‘Merry!’

Merry dragged himself from sleep, prying his eyes open with a groan. They’d been celebrating Beregond’s reprieve from death into promotion a little too... vigorously last night, or was it this morning, or was it perhaps yesterday?

With the state of his head, he couldn’t even be sure if he’d gone to bed with boots on... wait a second. Hobbits don’t wear boots.

He lifted the covers to peer into the depths. Boots. Where did the boots come from?

 ‘Merry!’ Another hiss.

 ‘What is it, Pip, and you had better have a good reason for wakening me.’

There was a clomping noise, which ought to have wakened him before, had he heard it (and from the rhythmic thumping he remembered from the slowly-dissolving dream, he had heard it and not wakened). Pip’s hissed repetition of his name, however... Merry was sure that if he’d died, that particular sound would have wakened him.

 ‘Merry, I wakened and there were these... these... things on my feet!’ Pippin hissed, though why he was being quiet Merry could not begin to fathom. On the other hand, as he groaned himself upright, he appreciated the fact that there were no loud noises in the vicinity. The tankards used by the Men of Gondor were so much... larger than the ones back home.

Merry looked over the side of the tall bed, down a precipitous cliff of bedclothes, to the floor below. Not far from him, Pippin’s bloodshot eyes stared into his. Letting his gaze fall down his young cousin’s rumpled uniform, Merry’s eyes came to rest on a pair of shining boots where proper furry hobbit feet ought to be.

 ‘Pippin, take those boots off this moment and return them to their proper owner! What are you about, pinching some officer’s boots and...’

 ‘I don’t know whose they are,’ Pippin said miserably, ‘and further, I cannot get them off!'

Merry closed his eyes and let his head sink back onto the pillow. ‘Go back to bed,’ he said. ‘I’ll deal with it in the morning.’ There was some trick to removing boots, which he as a Bucklander had more hope of knowing than a poor benighted Took. However, it did not seem to reside in the fuzzy reaches of his brain... the part he could reach, anyhow.

 ‘Back to bed?’ Pippin quavered. ‘With boots on?’

 ‘Why not?’ Merry muttered. ‘I do it all the time.’ He did not see the odd look Pippin gave him, but the clomping sound gradually retreated and he heard Pippin jump up into his own bed, his boots banging painfully against the wood frame.

Blessed silence.

 ‘Merry!’

Merry turned over and put an arm over his eyes. Maybe if he ignored it, ‘twould go away.

 ‘Merry!’

He gave in to the inevitable. ‘What is it, Pippin?’

 A stifled sob from the tween. ‘I cannot go to sleep, Merry. My head feels awful and I cannot get these boots off and... what if I were to die and you took my body back to the Shire and my parents saw me like this?’

Merry didn’t bother to tell Pip that there was no way he’d drag his young cousin’s body all those leagues back to the Shire, that they’d undoubtedly plant him in the soil of Gondor amongst the other, larger guardsmen, or lay him atop a bier in the Houses of the Dead—he shuddered at the thought. No, they’d plant Pippin properly, like a hobbit ought to be. Creatures of the earth, they were, living in the ground and retreating homewards into the earth a last time when life was done.

A sudden persistent worry popped up in his head, and try as he might, he could not dispel it. Pippin had gone silent. Merry found himself listening for his cousin’s breathing. He couldn’t hear it.

With rather more than a modicum of panic in his voice, he said, ‘Pippin!’ ...and grabbed at his own head, in response to a word rather louder than his poor tortured ears were ready to accept.

 ‘Merry?’ Pippin replied sleepily. Merry heard a stirring of bedcovers. His cousin was sitting himself up. ‘Did you need something?’

Feeling foolish, Merry said, ‘Are you well, Pip? I mean... well, what I mean to say, is...’

 ‘Yes?’ Pippin said politely, though he’d had much more strong Gondor beer in larger tankards than a tween ought to drink over the course of all his tween years, and really he wasn’t feeling all that well. Still, it is customary to answer your elders politely, and Pippin had taken to heart his new title. If he was Ernil i Pheriannath then it behoved him to act in a princely manner. Besides, it irritated Merry no end when he put on airs.

 ‘You’re not dying, are you Pip?’ Merry blurted, then winced. He hadn’t meant to put it so bluntly.

 ‘Dying, Mer? I’m dying?’ Pippin sobbed. It made all too much sense in his muddled condition. He felt simply awful, his head pounded and he felt like heaving and his body was aching abominably and he’d never before felt like this in his life. That had to be the explanation. He was dying.

 ‘No, Pip, of course...’ thunk ‘...not,’ groan ‘augh...’ Merry had fallen out of the bed in his haste to reassure his cousin. Dazed, he put a hand to his bloodied nose. ‘But I think I am!’

 Pippin rolled out of his own bed, landing like a cat on his booted feet with a loud thump that made Merry groan again.

 ‘You’re dying?’ he sobbed. ‘O Merry, I didn’t know! Why didn’t anyone tell me? O cousin!’ He thunked across the wooden floor to throw his arms about Merry’s shoulders, dissolving in drunken grief.

 ‘I’m not dying!’ Merry snapped. ‘Here!’ he said, boosting Pippin into his bed. ‘Get up there and go to sleep. You’re in a state, you are, and you’ll be worthless until you sleep it off.’

 ‘But I’m wearing boots!’ Pippin said. ‘What if I die with these boots on?’

 ‘No hobbit in the history of the Shire has ever died with boots on,’ Merry said. It wasn’t strictly true, but Pippin didn’t need to know that.

 ‘You mean...?’ Pippin sniffed.

Merry nodded, though it hurt his head. ‘Exactly,’ he told his young cousin firmly. ‘It’s a rule in Buckland. So long as you’re wearing boots, there’s no way you’ll die.’

Pippin considered this. ‘There’s something magical about them?’ he said. ‘But all those soldiers on the battlefield...?’

 ‘That’s Men! I’m talking about Hobbits!’ Merry snapped. ‘Now get under the covers and go to sleep!’

 ‘If you say so, Merry,’ Pippin said.

Merry nodded firmly. ‘I do say so,’ he said, and climbed into the bed himself, putting his arms about his young cousin and snuggling close in the manner of hobbits.

 ‘But Merry,’ Pippin protested.

 ‘What is it now, Pippin?’ Merry said, prepared to assure his young cousin that neither of them was about to be dying this night. Well, at least Pippin wasn’t. Merry wasn’t so sure about himself. He suspected he might have broken his nose, though his handkerchief seemed to be staunching the blood flow (good thing, or the laundress might have killed him in the morning, seeing what could happen to the pillows and linens), and he was experiencing the worst hangover of his young life, worse, even, than the one after his cousin Berilac’s wedding, when...

 Pippin broke into his thoughts. ‘What about my boots?’

 ‘What about them, Pip?’ Merry said, and surprised himself by yawning.

 ‘Won’t they keep you awake?’ Pippin said. ‘I mean, scrape against your feet, or something?’ Evidently he hadn’t noticed the boots on Merry’s feet.

 ‘Don’t worry about me, Pip,’ Merry reassured, giving Pippin a pat on the back and then rolling over so that they were back-to-back, just as at Parth Galen when they faced the oncoming Orcs... ‘The way I feel at the moment, I think I could sleep through anything.’

 ‘Very well,’ Pippin said. ‘G’night.’ He was snoring within a breath or two.

Merry did not even manage to echo his younger cousin’s salutation before his snores blended with Pippin’s, and peace reigned once more.