Title: Breaking the Silence
Author: aces
Rating: Lower end of things.
Summary: Merry, Pippin, war. "It was not exciting."
Notes: Follows movie canon rather than book canon, taking place during events in ROTK. I was struck by the very, very different situations Merry & Pippin found themselves in. Also, occasional tense-changing. Er, sorry about that?
Breaking the Silence
He is aware, pain hovering nearby as if waiting for him to wake fully before taking possession, and his eyes flutter open.
Dimness greets him, and a low murmur of voices elsewhere belonging to people unseen. He is lying on something soft, softer than the hard ground, the cold, hard ground he remembers lying atop outside the great white city.
He remembers with sudden vivid clarity, and the pain takes that as its cue, and he groans.
He remembers the Lady Eowyn, and the oliphaunt, and the Witch King, and his arm is unbearable in its icy pins and needles. He refrains from crying out again, at least, and desperately wishes he could move, find someone to tell him what has happened, how the lady fared, how the city fared, how his king had fared…
Pippin.
He remembers that Pippin found him, in that field, and he remembers speaking with his cousin but cannot remember what words fell between them. Pippin. The relief at seeing his little Took cousin, alive and whole, overwhelms him now when it could not before, and he nearly sobs.
A rustle of the bed covers, and he finally turns his head to survey more of the room in which he has been placed. Dim stone, heavy and massive in the way Men seem to favour. And sitting in a low chair next to his narrow but too-long bed (still, despite the Ents' draught), head fallen forward onto the covers and arm stretched out reaching even in sleep for his older cousin, is Pippin.
Merry catches his breath lest he wake the younger hobbit, and stares. Burnished coppery curls fall haphazardedly around his head, cloak bunched up and pushed to the side, and he is wearing black, no sign of his usual coat and fine shirt and blue knotted scarf.
Merry reaches out with his good hand to touch Pippin's hair gently, and he holds back another sob. He had been so certain he would never see his little cousin again.
"Pip," he whispers. The Took must be exhausted, for he is usually such a light, restless sleeper, but Merry needs to see his cousin's face, hear his cousin's voice, make sure that he really is alright. And Pippin might be able to give him other answers too.
"Pip," he repeats and lays his hand over Pippin's. He squeezes. "Pip, wake up." His voice insists.
Pippin stirs again and mutters something which includes Gandalf's name and an apology, and then he lifts his head and opens his eyes, raising his free hand to run through his hair tiredly.
His hand freezes as his eyes widen. "Merry!" he screeches, and leaps onto the bed to give his cousin a hug.
Merry is laughing, and crying, and his arm is aching. "Leave off, Pip, you're too heavy," he pushes with one hand so that Pippin is sitting next to him, rather than on him, and doesn't let go of his cousin's hand. He stares, and wants to ask "How are you?" but finds he can't speak.
Pippin is still wearing his Elvish cloak, over the black that Merry had glimpsed—a uniform of Gondor, Merry supposes, for it has the look of a uniform (he spies his own Rohan wear piled neatly on a table behind his cousin) and Pippin appears to have been wearing it for quite some time, for it is crumpled and dirty and he seems comfortable in it. He is not carrying his sword, and his eyes—his eyes are old and exhausted.
Merry squeezes his hand again. "Pip," he whispers and can think of nothing else to say.
Pippin sniffles mightily and wipes his nose with his free hand, and Merry laughs a little, though his own eyes are still rather watery. "How do you feel?" Pip asks, his words carefully failing to hide their concern.
"Better than I did," Merry answers honestly. "My arm…"
Pippin glances down at it, then quickly away to meet Merry's eye directly. "Aragorn was worried," he says, words still too careful, too controlled. "But he believes that you will mend."
"Aragorn?" Merry asks in confusion, and as if that were a summons, the Man himself appears.
