Burning down, the candle gutters, and in the flickering shadows his face looks almost alive again. Merry starts at the top of his head again and works his way down, telling old injuries, and he has done this a dozen times now and will do it countless more in this long vigil that he is not yet prepared to call a deathwatch no matter how many times his mind whispers the word, in the encapsulated eternity that stretches between him and the dawn. Pippin has a tiny scar just below his hairline from where he fell out of a tree when he was six years old and hit his head on a rock, and Merry, not understanding that even small head wounds can bleed profusely, had been convinced that his small cousin was dying; there is an ugly gash now that has stretched upward to envelop that small souvenir of boyhood. (Which inn had they been to? He only remembers that the ale was very good) When he was thirteen Pippin broke his arm, his left one, just below the elbow, when he fell off the roof of a shed and caught the edge of a rain barrel with his forearm. Merry, frightened by his pallor and cold sweat and not entirely convinced by the healer's assurance that no one had ever died of a broken arm, remembering blood all over a small boy's face, laid down the law and kept Pippin's feet on the ground for months afterward. That arm is broken now in more places than just the one. (It was a long walk home, whichever inn it was; a fine night and Pippin blithely, breezily tipsy with his arm slung around Merry's neck, and Merry filled with a soaring happiness that he had not yet learned to recognize for what it was) A sharply broken slat on a swinging gate once caught Pippin just right and scored him across the side. It didn't bleed much, but it left a razor-thin scar about two inches long that would be visible if Pippin's entire side were not one black, ugly bruise. (A discussion of the good and bad points of various girls had somehow degenerated into a cheerful argument over whether Pippin was a good kisser or not; and before Merry had been quite clear on what was going on, Pippin had grabbed him by the shoulders, swung him around, and kissed him full on the mouth right there in the middle of the road) Once, only once, they didn't quite outrun Farmer Maggot's dogs. One of them bit Pippin in the leg, not badly but hard enough to draw blood, there just above where his leg is broken now. Merry caught the dog in the head with a well-aimed apple, making it yelp and let go long enough for Pippin to clear the gate. (Somehow in mid-kiss it had become something else, something more than just proving a point. Pippin had made a small, broken sound into Merry's mouth and Merry had, carefully and gently, slid one hand around to the small of Pippin's back and pulled him a little closer.) When he was twenty-four and more than a little drunk, Pippin somehow managed to fall up the stairs at Brandy Hall, cracking his knee so badly on a step that he nearly broke his kneecap, though he was too drunk to realize it until the next morning. That knee is wrapped in stiff braces now, because when he was brought in to the Houses of Healing his kneecap was sitting at an angle that Merry couldn't look too closely at. (When Pippin had pulled back, when Merry felt he could trust his voice again, all he'd found to say was All right, I suppose you are a good kisser. Pippin's head had tilted just a little forward, then. Merry wonders to this day if Pippin would have leaned in to kiss him again if voices on the road behind them hadn't made them jump apart, if the two of them hadn't been swept into a crowd of friends and cousins and dragged along to three more taverns before the night was over.) On the back of Pippin's calf, where a large swath of skin has been scraped away, is a scar about three inches long. During the hay harvest the year he was sixteen, Pippin, not paying attention, stepped back into the path of someone else's scythe. (They haven't spoken of it, ever. That one brief moment is all that Merry has now to hold on to. One kiss, and this long vigil that might or might not end in dawn.) Merry rests his head on his folded hands and wonders, as he wonders every time he finishes this obsessive litany, how he could have let Pippin get hurt so very often.   Back to the fanfics page Back to the home page