Lord of the Rings Cabbages and Kings

Cabbages and Kings   
by Madelyn Scott 

Disclaimer: The Lord of the Rings and all its characters belong to the estate of JRR Tolkien, who created that adorable species known as hobbits, and to Peter Jackson and New Line Cinema, who cast them and made me want to write about them doing questionable things to each other.  


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Pippin had two favorite chairs. 

One had been in his bedroom at the Great Smials since he was small enough to curl up and sleep in it at night, and was for years kept well stocked with the fattest cushions and the most worn and comforting quilt in preparation for the mood taking him to do so. A veritable lord of a chair, it was, tall of back and high of seat, and according to the story, first belonged to great-great-uncle Isengar, who, it was said in after-dinner conversation, with a terrible sort of pride, had once Gone To Sea. Merry had built Pippin a boat in it one flat, rainy afternoon when he was six, and, armed with ample provisions (being Merry's lunch that he had saved and a second one that he had stolen) they had sailed down the Brandywine, founded the Shire again, routed an invasion or two of orcs and dragons around the corner of the dresser, and excavated Bucklebury and Tuckborough near the foot of Pippin's bed by the time that the supper-bell sounded. 

The other chair was pulled up close to the fireplace in the back parlour at Brandy Hall, and was very much wider and lower, with a seat nicely shaped and indented to best accommodate a hobbit rear, or two if the second hobbit was fairly small and didn't mind being poked with the corner of a book, or leaning against somebody else's shoulder and having him cough them awake at the most annoying times. Years ago, Merry would build a good fire with bits of kindling left in the grates in the adjacent rooms, wrap Pippin up in a blanket, and tell him stories about elves, gleaned from visits from and to Bag End. Then, later, as Pippin grew sleepy, less grand ones of his own about apple-pie-and-cream, and the time that Cormac fell into the well, and the spring before Pippin was born when the Brandywine burst its banks and you could catch newts and lampreys in a pail where they wriggled in the cool sucking mud at the doorstep. When Merry coughed, or cleared his throat, Pippin could feel the tiny vibrations in his chest travel through his own arm wrapped around it. 

Pippin wasn't all that concerned about elves any more, at least not on an evening like this, which seemed to him to be the most homely and hobbitish sort of an autumn evening. Not too cold, but cold enough to make snuggling essential, and full of woodsmoke and apples gone nut-brown where they had fallen. What concerned him at this moment in time was Merry, and the hundred and one unimportant, wonderful things about Merry that seemed to have taken to jumping out and surprising Pippin when he was least expecting them. Like the fullness of his lower lip, and the very pleasing pout it formed itself into when he concentrated, or the way that he screwed up his eyes when he smiled. When Pippin pressed into his side and told him secrets and stories very, very quietly, embroidering and contradicting until the stories flowed together and became no longer stories, but songs, Merry smiled a lot. 

Pippin had a number of secrets and other valuable nuggets of information, some of practical use, such as where sizeable patches of wild strawberries could be found, thumbnail tiny and sweet as sugar, and some stored for future blackmail, such as Melilot kissing one of the Boffin lads in the kitchen a week after she got engaged to Everard, or that a particular spot a little below Merry's shoulder blade was so ticklish that even the slightest threat to it could make him beg for mercy and promise almost anything that you cared to think up at the time. That slow doors creaked louder than ones jabbed quickly and held firm. That there had been three bottles of last summer's currant wine in the cellar that everyone else had forgotten about and were certain never to miss now that they had been removed to the bottom of a trunk in Pippin's bedroom. How if you kept to the left hand side of the window seat in the west drawing room, it was next to impossible to be seen from the door, and aunts would come in and talk about no end of scandalous and useful things. Secrets like these were only fun to know if you had someone with a comfortable shoulder and an interested ear to tell them to. 

Some secrets were too great and vast to tell to anyone, even in whispers. 

Pippin's great secret was that, in keeping with his Tookish nature, he had done something irrational, unplanned, and what he was fairly sure everyone would call most un-hobbitlike. He had found himself quite suddenly and utterly in love with Merry. 

Well, the Tooks might have been accused of a good many things over the years, but not doing what needed to be done and saying what had to be said wasn't one of them. And telling your funny, clever and rather handsome cousin that you thought of him these days as more than a cousin or a fellow conspirator might not be comparable to some of the Bullroarer's exploits, but Pippin reasoned that Merry really ought to know about a development like this. Such a thing, however, was far easier to decide upon than to put into action. Which was why Pippin had Merry engaged in a conversation about Pimpernel's upcoming birthday party, the plan being that the subject would naturally stray after a time to party food, and then Pippin would suggest that, just perhaps, they might have their own private picnic somewhere later on, because he liked it so much better when there was just the two of them and not so many silly lasses, and so forth. Such a plan needed care and a good deal of concentration, so the youngest Took was crushed to see Merry give an enormous yawn just as he was getting into the delights of the cozy corners of the wine cellar. 