"It is good to see you awake, Merry," Aragorn smiles as he approaches the bed, and Pippin slides off even before he can look in the hobbit's direction. Merry's eyes immediately follow Pip's movements, afraid his cousin will leave, but Pip smiles at him (it does not reach his eyes) and hovers discreetly behind Strider. "May I have a look at your arm?"
"If you like," Merry says in puzzlement and watches as Aragorn gently prods and pokes. "I didn't know you were a healer as well, Strider."
Aragorn smiles slightly but does not answer, intent on his work. He wears clean, formal clothes, and there is a peaceful confidence around him that Merry does not remember seeing before, used instead to that underlying current of tension and anxiety. He truly is a King, Merry thinks, and looks up again at his cousin.
Pippin is watching silently, the expression on his face remote as if he were in two different places at once. When Aragorn speaks, his attention seems to snap back into the room and the present.
"You are healing nicely, Merry," the Man says. "I am very relieved—most would not have survived such contact with the Witch King."
Pippin's eyes close, and his body sags, and Merry's own gaze darts back and forth between the king and his cousin. He wishes Pippin would come closer, not stand so distantly, but does not know how to phrase the request without sounding like a scared little child. Something has changed, something important, but Merry does not feel well enough to figure it out.
He does not understand.
"What of the Lady Eowyn?" he asks, because that question at least must have some sort of direct answer, even if it is bad. "And Theoden King?"
Pippin comes around Aragorn to perch on the bed once more, taking Merry's good hand, and Merry would be pleased but for the closed expression on his cousin's face. "Eowyn, like you, will recover," Strider says, watching as the younger hobbit moves to comfort his older cousin. A worried frown crosses his features briefly as his gaze lingers on the Took, and then he refocuses his complete attention upon Merry. "Though she will require more time than you, I think. King Theoden…" He sighs.
Pippin's hand tightens on his, and Merry sits back against the pillows on the bed. "Oh," he whispers, and closes his eyes.
"He died as he would have wished," Aragorn says with a simplicity that Merry knows he should find soothing. "He saved this city."
Merry nods, and sniffs, and gently breaks free from Pippin's grasp to wipe his eyes. "And you?" he asks once he has gathered himself. "Legolas and Gimli?"
"We are all well," Aragorn smiles, "and, as you can see, so is your cousin, and he can reassure you on Gandalf's behalf if you wish." His smile widens as he glances at the younger hobbit. "Pippin was in fine form earlier, ordering us all around to find you the finest room in the Houses of Healing and make sure you were given proper care and quiet."
Pippin turns to glare up at the Man, but Merry laughs, and Pip transfers his glare to his cousin. "I promised I would take care of you," he says, and normally Merry would have unrepentantly kept laughing at that haughty and affronted tone, but there is a haggard quality to it that stills his older cousin's merriment. "I was making sure you would be alright."
"Thank you," Merry says, and reaches up to give Pippin a one-armed hug. The Took is tense and bulky, unresponsive in his uniform. Merry sits back, troubled and frightened once more.
Aragorn places an infinitely gentle hand on his injured arm, and Merry looks at him questioningly. "Rest," the Man says, and looks at Pippin. "Both of you. I know you haven't slept properly in days, Peregrin Took, and Gandalf would not be pleased to find you falling asleep on duty." Pip frowns, almost sulkily, and Strider grins at him, used after all these months to the young hobbit's antics. "Merry will be well," he says as if the said Merry were not still in the room with them. "There is no need to worry anymore." The Man looks again at Merry. "I am sure you both have a great deal of catching up to do."
With that, he rises and prepares to leave the room.
"Thank you, Strider," Merry calls as Aragorn approaches the doorway. He looks back at the hobbits and bows his head once before disappearing through the doorway.
"He will be a great king," Merry says thoughtfully after a pause.
"If there is anything left for him to rule," Pippin says darkly, and Merry turns to stare at him in shock. Pip blinks and looks away uncomfortably, and Merry reaches up with his good hand to touch Pippin's chin, turn his face back so he can get a good look at it. Pip's eyes stay lowered.
