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The Gifts in Small Packages (NC-17) 
Written by December06 February 2021 | 50244 words | Work in Progress
Chapter 20.
First, he feels a chill.
A breeze is threading its cool fingers through his curls.
Pippin stirs, opens his eyes but sees only darkness.
He turns his face and there is glitter in the distance through a moving black lace.
Stars. Branches in the sky.
It comes back to him, where he is, why.
He shuts his eyes again, bids the cold to leave him alone.
So quiet, as if all sound has been sucked out of the world and breathed back as a whisper.
Eventually, there is nothing left to do but look once more. This time he becomes aware of a warmth flickering on his cheek from behind, a dim orange light. He is too drained to be bothered to look even out of idle curiosity. What does it matter. So he stays still, until the blade-leaves of some herb against his face make him itch and turn.
Leaning back against the tree trunk, one long leg stretched out, the other bent, there sits beside him in the night-black grass, the Dúnadan ranger with his pipe.
Aragorn shields it with his hand as he takes his time puffing, then slowly lifts his face and exhales into the night.
The familiar travelling cape is over his shoulders, and when he looks upon Pippin, his gaze is bright and sharp from under the hood.
“Good night, master Hobbit,” he says grimly.
Pippin sits up with some effort. His shoulder is deeply sore, must be a bruise from where he crashed into something on his run. Absent-mindedly he massages it, watching the man with a sense of glum apprehension.
“I’d offer you some, but I doubt you’d take anything from me right now,” Aragorn muses, tipping the pipe at him.
“I wouldn’t,” Pippin agrees, feeling less satisfaction than he would like to. He looks around, “What…?”
Aragorn shrugs, bends down to cover the smouldering pot again, before recounting in a casual tone that does not quite match his words, “Well. You wanted me to do something and I would not. You’d had enough and gave me a piece of your mind. I was horrid to you beyond the necessary and you ran off, must have knocked yourself out. I found you and waited. Here we are.”
“Hm,” Pippin prods around his cheekbone, which is puffed up and tender to the touch. He looks around again. No lights are on in the wards or in the distant mansions in the nobility’s circle above them. It is so quiet he thinks he can hear the stars in the wind. Such a peaceful setting, but all he can sense in the air is desolation.
The King says nothing more for a while, and Pippin is too tired to mind the incongruity of resorting to small talk.
“What time is it?”
“After three?” Aragorn offers without much interest, as though it is all the same to him.
“And what’s with the costume?”
“This?” the man shrugs. “I didn’t know where you’d gone to, and discreetly looking all over the place for a hobbit who does not wish to be found is much more agreeable in one’s tracking garb.”
“I didn’t realise you still kept all your Strider stuff.”
“I know, I surprise even myself at times,” Aragorn says without a hint at mirth.
He then reaches for something on the other side of him, where Pippin cannot see, and pulls a tall long-necked bottle to his lips. As he takes a hefty swig, the dark glass glints green in the moonlight. He puts it down with no apparent satisfaction.
Somehow Pippin knows this is not the first sip that night, maybe not even the first bottle. It rubs him the wrong way, and before he knows it the words are out of his mouth, “You’re drinking again?”
Aragorn glances at him. Takes another long pull on his pipe. Blows a thin snake of pale smoke.
“So you did see me, then.”
Pippin goes cold, swallows. Like a blow he did not see coming, it punches him right back into the dark enclosure of his lord’s rooms, where he watches unseen as Faramir’s white hands rove over Aragorn, the men’s faces blending together in sweet hunger. The noise of it all. Faramir’s humiliation all over again.
“Uh…” his throat will not obey “I…”
Aragorn does not wait for him to come out with something. “Don’t worry, I thought as much.”
Pippin shifts his weight uncomfortably. “I didn’t see everything,” he offers.
Aragorn sucks his teeth. “Peregrin Took! Remind me not to send you to infiltrate any enemy camps.”
“What?”
“At this stage, you should not even acknowledge that you know what I’m referring to, let alone offer further detail.”
Pippin sighs and picks at the grass.
“I see you can’t stand the pretence,” Aragorn observes when the hobbit says nothing.
“Can you?”
The man snorts. “Why do you think I drink?” As if to illustrate, he peers into the bottle with one eye and takes another swig. “And you’ll have to get a lot better. Step up your act. You scared my page half to death with your pyromaniac antics. Where were you at supper? And your rant at me – it was hardly subtle.”
