A/N:  This is a birthday ficlet for my wonderful friend and long-time beta Cairistiona.  It is unbetaed (so as not to spoil the surprise. ;) )

Aragorn was distantly aware that he was lying on something that, under normal circumstances, might be quite uncomfortable.  No matter; he could sleep a little longer.  He felt no sunlight on his closed eyelids, so it must not be dawn yet.  He rolled over and something hard dug into his kidney, but he’d slept on ground far more uneven.  In the wilds, he often made his bed in damp ditches or forest floors riddled with roots or even bare rock.  This wasn’t so bad.  At least the ground under his head was smooth—in fact it felt almost like planed floorboards.

Observations like that might matter more were his mind not so comfortably hazy.  As it was, he convinced himself that the hard lump digging into his back was merely a rock.  He drifted back to sleep . . .

“Thorongil.”

At first, the syllables didn’t register as a name, distorted as they were by an unfamiliar accent.

“Thor-on-gil . . .”

A high, sing-song voice.  Aragorn nearly growled in response.  Whoever or whatever this Thorongil was, it had best be a matter of some import to disturb his sleep . . .

“Thorongil!

The name—barked a bit gleefully this time—was accompanied by a sudden splash of cold water to his face.  Aragorn gasped and jerked and in the moment of clarity that followed, he became aware of three things in quick succession.

One:  that the oddly-smooth ground under his cheek was in fact made up of planed and polished floorboards.

Two:  that he was Thorongil.

Three:  that wherever he was, these were most definitely not appropriate sleeping quarters.

He opened his eyes and blinked blearily, trying to clear them of what felt like a desert’s worth of sand.  A boy of nine or ten summers grinned down at him.  The lad had a tousled mop of blond curls on his head and an empty wooden cup in his hand.  He seemed delighted with his little prank.

Aragorn rolled onto his back, raised a trembling hand to wipe his face, and bit back a curse when that hand went astray and he nearly gouged out his own eye.  His head throbbed in time with his heartbeat, and every small noise boomed like thunder.  His memories were a confused muddle, and after a moment, he decided that his small assailant was unlikely to judge him for that.

“Where am I?”  His voice came out in a rasp, rough and sharp as a carpenter’s tools.  His throat protested with a stab of pain.

“The Golden Hall.”  The boy cocked his head, still smiling slightly.

Of course.  Sunlight streamed down from the high rafters, cheerfully illuminating the bright tapestries, richly carved wooden pillars, and scattered tables littered with cups.  A few paces away, the great hearth’s coals still smoldered, though last night’s roast had long since been taken away.  At the head of the hall, Thengel’s empty throne looked down from its dais like a bemused chaperone.

More cautiously than before, Aragorn raised both hands to scrub over his face.  His body loudly objected to these strides towards wakefulness, but he chose to ignore it.  He suspected he would soon be having stern words with his body over its idea of appropriate decorum.

“What time is it?”  His mouth felt like it had given up all hope of moisture, but he managed to form the words.

“Past the third hour.”  Nine o’clock, as they would say back home.  Aragorn experienced a surge of dismay.  He could not remember the last time he’d slept so late without the excuse of injury or illness.  And despite the pain echoing through his skull, he was beginning to suspect that he could blame neither for his current predicament.  The child jerked his head at the hall behind him.  “They didn’t want to wake you.”  He indicated a handful of servants Aragorn hadn’t yet noticed—men and women garbed in brown and gray who glided through the hall, gossiping quietly as they collected dishes, scrubbed the tabletops, and swept the floors.  They were cleaning up after the feast, he realized, and he was in their way.  Aragorn felt the first of what promised to be many flashes of shame.

His hazy morass of memories slowly began to solidify until they made a kind of sense.  Yes, Thengel, King had ordered a feast to commemorate the last great hunt of autumn.  While most of their kills were hauled off to be salted or smoked, the largest of the wild boar was roasted whole, right there in the hall, while music played and dancers whirled for the entertainment of the hunters—of whom Thorongil was one.

He shifted his weight, and his kidney added to his body’s long litany of complaints.  Rolling to the side, he pulled object out from under his back and examined it.  His tormentor, which he had first mistaken for a rock, was in fact a sturdy, wooden tankard.  His strange surroundings, pounding head, and tangled memories resolved, forming a picture he little liked.

“I . . . was very drunk, wasn’t I?”

The boy, whose smile had faded, suddenly grinned again, wide and wicked.

Stifling a sigh, Aragorn set to the task of disciplining his body, that he might sit up.  He had encountered this malady often enough, after all, though he’d never experienced it first-hand.  As his limbs and head protested the slightest movement, he decided that when he returned to Eriador, he would have to be much more understanding of the young men who showed up for training or early morning patrols bleary-eyed and fading.

The boy glanced down at the empty cup in his hand with something like remorse.  “Just a moment,” he said before darting off across the room.  Aragorn remembered how that boy and a veritable herd of young ones like him had blown through the hall in the early hours of the feast—laughing and playing, wheedling the cooks for the best cuts of meat, chasing each other as they reenacted the hunt.  More startling than the children’s behavior had been their elders’ easy acceptance, and even encouragement, of it.

