Trust me; you don't want to be the hero.

You're rolling your eyes- aren't you? Or you just let out a deep puff of a sigh because, after all, that is what every hero thinks. They are all humble, quiet and honorable, always saving the day but never wanting to be recognized for it. When in reality, heroism has perks, glory and fame being a few. But I'm afraid, dear reader, that you are mistaken. Whatever book you've read is a lie. Whatever story you've heard was told incorrectly, because no one, absolutely no one, wants to be the hero.

And here's why.

I was twenty three when I began to lose my memory. The doctors said it was due to a brain tumor, I had a few months to live and everyone, my brothers, sisters, parents and friends would have to be ready to say goodbye. Let's just say those first few weeks weren't easy. Nor any day that followed.

The memory loss started simply enough, my shoes were left untied or my dog unfed. I'd send out the same email twice, or in the best cases, put salt in my coffee.

Things started to change after the first month, dizziness and headaches became prominent, I couldn't walk around without getting the urge to vomit, my eating patterns became irregular and before the second month was out my sister was taking care of my dog as the doctors took care of me.

I never really forgot the basics, something I was grateful for. I knew who my family was, I knew where I had worked for the past six months, and I surely knew my own name. Rosetta N. Maur, my mom had named me after my grandmother. My dad picked out my middle name- whatever that was.

Everything got a little weird when I hit the sixth week.

Events started to switch out in my head, the good and the bad ones. Suddenly I didn't spend Christmas with my family. Christmas didn't exist. In its place I chopped wood with my father outside of our humble shack of a home, snow piling up around our ankles as my surely frost bitten fingers gripped the handle of an axe. Instead of playing Mario kart with my little sister, I fed ducks along the river while my father fished downstream. I wasn't a kid on the swing set; I was a kid sewing barley in a field, sweat pouring down my face as I made jokes with a friend.

Not just any friend, my mind always corrected. Ara.

Ara. A weird name isn't it? Aravacson Tayst. Suddenly I began to see him everywhere; we walked the streets of our little village of Hobbiton together, grinning as we snuck apples away from vendors and played pranks on the Sackville Bagginses. I'd laugh as he tried to get the attention of Maria Cotton, she was, after all, much too good for a poor farm boy like him. He'd laugh in turn as I attempted to impress the rich and respectable Bilbo Baggins, because my social status was not much better than his. I was there when his father was incapacitated from the fever that swept the land when we were twelve.

Where was I again? The ventilator was doing its job, breathing wasn't as much of an effort as it had been before. There were beeps in the room I was in, it was white, I noticed, with a tiled ceiling and open cabinets that held a variety of strange compartments. A lady dressed in blue stood at my side, "It's okay hun," she said, "We've got you all figured out now. Your parents will be here any minute."

And there you have it. I grinned, and closed my eyes.

"Idiot."

"Ro."

"Ro."

"Ro wake up you useless piece of-"

I rolled over, rubbing my palm against my forehead and then down my face, pulling at the sweaty skin and chapped lips I found there. The voice belonged to someone familiar who sat a yard away, poking at the fire with an already charred stick.

"Good, you're up." He said- a wicked grin on his face. I soon recognized the stranger as Ara, because no one had perfect teeth like that. "I was a hairsbreadth away from rolling you off that cliff."

I groaned and sat up. "What?"

"That one, right there," he said, pointing with his fire poking stick. I turned to see that there was indeed, a drop off less than half a mile away. I glanced around. We sat in the middle of a dense forest, pines towered above us and birds chirped quietly every other moment. A mosquito buzzed somewhere near me. The sky was at that strange point between darkness and a sunset, or was it a sunrise? I glanced down, I was laid out on a thin, brown blanket, the fabric of which was coarse and rough beneath my fingertips.

"C'mon," Ara's voice caught my attention. He tossed me piece of the dried meat he had pulled from his pack. "We'll need to get on our feet if we want to reach the camp by sundown."

