Weight. Crushing weight, and worse than that is the fear, which presses him down as surely as the body of the horse that has fallen atop him. In his dream he cannot win free of the weight, he must struggle in vain and watch in horror as He--he never can name Him, ever--as He strikes Dernhelm to the ground like a fly. In his dream the helm rolls off and he sees Eowyn's beautiful eyes, open and glassy with death. In his dream her hair spills from its confinement to mingle with the blood and dirt on the trampled and desecrated field. In his dream He then turns his faceless hood toward Merry and reaches out, grasping toward his arm--

"It's a dream!" he shouts, half-terrified and half-triumphant at the realization, and wakes.

The door to his bedroom slams open and Pippin stands there in his nightshirt, disheveled, clutching a heavy candlestick. He stares wildly at Merry for a moment, then puts the candlestick onto the night table and climbs up onto his cousin's bed.

Merry shudders now, unable to get the image of Him from his brain, or the picture of Eowyn's golden hair spread softly across that horrid earth. Pippin holds him tightly. "What do you need?" he whispers.

Merry shakes his head. He cannot talk, his teeth chatter so hard. The cold of that touch works in his blood like poison, and his right arm and hand are lifeless. The rest of his body shakes despite Pippin's firm embrace, and Merry grits his teeth and keeps his eyes open--better that than the darkness that lurks behind his lids--and waits for the cold to abate.

It does, a little, enough for him to get out the word: "C-c-c-cold," he stammers.

"I can see that," murmurs Pippin. He hugs him tighter still and chafes Merry's right hand with his own. A moment later he clambers out of the high bed to fetch more blankets. Piling them over Merry, he crawls under and clasps his cousin close.

The shuddering becomes shivering becomes an ache becomes tingling, and then the tingling subsides everywhere except in his right hand and arm.

Pippin continues to rub the injured limb, his hands sure and calming, and speaks. "What was it this time?" he asks quietly. Merry gives a little shiver and Pippin shakes his head at him. "It was only a dream, my Merry-lad," he says. "It's better to talk of it and banish it. If you don't it might be there when you sleep again." They both know this to be true, all too often.

"I dreamed that I couldn't get to her in time," says Merry, and Pippin knows he speaks of Eowyn. He nods, and Merry goes on: "He killed her, and in the dream I didn't know it was her again, until her helm fell off and I could see her face..." His voice trails away, and Pippin snuggles against him.

"That sounds awful," he says.

"Mmmm," murmurs Merry, getting sleepy. The warmth is creeping back into his arm.

"Was that all?" persists Pippin.

"Mmmm? No." Merry is quiet for a moment; Pippin sighs, thinking he's gone to sleep again, and gives a tiny start at Merry's voice: "I was looking at her, and I was trapped under the horse's body, and He saw me and reached for me--He reached for my arm. Then I woke up." His eyes open, a gleam in the darkness of the room.

"What did you shout?" asks Pippin. "I was far down in my own dreams when I heard you, I guess I thought you were in danger..." His teeth glimmer in a small smile as he glances over Merry's shoulder at the pewter candlestick on the table.

"I think I said 'It's a dream!'" Merry muses, a puzzled look creasing his features.

"That's odd," agrees Pippin. "Why would you say that?"

Merry does not reply immediately. He is thinking: Pippin can see the threads of his thoughts, creating an answer. Finally he speaks. "In my dream, I knew it wasn't true. I knew Eowyn did not die that day, and I knew that He--He didn't really touch me. So I made myself wake up." His eyes come wide open and he struggles to sit up, pushing back the four quilts he is smothered beneath.

"What?" says Pippin, sitting up beside him.

"Don't you see?" Merry cries.

"No!" Pippin exclaims, half-frightened, half-amused.

Merry bounces gently in his bed. "I knew it was a dream! I made myself wake up!"

Pippin's eyes grow wide. "Ohhhhh!"

"Yes, yes." Merry's curls stand up in wild disarray as he runs his fingers through them, wide awake again. "I didn't let it go any further. Pippin, this is wonderful!"

