Title: "Displaced"
Author: Victoria Bitter
Pairing: Merry/Pippin
Rating: NC-17 eventually, PG-13 this part
Part: 2/3-4 (Yes, you read that right...it was supposed to be two parts, but 
then Frodo insinuated himself into things and Pippin made a damn big decision and 
now it will either be three or four, depending on how much I can convince them to wait 
until the sequal for)
Disclaimer: These aren't my hobbits, but honestly, once they're in bed, I 
don't think J.R.R. Tolkien or New Line Cinema quite wants them either. Let's 
just say they belong to collective myth, eh? Or anything else that won't get 
me sued.
Author's Notes: This story could be considered a sequel of sorts to 
"Last Standing," however, while recommended, it is not necessary to have read the former 
piece to understand this one.


***


Pippin's eyes, thrown wide with the stabbing shock, now crushed tight, and 
he rocked slowly into Merry's arms, his slim body shaking violently as his 
forehead came to rest against the emblem of Rohan wrought cleverly into cold 
enameled mail. His arms were locked tight around his battered ribs, fingers 
clenching on his sides in rhythm with the quavering hisses of scorned 
breath, but Merry's hands hung suspended impotently above his cousin's back, 
sturdy white gauntlets shivering with their own painless ache.

He didn't want to cause any more pain. He had already done too much, 
misjudged or forgotten or perhaps a bit of both and pushed Pippin too far. 
Merry closed his own eyes, his head falling back as if seeking atonement 
from the cold-glimmering stars. He'd only meant to help. To comfort. To pull 
Pippin from his melancholy. He'd never wanted this. After two weeks of agony 
shared in every changed bandage and swallowed cry, he'd never wanted to see 
Pippin in pain again.

But in his fumbling attempts at comfort, he had only shifted the pain from 
heart to body. If not simply multiplied it. His hands lowered again, a 
hair-breadth from the embroidered branches of the White Tree on Pippin's 
cloak, then stopped, pulling back harshly to dig  themselves into the earth 
at his knees. The soil felt cool and damp, even through the leather, like 
the wind-cooled trails of moisture on his cheeks.

For how long they knelt on that hill, a grotesquely poised tableau of broken 
comfort, Merry did not care to know, nor, in the years to come, would he 
ever care to remember precisely. It was a heartbeat and an eon, a moment and 
a year, lasting long enough to write questions on his heart in a sharp and 
scathing hand, but not nearly long enough to find their answers.

He knew only when Pippin's trembling began to ease, catching his own breath 
in shortened hope. He looked down, and the dark fabric bunched as shoulders 
tucked beneath it with deceptive strength, holding air and pain frozen as 
Pippin's body suddenly tensed. Then his legs scrabbled beneath him, and 
Merry could no longer even offer the support of something to lean against, 
as the younger hobbit was standing on his own.

Pippin's face was still as pale as ash, his arms still tight-bound to his 
body, but his stance was firm to the point of defiance, his eyes fixed on 
the lights of the camp. With only the briefest flicker of pain-fear, he 
paused, steadying himself, then began to make his stalwart way down the 
grassy incline.

Merry bit his lip, shaking his head silently as he followed. This was a 
facet of the Pippin he knew, brave yet boyishly prideful, but it was not the 
Pippin he liked very much, and it was certainly the Pippin who got himself 
hurt in the first place.

There was little he could do but follow at his cousin's side, standing ready 
to catch him should determination give way to weakness, but stand he did, 
and Pippin to his relief made no sign to turn him away. Indeed, he made no 
sign of having seen Merry there at all, but there was, it seemed, the 
faintest release to the knotting of his shoulders, and for the moment, that 
was enough.

Silence followed them towards the edge of camp, an absence of words 
deafening to Merry in crashing heartbeats and crushed whispers of 
wind-ruffled livery and needle-thin rasps of air between Pippin's lips. He 
mentally counted the steps to their tent, casting a worried eye on his 
friend's careful progress, but then Pippin stopped.

They were almost into the camp itself, sheltered in the darkness behind one 
of the outermost tents so that Pippin became little more than a scattering 
of polished mail-glint and too-pale flesh engulfed in shadow. He closed his 
eyes there, testing a ginger breath slightly deeper than those before.

The muscles of his throat corded tight, but the pain, perhaps, was slightly 
easing, and slowly, he unbandaged his arms from around his chest, lowering 
them with aching grace to lie at his sides. Pippin's chin lifted in pride, 
ready to step again into a world of comrades in arms and the revealing glare 
of campfires and cressets, but Merry could also see the tense set of his 
jaw, the way his fingers worked furtively in the weave of his trouser legs.