"Oh Pip," he says. "What happened to you?"
Pippin shakes his head, pulling out of Merry's hand as a consequence, and still he refuses to meet Merry's eye. "You must rest, Merry," he says, a plaintive note creeping into his voice. "You must get well."
"So must you," Merry retorts, hurt that his cousin won't look at him, confide in him. They had been parted before—often, in the Shire, when Merry was at his home in the Bucklands and Pippin at his among the Tooks—but now it feels as if there were some insurmountable barrier between them. One that Pippin has put up, deliberately.
"I am well," Pip says, picking at the topmost blanket. Merry reaches out to stop him, wrapping his hand around his cousin's.
"You're exhausted," the older hobbit says. "I did not even need Aragorn saying you have not slept in days to tell me that. Please rest, Pip." He tries not to sound desperate. "Please."
Pippin finally glances up at him, green eyes deadened, unfamiliar in his dirty black finery. "Please," Merry repeats.
Rest. If you will not talk to me, sleep. It is all I can do for you.
Merry throws back the covers and waits, and finally Pippin sighs and stands up to remove cloak and tunic and other bits and pieces, till he wears only his undershirt and breeches. Carefully, he lays his clothes on the chair, and then slides into the bed next to Merry.
"It's not finished, you know," he says as Merry wraps his good arm around him, shivering when he comes in contact with Pippin's cold skin. "Frodo and Sam are still out there, somewhere." He is shivering too, voice numb. "There will be more battle, Merry."
Merry feels his eyes prickle as tears gather but do not fall. "I missed you," he whispers, and Pippin convulsively wraps himself around his older cousin.
"Oh Merry," Pippin chokes, and Merry runs his hand through that burnished coppery hair.
"Shh," he says. "Sleep. We'll both sleep. We can speak later. They will tell us later what next must be done. For now, we can…sleep…"
Pippin was again dressed in black. At least Rohan finery was a lovely and deep red, but Gondor—why did Gondor's colours have to be stark black and mourning white and silver?
Merry smiled painfully at his cousins and Sam, finding it dryly ironic that they all were so awkward in their fine shimmering cloaks and fancy clothing. Perhaps they had all become too accustomed to dirty, torn weskits and shirtsleeves, making do with what they had at hand for so long.
They made their good-byes to the others, members of the Fellowship and newer friends, and the four set off once more for the Shire.
They should have been happy, Merry reflected, automatically taking the rear when Pippin headed for the lead, leaving Frodo and Sam to trot side by side on their ponies in the middle. They should have been ecstatic to be going home at last.
Merry was dreading returning. Scared of the changes he would find there, scared of the changes in himself, in his three friends.
Sometimes, Pippin was almost himself—when Frodo had awoken at last, when Aragorn was crowned King. But too often he was quiet, remote; too often no bright green fire lit up his eyes; too often he seemed to struggle to speak and at last give up, never meeting Merry's eye.
Merry wondered what had happened to him when they were apart, and if they could ever truly come together again.
Frodo murmurs to Samwise, who nods his understanding, before dropping back to trot next to Merry. He sees Sam pull ahead, calling out "Mister Pippin!" and smiles a little to himself at Sam's as-always perfect ability to intuit his master's thoughts.
Merry is handsome and alien in his Rohan finery, but the tense abstracted frown on his face is, to Frodo at least, comfortingly easy to decipher. He has learned to take what comfort he can in snatches, wherever it can be found. This very journey is a comfort, for it delays the inevitable long enough that Frodo can feel pleasantly unaware for a while yet of what the journey's outcome will be.
He is dreading returning to the Shire.
Merry is watching Pippin and Sam up ahead; Sam has coaxed Pip into laughing at something or other. And Pippin, who is handsome and remote and more fittingly called Peregrin than Pippin in his own solemn and resplendent Gondorian black, is brought back to comforting familiarity with his pealing laughter.
"Give it time," Frodo says, still smiling at the backs of his cousin and friend.