"Brilliant," the lad says, although privately he thinks that the dream had gone quite far enough, considering the state Merry was in just a few minutes gone. He quashes this unworthy thought, though, and smiles at him. Will Merry ever be able to think clearly about the Black Rider, the Wraith King, and name him to himself? Pippin does not know. Should he? This, too, is hidden. For now, Merry is obviously pleased and happy and so Peregrin Took grins back at him, hiding his fear deep inside.

"I'm hungry," announces Merry, beaming. "Are you?" He slides out of the bed and pulls his robe on. "I am going to put some bacon and onions and those mushrooms Farmer Maggot gave us today into a big pan with a lot of butter and have a glorious fry-up." He casts a pitying glance at Pippin. "I only hope there shall be enough for you."

Pippin jumps from the bed. "Really, my dear Brandybuck. How you do jest. You know I would happily push you into the river to get at mushrooms." He follows Merry out the door, poking him between the shoulder blades.

Their voices fade down the hall. "As if a Took could get the better of a Brandybuck anywhere within a league of a body of water."

"Don't tempt me, Meriadoc."

"All right, that's it. No mushrooms for you."

"Hey!"

When Frodo awakens in the night, there is no one there to tell his dreams to. He forces himself to silence--he does not want to wake Sam, or worse yet, Rose, who is already heavy with the Gamgee's first child. And so he lies in the dark, breathing hard or not breathing at all as the endless moments tick by. His four-fingered hand seeks the hard gem that lies upon his breast, the gift of Arwen Undomiel, and he waits blindly for the fear, the horror, the regret to pass.

Sometimes he dreams of Weathertop, and the Wraith-king, and then he sees that white face and pale hand, glowing with menace and clasping a long knife. Frodo always wakes before the knife pierces his shoulder. When thought returns again, he thinks it is because such pain is too great to to hold in memory fully--his mind cannot encompass what his flesh once endured.

Sometimes he dreams of all the griefs of the journey--he sees Gandalf slip again into the darkness beneath Khazad-dum, and watches Boromir's face change and grow dangerous as he reaches for the Ring. There is Gollum, always and forever betrayed and betraying, an answerless enigma--could he have been saved? Frodo will never know.

Sometimes in dreams he must walk again toward Shelob, holding the light of Earendil aloft, Sting glittering blue in his right hand (oh there are five fingers on his hand in the dream, in every dream but one) and knowing, somehow, that it is in vain, that no matter how he faces down this ancient terror, she is cunning, and his sleeping-self wants to scream to his dream-self, a warning: Run, run away, but not like that, not heedless and foolish and fey. And then to feel again the sting in his neck. And wake.

There are too many bad dreams for Frodo: dreams of his cousins trapped among orcs, dreams of teetering at the edge of the Cracks of Doom, dreams of marching endlessly across the waterless wastes of Gorgoroth.

And then there is the worst dream, the dream that he does not remember upon waking, because the shame of it is to great, the truth of it is too harrowing.

In that dream, he lies, bound, on the floor of the tower room on the border of Mordor. It is where the orcs brought him after Shelob's sting. He comes to himself surrounded by leering orcs; they strip him and paw at him, and mock him when he weeps. They finger their knives and ask him endless questions, slapping his face when he lies, slapping his face when he tells the truth. He is naked, and he is alone, and Sam--Sam must be dead. But if Sam is dead, then he is beyond the Dark Lord's reach, he has escaped this endless nightmare. It is the loss of the Ring that burns in Frodo's heart--he knew as soon as he woke that it was gone.

And the horror, the true horror of the dream, is that he is glad.

It is gone. He is encircled by enemies, and fated to torture and death, and yet in some deep recess of his being, a tight grip has been released. The Quest is over, the Ring is taken, darkness and hatred will shadow all Middle-earth. And all Frodo can feel is relief.

When he wakes from this dream, he finds himself weeping. He cannot remember this dream, only endure an infinity of shame without understanding why.

* * * * *

During the days, Frodo is busy and contented, at least on the surface. Sam is taken up with the re-ordering of his beloved Shire--he assists Will Whitfoot as he assisted Frodo during his short tenure as Mayor, and spends much of his time helping folk get their farms and fields into healthy condition. He also spends a great deal of time in the gardens of Bag End and down on New Row in his Gaffer's garden. (The Gaffer protests noisily at Sam's "interfering ways", but his rheumatism slows him, and Sam ignores him and tends to his small patch with silent devotion.) Whatever Sam touches blooms. Even Frodo can feel it--he can almost see life flowing from Master Gamgee's hands.

