Chapter 19: Occlusion

“Hullo, Aragorn,” the hobbit said, not bothering to turn around.

The King stopped walking, the bottom edges of his cloak brushing against the tips of the grass in this field behind the stables.

“I had forgotten about hobbit hearing, it seems,” he said kindly.

A snort in answer. “Either that or you’ve forgotten your skills as a Ranger -- how to sneak up on people and all that.”

“Duly noted,” Aragorn said and stepped to the fence himself to rest his own arms on the top of it.

“Would you like a better view?” he asked, looking down at the top of his friend’s curly head.

“Yes, please,” came the answer, and Aragorn lifted him under the arms to prop his feet on a higher fence slat so that, even though he was still holding to and peering through the fence, it was at a higher level with, indeed, a more open and better view.

The two watched in companionable silence, for a few moments, the few horses belonging to a contingent of soldiers newly returned from a foray toward the sea towns where the Corsairs bothered. Their saddles taken off their backs and bridles lifted from their heads, the animals roamed the good, fresh grass.

“In these meadows,” the hobbit finally commented, “they’ll cool off as they should.”

“Aye,” Aragorn smiled softly. “Your words are good.” He made a small gesture toward the other side of the meadow where, if one was looking for it, could be seen a glint of mail. And their Men who are weary may lie on the ground and sleep. For on this night, they’ll need no watch to keep.”

The comfortable quiet lingered a moment longer. Then the hobbit turned his head up toward Aragorn with a grin. “You had ought to have your cobbler do a better job at patching the sole of that right boot, you know,” he said conversationally. “That’s how I knew it was you.”

“Humph,” Aragorn responded, blowing the air out past his beard and pretending to glower down at the hobbit. “So, I should be taking advice on footwear from a hobbit then, shall I?” he asked.

“Oh, of course,” came the confident answer. “We really are a very practical sort, you know.” He carefully turned himself around so that his hands clutched the fence behind him, and moved as if to jump off toward the ground, but then thought better of it and clutched his hands tightly again.

“I’m sure you are,” Aragorn said, lifting him beneath the arms again, this time to set him back gently on the ground so that they could walk together back toward the Citadel.

“Well, we are!” the hobbit huffed out. “Leastwise, we Brandybucks.” He shook his head. “Though there are some among hobbits...” He looked up to Aragorn, his dark blond curls catching the light from the setting sun and his eyes crinkling at the edges. “Where is Pip, anyway?”

Aragorn threw his head back and laughed. He reached down to take Merry’s hand as he brought his chin forward again, that same sun glinting off his white teeth. “I am sure he is probably off somewhere undermining the decorum among my off-duty guards once again,” he said, still smiling.

Merry smiled, too, at the memory image that came to him of a Tower Guard, obviously nursing a morning headache and surly temperament due to an excursion the night before, while Pippin chattered happily on in front of him, when he wasn’t stuffing his face with everything available on the first breakfast table.

His smile faltered, though, and he stared down at the grass upon which he and the King walked.

“Merry,” Aragorn said softly, stopping along the grassy path as the shadows lengthened and reaching to tilt up the hobbit’s chin. “Is something wrong between you and Pippin?”

Merry shook his head quickly within the King’s grasp but did not look up. “No,” he said, then repeated louder, bringing his face up to look into Aragorn’s as quiet tears came, “No, not now, anyway.

“It’s just,” he closed his eyes tight for a moment, then opened them but refused to meet Aragorn’s as he muttered, “I haven’t been very nice to him about Diamond, is all, and now we’ve made up, I suppose, for I know now that she loves him and he her and -- and Pip forgives me,” he finished, wiping the back of his hands across his eyes and trying to smile at Aragorn. “It’s silly, I suppose.”

Aragorn bent down on one knee in the grass. Even so, he remained taller than the hobbit and still had to tilt his head down as he spoke. “No, Merry, it’s not silly at all,” he said. He was silent a moment, letting his friend sniffle quietly beside him in the twilight as Aragorn held his hand before saying quietly, as he looked up at the evening’s first visible stars, “Pippin is a very forgiving hobbit.”

Merry nodded in agreement, still distracted by his own tears.

“In fact,” Aragorn went on in a voice that neared to a whisper, “I have known only one other who was more so.”

