Passing the Time

Diamond was a regular letter writer; a fact greatly appreciated by Pippin and Merry, who both suffered whenever word failed to come from Long Cleeve.

“I can’t bear it,” Pippin groaned from deep within a mound of bedcovers one morning, three days after the Messenger had brought Diamond’s last letter. He’d already missed breakfast, and the anxious and pale face revealed to Merry when Pippin pulled the sheets down over his head suggested that Pippin had neither the will nor appetite to attempt seconds either.

“I shall sleep til the Messenger comes,” he muttered, shifting onto his side and turning forlorn, green eyes at Merry. “If he doesn’t come, I’ll sleep til tomorrow.”

Merry sighed and scrunched his cousin’s curls sympathetically before he left the room. Dramatics aside, Pippin was quite hopelessly in love with the lass, condemned to the sweet agony of waiting for letters each day, and Merry humoured him when he couldn’t distract him, knowing full well that if he were in the unhappy situation of loving Estella from afar, he would be quite sick from it too. Besides, forcing Pippin out of bed would mean inflicting an impatient, fidgety Took lad on himself for the whole morning, one that would jump out of his chair and run to the door at the slightest sound from outside, and it was better, surely, to avoid that.

Two hours later, Pippin awoke to find Merry sitting beside him with a plate of bread and cheese in one hand and a letter in the other. Grabbing the letter with hope, curiosity and fear in his eyes he saw, as Merry had, that it was addressed to him in Diamond’s delicate script, and he swallowed, and opened it carefully.

A moment later his face lit up and he beamed at Merry and laughed, and read on, reaching absently for a chunk of bread as he did so, and Merry grinned and kissed his cousin on the brow, sighing with relief that his cousin need not die of heartbreak, at least not today.