Chapter Text
Your world has always been silent but that does not mean it isn't beautiful and you hate those who look at you with pity in their eyes. How can they think that you are broken when you do not feel incomplete?
Your mother understood that. She always loved you without hesitation and you do not remember your father as anything but kind. It was the rest of Hobbiton that troubled you – the fauntlings who tormented you as a child and the adults who sneer behind your back; they are the ones who cannot look past your so-called disability to the person underneath. Your neighbors may not hate you but their judgment makes them awful company and thus, with a few small exceptions, you live a solitary life.
You take long walks through the Shire's well-tamed woodlands and spend hours reading. You work in the garden and cook food enough for one, going to the marketplace and buying tales of far off places that you visit in your dreams.
When you must interact with other hobbits, you prefer to write instead of speaking. Your neighbors do not need more reason to look down their noses at you and you can see from their expressions that you do not pronounce the words correctly, your own voice a foreign vibration on your tongue.
Even your mother's endless patience could not teach you to match the sounds of silence, though you owe your ability to communicate to Belladonna Baggins nonetheless. She taught you to write and to read, to see the words that others speak by the movements of their lips and while she lived, you had a language of gestures all our own.
Indeed, your mother is the reason that you are able to stand proudly. She taught you to live within the world instead of sending you away to live in isolation the way that Bungo's family wished. Your mother made you strong enough to survive your parents' passing but you still miss them every day.
No one else has ever tried to see the world as you do; no one else cares to speak your language and you do not expect for this to change.