In My End Is My Beginning by Lilith

An Adventure

March 24th Prompt: He sat down on the bank at the side of the road and looked away east into the haze, beyond which lay the River, and the end of the Shire in which he had spent all his life. (The Fellowship of the Ring, Book I, Chapter 3)

Format: ficlet
Genre: gen.
Rating: General
Warnings: n/a
Characters: Sam Gamgee
Pairings: n/a

He was not, Sam knew, a hobbit possessed of much imagination or given to the desire for adventure.  He loved stories, that was true. He’d loved the stories old Master Bilbo had told him. He’d sat at his feet and listened to stories of Elves and Dwarves and of strange and peculiar Men. He’d scooted closer to the hobbit’s chair and listened to tales told of a cruel and crafty dragon and, sometimes, thought he heard the slow and low drawl of Smaug’s voice in the comfortable space of a hobbit hole. But he was not the hobbit who thirsted for those adventures. He wasn’t like Master Frodo or Masters Merry and Pippin who’d play at swords, swinging a walking stick at one another and occasionally — and very much their own fault too for such foolishness, his gaffer would say — hitting one another and not on purpose. He wasn’t like them dreaming of adventure, of setting out from the Shire and into the Wild and encountering all manner of strange and wonderful things.  

Those were adventures for other people, not for Sam. They were for the Tooks and the Brandybucks. They were even for the Bagginses, if you were Master Bilbo or Master Frodo, and it wasn’t simply because the Tooks and the Brandybucks and those Bagginses were not quite as respectable as they might be. But it was also because they could go. They weren’t needed at home, in the garden and in the house. They had family, as Sam did, but they could leave their family and their house and be sure someone who care for them. Sam knew that. He understood that. He was that someone. He was the one who took care of the house and of the garden and of Master Bilbo and Master Frodo; if one left or both, Sam would still be there, ensuring the home and garden were exactly or almost exactly as they’d been when they left. The only way Sam would go adventuring, not that he thought of it, really, mind, would be if he had to go in order to take care of one of them.