Disclaimer: We all know the drill, Tolkien characters aren't mine, but Ismë and anyone else you don't recognise are my own invention :)

Update: To any returning readers, below is the new introduction to the story, which I suggest you read. It doesn't exactly change anything that has happened so far, but it might be useful (and hopefully, enjoyable) for you to read.

Please, please, please let me know what you think. I can take anything you want to throw at me, because I'm always looking to improve my writing.

Thank you,

Youronlydoll x

Selfless Acts

Pippin I

Looking back, I wonder how it came to be that I should cross paths with that lady of the House of Denethor. I wonder who decided that I should get to witness those fateful days in Minas Tirith. I wonder who decided that I should be the one to tear her life apart.

I was just a simple Shire boy, young and innocent, barely aware that there was even such a thing as the outside world, when the Lady Ismë was living her most important years in the House of Denethor, a million miles away from my life. I had never set eyes on a member of the race of Men, neither had I seen dwarves or elves or any other beings, but Hobbits. So, how could it be that our lives should intertwine so many years later?

Fifteen years after she had arrived there was when I first encountered her in Minas Tirith. They were dark times for her, dark times for us all. She did not speak to me for days after I had arrived, still to this day I do not know if she knew I was even there, and when she did she was full of a sorrow and melancholy, such like I had I never seen before. There was so much sadness in that house!

We had arrived, Gandalf and I, to find a city cowering in the corner, like a tiny babe who's lost its mother. The people never stopped to speak to us – such like in the Shire, when every Hobbit knows every other – only to pause and stare in awe at the great wizard who had come to visit them. They were a city paralysed by fear and I could not blame them. I had never been so close to the land of Mordor until I went to that ill-fated city. The shadow of it had nearly covered them, they had almost been consumed by it, there was little hope left. It was hard to be rid of that shadow, even once it was out of sight, for I think it had infiltrated the city long before I arrived there. It had been infecting everybody inside for many years, like a disease without any symptoms or like something nestled in the ridge in the middle of your back, so that, though you always feel it there, no matter which way you turn, you can never quite see what it is.

They, who rarely encountered strangers in their city, let alone their own home, were a broken family. Never more was a roaring fire and a few friendly words so direly needed. But the more time I spent there, the more I began to realise that not all the friendly words in the world could bring them back from the shadows, for the damage was already too far gone.

Lord Denethor was a frightening man, that was another thing I learnt. I should have known it by the way in which he spoke to Gandalf, for the wizard was nothing but civil with him. I had not heard anyone speak to Gandalf in that way, as everybody knows how great he is and how much he does his best to help. But my judgement was clouded. The thought of Boromir, the memory of him and the time we spent with him was lodged in my mind and would not go away. When I looked upon his father's face, it only served to make me see it even more vividly than before. How could a man so cold, so weak, have fathered a great man like Boromir?

Perhaps that was why I offered him my services. I thought he would be like Boromir and that it would be so grand to serve a man like that, so noble, so brave. That along with the thought of Boromir and the gratitude I felt towards him for protecting us. I knew I had to make it up in some way.

But I think fate had given me a push somewhere along the line too. For the moment I set eyes on the lady in question I knew that I had to help her, I had to help them all – for the others, Faramir and Adora needed me just as much as the Lady Ismë did. It was not as though I could give them anything in particular…what I mean is, it could have been anyone, so long as they had the right amount of affection and determination. All they needed was someone, a stranger, to enter their little world, enter their great stone fortress and pull them up and out from their stupor. I was no more special than anyone else who might chance upon them at one point in their lives. But I think I was the biggest-hearted thing that had stepped foot those doors in a long time. It was circumstance; it was fate that brought me there, at just the right time as well – for surely the war of the Ring would have destroyed them, had Gandalf and I not intervened when we did.

Many events were to happen before I got there, all of which I knew nothing about beforehand. I do not think that even Gandalf knew about many of them, for Lord Denethor was a secretive man, who rarely left the comfort of his home to seek the company of outsiders. Nor did any outsiders venture into his realm in return. Faramir was Gandalf's only link in those fateful years, although they had been but newly acquainted shortly before everything had begun.

But of course, I was blissfully unaware of these events as they occurred. I was still a young Hobbit, too busy being chased out of cornfields with handfuls of stolen vegetables, or sneaking through windows or drinking too much ale in the Green Dragon with my friends. I was completely oblivious to the goings on in Minas Tirith, the great white city that I had never even heard of back then, in a land that I dared not even think about going to. I was just like any other Hobbit then, content with my simple, happy life, without the slightest inclination to change things.

I have no idea why I was chosen to go down that path. For how could I have such an affect on one so important? What was I to the Lady Ismë, wife to a son of the Steward of Gondor? Who in the whole of Middle Earth would believe that I, a small Hobbit, could change the course of the future?