This had all, Merry
reflected in exasperation as he wrestled Pippin’s arm behind his back and
stuffed said arm into the sleeve of a dress shirt, been much easier when Pippin
was ten years old.
He hadn’t really considered the inherent difficulties of the situation when he
had grabbed clothing and tackled Pippin to the bed in response to Pippin’s
assertion that he was not going to dress up for their cousin’s
engagement party; he’d dealt with such assertions before and always emerged
victorious. That, however, had been when he was twice Pippin’s size; now that
they were equals in size and at least equals in strength, the situation was a
bit more complicated, and might well come down to an issue of who became weak
from laughter the fastest.
Merry shoved one last cuff button into a buttonhole with an exclamation of
triumph and flipped Pippin onto his back, straddling his waist and pinning his
shoulders to the bed. “Ha! That’s half of it on.”
“No it’s not, it’s still unbuttoned,” Pippin argued, catching Merry’s hands and
making a far too successful effort to keep them away from the open front of his
shirt.
“Pippin Took, be still and change your blasted clothes or I’ll tie you
to the bed and do it myself!”
“Ooh, promise?”
“Right, that’ll be enough of - hoy!” Pippin bucked underneath him, tipping
Merry off from him, and nearly had his shirt back off before Merry wrestled him
momentarily still again. Merry grabbed the shirt Pippin had been wearing to begin
with, braced Pippin’s arm to the bed with one knee, and tied the sleeve
securely around Pippin’s wrist. With considerable difficulty, he stuffed the
shirt through the headboard and back around, catching Pippin’s other arm just
as it was about to get him into a headlock and tying the other wrist equally
securely, pulling back to tie the sleeves again around the headboard. Panting
with exertion, he sat back onto Pippin’s thighs.
“Now what?” Pippin asked sweetly.
“Now I’m going to change your trousers, so quit wriggling,” Merry ordered.
Pippin’s legs jolted up underneath him, nearly knocking him forward. Caught
somewhere between grumbling and laughter, Merry swung off from him and crawled
back between his knees. “Hold still, you irksome Took!”
“Or what? You can’t nononoSTOPHOY!”
Merry snickered as Pippin twisted and howled with laughter and protest
underneath the hands that tickled their way up from his waist to his ribs.
“Give up, Pip. Those dress clothes are going on whether you like it or not.”
“No!”
“Yes!”
Lightning-quick, Pippin locked his ankles around the small of Merry’s back and
yanked, knocking him forward with enough force that Merry’s nose was an inch
from Pippin’s before he finally managed to break his fall. There was a moment
of startled stillness, during which Merry made a discovery: regardless of his
tendency to argue about dressing up, Pippin was most assuredly not ten years
old anymore.
“And this is supposed to stop me tickling you how?” he asked, more breathlessly
than he would have liked.
Pippin smiled angelically up at him, legs still clamped tightly around Merry’s
waist. “Well, it did, didn’t it?”
In the position he was in, trying to wriggle his way free seemed to Merry to be
a distinctly bad idea. He was already arguing with the beginnings of an
erection that was, he informed himself, a purely natural, instinctive response
to the physical stimulation involved in trying to outwrestle Pippin and had
nothing at all to do with Pippin himself. “Listen,” he said sternly, lifting himself
off from Pippin with his weight on his arms. “I’m going to take off your pants,
and I do not want to know why you’re smiling like that, so kindly keep
still and don’t knee me in the nose or anything.”
Pippin lifted an eyebrow and his gaze traveled pointedly down to Merry’s
still-trapped waist. “And how are you going to get them off?”
In answer, Merry grabbed hold of one of Pippin’s knees and tickled, making
Pippin yelp and jerk his leg away. In a flash, Merry swung around so that his
hips were up by Pippin’s head, out of reach of his legs; pinning Pippin’s hips
to the bed with one forearm, he began unbuttoning Pippin’s pants, hoping that
in the position they were in Pippin wouldn’t notice that the exertion involved
in wrestling had left Merry’s hands shaking.
Pippin squirmed underneath him, arguing and protesting and laughing and
generally making Merry’s life difficult. When Merry began sliding his pants
down his thighs, Pippin snapped his knees wide open, effectively stalling the
pants’ downward progress, and Merry was reduced to tickling him again in order
to pull them the rest of the way off. Moving down to sit on Pippin’s shins, he
grabbed the velvet dress pants and began stuffing Pippin into them, resolutely
ignoring the fact that all this activity had had its effect on Pippin too.
