When Rosie announced that her mother was visiting for afternoon tea, Sam and Frodo suddenly remembered a very important meeting with Merry and Pippin, apparently planned for half the week.

"Fine with me." Rosie replied breezily. "I don't want you here any more than you want to be here. I've had enough male company to last me lifetimes, I want a chance for women's talk."

They hadn't yet left when Lily Cotton arrived, though, Sam watering the vegetables and Frodo playing peek-a-boo with Elanor.

"Where's the flower baby? There she is!"

Elanor scrunched her face up in delight.

"Off you go, and tell Merry and Pippin I said hello." Rosie took Elanor from Frodo and shooed him out the door.

"Here, I'll hold her," Lily offered when they were alone. "Come to your grandmother, little one."

Elanor's eyes went big with worry, chubby hands clinging to her mother's hair as Lily tried to take her.

"She gets pensive with people she doesn't see regular." Rosie apologised, taking Elanor back and walking through to the kitchen.

"She'd know me better if you came by more often. I feel like I never see you, Rose."

"You know I can't go out much, Mam, Mr Frodo needs looking after more days than not, and this hobbit hole's not the easiest place to clean."

"It's not your duty to look after that eccentric old bachelor." Lily sat down at the table and picked up one of the small pies Rosie had made. "You're married to Samwise, not Frodo."

"What's that supposed to mean?" Rosie gave Elanor one of her knuckles to suck on to keep her quiet, standing across the table from Lily with a stony expression.

"It means there's talk. That your marriage isn't proper."

Rosie looked down at her daughter's tiny, perfect face and gave a bitter laugh.

"Were you and Dad ever in love, Mam? Did you ever watch him sleep and ache with love for him so much you felt like singing and crying all at once? No, you don't have to answer. I know you love him in your way, because he's given you a good life and healthy children, but that's never been what I've wanted."

"It's those fairy stories I told you as a girl, they've filled your head with nonsense."

"When Sam was away, I got three offers to wed that I never told you about, because I knew you'd make me say yes. And some of those offers were from much richer folk than a Gamgee from Bagshot Row, but I didn't care at all. There's never been anything so proper in the world as my marriage, and that's that."

"You never think rationally, never consider what might come of a thing before you do it." Lily threw up her hands in exasperation, knocking a small vase of flowers off a shelf behind her. Rosie dived, reaching out, upsetting a plate of sandwiches but catching the vase before it hit the floor.

"Careful! You almost broke it." she scowled at her mother, putting Elanor in the baby basket on the table and replacing the vase on a higher shelf, where it couldn't be knocked. A few drops of water had fallen out of it onto her hand, Rosie sucked the nectar-sweet liquid into her mouth absent-mindedly and turned back to the argument.

"You're not a tween anymore, Rose. I tell you these things because I don't want to see you come to grief. You're not the princess in a story, you have to be sensible."

Rosie thought of the sheaf of loose papers Frodo wrote on every day. "No, I'm not the princess." I'm the happily ever after, she added silently but didn't say.

After she'd walked her mother to the end of the lane, Rosie wandered down past the lake to the field where the children were playing in the late afternoon light.

Sitting on the low white fence by the road, the same place she'd daydreamed years away, Rosie rocked Elanor in her arms and watched the village games, thinking about her mother's words.

By the time she got home it was almost dark, Sam and Frodo outside waiting for her. Well, Sam was waiting, with Frodo asleep on his thigh. He smiled comfortingly at Rosie as she sat down beside him with a sigh, taking the pipe he offered her gratefully.

"Sam." Rosie said after a short quiet. "When Frodo's stronger, in a few years perhaps, can we go away? Not forever, a year maybe. Just the four of us, and any more babies I have between now and then. I want Elanor to know there's worlds outside of Hobbiton, that this is one way to live but that Big People and Elves and Dwarves all have their own ways too. Then, even if she never leaves the Shire for the rest of her days, at least she'll know what's out there, that she's allowed to live in whatever way make her happiest. That there's nothing wrong with fairy tales, and no such thing as proper."


~

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