Title: Negation
Warning: spoilers for RotK
Notes: for an improv challenge - Light. At least two scenes. Forty-five to ninety minutes.
Written in 59 min.
Disclaimers: Still not mine. Damn.

For all the time Sam spent in the sun, Frodo fancied dark to suit him best. Asleep and twisted with the covers all around him, shadows lingered in the crook of his bent arm and the dip of chin. A deep pool rested in the juncture of his legs and tiny rivers of black ran amongst the dulled curls. Frodo felt it safest to openly admire when the dark served as a guide and fellow conspirator. There was nothing shameful in Sam's unabashed nakedness, nor in his study of it now. The only shame lay in the deep hollow of his fingers and the missing shadow of his third finger. It was safest to touch where the dark had already been.

Frodo took care to keep his caresses limited to the pockets of dark, his missing finger became a part of Sam.

~*~

Sam liked the light. It was harsh and unrelenting in showing Frodo's sunken cheeks, the bruises under his eyes, and the strange blue tint to his skin. Every time Sam looked at Frodo under the sun, a familiar vise tightened at his stomach and the effort it took not to cry would cost him a bitten tongue. But there was a strange relief there too. Frodo was solid in the light. His face would fill out with as many meals as Sam could cook him, the same went for the rest of Frodo's poor body. The bruises would fade with sleep. All the ailments that the sun highlighted could be fixed by Sam's own hands.

When the dark came, Frodo would melt into it, an outline of moonlight beaded on cobwebs. He would fade, and every time the sun set, Sam was afraid that one day Frodo would simply dissolve.

Daylight exposed all of Frodo's trials, but it was the very physical marks of his ordeals that kept him there, with Sam. The dark liked Frodo too well.

-end-