The Bound of the Fellowship

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Setting: The Shire, after the War and after Frodo leaves.

Merry explains the lives he, Sam, and Pippin took on after everything was over.

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It’s been over for more four years.

Four years.

The Quest is long over, but not forgotten. The effects of it are still with my three companions and I, and I doubt that the others back in their countries have recovered either.

And I doubt we will ever recover.

The nightmares still come to me at night sometimes, and I wake up in sweats with my right arm trembling and cold until Estella reassures me that it is only a dream. And sometimes Pippin – though he is the one that grew up the most – calls me to his home so we can be together and talk about the troubles that still surface.

He is married now, to a fine lady named Diamond, who is good friends with Estella and Rosie. We are a fated group of Hobbits – Sam, Pippin, and I, to have survived it all together, and to come home and start families with these lovely Hobbit lasses who all are friends like we are.

But there will always be a gap where Frodo should be – an empty hole, that we wish he would have filled, but we understood completely why he had to leave.

Frodo and I were the only two out of our four that were affected by the Black Breath, though he was affected greater than I. But often before he left, he would come to me and talk about his wounds and his inner pain. And I knew, even before Sam, that our dear Frodo could only hold onto us and the Shire for so long.

And even with him gone, life carries on like it used to, almost exactly. Though the walls of Brandyhall are decorated with my memories – my sword, my armor. It used to pain me to look at it all, but once I realized we were safe – that there indeed was a happy ending…

We were all able to move on.

Pippin has a son as well, whom he named Faramir. Sam has many children, and I had the honor of having one of his first sons named after me. Sam almost has the whole Fellowship of the Ring in his large family, also proof of how greatly we have all been affected. He even has a son named Frodo, who ironically enough – is his gardener.

Though Estella and I have no children, I wouldn’t mind a daughter named Eowyn – the fair lady of Rohan who I do greatly miss, and hope to see her soon. The Fellowship of the Ring has not been together since the last days of the Third Age, and it will never be whole again without the presence of Frodo and Gandalf… but I should still like to see the six of us – Pippin, Sam, Aragorn, Legolas, Gimli and I together again. With Boromir being our first loss, and Frodo and Gandalf leaving us to go onto a better life where I shall see them when I depart, the six of us are the only ones that are left. We would all do anything to have the nine of us in the same house once more.

I often see it in Sam’s eyes that he means to leave the Shire soon, to be with Frodo, Gandalf, Bilbo…and of course the Elves. But he will not leave just yet, with his young children and wife here in the Shire. But I see it in his eyes that he will leave before his time.

But I will not, not before my time is right and I depart in whatever my fate has in store for me. Not while a good part of our Fellowship is here – not when I have so much to live for, and so much more to see and re-see…for now that it has been a long time since our Quest was over, I would like to re-visit some of the places where I stayed, when I was too frightened to notice the beauties of the Eastern side of Middle-Earth.

I doubt Pippin will leave either – we have always stuck with each other, and the only time we have been separated was during the War, which was bound to happen at some time – it was better than being separated by death.

At any rate, if I were to leave the Shire for the Havens, he would surely beg and cry to either come with me, or for me to stay – and I would never have the heart to leave him, anyway.

We have become too close.

The Fellowship did not end – for as long as we can still remember one another, and others in the following Ages can remember us…we are still a Fellowship, bound by love and trust.

And it was never broken – even in the dark ages.