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The door to their quarters opened easily enough, although it was very heavy for a Hobbit. Four Hobbits almost danced into the room looking around with great delight. Their exuberance wilted somewhat on finding the room apparently deserted. But it was not silent.

Beyond the curtain that separated the main room from the sleeping area there came soft but strident sighs of love made and love declared between pain and ecstasy, devotion and need.

In mid-rush towards the curtain Frodo skidded to a halt realising that the occupants were somewhat occupied. He turned away not knowing whether to blush or turn white as the driven snow as it became obvious that the occupied lovers were both male. “I would that they had waited until after we had departed,” he stated solemnly.

“Jealousy now, are we?” Pippin blurted out with a monumental grin spread across his face. Already he and Merry had climbed up and seated themselves on the end of the long wooden table, legs dangling down and swinging gently like little children trying to pass the time.

Sam fair knocked the wind out of his lungs with the firm jab in the ribs with his elbow, and was seemingly satisfied with the grunting cough that left Pippin spluttering and falling to the floor. “Why, Mr Frodo,” Samwise declared. “Not getting a touch embarrassed, if you get my meaning? I mean, not to be outdone, as it were, and begging your pardon, but loving such as theirs is . . .well, strange, if you ask me.”

“No, Sam,” Frodo replied. “I’m neither embarrassed or jealous. If I learned anything along my journey it is that nothing is strange or different unless we forget what was spoken of in the Lore of Old. Love is in all its guises both beautiful and boundless. The heart doesn’t see with our eyes, Sam. It can only feel with the senses of the soul. The soul doesn’t have eyes, it simply follows the heart.”

“Well spoken, I say,” Merry put in, dragging gently on his pipe in deep thought. “Truth is better out than ignored, and I can’t say I’ve ever been drawn to the ladies myself, now that we’re about it.”

Sam looked up with a dark brooding look in his brown eyes. “No? Then why were you sweet-talking Rosie Cotton, then?”

Merry plucked the pipe from his lips as he caught the look in his friend’s face. Time for a fast thought, make no mistake, he thought silently, or Samwise Gamgee would have his hide. And Merry, being a Brandybuck, was as good as the next at talking himself out of trouble, if it wasn’t further into it. “Just trying to get you to realise, my dear friend, that Rosie won’t wait around for you to pluck up the courage to speak to her.”

Sam’s face fell off him as he realised what Merry was implying. “Why you . . .I’m no scaredy-cat . . .just taking things slow, is all.”

“Of course you are,” Merry agreed jovially. “And on the first day we get back to Hobbiton, you’ll ask Rosie to walk with you along the banks of the lake,” he added and laughed.

It was not meant cruelly, but all the same they all knew Sam was very shy and overawed by Rosie. He watched Pippin join in the laughter and Frodo’s face was wreathed in an amused smile of his own. Sam lowered his head in shameful silence. He sat down and huffed a sigh through his nose, after a moment he looked up and there was a firm light in his eyes. “That might have been true a year ago, Meriadoc Brandybuck, but mark my words. When we get home, I’m going to ask Rosie Cotton to marry me.”

There was a sudden silence among the three, stunned and surprised, but not entirely convinced of his sincerity, or his courage.

“You’ll see,” Sam added smugly, stuffing the end of his pipe into his mouth. There was a determined air about him that had never been there before. Never had a Gamgee shown such determination, or courage. In fact, never had a Gamgee ever been through the trails he had endured. He had changed. He was more of a man than Hobbit now, although his stature was unchanged.

Merry nodded thoughtfully, although part of him still believed that Sam was brave now, but when he got to standing before the woman, whom he had secretly loved for more than two years before they had left for Bree, it would be a different matter.

As they puffed silently on their pipes, only half hearing the lovers not ten feet from them Sam looked long and hard into the smooth marble floor. Drawing the pipe slowly from his mouth he licked his lips, far away in his own thoughts. “Frodo Gamgee,” he murmured dreamily. “That’ll by my first son’s name.” In shocked silence, no one spoke, hardly breathing, as if they knew there was more to come. “And as soon as he opens his little eyes and looks up at me I’ll tell ’im all about his brave Uncle Frodo, and what he did to save his old dad from the river, how he cured himself of an awful fright of water that he had and how he wobbled the boat and acted all brave when really he was all jelly inside. And I’ll tell him how four nobody Hobbits showed the men of the West what honour was, and what was brave and true, that there was something good in this world to save after all. And how promises should be kept, even when everything is against you. How loving someone, even if it’s just a friend, is important, and trusting a stranger is sometimes a good thing even though it might not seem like it at the time, and even when it goes bad as sometimes does. It makes you strong being in a Fellowship, like what we had. And then when he’s bigger I’ll tell ‘im about the scary bits, don’t want to frighten the little mite, of Shelob and Oliphaunts, and how we got away from them Orcs.”

Frodo stood unmoving beside the table, a tear rolling silently down his cheek. “You would really do that?” he asked softly. “Name your son after me?”

Sam looked up and smiled wistfully. “I reckon I will,” he decided.

Frodo drew in a less than steady breath, touched to his core and unable to speak for a moment. “Oh, Sam,” he sighed. “Don’t forget to tell him about his brave dad, will you? Tell him how he stormed Barad-dûr to rescue his Uncle Frodo, and how he stood up to King Elessar in Bree, fists up ready to do battle with a man of the big folk.”

Sam looked at him evenly. “Now Mr Frodo, don’t make fun,” he said softly. “I was being serious.”

“So was I, Sam,” Frodo said, smiling. “If I was Frodo Gamgee, I would want to hear all about Samwise the Brave.”

“And if I was Merry Gamgee, I would want to know what happened in Fangorn Forest,” Merry agreed, putting in his unasked-for four pence. “‘How huge was that Ent, then dad’, I’d ask, and you’d say ‘very huge, my lad and very frightening, make no mistake’.”

“And not forgetting Pippin Gamgee, he’ll want to know all about the battle at Isengard,” Pippin added, not to be outdone.

Sam stared from one to the next in utter amazement. “Now ’old ’ard!” he spluttered. “How many sons do you think I’m goin’ to ‘ave?” Over the top of his head, Frodo smiled broadly at Merry and Pippin who both grinned back mischievously. Sam looked up at him with a mock scowl. “Now Mr Frodo, don’t encourage them so. They’re as bad as they get without it.”

El fin

Zuleika von Fleuger © July 2004

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