Pippin crosses his arms.
“Get stuffed, Aragorn. Too much trouble for your benefit.”
The man turns his face to look at him with both eyes, tilts his head to the side. “Really? Must I break it down? This is not for my benefit, Pippin. Or rather, I am far from the first in line to be protected by…” he curls his lips in.
“By covering it up?” Pippin offers with caustic enthusiasm. “Keeping it secret? Pretending it didn’t happen? Lying?”
Aragorn laughs. “Thank you. Yes, any of these will do. Let us see now. Of the hundred woes that failing to keep it secret would unleash, which shall I present to you first? Oh, even this – how would you like this? What do you think would happen if…” he takes a breath to carefully pronounce the name, “if Faramir knew that you were there?”
Pippin raises his chin, “What makes you think he doesn’t?”
“Good try. What makes me think that? How about, that you are still his esquire?”
Pippin sits back.
“He… No, he wouldn’t…! Why… dismiss me? He has nothing to be ashamed of!”
“That,” Aragorn moves the tip of the pipe from side to side in his mouth, “is highly debatable.” He raises his hand to pre-empt Pippin’s objection. “You speak so because to you, what passed between him and I is not in itself wrong. And I, too, would say that he has no shame in this – not because there is no wrong, but because the shame is all mine. But you told me yourself that he looked distressed when he went – would you say he shares either my view or yours?”
Pippin looks down while his fingers pluck out tufts of grass from the earth. “Maybe he would… if you said it. If you hadn’t left him to wake to an empty bed with no explanation. But you won’t even give him the common courtesy of saying you’re sorry.”
He has to squeeze his eyes tight to hold back the tears. To finally speak openly is a surreal sensation, like being stuck in a recurring naked-in-public dream. But it is also strangely freeing, the words washing his insides clean, and he really wishes he could cry.
“He cannot know that, Pippin. My contrition is my burden alone. Let him go on thinking that I used him – for the beauty of his body and the willingness of his touch. Seduced him for a distraction from routine, and that’s all it’s ever been.”
“What are you, mad?” Pippin laughs through the knot in his throat. “Faramir would never think that of you. He wouldn’t have it in him to be that unkind.”
“Perhaps so, though I hope you are mistaken. The lower his opinion of me, the less pain, on balance, will he have to work through.”
“And then what? Spend the rest of his days serving a king he can neither respect nor trust? How can you be sure you’re not making it worse?”
Aragorn stares ahead for a long moment. “I cannot be sure, Pippin. I’m going to have to take my chances and live with what happens. And so I say, better this than to give him any reason to think that I may love him. Because that is a wound that never heals, and would bring him only greater sorrow.”
“But…” Pippin is not certain he is ready to see Aragorn’s face when he asks this, “but you do love him, don’t you?”
Aragorn heaves a sigh and slides down the birch’s trunk to sprawl in the grass flat on his back, as though to even be asked this drains him of all strength.
“What do you want me to say?” he asks bitterly. He scans the constellations above them, raises his eyebrows at a loss where to even begin. “Of course I should love him. As I love Éomer, and Legolas, and Gandalf.”
Something hard and heavy drops into Pippin’s stomach, and he does not want to hear the rest.
But Aragorn goes on with sudden inspiration. “I should love him so much, Pippin – as you would a dear old friend, whose counsel you treasure, who shares your joy and woe alike, whom you trust your back in battle. And Faramir I can love maybe yet a little more still – for he had sought in me from the start, maybe without knowing it himself, someone to receive what no one else could. The adoration he can no longer give to his brother, the devotion that is his father’s due, and later the companionship that had once been wanted from him at home. All that I took without a second thought, for few things in life have been more delightful to me – and I gave back with both hands. Which is all well and good. But this – not this, Pippin. Not this…” he cringes, visibly struggling as though to force himself to swallow something putrid. “Look, we cannot even call this love.”
“Why not?”
“Because I don’t! I can’t! What even is this? It does not fit – with anything, anywhere. It is wrong.”
Pippin resists the urge to roll his eyes. “Wrong because you are wed? Or because he is a man?”
Aragorn gapes for words. “But… both! All of it! Pippin, I cannot be bloody… in love with my steward. This is ridiculous. I never asked for it – and neither did he. Look… Time shall pass and he… he will forget – and then so can I.”