Merry stepped in close, venturing a hand loosely on Pippin's shoulder. He 
was rewarded with a quick glance of relief naked but for the lightest 
question, and he smiled softly. *I don't think any less of you, Pip.* Pippin 
offered his own faint smile in reply, but as Merry took Pippin's good hand 
in his, the smile turned into a moment of sobbingly pure radiant need, and 
Merry stifled a cry at the unexpected strength of the black leather-clad 
grip.

His fingers felt as though they were being slowly pulped, but Merry only bit 
deeper into the smile, then questioned a glance towards the tent. There was 
a moment's pause, a thinning of the relentless crush that lasted only a 
half-heartbeat before it came down again harder than ever and they were 
stepping out of the shadow, moving into the light and bustle of camp with 
nods to guards and a brisk step that belied the pain stabbing from Pippin's 
chest through Merry's hand.

When at last they pushed through the heavy canvas covering the entrance to 
their own tent, Pippin dropped the clutch, curling his arms back against his 
sides as his head ducked down with a muttering that Merry suspected would 
fetch quite the disapproving glare from Paladin Toook were he to hear such 
oaths from his young son's lips.

Merry laughed dark and low, working his fingers to try and call true feeling 
back through the abused tingling, then stepped forward, reaching for the 
clasp of Pippin's cloak. He knew the heavy fabric must be an unwelcome 
burden as Pippin reached so dearly for breath, "Poor Pip, let me..."

To his surprise, Pip's head snapped up, a tumble of curls clinging 
haphazardly to the gleam of sweat on his brow. "I can undress myself, 
Meriadoc."

*Meriadoc.* The word, so crisp and formal, took Merry aback, and he fought 
the urge to shake his head in disavowal of the moniker. His mouth gaped a 
moment, then his brow lowered darkly, and he turned away, sitting on the 
edge of the bed and unclasping his own cloak to crumple on the sheets in a 
rich pile of dark green velvet and white silk cord. "Of course you can. 
Whatever your years, Peregrin, I do consider you grown," he almost left the 
simple assurance, but then his own wounded pride reared its petulant head 
before he could halt himself, and he heard his tongue spit a quick betrayal 
that pricked them both. "...at least enough for that."

Pippin said nothing, but Merry heard the stuttering effort of his breathing 
before the thick rustle of a sable cloak folding to the ground, then, in 
time, the clatter of a gorget and clicking unbuckling of braces. Then there 
was silence, and Merry frowned. The gauntlets he knew, would make no sound, 
but the mail...

The mail. Well-forged and tightly wrought, their mailshirts differed in 
colour, but both shared the same sturdy weight, and both could only be 
donned or removed by slipping them up and over one's head. A
servant had come to help them dress that morning, but Merry remembered now 
the pained look on Pippin's face as he had raised his arms through the 
sleeves and the weight had first settled against his
shoulders. It would be nothing short of torture to free himself of it 
alone now.

Merry sat frozen on the edge of the bed, watching Pippin's shadow on the 
canvas wall as chin bowed to chest and determined fingers clutched at the 
hem of the mailshirt. The first attempt made a scarce six inches progress, 
then fell again with a shudder, and Merry closed his eyes, locking away the 
image.

He could do nothing for the sounds, but they told the story as clear as any 
shadow. Tiny, sucking bites of air. Links rattling like bloodthirsty bells 
in shaking hands. Whimpers tucked deep into the throat but still bleeding 
from the edges of lips pressed tight together. Seconds that stretched to 
minutes that seemed to stretch to hours of gentle, brutal little noises, 
then at last a stretched cry and a heavy jingle and...silence.

Slowly, Merry turned, eyes opening. Pippin stood facing him, head bowed, 
arms clutched once more against his ribs as he rocked slowly back and forth, 
droplets of sweat scattering from his curls to glitter as bright and wicked 
gemstones on the pile of linked jet torment now defeated at his feet. He 
still wore a thin leather jerkin beneath, buckled over his silken shirt, and 
as Merry watched, two heavy beads of liquid appeared on his chest, winding 
silver streaks across the tooled intricacy of branches.

It took him a moment to recognize these new flecks of moisture for what 
they were, but when he did, Merry felt his throat grow tight, and the 
bruised pride that had held him across the tent buckled. Pippin was crying.