This left only one suitable punishment for Pippin to administer. He stuck his hand behind Merry's shoulder and tickled him. 

It was fortunate that the ceilings at Brandy Hall were somewhat higher than in most holes, or Merry might have met with a sudden and violent headache when he shot upwards in the chair. As it was, he only grabbed Pippin around the waist and proceeded to wrestle him to the cushions. Pippin twisted and squirmed like a past master of the art, but Merry had a good two or three inches on him in height and even more of an advantage in weight, so the match ended quickly amid much laughter with Pippin's wrists pinned above his head. 

"Submit," Merry ordered. 

Pippin submitted, going quiet and biting his lower lip, waiting, for what? - nothing. Anything. It was one of those lovely, hushed, and not nearly frequent enough moments when he was completely aware of Merry in a hundred ways and places at once, and often, with that, discovered new and surprising things. It was at times like these that he had discovered the single, half-hidden freckle high up on Merry's right temple, that you could only see if you happened, for one reason or another, to be upside down. And that Merry had to be at least ten pounds heavier flat on top of him than at any other time, but if Pippin pushed hard against the weight at Merry's hip and wriggled, just a little, it stirred a very warm, very special feeling somewhere deep inside his belly. He wriggled now, judiciously, a steady, almost comforting, back and forth movement against one of the seams of Merry's breeches. Merry made an odd little sound in his throat and stroked his hair a bit in an absent way. Then he seemed to come back to himself, ruffled it, and heaved off. Pippin chewed on his lip again, disappointed. 

"Merry Brandybuck," he said, "you're getting fatter than Farmer Maggott's prize pig." 

"Oh... that's good." Merry had propped himself up with the biggest cushion and was starting to nod. After a few moments of beautiful silence, he opened one eye and squinted at Pippin. "Hoi. I'm getting what?" 

Pippin poked him in the ribs. "See? You haven't been listening to a word that I've said." 

"Have." 

"Have not." 

"Have... oh, bugger, alright. I'm sorry." Merry removed Pippin's hand with its bony jabbing finger to a more comfortable place on his hip and yawned again, even more widely. "Da made me go round the tenants with him today, and you can't take the trap all the way to some of the holes on the north side, you have to leave the pony on the road and walk about forty miles..." 

"If Aunt Esmy heard you exaggerating like that," observed Pippin, "she'd call it positively wicked." 

"...hush, you... at _least_ forty miles in the mud to make polite conversation with an old gaffer who spat pipe weed the whole while we were talking. I'm tired and my feet are still cold." As if to emphasize this, Merry stretched out one leg and wiggled his toes before the fire. The mug of ale balanced on the arm of the chair teetered, and Pippin, who much preferred a good Buckland beer to anything that passed for the same in the Shoulder of Mutton at Tuckborough or the Ring O'Bells at Pincup, hastily moved it to safety. 

"Make conversation with me," he suggested, slipping under Merry's arm. "But not so very polite." 

"If only such a thing were possible with Peregrin Took." Merry neatly took the force out of the elbow aimed at him by wrapping his arm around Pippin's shoulders. "What do you want - a story?" 

"No, not exactly." Pippin shrugged, as far as he was able to. "Just... anything. Everything." 

"There's a lot of anything in the world, Pip, and even more of everything. I'm not sure I'd know where to start." 

"Don't _laugh_ at me, Merry!" 

Merry's look of amusement faded. "Pip, I was only teasing, for land's sakes." 

Pippin averted his eyes. "Well, don't tease so much, either. It isn't very nice." 

"It isn't very nice to call me a saddleback pig." 

"Oh, but I didn't mean that, you know I didn't." Pippin shoved at him, beyond frustrated. "I just wanted you to pay attention when I'm trying not to prattle and be silly and behave like a sensible grown-up hobbit who you can talk to properly. Wouldn't you like that, Merry?" he added, hopefully. 

Merry frowned a little. "I rather like it when you're silly, actually. But I suppose that if you want to be sensible, I can try. What do you want to talk about first - the harvest or Uncle Dinodas's gout?" 

Pippin sighed, wrinkling his nose. "A story might be better after all," he admitted. It was rather less than he had hoped for, but at least he would have the sturdiness of Merry's chest under him for a while longer, and the steady comforting rhythm of his voice, and perhaps, just perhaps, if he kept very still and pretended to fall asleep, Merry might part Pippin's curls and secrete a quiet little kiss there. It wasn't a certainty, but certainly worth the attempt. He circled one of the buttons on Merry's waistcoat with his fingertip, pulling at it absently and feeling the threads strain. "An old story," he said. "Something I don't remember." 