"Camp?" I asked, taking a bite out of the poorly seasoned meat as I came to sit up. Ara laughed. "You really are out if it, aren't you? You couldn't have hit your head that hard."

"Apparently I did," I mumbled, glancing up at him. "What was it that hit me again?"

Ara grunted, "Well, take no offence to it, but I did. You weren't acting yourself, you tried to run away from me."

"I did?"

He nodded. "One minute we were walking through the woods, the next you took off into the brush. I chased you for at least a mile before you tripped, screaming at you to stop the entire time. But you, being the idiot that you are, kept going, and so I, being the dashing, yet innocently confused hero that I am, did what I had to do and hit you over the back of the head. I daresay it worked."

"The amount of apology in your voice is really too much." I said, rubbing the bump behind my ear that he had no doubt put there. I did have a terrible head ache, but it wasn't as bad as it was before. What was the cause of the previous one again?

We finished our food and I stood, collecting up the blanket I was sleeping on and shoving it into my own pack. I closed my eyes as I did up the final button on the leather bag beneath me. Everything was a blur.

"Ara, I think you really did hit me too hard." I said softly, and my friend looked over at me from where he crouched putting out the fire, the smallest hint of concern etched onto his strangely angular face. He never had gained any weight. "I did?"

I nodded, swinging my pack over my shoulder. I couldn't remember what had happened the night before, nor the week before, let alone the reason we were in a forest sleeping in the rough. It was altogether strange.

I explained this to him, and Ara chewed on his thumb, eyes focused on the dying embers he was piling dirt over. "Well that is a mysterious happening. Shall I start from the beginning?"

I nodded, grateful for what I had hoped to be closure to the concerning lack of information in my brain.

"In the year two thousand eight hundred and eighty six, a hobbit lass named Hona fell in love with the dashing young Reddo, and together they had a daughter named Rosetta-"

"Not that part," I said, rolling my eyes. "Just… why am I here?"

"Well if you really want to get into the tale of the birds and the bees-"

"No," I interrupted, pointing at the needle covered ground. "I mean here. Right here in this forest. I don't understand. Why aren't we in the Shire?"

His eyes widened. "You really don't remember- do you? Well, putting it simply, we're trying to find your father."

I swallowed as a bit of memory floated by. I reached out to grab it, and when I did I felt a strange down beat in my chest, that feeling that you get when you just barely miss cutting yourself with a knife, or just barely save yourself from falling. I had just barely caught the memory.

"Orcs raided my farm, they took my father."

He nodded, voice growing somber. "Your mum's been going mad, and we need to get him back before the harvest."

I breathed, feeling my heart beat come down a bit. "Yes, we need to find the orcs that took him."

"And those orcs are currently camped out near the eastern border, if our sources are correct."

Our sources were the hobbits themselves that had been driven out the day before. They were correct.

"We're going to sneak in and get him out."

"But that's suicide!" I spluttered. The orcs were easily thrice our size, completely merciless and brave to a fault. "We don't have weapons and it's just the two of us, and it's not as if we'd know how to use a sword anyways! We'll lose our heads in there!"

Ara grinned, and took out a small, red painted box looking item from his pack. It had a thin, flared string coming out from beneath the folds of the paper. It was a bomb- I realized. It was the one he had been working on ever since Gandalf had first shown him the ways of firework making.

"Perhaps, but they'll lose something greater."

A/N: Hey everyone! I have absolutely no idea where I'm going with this... or if it makes any sense. I'm functioning on about three hours of sleep right now. Don't worry, you'll see some Hobbit characters soon enough. So if you don't get the idea: Rosetta begins to have her memories replaced by those of an alternate version of her in Middle Earth. She goes into a coma and that coma flings her into it, with only a basic understanding of her past. Let me know what you think! Sorry for any spelling/grammar errors... I'm tiiiiiiiiiiiiired!