“Pippin,” he said patiently when he had the pants nearly all the way on and
found that Pippin had dug his hips resolutely into the mattress.
“What?” Pippin asked innocently, eyes dancing with laughter.
“Lift your hips so I can put your pants on.”
“And if I don’t want to?”
“Then what, you’re going to lay here all night with your clothes half off, your
hands tied to the headboard, and me sitting on your legs? That door isn’t
locked, you know, if one of your sisters -”
Pippin’s hips shot off from the bed.
“Good lad.” Merry pulled Pippin’s pants up around his hips and began buttoning
them; but somehow during the process Pippin’s hips shifted in just the wrong
direction at just the wrong time and Merry’s hand ended up half on the pants
and half on what was promising to become a rather sizable erection. Pippin gave
a swift, near-silent gasp and his hips jolted reflexively under Merry’s hand.
“Hold still,” Merry said with as close to exasperation as he could manage,
deliberately not noticing that Pippin’s movement had been toward his
hand and not away from it.
“There,” he said, sitting back. “Pants are on. That didn’t kill you, did it?”
Pippin wriggled underneath him, making Merry wish that he wasn’t sitting quite
so high on Pippin’s legs. “They itch,” he complained.
“They don’t. It’s all in your head.”
“It’s not, it’s all in my legs. And this shirt itches too.”
“You weren’t complaining about it before,” Merry informed him, crawling forward
to straddle Pippin’s waist and pulling the front of his shirt closed.
“Yes I did, you just didn’t listen. And it’s hours yet before I can take them
off again.”
Merry bit the inside of his lip very hard and slipped the bottom button of
Pippin’s shirt into its buttonhole.
“And they look ridiculous.”
“Nonsense, Pip. You look fine in them.”
Pippin pursed his lips and examined Merry critically. “So do you. Or at least
you would, if your shirt wasn’t all pulled out of your pants and your braces
hanging half off, and your hair all -”
“All right, all right. It’s your fault I’m a mess, you know.”
“And anyway, I don’t look fine, I look like someone training to be a
great-uncle.”
Merry glanced up, then wished he hadn’t. Pippin’s face was still flushed with
exertion, laughter lurking in his eyes and at the corners of his mouth, hair
falling in a tangle into his eyes, and that would have been bad enough had he
not been fastened securely to the headboard with his shirt hanging open. Merry
swallowed hard and began buttoning buttons with great determination.
“You’re buttoning it wrong, you know.”
“No, I’m - oh, bugger.” He’d gotten almost to the top, too, and now had to go
back and undo all those small, numerous mother-of-pearl buttons and do
them over. “Hold still this time!”
“I was holding still last time.”
“No you weren’t.” Those buttons seemed far more slippery on the way down than
they’d seemed on the way up, or possibly his fingers were getting tired.
Whatever the cause, the result was that the unbuttoning was proceeding rather
more slowly than Merry would really have liked. “If I untie you, will you
button this yourself like a reasonable person?”
Pippin grinned. “No. I want you to do it.”
“Oh, for the love of...” Merry continued unbuttoning, grumbling as he went.
Every time his fingers brushed skin, which they did rather more often than he
was comfortable with, Pippin jolted slightly underneath him. The button-fixing
endeavor was not helped by the fact that Pippin’s breathing was oddly rapid and
shallow.
“There,” he muttered as he reached the end of the buttons, and caught himself
just before he smoothed the shirt away from Pippin’s chest, which was exactly
the opposite of what he ought to be doing. It wasn’t as if he had time to be
fumbling about, either; the light was fading fast, paling Pippin’s
summer-tanned skin in the violet wash of dusk. He envisioned trying to manage
these irksomely small buttons by touch in the dark, and forced his hands to
move faster.
“Merry...” Pippin said softly.
Merry glanced up, but Pippin’s face was too shadowed now for Merry to see his
expression. “What, Pip?”
There was a minute of silence; then, “Nothing. I just...”
With a sigh that was half satisfaction and half relief, Merry slid the last
button into its buttonhole and moved back down to tuck Pippin’s shirt into his
pants. “You just what?”