Merry blinked at the ceiling, pondering this, the firelight catching his riotous yellow curls. Pippin had heard it told somewhere that the elves were a very handsome folk, and ever since then, he had somehow been inclined to picture all of those people with heads of rich golden hair. "Once when you were fifteen, you thought you'd go for a walk in the woods, but you got yourself lost instead, and we had to go out with a search party. We looked until it got so dark we had to light lanterns, and then I found you asleep under a tree." His mouth quirked in a faint smile. "You were only thirty feet from the stile at the bottom of the meadow. You must have been walking round in circles." 

"I remember _that_," said Pippin, petulantly. If truth be told, he hadn't intended to go anywhere further than the garden that afternoon, where there was a game of ducks and drakes, which he was rather good at, going on at the pond, and enough hints had been dropped by the kitchens about an extra large gooseberry crumble surfacing at afternoon tea to quash most of the dark mutterings that it was just a rumor, but when he had come round the bushes and seen Peggotty Woodruff giving Merry a sloppy sort of kiss on the cheek and Merry looking none too unhappy about it, a hot tight sort of feeling had squeezed his chest, like eating one too many helpings of pudding, and he had had to go and find a quiet shady place where he could breathe very hard and try not to blink. Pimpernel had found out about it later and tormented him for weeks in the way only a sister could about being jealous of Merry. Which was right in a way, except that he felt like it was really Peggotty he was jealous of. 

Merry had carried Pippin pickaback back to the house, the lanterns twinkling ahead of them like little glow-worms through the trees. He had been warm from walking and smelled of ale and apples. 

"You gave us all a good scare that night. I should have boxed your ears." 

Pippin turned his head, pressing his face closer into Merry's shirt in the hope of catching that warm-apple scent again and succeeding for a fleeting moment. "You didn't, though. You went down to the kitchen yourself and made me a pot of tea and a plate of bread and dripping then came back and sat with me until I fell asleep." 

Merry flicked the tip of Pippin's nose lightly. "You gave _me_ a scare, you Tookish halfwit. Why did you want to go wandering off like that, anyway, if you remember it all so well?" 

Somehow they seemed to have gone around in another circle and brought Pippin back to where he meant to go all too suddenly, like walking home on a summer's evening talking carelessly about tomorrow, and the day after that, and the next, and boats (always a dangerous subject away from Buckland) and where the road that hurried off over the downs through Hardbottle and Hopsbury finished up eventually, and Oh, here's my front door, so goodnight. Muffled in shirt, he drew in a quick breath. "Because you were too busy kissing lasses to take any notice of me. And I _want_ you to take notice of me." 

"Pippin, what in the world are you talking about?" 

"I mean that I don't want you to kiss Peggotty, or any other lasses for that matter. I want you to kiss _me_!" 

He felt, rather than heard, Merry's sharp intake of breath and the beautiful silence that followed it, and squeezed his eyes shut. At that moment, with that hot-cold, sickening feeling of having made a terrible, terrible mistake, all of Pippin's plans crumbled into a little pile of dust, and he would have given anything, even both first and second breakfasts, to have never spoken at all. What had been grand and exciting just a very short while ago now filled him with the absolute certainty that Merry would now never, ever, want to speak to him again. A long black future of just being Pippin instead of part of Merry-and-Pippin seemed to be yawning wide beneath his feet, and he gasped, twisting from under Merry's arm with a peculiar half-sob rushing up in his throat to choke him. 

"Please, Merry, let go of me... please!" 

Merry was strong as well as being heavy. And fast - not as fast as Pippin, who could out-run, roll or dodge him with ease given enough freedom to move, but more than fast enough to grab his cousin around the waist when he was already struggling, wrestle him almost flat to the cushions again, and straddle his legs to prevent his escaping any time soon. Pippin wriggled and fought, but Merry's hands and knees held him close, and his deep gray eyes closer, and Pippin was left to tremble and sweat and wish, for the first time in his relatively short life, that one of Bilbo's dragons might appear and just swallow him up. 

"Don't you dare, Pippin Took," Merry said, in a quite uncharacteristically low, throaty voice. "Don't you dare tell me that and then try and run away - don't you _dare_. Open your eyes." 

Pippin shook his head miserably. Perhaps it wouldn't hurt quite so very much in weeks to come if he didn't look into Merry's eyes now, didn't let himself see the shock and distaste that certainly must be there so he'd keep remembering it later, the same way he'd remember Merry's breath touching his cheeks, his lashes, his lips, like turning your face up to warm misty spring rain. 