Frodo is writing. He has much to write of--he knows he must chronicle everything that took place. He and Sam go often to Crickhollow, where Merry and Pippin have taken up residence, and while he is there, he quizzes them gently about the paths they took, through forest and field, from the depths of Fangorn to Orthanc and then Gondor and the Black Gate. It is hard to get them to tell the darker sides of their stories, but he can often corner Merry, who will tell him of Pippin's travails; and when he gets Pippin away from Merry, the youngest member of the Fellowship will confide that he worries yet about Merry, and tell Frodo what Merry has been through. Frodo offers love and comfort, and gleans from their hints more than they have imagined. Home at Bag End he sets it all down, well taken care of himself as he knows.

Rose is a bustling, capable lass--lady, Frodo supposes he should now say, but he can never look at her apple cheeks and glowing face and think any word but "lass". She is rounded and soft and comfortable, and matches Sam well: Where he is uncertain of his privilege still, she stands like a lion and puts him well to the front. Frodo smiles to himself to see it, and to see Sam's discomfort wane as he slowly becomes accustomed to the deference which people pay to him now.

Beneath the surface, there are the nightmares, and a sense of waiting, of living life within a held breath. Frodo does not know what it is he waits for. But he waits.

Sam is spared nightmares, most nights. When they do come, they are difficult to remember--glimpses of Orodruin, or the desecrated wastes that lie before the Black Gate, filthy barrens which no hand can make green again. He dreams of Gollum's teeth in his shoulder, and of the voice of that wretched, wracked creature whom he loathed so completely. Shelob, too--her soft, monstrous weight crushing him to the earth in the pass of Cirith Ungol, the acid ichor of her wound scoring his hands.

In the worst dreams he relives that awful time, short though it was, when Frodo was taken from him, dead as he thought. And he does not know which is worse--to believe that his master has passed away from life, or to discover that he lives yet, and is alive in the hands of the orcs. And so those dreams seesaw back and forth between the two realities, and when he wakens, he is sick, sick in his soul and his stomach, with the nauseating passage between grief and rage.

Rose does not ask what is wrong when he wakes from these infrequent visitations. She holds him close and smooths the hair back from his clammy forehead, and rocks him like a child when he weeps, as sometimes he does.

It took him a while to understand that his tears do not distress her. His Gaffer would have hard words to say about a fool who went and placed himself in such passes and then suffered nightmares about it. To the Gaffer who lives in Sam's mind, his tears smack of self-pity, and if there is one trait which Sam's Gaffer--and Sam himself--cannot abide, it is self-pity. And so for a long time, Sam choked back his sobs and turned away from Rose in their large bed, hoping not to waken her.

Then one night he felt her warm hands run gently across his back, and he turned to her and buried his head in that welcoming place between neck and breast and wept. He was ashamed, after, but she brought him sharply up when he muttered and ducked his head.

"Oh, my dear Sam," she said. His heart gave a twinge at this echo of the words, heard so often from his master's lips.

"I, I'm sorry," he said, rubbing his swollen eyes and red nose.

She handed him a kerchief, plucked from the table by the bed. "Don't you dare apologize to me for that," she said, and he looked at her surprised. "I got no right to carry on so, Rose," he said.

She lay back on her pillows and gazed at him, blue eyes puffy with sleep, curls tumbled over her shoulders. "If not you, then who?"

Stung, Sam replied without thinking: "Mr. Frodo, that's who!" The room was dark, the hole quiet around them. Sam thought of his master, sleeping somewhere down the hall and always silent, never calling for him. He spoke low, then, but with feeling. "If he don't carry on in the night, then it's the better for him and I'm glad. But then again, if he don't carry on in the night, why must I? It's no good saying I haven't seen awful things, Rose, but he's seen worse, so he has, and felt worse things, too."

She pulled him down beside her and then spoke. "You think he has no nightmares?"

"I never hear him," replied Sam honestly.

"I do," she said simply, and restrained her husband from jumping up right then and there to check on Mr. Frodo. "I hear him sometimes, just barely. Maybe talking in his sleep, maybe crying, I don't know."