Pippin lifted his hips obediently when Merry slipped his hands under them,
catching up Pippin’s shirt-tail in one hand and sliding it down below the
waistband of his trousers across a soft swell of firm muscle and smooth, warm
skin.
“Pip? You just what?”
“I just... I’m not in the mood for parties tonight, that’s all.”
“Tough on you, my lad, because after all this effort I put in to get you
presentable-looking there’s no way you’re staying up here in your room.”
“I wasn’t thinking of that really,” Pippin answered as Merry tucked his shirt
in at the side. Merry’s thumb grazed lightly over Pippin’s hipbone, making
Merry increasingly glad that the shadows in the room were deepening. “I was
thinking we might get some food and a couple of bottles of wine and go down by
the river. It’s warm enough still.”
Merry was silent, thinking, as he tucked in the other side. “If we don’t at
least put in an appearance, my mum will have both our heads. You know what a
stickler Ruby is for formal events and propriety and everything going just
right.”
“Since when were you afraid of Ruby? Or your mum, come to that?” Pippin asked,
and his hips moved a little as Merry’s hands slid toward the front underneath
his waistband. Merry paused, at the point now when he could no longer avoid
thinking about how awkward it was going to be tucking in the rest of Pippin’s
shirt. There was still enough light for him to see clearly as Pippin’s fingers
wrapped around the shirt tied to his wrists, tightening until his knuckles were
white, and the shallow rise and fall of his chest slowed and stopped. He looked
up at Merry, waiting, for an answer or for... what? Room, yes, I need room
to maneuver without touching anything I shouldn’t, Merry thought suddenly
with a rush of relief; still watching Pippin - how long can the lad
hold his breath, anyway? - he slipped his hand out of Pippin’s trousers and
began, slowly and carefully, to unbutton them again.
“I’m not afraid of them,” he said quietly. “But it won’t hurt us to go for a
while. You can live with these clothes for that long.” He managed to tuck in
the front of Pippin’s shirt without brushing his hand across anything awkward
and buttoned Pippin’s trousers again.
“There, you’re presentable. Or will be as soon as you’ve combed your hair and
put on your coat, anyway.”
Pippin grinned. “Are you going to let me up, then, or is there anything else
you’d like to do while I’m tied to the bed?”
Heat flooded into Merry’s face. “Hold still, then, and I’ll let you up. But
those clothes are staying on, do you hear?”
“I’ll leave them on until you say to take them off,” Pippin said
good-naturedly, making Merry blink and shift uncomfortably.
Merry leaned forward and untied the shirtsleeves, and Pippin brought his hands
down with a wince and a grumble to rub at his wrists. “My shoulders are sore
now,” he complained.
“You’re the one who was thrashing about,” Merry informed him.
“Merry...”
“What?”
“I can’t put my coat on with you sitting on me.”
“Oh. Um, yes.” Merry braced himself to ease off from Pippin and had just begun
to move when the doorknob turned, sending him off from Pippin so fast that he
skidded over the edge of the bed and head-first onto the floor as Pippin folded
up into a small ball and shrieked with laughter.
“What are the two of you doing up here?” Pervinca asked in exasperation,
poking her head around the door. “Get yourselves downstairs, the party’s
already started and Ruby keeps looking pointedly at your chairs and tapping her
fingernails on her glass.”
“Coming, Vinca,” Pippin managed as Merry stood, rubbing his head. Pervinca’s
startled gaze took in the generally disheveled condition of Merry’s clothes,
making him very glad that his shirt had gotten pulled out.
“Well, whatever you have been doing, stop it and come down,” she
ordered, and closed the door with a bang.
Still laughing, Pippin crawled off the bed and reached for his coat.
“What in the world is so funny?” Merry asked sheepishly as he put his clothes
back together and reached for a comb.
“Nothing, nothing. Come on.” Pippin waited impatiently until Merry was through
with the comb and then plucked it out of his hands to yank it through his own
hair. Still snickering, he followed Merry out into the hall, where Pervinca was
impatiently tapping her foot.
“Come on, then,” she ordered, turning to head back downstairs.
“Merry...” Pippin said as they followed, more than loudly enough for Pervinca
to hear.