And the gentlest mouth, with that plump lower lip that he somehow already knew the feel of from staring at it so often, tracing its contours with an invisible thumb and forefinger, pressed itself lightly against his forehead. 

Pippin opened his eyes. 

"Is that something like what you want?" Merry asked softly. "I'll do it any time." 

Pippin's mouth opened and closed once or twice, and something of the Took resilience rose in him. He sensed some sort of a challenge, the choice being placed in his hands, and if a Took, even a rather young and occasionally foolish one, turned down a challenge, he might as well call himself a Chubb or a Bracegirdle instead. He swallowed hard. 

"No," he said, "no. Not enough." Then, shortly afterwards, "Oh," very quietly, because Merry had bowed his head and hidden one of those kisses beneath Pippin's left ear, and, "Oh," again as his cousin shifted his hips and then that familiar warm feeling shivered through him, and he had to hold on to something and press himself against it very hard, and Merry seemed to be the closest and warmest thing to hand. So he wrapped his arms around Merry's waist, and braced his foot against the chair and wiggled and pushed like before, which made Merry lift his head and catch his breath, saying, "Pip!" in a surprised, pleased way. 

Then Pippin felt Merry's hardness warm and excited against his own from their tussle, and his cheeks flamed as he felt his own body respond to the new and dizzying sensations tenfold. Merry's eyes widened and his mouth fell slightly open as the two hobbits stared at each other, their chests heaving. One would breathe in just as the other would breathe out, so that they were sharing each other's air, which sent little hot, feathery feelings scurrying up and down Pippin's spine, particularly with Merry's mouth only a kiss's breadth away from his. He shuddered and pushed hard, and Merry's eyes darkened to the color of the Brandywine as it reflected leaves and autumn sky. 

"Pip," he muttered, "Pip - oh -" and Pippin whispered, "Merry," then his throat tightened and he couldn't seem to talk any more somehow, only make little urgent, whimpering sounds as Merry's hips rocked forward against his, grinding them together through the layers of cloth, heavy and hot and wonderful and as close as they'd ever been. Oh, and he _wanted_ Merry close! 

Their mouths met quite by accident in the middle of it all, when Merry moved to kiss Pippin's ear again, and Pippin turned his head to nuzzle Merry's cheek, and their noses collided halfway, followed shortly by their lips, and they pressed them together. To Pippin's delight, Merry tasted almost exactly the way he smelled, sweet and beery, but hotter, particularly where the tip of his tongue tickled wetly over Pippin's, and so good with Merry's body moving in increasingly jerky thrusts with his that he almost sobbed aloud. It was a strange, panicky feeling, as if he knew he had to get somewhere or find something, but he couldn't quite reach it, although their rocking seemed to be pointing him in the right direction, and Merry's eyes and the quick, rough little sounds coming from his parted lips were giving their own encouragement. And Merry sounded a lot like Pippin felt, straining and reaching and _please_, and then he was suddenly letting all his breath out in a rush and an, "Oh, _Pippin_!" and squeezing the wind out of him, and Pippin felt warmth dampening the front of his cousin's breeches. Finding it difficult to breathe any more, and next to impossible to think, he wrapped his arms around Merry's neck, crushed his mouth against his own in a wet, open-mouthed kiss, and gave a few last hard, desperate pushes. And sobbed again. And twined his fingers into Merry's springy curls, and released. 

For a long while, they lay perfectly, beautifully still, simply breathing in and out, in and out, listening to the frantic thumping of their hearts returning to normal. At last Merry gave a sort of tired, contented sigh, and his lips moved slowly against Pippin's temple. 

"What about that, Pip? Is that enough, do you think?" 

Pippin found that he could, after all, speak, although the scent of Merry's sweat still made him dizzy and he'd suddenly never felt such a lovely bone-weariness in his life. "Yes," he whispered. "Yes, Merry... I think that's what I wanted." 

Merry kissed the corner of his mouth and pinched him gently. "Silly Took," he murmured, but it was with the utmost fondness. "I do love you." 

"Love you," echoed Pippin. It came to him with some astonishment that this evening had really turned out much better than he had ever planned, and that gave him some hope that Merry would not only be still talking to him in the morning, but might possibly be adventurous enough to try something like this again with him very soon. After all, Merry was as much Took as he was when it came down to it. The thought made him wriggle happily, and as he did so, he became aware of the cooling, slippery stickiness trapped in the cloth between them. 

"Merry?" 

"Hm?" Merry sounded half asleep again, pillowed on his shoulder. 

"I think that I need a bath." 

FIN. 


End file.

Lord of the Rings, Friendship, Romance