Merry started, shocked for the moment out of his tears, and stared at Aragorn. “You -- you mean?” he whispered hoarsely.

Aragorn lowered his gaze from the sky to look into the hobbit’s eyes. “Yes, Merry,” he said solemnly. “If I had failed further at Weathertop, or if he had not reached Rivendell in time, or if -- for some other reason -- Frodo had not been able to fulfill the Quest -- I think--”

Merry’s eyes had grown wider and more round as the speech continued, and now he choked “Oh!” and flung himself upon Aragorn, wrapping his arms around the King’s neck as he buried his face in his shoulder to whisper, with tense sadness, “Oh, Aragorn, then I would have lost both of my cousins!”

The King’s arms circled around Merry to hold the hobbit close from behind, and he nodded.

“Strider,” Merry said, lifting his head just slightly from the King’s shoulder to look up into his eyes, “I miss him, still.”

Aragorn in turn closed his eyes and patted the hobbit slowly on the back. “I know, Merry,” he said. “I know. As do we all.”


Diamond walked slowly through the streets, holding carefully to Estella’s hand. Everything in this City was just so Big -- too big for them, she thought, as Estella clutched tightly to her while skirting a rock that lay in the path. Diamond heard Estella’s giggle and chatter to the Guard who followed them and wondered at the trembling she felt in her friend’s hand.

Perhaps, she wondered, Estella thought that they might expect other from the Big people of Gondor than the kindness and honor with which they had been unfailingly met so far.

She stopped, curious, to gaze at the shops scattered about them in this street. Diamond sniffed the air experimentally but could not identify the source of the strange odor.

“Please,” she asked, drawing herself up to her full height and talking over Estella’s chatter to their accompanying Guard, “do you know from whence comes that strange smell in the air?”

The young Man nodded and pointed to a shop one door down from where they stood.

“Thank you,” Diamond acknowledged him with a gracious nod of her head and walked forward so that Estella, still clinging to her, had to skip one or two steps to catch up.

“Diamond?” she whispered in the other hobbitess’s ear. “Do you think maybe we should wait for Merry and Pippin before we actually go in the shops on this level? I mean, they are not as close to the court as they have been before,” she hastily added.

Diamond calmly turned her gray eyes upon her friend.

“Well, I mean, I know they’re awfully busy, what with Pippin having Guard duty and Merry talking to Eowyn and going to the Houses of Healing all the time, but...”

She squared her shoulders back in the face of Diamond’s calm gaze and concluded, “Well, fine then. Let’s go in,” she said brightly, grasping Diamond’s hand firmly as she reached up to push the door open with her other.

A bell rigged above the lintel jingled as they entered, and then stood for a moment inside the slightly darker entryway as their eyes adjusted to the light, a variety of smells and glimpses of sparkling things coming to their senses from the shelves above their heads. Their young Guard chose to remain outside.

A tall Woman with long skirts and her hair tied back and covered with a silken kerchief stepped before the hobbitesses just as another Woman’s voice called from farther back in the shop, “Who is it, Argine? Was there someone at the door?”

“Yes, Mother,” the young Woman called back into the depths, “but it is merely two little girls. Off with you, now,” she said to Diamond and Estella, and made motions with her hands as if to shoo them away. “You ought to know better than to be in here. Out you go before you break something!”

Diamond, her eyes now adjusted to the lighting, looked up into the Woman’s fair face just as Estella said indignantly, “Hoy! We are not lasses!”

Argine had just taken a better look herself, and she gasped at the sight of pointed eartips peeking through curls on their heads, and bare feet that nudged out from the hems of their skirts.

“I--,” she gasped, then called sharply, “Mother!” before dropping herself into a curtsy before the halflings. “My -- my ladies,” she whispered. “I welcome you to our shop.”

Her mother had bustled up behind her as she spoke, and now she, too, gasped and spread her skirts out, curtsying before she dropped abruptly to her knees, tears streaming down her face.

“Oh!” Diamond gasped softly and Estella cried out, “Mistress!” so that Argine rose and turned around in alarm.

Her mother waved her off, though, and continued advancing forward on her knees, her arms outstretched toward the hobbitesses, who held on to each other as each glanced uncertainly from her companion back to the shopmistress.