Sam bit his lip and his eyes filled with tears again. "Why don't he say anything?"

"Why do you think, Samwise?" asked Rose. "I think of going to him, but he says nothing during the daytime hours, and so I think he wants to be left alone with it. I do not know what happened there at the end of your journey, but I know it must have been bad, for neither you nor he will say anything beyond the barest of facts: That that Gollum creature attacked you and then him, and they struggled for the Ring, and then Gollum fell into the fire with it. And I know Mr. Frodo lost his finger that day, which makes no sense unless he wore the Ring on it, which makes no sense unless, unless, well, I'll just say it makes no sense." Sam, struck dumb by her shrewd guesses, could only stare at her shadowy face on the pillow beside his. "I'll just say, I think Mr. Frodo is sad, sad and maybe shamed, and so I leave him be."

"Rose," said Sam haltingly, but then had no words to continue.

She did, though (as he would discover she often did throughout their long years together): "I won't take my pity and my ignorance in to shame him worse." She raised an eyebrow at him. "But you, you have no shame in you, only grief, and nothing wrong with it. So don't you worry if you wake me up with your crying, Samwise Gamgee. I am here for your tears as well as your joys, and you for mine." The matter apparently settled, she kissed him.

He smiled back at her, and they did not speak of it again.

And so even as her belly grows and the unborn babe becomes a sweet, awkward interference between them, he still turns to her on the nights when he awakens, frightened or angry or grief-struck, and her arms are always there, strong and safe and needed.

And if he thinks he hears Mr. Frodo in the night, he gets up and makes some small clanking in the kitchen, so that Frodo can come out in his dressing gown with his black curls standing up in corkscrews all over his head. They sit with tea or warm milk or spiced wine, there in the small hours of the night. They might talk of their travels, or some small jest of Mr. Merry or Mr. Pippin's; or they might say little, just sit companionably together in the comforting warmth.

They went on past where words can help or harm or heal, and now they are back, but still words are often unneeded between them. Certainly Sam never says a word about his master's red eyes and nose, or his pale thin cheeks. He hands him a ginger biscuit and they wait for the dawn together.

For Pippin the dreams are dark waters, and he sinks without a ripple beneath their surface. Sometimes the Uruk-hai surround him--he sees Merry fall with a cruel blow to the head, and is swept up himself into whirling, stinking chaos; or it might be the endless run across the plain, and the cruel lash of the orc-whips at his heels.

He dreams also of the killings--those slain before him, and those he slew. He can kill, he knows that now, and the knowledge is heavy even in his waking hours. When he sleeps he is presented with each death in wrenching detail, and he sees also the deaths of those who died before his eyes--Boromir, feathered with black arrows, and also the many he saw fall in the battles at Minas Tirith and the Black Gate. The reeking dead and piteous wounded line up for his inspection and he must look at them all, for in dreams he cannot close his eyes and shut them away.

Pippin dreams of the troll which fell upon him at the Morannon--the terrible black weight, the sticky blood which nearly drowned him, the stench--above all, the stench. And then the long-seeming, terrible time afterward, before Merry came to comfort him and help him heal, when he lay fevered between life and death.

The worst of all his dreams show him again to the Enemy, naked and helpless beneath the gaze of that fiery eye, shivering like a trapped animal in the predator's glare. He feels again the foul menace, the knowledge that he is filthy, small, worthless, useless.

He wakes noisily, struggling to emerge, fighting back in the only way he can remember, with arms and legs flailing, high voice ringing out in anguish and anger. He comes to on the floor sometimes, with Merry bent over him. Pippin can hardly see when first he wakes, so he never knows the fear that flickers across his cousin's face before Merry schools himself back to calm. When Pippin can focus his eyes once more, Merry is helping him climb back into bed, and often climbing in with him.

They talk about their nightmares to each other then. Sometimes Pippin cries, but more often he is almost dazed, and will recite the details of the dream in a flat voice: "And then... and then... and then..." The words roll out of him without volition, and Merry holds him tightly and strokes his hair until he feels Pippin shudder and relax at last.