“What, you actually believe that?”
Aragorn throws his arms open. “What choice do I have, tell me please? How would you have me go on in the knowledge that this misery knows no end? Do you have any – any – idea what it’s doing to me, how it burns?”
Why don’t you tell me about it, Aragorn.
The man runs his hand up his scalp and gathers a fistful of hair. “Like the fires in the pits of Mordor it burns. Every time I set eyes on him, each time he even just comes to me in thought. I get visions, notions in my head that are not for me to entertain. He would not more than touch my hand by accident, or look upon me with that… you know that look he has, with the kindness in his eyes and that dimple in the corner of his smile, that is only ever on one side but not the other.”
His smile only dimples on the right, Aragorn. Yes, I know the look.
“And ‘tis as though I am crowned king all over again and stabbed through in the same breath. I ache to hold him with a tenderness that is not a man’s due, and I melt, and I crumble, and I know that yet another night without sleep awaits me, and things are ready to spill off my tongue that never should be said, that cannot ever be.” Aragorn swears with great feeling and props himself on his elbow to grab the bottle for another long pull.
He breathes out, shakes his head, takes another drink, falls back down. “I don’t know, Pippin. I don’t know…”
“Well, I’ll be… And you tell me off for lack of discretion?”
Aragorn turns his face to him. “How dearly I would pay to have someone to talk to. I am not asking for sympathy, even understanding, just to not have to carry this madness cooped up inside my head. Which was bad enough in itself, except now I had to go and wreak him this hurt when he came to me with all his trust… Oh Pippin, will you believe me, I did not mean to do it!”
In this moment, seeing his grief, his inebriated candour, Pippin does believe him. But he only fishes in his pocket, half-surprised it is still there, and hands Aragorn back his little bottle of oil.
Aragorn shuts his eyes as his whole face falls.
“Did you not just tell me that it burns you like the pits of Mordor, or whatever,” Pippin says flatly. Earlier this very evening he would have bid any price to get some sign of moral discomfort out of this man, but to now have him utterly mortified stirs nothing.
“How you have changed, Pippin,” Aragorn says quietly. “I see our old fellowship bond is well behind us, and ever your loyalty lies fully with your new master now, and for me you shall have no forgiveness.”
“Looks like it,” Pippin’s voice rings cold and distant even to his own ears.
“Good, he will need one like you.”
Aragorn studies the stars for a long time, before picking up as though in his mind the monologue had never paused. “But of course I had hoped, Pippin, o how terribly I had hoped. And when alone in the twilit hour he stood upon my doorstep in his white cape, and I saw in his face that he too hoped, and had long battled the sweetness of his hope, and yet nonetheless came to me undaunted… But I swear, I did not actually mean to, yearning and intention are not one and the same. And yet…” Aragorn covers his eyes with his hand, “I could not. Couldn’t take it. Not when he burns for me in return, when in his eyes… When I see that he is willing, at any cost, till the last breath… ‘Tis greater than me, I am helpless. He is a better man, his resolve lasted the longer. But I lose my reason altogether.”
Pippin winces, shakes his head. “But aren’t you overthinking a bit, Aragorn? You talk like it be some fey witchcraft thing, but all I see is a man who is in love but will not let himself be.”
“Huh. Of all the peoples of middle-Earth, only yours could say that. It speaks something, doesn’t it, of the nature of my heartache that I can only vent it to a Hobbit.”
To this, there is nothing to counter.
“You drink too much,” Pippin concludes sulkily.
“Aye, you’re probably right.” Without warning, Aragorn flips the bottle up by the neck and hurls it straight ahead at the nearest tree. Even from a supine position, he makes a mighty throw and the bottle explodes in a violent shower of stars.
“Oh, for Valar’s sake, Aragorn!”
Someone will have to clean that up now, not that you would have considered that.
Aragorn settles back down nonchalantly. “Not every desire of a Man’s heart is good, and sometimes even the good desires can be misplaced, misdirected. And look what it has come to, what a horrid, horrid thing I have done.”
“But Faramir would not hold it against you, he would understand. If only you just…”
“Just what?” Now that the wine is gone, Aragorn takes out his pipe again, starts stuffing more pipeweed into the pot. “Be with him?”
“But – yes!”
The man looks up at the sky and laughs.