“My ladies,” she said softly, echoing her daughter, as she stretched forth her hands and caught one of each of the hobbitesses’ within them. She brought Estella’s, then Diamond’s hand to her mouth in turn and kissed them softly with reverence.

“I wish to thank you,” she said, smiling through her tears, and when they would have opened their mouths to object, she went on, “I am Rachael, wife to Ogier, who was of the Third Company of the Guard, before the fell battle before the Black Gate.”

She smiled still, shaking her head through the tears as Estella looked upon her with horror and Diamond began to quiver. “No, no my ladies,” she said. “All is well, for though he was injured and could no longer serve his Lord, or his King, as a common soldier, my husband was alive, alive and waiting for me when at last I returned with the wains that had been sent into refuge at Lebennin.

“And it is to you -- your people -- and your husbands that I owe my thanks,” she said, squeezing lightly each small hand she held as she still knelt before them, “and I have never had chance to offer it until now, for at my return the pheriannath had already left the City, and I have never had chance until now to see any from the race which brings to us small but doughty warriors in our hour of need.”

Overwhelming indeed was this City and its inhabitants, particularly in the news they might bear of the hobbits who had left the Shire upon the Quest, Diamond thought, even as the pride in her heart for Pippin grew yet more, and she began to smile back at the Woman.

“Oh, you poor dear!” Estella meanwhile had exclaimed, and worked her hand loose from Diamond’s to pat at the Woman’s face. “I am sure we are all quite happy that your husband came home safely, if -- if not in one piece,” she said, and her voice broke on these words as she remembered her first sight of Freddy after the Lockholes, and she leaned over to wrap her arms about the Woman’s neck in a hug as tears came, too, to her eyes.

Rachael closed her eyes in bliss and then opened them to look shyly at Diamond, who still held the hand that did not hover over Estella’s back.

“It was a brave warrior, indeed,” she said to both of them, “to slay a troll that would have killed a dozen Men, and I am most especially indebted to the Ernil i Pheriannath.”

Diamond had swallowed hard at the mention of the troll, and a quiver ran through her, but now she came a step closer at this repetition of the title she had heard used for Pippin upon their entrance to the City.

“Please, Mistress Rachael,” she said softly, “what does it mean, ‘Ernil i Pheriannath’?”

“Why -- why, did you not know?” Rachael cried out, drawing back a bit from Estella as her daughter hovered nervously over her shoulder. “Sir Peregrin is called the Prince of the Halflings! Is he not?” she asked anxiously, looking from one hobbitess to the other.

Estella made an odd sound that might, if she had not been crying, have been a laugh, but as she muffled her tears again in the Woman’s shoulder, it was most likely a sob.

Diamond smiled and took another step forward to place her hand kindly upon the Woman’s shoulder. “We do not call him such,” she said simply, then smiled wider and cast her eyes modestly down. “Though he is the king of my heart.”


Pippin scrambled to his feet from the stone bench set within an embrasure of the Citadel’s wall as he heard footsteps approach on the stone floor. As he saw who it was, he drew himself up to rigid attention and saluted after the manner of Gondor, with bowed head and hands upon the breast.

“Prince Faramir,” he said respectfully.

“Prince Peregrin,” Faramir smiled and bowed the same in return.

Pippin blushed red to his eartips and shuffled his feet nervously along the stone. “You don’t have to -- That isn’t--” he stuttered out, and Faramir laughed and placed a hand upon his shoulder.

“Come,” said the Prince of Ithilien, “you are already a friend of Kings and of Wizards. Surely a bit more royalty, such as it may be, is not too much for you?”

Pippin grinned, and shuffled his feet again, his hands behind him and his eyes looking bashfully down.

Faramir sighed and turned himself to sit upon the bench, stretching his legs out in front of him and his arms spread along the back. He tilted his head backward to stare at the ceiling, but began speaking just as Pippin had made up his mind to begin to tiptoe off.

“Do you know, Sir Peregrin,” Faramir began, “I believe I have been remiss.”

“Er,” Pippin shifted from one foot to the other. “Er, sir?” he asked. “What do you mean?”

Faramir sat up, swinging his arms before him to clasp his hands loosely above his knees. “It seems,” he said solemnly, though there was a light of amusement in his eyes, “that I have not made the acquaintance -- or, I should say,” he added thoughtfully, “gained as much knowledge of,” but then returned to his earlier tone, “as many hobbits as I ought.”

