"I should like to save the Shire, if I could - though there have been times when I thought the inhabitants too stupid and dull for words, and have felt that an earthquake or an invasion of dragons might be good for them. But I don't feel like that now. I feel that as long as the Shire lies behind, safe and comfortable, I shall find wandering more bearable: I shall know that somewhere there is a firm foothold, even if my feet cannot stand there again."

carrying the world around his neck

"I see no hope of it now. But I've got to do the best I can."

^{In all instances Frodo was not the same Frodo that Bilbo had left. It could have been so easy for him to regard the one he called ‘lad’ as an entirely different person. It might have dulled the pain, of having the one he admired most seeing what had been done to him. What his adventure would turn out to be.} 

^{And Frodo with all his heart did not want Bilbo to feel grief over finding the One Ring, learning what it had wrought in him and what it had cost many others in turn. Countless suffering across the plains and waters of Middle Earth over such a small thing. One now swept from his grasp, near but so far, his greatest enemy near, his closest companion lost and without him…}

^{Oh, and the memories. Enough to leave him cold, trembling alone in the dark cradling something between his fingers that he could no longer find.} 

^{How did he tell Bilbo that he would not be ever going home again? For this reason his hooded eyes pointedly ducked beneath his gaze, like a sullen child full of troubles he could not tell.}

^{“Uncle, I feel perhaps I am more in love with the Shire than I have ever been, ” He said at last, his voice still creaking with something old and withered inside him. “It is not home I am to go to, and perhaps that is why.” Yet when he spoke of darker places, Frodo pointedly met his gaze with something haunted, as if to silently confirm what he could not speak aloud. That he had a darker errand, far darker than anything Bilbo had seen — that anyone had seen save those that had entered Mordor and somehow left it.And it ought to stay that way, which is why he was silent on the matter.}

^{The only thing he could think of now was the only thing he felt Bilbo could be trusted with, despite his kind heart the Ring’s retrieval would not be good for his soul.}

^{“…I want to know where Samwise has gone, Uncle. It is not the Shire he goes to. We walked a road alone, the two of us, with nothing but a guide.  Where do they go when they leave this place? Where Samwise goes…he cannot be left alone in.”}

^{There was almost a desperate note.} 

^{“Please, Bilbo. I cannot abandon Sam. Please, we — I can’t leave him. After all he has done for my sake even when I bid him not to…he does not deserve to face danger alone.”}

^{Yet somewhere inside him the child Frodo had once been was screaming at his Uncle to help him all the while.}