Without another moment's thought, Merry crossed the tent and knelt slowly at 
Pippin's feet, as though the floor were scattered with broken glass rather 
than merely a broken heart. Pippin made no move, no sound as Merry's hands 
went to the first buckle of the jerkin, but his eyes looked down too 
eloquently, open and bleeding saltwater as leather slipped through 
brass.

The jerkin was first, opened to let him breathe a bit easier, but not 
removed, not just yet, better to let him keep the comforting embrace of 
his own arms for a few more moments.

The greaves were next, the last vestige of armour, then he brushed his 
knuckles along the cuffs of the boots, this strangest barrier between 
the hobbit lad he knew and the warrior Man he had so nearly become. Peeling 
Pippin's good hand down from his chest to balance against Merry's 
shoulder, he lifted first one foot, then the other, letting Pippin control the 
pace as he pulled the boots free and set them neatly one beside the other.

Pippin's feet seemed more natural now, but black wool stockings still 
covered them, and Merry almost smiled, remembering how he had dangled the 
strange garments in puzzlement when he had first seen them laid out with his 
new uniform, forced at last to ask the steward where and why they were worn. 
He'd worn boots once before, when the Brandywine had pushed a bit past its 
banks one summer when he was a lad, but stockings were something entirely 
Mannish and new...though he had to admit that they did soften the rubbing a 
fair bit.

Neatly rolling up the legs of the trousers, he pushed the stockings down 
Pippin's calves one at a time, trailing across the bare skin exposed as they 
rolled down his legs to his ankles, then down over his feet. As they slipped 
under the heel and the first soft thatch of auburn curls came free of the 
knit, Merry let the balls of his palms free the remainder of the stockings, 
catching his fingers in the softness of something still entirely hobbit, 
gently but firmly tracing every line and plain down arch to ball to long, 
travel-hardened toes as if moulding them into his memory before the 
stockings came away entirely, and he balled them into a tight knot 
quickly shoved down the leg of the nearest boot.

Then skimming as lightly as a stone tip-toeing over the surface of a 
mirrored pond, Merry's hands slipped up the lines of Pip's legs to his 
waist, circling along the waistband of his trousers to light on the buttons. 
He paused there, uncertain a moment, and looked up, but Pip's eyes were 
closed, his hands motionless, his head tilted back just slightly as if in 
prayer or supplication, exposing the pale, delicate skin of his throat to 
the flickering torchlight.

For a moment, he was utterly still, then as if in answer to the question in 
Merry's eyes, a tiny breath, hardly enough for the sustenance of life 
itself, shivered eloquently through him, and Merry knew. His fingers twisted 
swift on the fastenings, and the sable wool pooled like pitch at Pippin's 
ankles, exposing the proof of a life once lived in the deep tan of his 
calves painted against moon-white thighs.

His shirt remained sweat-bunched at his waist at first, then gradually, like 
the unfurling of a ship's sails, it peeled away from his skin, falling loose 
as a statue's drape halfway down his thighs, the linen still lined in a 
cracked riverbed of wrinkles and creases. Pip wore only the shirt and jerkin 
now, his eyes still closed, his head slipped further back so that his lips 
were called apart just enough to draw a line of black space between them, 
flickered now and again with a nervous tongue that shined wind-chapped lips.

Merry stood, dared a hand to push the strangely long curls back from 
Pip's shoulders, feeling them soft as milkweed floss against the backs of his 
fingers even as the leather of the jerkin ran heavy-supple beneath his hand. 
As gently as opening the wings of a butterfly, he peeled back the sides 
of the jerkin, holding the stiff garment as precisely as if the elegantly 
tooled edges were deadly razors as he slid it down Pip's lean arms, unable 
to quite miss the way that the shirt clung here and there to lines of muscle 
he somehow did not remember. The moment the armholes slipped past the tips 
of Pippin's fingers, Merry's hands uncurled and he dropped it, suddenly 
unclean, hearing the dull, creaking protest of leather and jangle of brass 
buckles muffled in the soft, thick wool of black trousers.

A moment breathed suspended between them, the task complete and yet nowhere 
nearly done, everything unsaid and yet too many words between them already 
to chance any more. Pippin's eyes opened slowly, as if waking from a dream, 
and he held Merry in a fathomless gaze of accusation and atonement, love and 
incomprehension, fear and trust and something else...a change too deep to 
risk interpretation.

Lips parted, breath pulled in to hang hope on the edges of tongues poised to 
speak, but then courage failed, and as cruelly as the strings of a puppet 
snapped by a heedless child, Merry dropped hastily to one knee, gathering 
the clothing to his chest in an artless bundle of so many pretty rags.