“Er, sir?” Pippin offered hesitantly. “But I thought Stri-- King Elessar,” he said with brow furrowed, “had forbidden the entrance of Men to the Shire.”

“Ah, so he did, so he did,” muttered Faramir, looking away briefly before bringing his eyes back to rest upon Pippin. “But you are not in the Shire now, are you, Sir Peregrin?” he asked, with one eyebrow quirked.

“No,” Pippin answered, the beginnings of a smile around the edges of his own lips. “No, I am not.” And he shuffled closer to the bench, and then hopped up to sit perched on the edge of it beside Faramir. His feet dangled next to the other’s booted legs.

“We had not a chance to get very well acquainted during the War,” Faramir said. “For, when I met you first, it was only for a brief time, in the company of Mithrandir and of my father” -- he ignored Pippin’s slight intake of breath and biting his lip, and his glance away, at the mention of Lord Denethor -- “and then, when I returned again to the City, I was not conscious of anything for a long while,” he said, and reached a hand up to gently scrub away a tear from the hobbit’s face as he said with the utmost kindness of feeling, “though I do know it is you I have to thank that I woke again, and I hope you remember the words I have tried to speak of this before, though nothing should be adequate thanks.”

Faramir caressed another tear away with his thumb and then let his hand fall as Pippin, his head bowed, sniffed and then nodded.

“But other than that,” Faramir said in a tone of light banter again, resting his hands once more upon his knees, “I am afraid I was too terribly distracted in the days after the War to pay you much attention.”

Pippin sniffed and rubbed his nose, but his tone also was light as he replied. “I can see why. She is quite distracting, my Lord. I believe Merry finds her so as well.”

“I believe the both of you have your own distractions now, thank you very much,” Faramir said, wagging a finger in the face of the hobbit, who ducked to try to hide his smile.

“But, yes, she is quite distracting,” Faramir said, leaning back again. “And if I had not met your cousin Merry at so near the time I met the Lady Eowyn, when we were all thrown together at the Houses of Healing and must needs only wait and worry for our friends and kin” -- Faramir sat forward again to gently rub the stiffened back he saw before him -- “well,” he sighed, “I daresay I should have been chid for not coming to know even one hobbit as well as I ought.”

“You were chid, Lord?” Pippin asked, looking up with surprise.

“Indeed I was,” Faramir chuckled ruefully. “It is why our visit to this City of my youth has been arranged to coincide with yours.”

He leaned over to press his head against Pippin’s forehead and to whisper conspiratorially, as Pippin’s eyes started, then softened and twinkled, “I distinctly recall our King, Lord Aragorn, saying to me, ‘Really, Faramir, it is bad enough that I have not managed to arrange my duties well enough in nine years’ -- nine years, think of that! -- ‘so that I should be able to go and visit my hobbit friends near to their home in the North Kingdom, but here you are, close by and near enough at hand for frequent visits, yet when I wish to speak to you of hobbits, your knowledge of them beyond their deeds and your meetings with them in the Great War’” -- Faramir grasped Pippin’s chin and held it firmly as his eyes flickered and he would have looked away -- “’is nearly limited to the aid young Meriadoc gave to you in courting the Lady Eowyn, and of informing you what he knew of her people the Rohirrim as we rode to Edoras. Really, Faramir,’” that Man said, and shook his head, “’I shall have to order you to make certain you befriend as well the very next hobbit to visit this City, and make sure you are not quite so distracted this time!’”

Pippin giggled at the end of this long speech, both at Faramir’s words and at his imitation of Aragorn’s voice.

Faramir smiled as well, and let go the hobbit’s chin. Pippin swung his legs a moment and hummed a bit, then looked up at the Man with a smile on his face.

“So, where are Merry and the fair-ly distracting Princess Eowyn?” he asked. Faramir scowled and pretended to lift a hand to him, but Pippin just giggled and ducked his head a little, not moving from his position on the bench.

“They are again at the Houses of Healing,” he sighed and sat forward with his elbows on his knees and his chin in his hands. “And are like to be there a very long time before they learn all they wish to know of herblore.”

“Aye,” Pippin nodded and agreed, wiggling slightly closer to Faramir on the bench. “And don’t I know it.”

Faramir laughed with him, and they sat together quietly a few moments until Pippin’s curiosity got the better of him.