Merry glances askance at him before turning his eyes down to his own pony, his mouth turning down as well. "Give what time?" he asks in a miserable attempt at innocence.
"Give him time. He will speak when he is ready."
Merry looks at him, a very direct and hard gaze, and he too would probably be better-fitted as Meriadoc than Merry in such finery and with such posture, but Frodo feels old and tired and incapable of change. "He won't talk to me," Merry says as if that explains it all, and of course it does.
"He does not know how to," Frodo sighs. "I don't know what happened, Merry, to either of you; I was not there to experience it. Pippin…does not have the words yet." He returns Merry's stare with a direct gaze of his own. "Do you?"
Merry looks down again, and that is enough of an answer for Frodo.
"You have not spoken either," Merry says quietly after a pause long enough that Frodo had thought the conversation finished.
Frodo takes a deep breath. It hurts to do so. "I cannot," he says, and thinks of the book bound in red, waiting for his story.
Merry sounds troubled, and sad, and Frodo remembers when he was a babe, a child, a tween, and as merry as his name. "I know," he says.
"Then surely you can understand why Pippin cannot speak yet either."
Merry sighs, and looks again at his cousin ahead, travelling next to Sam, their conversation finished and a distant, closed look again on Pippin's face.
"I know," he says.
Frodo and Sam were asleep. Pip was glad of that, for it often seemed that Frodo had trouble falling asleep, and Sam would not go to sleep himself until he was sure his master was quiet.
Merry was not asleep. He was instead sitting quietly near to Pippin, contemplating the night sky, wrapped securely in his thick red cloak.
Pip shivered, and looked away from his cousin. Sometimes, he wished Merry would go away for a while, and when he wished that he was shocked and ashamed of himself. More often he wished he could talk to Merry—but the words would not come. They clogged in his throat and died there, and he was beginning to feel a little desperate that one day all those unspoken words would choke him.
"I was excited," Merry said, and Pippin blinked in confusion as he was dragged out of his own dark thoughts.
"When were you excited?" he asked, trying to recall if he'd missed some earlier remark of Merry's to put this one in context.
"When Theoden accepted me into his service." Merry was sitting back on his elbows, squinting up at the stars amidst the trees. "When Eowyn grabbed me up onto her horse among all the other soldiers. Before the battle."
Pippin looked away, sickened. "I was not excited," he said.
"I was glad of the chance to do something, you see," Merry explained as if he had not heard his cousin speak. "I had been left behind by everyone, and you all seemed to be doing something so important—I felt less than useless, worse even than when we were with the Ents and all they would do was talk and talk. And that fight at Orthanc, with Treebeard and all the other Ents—well." His mouth twisted wryly. "That was not a real battle, was it."
"There was nothing exciting about what I did," Pippin said tightly. Merry finally looked away from the night sky to stare at him intently, and for once Pip met his gaze and held it. "I was lost, and terrified, and unbearably alone. I didn't know what to do. Sometimes Gandalf wasn't there, and even when he was he was ordering me about, telling me to light beacons and not say things and ride behind him on Shadowfax…" He clamped down on his words, shaking as he remembered standing in the Great Hall as Denethor had his dinner while his own son rode off to death, remembered running frantically to find Gandalf because Denethor had gone mad, remembered his isolation and helplessness, his desperate desire just to be a tween in the Shire again. How could he put those feelings into words? Why would he even want to share that humiliating fear with anyone?
And yet sometimes, he feared he would go mad with not speaking of any of it.
"It was not exciting," he said tightly, and turned away to check again on Frodo and Sam.
"I was nervous before the actual battle," Merry said, and Pippin tried not to hear his words. "And then when we were galloping toward all those orcs…there was no time for fear. There was no time for disgust at killing living creatures. There was no time for much of anything but the fight, really." When Pip glanced at his cousin, he saw Merry's face was vacant, tired. Merry met his gaze. "It was not exciting," he said.
