The red light of the Sammath Naur played across Frodo's face, and Sam knew before his master spoke that something had broken.
"I have come," Frodo said, but the voice was not his. It was older, colder, ringing against the molten dark. "But I do not choose now to do what I came to do. I will not do this deed. The Ring is mine."
And he was gone — vanished — only his footprints pressing into the ash where he stood at the very lip of the fire.
Sam scrambled forward, blind with grief. "Mr. Frodo! No — Mr. Frodo, throw it in!"
But there was no answer save the laughter that was not laughter, and the mountain groaned beneath them as if the Enemy himself had turned his whole mind here at last. Sam felt it — a great Eye sweeping the dark like a searchlight, hunting, hunting.
He could not see Frodo. He could only hear him weeping, somewhere on the ledge, caught between two wills.
Then the small voice came, Frodo's own, buried and faint: "Sam. Sam, help me. I can't — it won't let me—"
Sam wept too. He thought of the Gaffer, and the Water at evening, and yellow cream, and all the green things growing that would burn if he failed. He thought of the long road and Frodo's hand in his on the stairs of Cirith Ungol. And he understood, with the awful clarity of a simple heart, that love sometimes meant doing the hard thing and not the kind one.
But he could not strike his master. That he knew at once and forever.
So he did the only thing left to a gardener: he reached out his arms into the empty air where the footprints were, and he took hold of Frodo, invisible, and he held on.
"You don't have to fight it alone," Sam said into the dark. "I got you. Like always. We falls together or we don't fall at all."
The unseen body thrashed. The Ring's voice rose, promising Sam gardens that stretched to the horizon, a Shire made green again by his own hand, power to make every barren place bloom. For one heartbeat Sam saw it — and saw it was a lie, for the gardens it offered were his master's bones.
"No," Sam said simply. "That ain't mine to want."
He pulled. Not toward the fire — he could not make Frodo cast it in — but back, away from the edge, back toward the door and the daylight and the world that was still alive. He dragged that struggling weight inch by inch across the burning floor.
And then, into the strife, came another shape. Gollum, blood-streaked and gibbering, leapt upon the invisible Frodo, his hands closing on what his eyes could not see but his heart could smell. The two of them grappled at the brink, and Frodo flickered back into sight as Gollum's teeth found the finger and the Ring both.
Sam saw his master's face — saw, in that splinter of a moment, sense return to Frodo's eyes, horror and shame and a desperate love. And Sam, holding Frodo's belt, felt the lurch as Gollum tore free with his prize and danced, screaming his joy.
The ledge crumbled.
Sam set his heels and hauled with all the strength that the long starving road had left him, and Frodo came back into his arms as Gollum and the Ring went down together into the fire.
The mountain screamed. Light, terrible and final, climbed the shaft of the Sammath Naur.
They lay on the trembling stone, two small ruined creatures, and Frodo's maimed hand found Sam's face.
"I claimed it," Frodo whispered, weeping. "I failed, Sam. At the very end I failed."
"No, sir," said Sam, and he was smiling though the world was ending around them. "You couldn't do it. But you couldn't kill that wretched thing neither — and that pity finished what your strength couldn't. Reckon mercy did what we couldn't, in the end."
Far off, eagles were crying. The dark was breaking. And Samwise Gamgee held his master close and waited, unafraid, for whatever came after.