“Pippin, o Pippin. Sweet gods in Valinor, to be this young again.”
“But…”
“How in the world do you imagine it would look like in practice?”
“Now you’re thinking of that?”
Aragorn ignores the sarcasm. “Pippin, you might not like this, but I do love my wife. Oh, don’t look at me like that, I do – as best I can, and in no way do I wish to part from her. But… it is not about the circumstances, you must understand. The circumstances make it worse, but it is not what makes it impossible. It cannot be because it can never be, Pippin.”
“I think all love is good,” Pippin says quietly.
“So I had used to think too, but now, oh, I envy your certainty. I really do not know anymore. What good could come of this love? What good generally comes of my love? Do I not wreck people’s lives following the whims of my heart, striving for affection that is not my due?”
“Why are you so humble all of a sudden? Are you not High King? Your hand reaches far and your word is law. There isn’t anything you couldn’t change.”
“Change?” Aragorn repeats, so taken aback that he almost looks about to burst out laughing. “Change! Ha!” He huffs and jerks his head like a horse poked in the nostrils.
Briskly he stands up, and in the next motion gathers up the Hobbit by the scruff of his clothes. Before Pippin knows it, he is hauled along as the man strides out onto the open platform at the edge of the gardens. Pippin’s first thought is he is getting cast off the balcony, thrown out like a dumb sack of rubbish, but Aragorn lets him drop onto his feet before the balustrade.
“See this,” he says with some grim glee, swinging out his arm in a wide arc to encompass the moonlit panorama of the city below and the fields and river beyond. “You think anyone here wants it changed – any of them, any of it, ever? You think because I build fountains and silver gates, and have Elven trees planted along the streets, and put music in the halls instead of gloom, that I orchestrate any actual change? That’s what kings are for, eh, to make everything pretty and give everyone candy, and design laws to please themselves.”
As if he does not trust that words are enough, he drops on his haunches before the Hobbit, takes him by the hand, leans in to him. “Listen to me, Pippin. You are a fiery lad, I know, but you listen to me, you listen to me this once. There are many, very many things, large and small, that I cannot do, even as King – that no one can do. Be careful, Pippin. Our life may seem to you enchanting and fair: we give our children names in the High Tongue, and wear clothes of erstwhile fashion, and drink from goblets of silver and gold, and we speak of valour and duty as your neighbours would speak of the weather. You see our life as full of wonder, and hence also of possibility – but do not think our custom gentle, do not think our ways forgiving. Are you hearing me, Pippin?”
“Yes,” the Hobbit mutters reluctantly, thinking this would all sound a lot more poetic if Aragorn’s breath in his face were not so sour-sweet from the wine.
Aragorn sighs. “You have watched your lord stand beside my throne when I sit in judgement – it may have escaped you, but if you go and count, you will find we have more ways in which a man can bring upon himself to be put to death than your folk have cultivars of potatoes. Looking at Faramir you may not see it, for he applies mercy with rare generosity – for indeed he is rare. Others in his stead would do otherwise. And you go out in the street, and you stop the first man you meet, and you ask him if he wants that changed. And he will tell you nay. And he will further tell you that death is by far a kinder fate than disgrace – they may not all live up to it when a test comes, but they all believe in it.”
“As do I,” Pippin says quietly.
“As you have come to,” Aragorn corrects. “Before you went on the quest with the fellowship, was this a topic you were even aware of as a concept, life versus honour?”
Pippin looks down.
“Pippin, we dream of the glory past. Of a glory noble and strict, of mercy that is wise, not soft, of purity and clarity in everything that we do. I was crowned upon the names of Elendil and Númenor, and so I am a king returned. I reconstruct, not reform. My pledge is to take them back into the good ways of the past that they hearken to so, which are the merit by which everything is measured. A merit that is swiftly slipping beyond reach, for all dams have now been broken and time is streaming downhill, and I have got no Elven Ring wherewith to impound it. Do not put your faith in me, for not every wrong I can set right.”
Pippin studies his smaller hand clasped in Aragon’s long fingers. “And so you are content, you shall never ask… for anything more than that.”
Aragorn grins at him. “Ask for more? Does the heart ever stop wanting, something or other? Isn’t happiness always dancing just around the bend? You are young, you do not understand why someone would not take a leap of faith to snatch it by the tail. But I have lived long, and I have wanted much in my time – and much I have been given. Greed has failed many a good man, and the greed of a king is a very, very dangerous thing indeed.”