"I wonder if it will ever get better," says Pippin one night, exhausted. His eyes are sunken, his cheeks thin; his sweet mouth is sad and the corners turn down uncharacteristically. Merry holds him close and lays his head on the chestnut curls. The autumn wind rushes softly through the trees outside the darkened room, and he knows a change is coming in the weather.

"I don't know, Pip," he says. "I think it will. I mean, things are better already, aren't they? At least now we're just dreaming about the awful things. We aren't in the middle of them any more." Pippin's lips curve up a little at this. "The dreams are awful, but they're only, only echoes, maybe. The real things, the true things, are all good." Merry lets him go with a pat and sits on the edge of the big bed. "Like today--could today have gotten much better?" He grins.

"It was a good day, wasn't it?" Pippin lies back on his pillow and a slow smile dawns. "Fatty's face when the wagon turned over and dumped him out..."

"And Uncle Sandheaver when the wheel went over his foot and then spilled his beets!"

Pippin tries to look remorseful but succeeds only in looking like he has smuggled sweets from the kitchen, and he gives up and grins again. "Well," he says, "He'll be fine. He does have enormously big feet, even for a Sandheaver."

"I just hope the pony recovers from its fright," says Merry with a snort of laughter. "Why did you run out in front of it, anyway?"

"I was trying to get away from the Cheever sisters," says Pippin indignantly. "Who you set onto me!"

Merry holds up his hands innocently. "I just told them you were cowering behind Widow Fuller's tanning stall."

Pippin sighs. "I had hoped the fumes would keep them away."

"Vain hope. They are after you, my dear Took."

Pippin makes a face. "As if a Took would be caught in a pantry, much less under a wedding canopy, with a Cheever lass." He passes his hand over his eyes and his smile fades. "I don't know, Merry-my-lad," he says.

"What do you not know? Your elder cousin can fill in any gaps in your education..." Merry's tone leaves no doubt that his mind is still on the Cheever sisters, who he, at least, might not scorn to meet in a pantry, if not beneath a canopy.

Pippin shifts fretfully, sitting up in bed. "What lass would have me, really have me, this way, like I am now?" A chilly draught creeps past Merry's dangling feet and he shivers.

"Oh, Pip," he says, sobering. "First off, you've no need worrying over such things for a long while yet--this isn't the North Farthing, no one is trying to marry you off before you've even got out of your tweens. And second," he puts his hand over the lad's mouth for a moment to stop him interrupting, "whatever do you mean? It's true that there's no lass now in the Shire who could really understand what you've been through. But that's true of us all--me, you, Frodo, Sam. And look at Sam, will you now? He's already married, and Rose seems to have no complaint about him."

"Do you think Sam has nightmares?" Pippin asks, startled out of his self-pity.

Merry squints at him in disbelief. "Well, yes, I'd say so. Considering that what he and Frodo went through was many times worse than what you and I did, and I know my own dreams are no summer picnic..."

Pippin touches Merry's arm. "Yes, you're right of course. It is just hard to imagine with Samwise, somehow. He's so, so, so..."

"Stoic?" suggests Merry.

"Yes. But I suppose he must. Poor Sam."

"Well, as I was saying. He does have Rose, luckily, and they seem quite happy together." Merry's lips quirk.

"Yes, maybe so," muses Pippin. "I haven't met any Roses yet."

"You don't need a Rose," says Merry with certainty. "Not sure what she'll be like, your lass, but when she comes along, you'll know her. And your nightmares won't matter to her." He scratches his chin. "Or your uncommonly long nose."

Pippin swats him. "How comforting you are, Meriadoc, really." He is surprised by a yawn of surprising proportions. "I think I must be... oh..." --he yawns once more-- "sleepy again now."

"All right then, Pippin." Merry begins to slide off the bed but his cousin stops him.

"Stay here?" he says, and in his eyes Merry sees an echo of the nightmare lurking.

"Certainly," he says. "Only scoot your underfed self over so a poor hobbit has some room." Pippin wiggles aside and Merry climbs under the quilts with him.

"Thank you," murmurs Pippin a few minutes later.

"You're welcome," yawns Merry, his own lids growing heavy. "Just don't wake me with bruises, that's all I ask…"

"Oh, do hush, Merry. You're safe as long as you don't start dreaming that I'm one of the Cheever sisters..." Pippin's voice trails away and silence falls over Crickhollow.