’t have the words to comfort Buttercup. The world had … tilted, and he wasn’t certain that it had righted itself yet.

Because long before there had been a pretty golden ring filling his mind with selfish urges and dark suggestions, there had been the steady presence of the something in the back of his mind, a faint hum that never faded.

And the sudden silence in his mind was downright terrifying.

Notes:

Thank you for taking the time to read this. PLEASE let me know what you think. This story is so very dear to me, and it will be a long journey. Please subscribe if you're interested!

Happy New Year, you wonderful strangers.