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Mountains and White Towers (LOTR fanfic)
(1.24.07 – Reposted from ff.net)
AN: One Shot. Pippin/Diamond (canon pairing from appendices). Focuses on Pippin’s struggles to return to normal life after the events of ROTK.
Disclaimer: None of this is mine.
…Mountains and White Towers…
./.
Peregrin Took dreams of mountains and white towers. In the green grasses of the Shire he paces and pauses and looks west and aches inside for something he does not understand. He craves the rocky paths that he once trod and pretends happiness in what he has always known and always loved, but he is as changed as that other hobbit that once broke tradition and traveled far.
He has been touched by blood and death, by compassion and by fear and he is alive by the grace and speed of others and remains indebted to the dead, and yet he is equally alive by his own right and is a living testament to his strength and will. He cannot go back to the quiet paths because he has been born anew and born more complete. He is as he has always been and never been before, a new breed, a new mixture of hatred and knowledge and suffering—melancholy and mischief, disbelief and disillusionment.
Pippin dreams of mountains and white towers because that is where he found the essence of himself and took stock of himself and paid a debt owed as equally to himself as to his fallen friend, because honor has become more than an ideal and sacrifice more than a tale on a rainy day. He has been tempered in rain and lightning and lit the beacons in the dark of night and man and life.
The trees are smaller and the night is lighter and the colors have become muted and the horizon has become too close for comfort and he wants to stretch his legs and run for the setting sun, run for the night sky and the fiery stars and the world that he now knows exists beyond safety and boundaries and home.
He has lost his home. Not to fire and death and monsters and the eye that haunts his dreams, but he has lost it nonetheless because part of him was lost to darkness, part of him was lost and it was his innocence and his naiveté and his belief in a world that was always good and pure.
The world stretches past the horizon and he is that horizon and the lingering sun and the rising stars and he is all that he has seen and all that he has dreamt and all that he never knew existed but has come to believe and is driven to understand, though he has yet to understand that need, define that ache.
When long nights stretch and day hovers on an edge of insanity and desperation he walks the length of his home and the garden path and the dewy hills and plans a trip to visit old friends, revisit a place of old glories and new realizations and travel back to a time of hope in a world of darkness.
Merry wonders at his hesitation, at the maps he has begun to collect and the journals he reads, but for Merry there was no great realization. Merry was wiser and stronger and quicker to believe before he followed two friends and a man on a journey that for Pippin has no end. Merry was desperate and angry and eager and afraid and it took its toll as it always took a toll, as it will always take a toll but he is as he almost always was and the world remains as the world was built and lies sturdy. For him the Shire is a foundation on which dreams are built and which a future can be constructed, but Pippin stirs and wanders and remains restless.
When Aragorn and Legolas and Gimli visit from their far off lands as they had sworn to do, Sam and Merry are eager to leave the Shire and visit the Green Dragon Inn and speak long into the night of adventures new and old over a pint and a pipe in the company of old friends, but Pippin is reluctant to tear open a wound still raw and is quiet, for a change, and Aragorn looks into his hobbit friend’s eyes and inhales sharply at the base need and the deep change. Hours later he will pull the elf and dwarf aside and confide and confer and they will take both hobbits with them when they leave, because Pippin suffers without the world and Merry would suffer without his friend. They travel the long road back to Gondor, for Aragorn has matters of state to attend to though Faramir leads the people in his absence with Eowyn by his side, and Merry and Pippin seldom complain for they are more weathered and more changed than any had realized, and the paths may be long and strange but they hold an echo of comfort in their uncommon feel.
They travel with not much trouble, though there are several skirmishes where the hobbits prove they have if nothing else learned a little about the use of daggers, and they stop in Rohan to greet old friends. When they reach Gondor the hustle and bustle is different enough that both hobbits are taken aback, and they stay for several weeks as guest of the King and enjoy comforts new and yet familiar, but already Pippin itches for the open road and the three warriors watch and confide and confer and Aragorn smiles sadly because he sees something of himself in the precocious foolhardy nature of his friend.
They leave Gondor to travel back, and they stop in Fanghorn Forest because both hobbits wish it but Treebeard does not answer and Pippin remembers old terrors and dies a little inside. That night he sees a burning tree in his mind and wakes to a red sky and does not eat until the horizon is blue and pure. Aragorn watches and waits and walks and says nothing but knows this cannot continue much longer or it will be too late and Pippin will be consumed by restless fury.
Pippin dreams of mountains and white towers and he is learning, now, that no matter how far he travels he will never reach home again. He is coming to terms with the fact that his world is in ruins and though he has saved the Shire for his friends it is not as it once was because he is not as he once was. He lays silent and awake as his friends sleep and stand guard and Aragorn comes and sits next to him and asks him, softly, what he plans to do. Pippin is blind and deaf and aches and can see nothing but the wind, hear nothing but a question he does not know how to answer.
Pippin dreams of mountains and white towers and walks a lonely road to a home that is an empty shell of a former life, for there is nothing left for him in the world—nothing that he understands, or believes, or would die for. His cause has died in the flames of Mordor and he is glad of it but he is lost without it, lost without a road to travel, a destination, a goal to accomplish. He wanders aimlessly in his mind and almost believes that this emptiness, this almost-living death is better. He fought for peace but he has become consumed in a war of his own making, and each day he bleeds and dies in a silent battle.
The treetops burn as the sun rises in the eastern sky, and Pippin watches and burns and takes a swim in the stream that comes from the mountains and shivers in the cold of the water, the cold of his heart. It is there that he sees her, on the bank of the stream, hair fiery-golden in the reddish sky, and his heart skips and then beats, and he can feel its steady thrum as he has not felt it in months—years. Her eyes are blue—blue like the sky over Rivendell, blue like the sky over the icy mountains, and he stares, breathless, disbelieving.
Her hair is bound back by a simple ribbon, and it is that detail that lets him know that he is not dreaming, because he wants to see her hair loose across her shoulders and back, tangled by the wind and he is moving before he realizes, moving towards her as if in a trance, and her hair is a color he has never seen before and the trees are a brilliant green and brown behind her and the water is rushing past so loudly he thinks he must have been deaf to not hear it before and he feels—feels as he has not felt in forever, feels as he thought he might never feel again.
Pippin dreams of mountains and white towers as she sleeps in his arms, and swears, softly, that he will take her there one day, show her the wide world and all its wonders and then return to the home they will build, the children they will have, the future that remains here. He thought, once, that his world was destroyed, that he was destroyed but he dreams of an eye burning his soul and a white tree burning in the distance and her arms tighten around him and he stirs and awakens and leaves those dreams for another time, for he has been reborn in her blue-eyed gaze, reborn by her faint smile, into another life.
Finis
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Absolutely stellar character sketch! <3
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Out of the Fellowship, Pippin is most definitely my favourite.
There's a reason we have a cat named after him. With a personality to match... *rolls eyes*