“Faramir,” he asked, wrinkling his nose and looking up through his curls, “why aren’t you with them? Gandalf said you liked learning of lore and such.”

Faramir sighed and removed his hands from his chin, turning them over on his thighs so that he looked down upon his empty palms. “I do, Pippin,” he said quietly, “but they are trying to learn this day of the knowledge of Ioreth -- do you remember the old Woman among the healers?”

He glanced over to see Pippin’s nod, and the concern on the hobbit’s face.

“Well,” Faramir said heavily, studying his fingers again, “she has had a brain attack within these years, and her tongue does not trip so lightly as it once did. She must now struggle with her words. It pains me to see her so,” he finished, and then turned quickly from his gaze at his hands to study his companion.

“I’m sorry! I’m sorry!” Pippin choked out in a small voice, his face scrunched up with eyes closed and his back stiff as the tears and the quiet sobs came back to him. “I just -- b-before,” Pippin stuttered out as Faramir gathered him close in a hug and he leaned to rest his forehead on the Man’s chest. “When -- when you found me on the bench, I was thinking about my Da,” he finally whispered out.

Faramir’s turn it was to stiffen, and Pippin gasped and pulled back within the circle of his arms. “I’m -- I’m sorry, my Lord,” he muttered, his words tripping over themselves as he rushed to apologize, “I dinna mean to make you think of Lord Denethor.”

“Pippin,” Faramir responded, forcing himself to relax and slowly drawing the hobbit toward him again, so that Pippin lay against his chest with his face looking outward.

“You needn’t apologize for thinking of your father,” Faramir said above Pippin’s curls, “nor for causing me to think of mine.

“For though you knew him but in his latter days,” he said in a wistful tone, “once he was a great Man. He bore Mithrandir more welcome than you saw,” Faramir said and glanced down at the hobbit snuggled against him, “and did not mind so much then that I was adept at being a wizard’s pupil,” he said heavily.

“It was painful,” he said in the same heavy tone, “to see him change, not only for the way he treated me, but for the pain it wrought in him, and for what I saw as this once-strong warrior aged and withered through the years, though they be not so great upon him, before my very eyes.” He sighed and closed his eyes sadly, tilting his head to one side to rest his cheek against the hobbit’s curls and holding him more closely.

Pippin was now sobbing again, and choked out between cries, “My father is ill, Faramir, and I am watching him, too, age and wither before my eyes. He will be cross with me, or someone else, or at my mother -- but most frequently with me, I think - over things that would never have bothered him before. And I know that he hurts, and the healers cannae help, and I know there ‘tisn’t anything I can do, and -- and I don’t think I can say anymore,” he finished, and cried some more into Faramir’s tunic.

Faramir held him close, and rubbed his back, until at last Pippin sat up and wiped at his face with a handkerchief, still sniffling.

“Gandalf would say something very gruff right now, and then call me a fool of a Took,” Pippin said toward the bench.

Faramir chuckled sadly and replied, “Well, I am afraid I am not much help there, as I do not think you are a fool, and being appropriately gruff was something I never learnt properly from the Wizard.”

Pippin giggled slightly into his handkerchief, and then hiccuped, as he was still sobbing a bit as well.

“When I was little,” he said, and looked up with the ghost of his usual smile at Faramir, “I used to pretend that Gandalf was my Grandda. They didn’t take me to visit Mama’s father too much before he passed away, and my Da’s da died before I was even born.

“But,” he said with a more true smile now through the remains of the tears, “Gandalf had known Da’s da, and nearly all the Tooks before him, and so I decided that he should be my Grandda instead. I never completely grew out of it, you know,” he said, his voice trailing off softly as he looked down at the bench once more.

Faramir laughed though it pained him even as he did so. “I think I felt something alike to that, Pippin,” he said. “Though it is only hobbits, I believe, who would have the gall to graft an unwitting and potentially unwilling Wizard onto their family trees.”

Pippin lifted his eyes to Faramir’s and smiled at him until his expression dissolved once more into tears. “Oh, Faramir,” he said sadly. “I miss him so much. Almost as much as I’m going to miss my Da.”

“I know,” Faramir said and gathered the hobbit to him again so that Pippin was practically in his lap as they shared their grief together. “I miss them both as well.”