Tears washed unblinking and unspilled across his vision, he stood, stumbling 
over his own feet, and fled to the chair that stood by the bed. They'd 
shared beds before, so pragmatically and simply as cousins and friends and 
comrades, but now it yawned before him in unworded tension like a 
white-sheeted wraith. Merry could sense in his heart the litany of words 
almost spoken, and it frightened him, Pippin's sudden reserve weightier than 
any grandiose proclamation could ever have been.

His fingers worked helplessly on of the chairback, bone rolling and 
straining white beneath the flesh of his knuckles as he tried to squeeze 
useless words from the mute wood. His throat had grown tight, a thin passage 
that barely gave petulant access to air enough to breathe, and even that 
seemed to clutch away when he heard a careful breath shudder across the 
tent, followed awkwardly by thin, stumbling words. "There we go. Such a 
to-do that I'm grown, and here I weep like a faunt...you must be..."

Merry turned, his hands ripping free from the chairback to bore into 
themselves. Pip was facing him now, the thin silver tear-trails swiped with 
a dampened sleeve into a blurred gloss that glimmered like sweat in the 
candlelight. His eyes still brimmed, but his lips were set thin and one 
corner torn up into the slightest mask of a smile.

Their eyes met, and Merry felt his heart trip over itself as Pippin slowly 
reached out, hardly doing more than turning the palms of his hands forward, 
his arms so slightly raised that the shoulders of his shirt never creased. 
It was enough.

Merry could never recall moving, but somehow, Pippin was in his arms, held 
as carefully as the memory of a perfect dream, and he could feel the 
shivered half-breaths against his own chest as newly callused hands branded 
the back of his neck. "Merry..." the words came not as sound, but a thin 
buzz of breath against the soft skin of his throat beneath his ear. 
"Merry, I'm frightened."

He nodded, brushing his cheek against the soft curls that smelled of 
cold steel and warm hobbit-lad. "So am I. There's so much..." The word faded off 
into shamed inadiquacy. Too much indeed. Too much everything. Too much 
everything to ever be what they had been. Too much everything to ever be 
what they had never been.

Pippin's hands slipped down to his shoulders, his head pillowing now against 
Merry's shoulder as they stood there, Merry's lips in his hair, their arms 
woven thickly and their bodies clasped together until there was no longer 
any true understanding of who comforted and who took comfort, who stood and 
who was held. Merry could feel the warmth of Pippin's breath in his hair as 
he spoke, and he discovered himself leaning ever so slightly into it, as 
though that faint breath were a campfire's glow in the darkest of nights. 
"What did you think of when you died, Merry?"

Somehow, the question didn't shock him as it should have, and he only closed 
his eyes, suddenly cuttingly aware that the fingers of his right hand could 
feel the folds of Pip's nightshirt but not the weave of it, that the night 
air fell slightly cooler through the leather upon his left arm. "Longbottom 
leaf. Finding perfect skipping stones on the edge of the Brandywine. Falling 
out of trees in a pile of golden leaves and red apples. How snowflakes look 
when they catch on your eyelashes."

"Did you think of me?"

"You were those memories."

Slow as petals peeling back from a fisted bud, Pippin's fingers slipped off 
his shoulders and poured down to his chest, his forehead now resting against 
Merry's, a moisture caught between them unlabled as sweat or tears. "I 
thought of you."

Pippin's lashes were penstrokes of candlelight over the dark of his eyes, so 
near that Merry could see nothing but the depth of them, a dangerous 
anonymity that wrapped far too much meaning in the slight circling of 
fingers, the quickening thrum of his pulse. "The way you smile when you're 
going to get me in trouble, and the way you smile when you talk me out of 
it. Apple juice on your chin. Butter on your fingers. Your hands."

Was it possible to speak without breathing? "My hands."

"Not just your hands."

Then the lashes fell fully, the slightest tilt of the head, and now he knew 
he wasn't breathing at all, because any breath would pull him just that 
little bit nearer, and he felt his shoulders draw tight as his stomach 
quivered with sweet terror. "Pip...." He didn't know what he asked, what he 
warned, what he hoped, but Pippin did not pull away, and somehow, neither 
did he.

"I don't want to think of you when I'm dying." A plea, a heart-sob made 
voice, it wrapped tight around the edges of Merry's fear, gathering it up 
with hope. Then Pippin's blurred features vanished into the dream-darkness 
behind his own closed eyes, and he felt a thousand nights wishing come 
to press warm and soft and living-sweet against his lips.




To Be Continued...