“Could we please stop speaking like it is so out of this world… What, you think in all the ages of the world – in all the history of Gordon, you are the first man to… to…” He can no longer bring himself to say, love. “With another,” he manages at last.
“I am not. Which is why we have laws specifically against it.”
Pippin blinks. “Laws? I’ve never heard of any such laws.”
“Have you ever heard anyone say murder is wrong?”
“What? No! But that’s rather…”
“Self-evident? So it is.”
“But! What? How can you even compare? It’s not at all alike.”
Aragorn shrugs. “Maybe not, the punishment is the same though.”
“You can’t… be serious.” Pippin’s insides do not listen to his own denial, and go cold.
“Exile at best,” Aragorn confirms, his tone so level and casual, “but that’s – well, highly unlikely.”
“Is that… what you would have to… To Faramir? If it became… if people…”
“Honestly? I don’t even know what I would have to… what would happen. His position certainly grants some protection, but this is not a power that even I have. And even if I could spare his life – I have no power to spare him the dishonour.”
“Why is it a dishonour only to him?”
“It is not,” Aragorn replies slowly. “I wouldn’t count on many following a king such as myself after this. But… it is not equal… depending on…” He touches his fingers to his brow, frowns as though with pain. “Depending how… who… He is younger and gentler than I, it would be obvious how it went.”
“I get it,” Pippin looks away.
Aragorn covers his eyes with his hand, sighs deeply.
“Pippin, no one can know. After tonight, you may not mention this even with me. Upon fear of death, no one may know.”
“‘Tis not a fear that he knows, then. He would be with you at any cost to himself.”
“So he would, if I know him at all. But it is not a cost that I am prepared to have him pay, nor is the cost only to him. And even if so, how? Where? What, run away, live in a hut in the woods?”
“Beren and Luthien did,” Pippin mutters darkly.
“Oh, for the love of the West! I am sick and tired of hearing about Beren and Luthien! And you know what, I do not wish to go into exile, alone or with anyone. We did not spend half our lives risking every imaginable horror and torture, to now have to flee our own land to find a sliver of peace. It is no life to share with your beloved. And Faramir loves Gondor perhaps even more than I do, she is the only home he has ever known – how can I take her away from him.”
“Does Faramir not get a say?”
But to Aragorn this is no more than a rhetorical question. “Pippin…” he says as though protectively, as one trying to find the words to speak to a boy. “Pippin, I am so sorry. For everything. For what I have done to your master, what I continue to do. For this mess that you are in, that is your mess now too. Take good care of him, Pippin. When he comes back, you take good care of him.” He shakes his head, and looks away, and for a moment it seems he might cry.
“But you… and so you won’t…” Pippin ventures, feeling weak and hot as though after a fever.
“Go after Lord Faramir? No indeed, I won’t,” Aragorn replies very gently, and the gentleness communicates a strange resolute finality to his words. “That I won’t do. Ask no more of what I want. And do not talk to me of change, for true change is as rare as the first rise of a new star, and often much sorrow must precede it.”
He stands up and looks over the City as the promise of dawn begins to show in the East. And Pippin as though hears a door shut, for despite his old garb, the man beside him is no longer a Ranger of the North. He is once again King, as clearly as if the silver crown sat upon his brow. His stance straight and tall, his lean weathered profile is proud and shows no more signs of inner strife.
“Now go,” he says. “Go and write to your master a letter, and tell him I understand he has a private matter to attend to in Emyn Arnen, and he may have my leave to remain there until he is content to return; his work he need not worry about, it will be taken care of. You send that letter so that he will have it early on the morrow.”
“Yes, my lord.”
“And on your way, pop into the kitchens and tell them to get raspberries for breakfast.”
“Raspberries, sire? I’m afraid ’tis hardly late enough in the season…”
“Well, they’ll have to be resourceful then, won’t they? For my lady Queen will be arriving in the morning, and she loves raspberries. It would be a good way to mark her return.”
“Yes, my lord.”
He is about to take his leave, when the King looks at him again.
Aragorn sighs. “Just don’t do anything stupid. Please.”
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Wow, very promising – and finely written, as always. :) Hope to see more soon!
— elektra121 Sunday 10 April 2011, 15:13 #