Pippin sat down again, next to his cousin. "I was certain I was going to die," he said. "While we waited, Gandalf and I, within the walls of the city…I was certain I was going to die, and you wouldn't be there." He could feel his face scrunching up, but he couldn't stop it. It had been so exhausting, that long wait for the battle to come, and it had been so terrifying when it finally came, and he had never wanted to be a soldier and he didn't know what to think of himself now he was one. "And then we lived, and when we went searching I found your cloak…"
Merry reached out and took his hand. "I knew you couldn't be dead," Pippin said, barely aware of what words were escaping his lips. "Not after all that, not after all we'd been through together, not after what I'd been through without you since coming to Gondor. You couldn't be dead, when I lived. But when I found your cloak…" He turned to bury his face in his cousin's shoulder. "Oh Merry…"
"Shhh," Merry soothed. "Shhh…"
When Merry had woken in the Houses of Healing, when he had donned his uniform and gone with them to fight once more, Pippin had felt as if he didn't recognize his own cousin. Didn't know what to say to him, how to talk with him anymore, and it had been so frustrating, his inability to speak with Merry as of old. They had not been parted long—they'd often spent far more time apart in the Shire—but too much had happened this time, and Pippin did not know how to speak of any of it. He could feel a wall of silence building up between himself and his cousin, and was helpless to break it down again.
But Merry had always had his own fair share of destructive tendencies.
"I am no soldier, Merry," he said, and they were holding each other up as they had done so many, many times before. "I don't want to be a soldier. I want to go home to the Shire and drink a pint at the Green Dragon and go home to my father and learn how to be Thain after him."
"You will, Pippin," Merry answered, and wrapped an arm around his shoulder to give it a squeeze. "I hope you never have to hold a sword again, Pip. But I can only hope; I don't know."
Pip grinned wryly. "If there is nothing else I have learnt these past few months," he said, "it is that I know very little."
Merry laughed at that. "It certainly took you long enough."
He pushed at Merry's arm, but not very hard, by way of answer.
They sat for a moment in quiet contemplation, but only for a moment because Pippin found now he wanted to talk, could talk, needed to talk. "It won't be enough anymore, will it?" he asked carefully and turned his head in time to see the frown crease Merry's forehead. "The Shire, I mean. We won't be able to stay, will we?"
"Oh," said Merry, and he was quiet for a moment. "I don't know, Pippin. We're rather like Bilbo now, aren't we? Off Adventuring. And he didn't manage to stay put, did he?" He paused again before going on. "But we will always have places where we are welcome. And we shall always have friends beyond the Shire." He smiled softly. "And we will always be able to go back."
Pippin smiled as well, and closed his eyes. "I missed you, Merry."
Merry's arm, still around his shoulders, squeezed. "And I you, Pip."
Pippin fell asleep slowly, and dreamt of the Shire.
Frodo wakes, restless, but is so used to waking this way he stills himself immediately, so that neither Sam nor the others will also wake up. That is when he hears his cousins speaking quietly together, Pippin's lilt fast and tense and Merry's tones slow and thoughtful.
Frodo smiles, a little, and refuses to hear the words, to eavesdrop, glad only that finally his cousins can speak again to each other.
He listens for a while to the comforting hum of their voices, glad of their company, and is falling back to sleep when he hears Pippin ask, "We won't be able to stay, will we?"
Frodo stops breathing for a moment, and listens to Merry's answer, so careless and thoughtful at the same time. And when he hears the satisfaction, the completion, the sure knowledge in Merry's voice as he says, "And we will always be able to go back," he fights to hold back a terrified sob.
Because he knows, suddenly, no matter how long he may remain in the Shire, he will never truly belong there again.
And he knows too, with a surety that is beyond doubt, that Pippin and Merry are right, and that while they may go back and even belong, because of their experiences they will never be able to remain. Their hearts and feet are restless now that they have travelled, and they have other allegiances, and the Shire cannot contain them.
Frodo, once again, wishes he had never brought his friends along on his journey.