He used the moment of privacy to drag himself into a sitting position against the nearest column.  As Aragorn stifled a groan, he grimaced at the extent of his own folly.  Just weeks, now, since he’d arrived in Rohan, and already he’d repaid the Mark for their hospitality by behaving like a common tavern lout in the king’s own hall—what Thengel must think!  Yet, he searched his memories for warning or reproof and remembered instead the king’s booming laugh as their exploits on the hunt were described.  He remembered his captain, Gromol, singling “Thorongil” out for a special toast since it was he who’d killed the largest boar.  He remembered the grins of his comrades as they teased him for shooting the beast with an arrow rather than riding it down and spearing it.  He remembered jokes and songs and claps on the back and his cup being refilled again and again.

The boy returned, having filled his cup from a water barrel near the hearth.  “Here . . .” he held out the water like a peace offering, and Aragorn accepted, nodding to show his thanks.  He took a long gulp and savored its coolness against his throat, but cursed himself for using the last of his tea leaves just a week before. 

“My thanks,” he said in a voice he almost recognized, “My throat was quite sore.”

“I’m sure,” the boy said with a sparkle in his eyes, “You were singing.”

Aragorn felt a thrill of dread.  His singing voice was not so terrible, but he shuddered to imagine what songs he might have found appropriate in his inebriated state.  “Singing?”

The boy burst into an irreverent song that had been invented by the minstrels just the night before.  Aragorn could not quite remember uttering it himself, but his face flamed as he recalled the lyrics.  It was about a heron that slays a monstrous auroch by tickling it to death with its feathers—a typically light-hearted bit of Rohirric comedy.  But, the heron in the song was named “Goronthil” and the auroch described bore a striking resemblance to the roasted boar.

“Don’t worry,” the boy said as he finished the song with a flourish and Aragorn contemplated the feasibility of simply melting into the floor, “Father’s not angry.  He said it was like you’d never seen mead before.”

It struck Aragorn suddenly that he ought to recognize this particular boy.  Father’s not angry . . . did Gromol have a son that age?  He couldn’t quite remember.

“I hadn’t,” he rasped in reply, eager to change the subject from his recent foray into a bard’s work, “We don’t have it in my homeland.”

The boy’s eyes widened.  “But, all men drink!”

Aragorn managed to smile, just a little.  “I did not say we never drank.  We’ve wine made from grapes and many kinds of beer and other drinks besides.  But, mead I’d not tasted before.”  And, of course, he’d never imbibed to such excess.  The Elves of Imladris enjoyed wine, but were merely puzzled by the Mannish impulse to drink to stupor—for, why would one wish to dull their experience of the natural world?  Among the Dúnedain, revelries like this one were far from unheard of, but there Aragorn always acted as master of ceremonies and restrained himself to polite sips, ever wary of shaming himself in the eyes of the people who called him “Chieftain.”  In all other settlements of Men, meanwhile, he’d perfected the art of nursing a tankard such that he blended into any common room but never let his wits be addled.

But, here in this strange hall, hundreds of leagues from home, he’d given himself over to the celebrations.  He’d feasted and drank and stumbled through unfamiliar dances with merry women he’d never seen before.  And as the sweet, honeyed wine continued to flow and the revelries showed no signs of stopping, he’d let go of all his inhibitions, becoming less dignified and more effusive with each sip until his mind strayed into an impermeable fog.

Dear Valar, he was fairly certain that, late in the evening, he’d raised a toast to the exemplary quality of Rohan’s goose feathers.

The boy perched on a nearby bench and watched as Aragorn pulled himself back together.  “Is it true you shot that boar three times?”

He winced a little.  “It is true.” The child’s eyes were shining, so Aragorn decided to disabuse him of whatever hero-worship he was nurturing.  “It was very foolish.”

The boy’s expression clouded.  “Why?”

Aragorn drained the last of the cup and adjusted his clothes, grateful that they were all still in more or less the right places.  “My bow was not heavy enough for an animal of that size.  My first shot merely angered him and the second slowed him little.  Had my last arrow not felled the creature, he likely would have gored me.”

“Oh.”  The boy seemed to digest that for a moment, then shrugged it off.  “I like the spear better, anyway.  When I’m a Man, I’m going to lead all the great hunts!”

Aragorn smiled as he dragged himself to his feet.  “Give that a few years.”

“And then I’m going to feast and celebrate all night!”

Aragorn’s joints complained.  “Give that a few years.”  A wave of nausea hit him suddenly, but he clenched his jaw and leaned on the pillar until it passed.  When he could speak again, he smiled a bit wryly.  “And I hope you never feel the need to ‘celebrate’ quite as forcefully as I did.”

The child cocked his head quizzically.  “But, if you didn’t want to feast, why didn’t you stop?”

And wasn’t that an astute question?  Aragorn could not quite explain the reckless abandon he’d embraced.  Perhaps it leaked over from the joyful spirits of his comrades or the merry ambiance of the feast itself.  Perhaps he was still driven by the lingering thrill of being in a new and exotic land.  But, he suspected that his willingness to give himself over to revelry had more to do with how the Men of the Mark saw him.  To them, he was simply Thorongil, the man who’d shot a boar.  Not the living embodiment of ancient nobility or the last hope for a kingdom’s renewal, but simply a man who’d hunted well and managed to feed a great hall for an evening.

Quite suddenly, he realized that the boy before him was no simple urchin nor even a captain’s child.  “You are Thengel’s son.”

Théoden nodded, wearing an expression that said ‘of course.’

A smile tugged at Aragorn’s lips as he arranged his clothes and prepared to return to his barracks and face his comrades’ inevitable ribbing.

“You will understand someday.”

Fin

A/N:  Happy Birthday, Cairi!  Hope your day was just as fun, but came with fewer hangovers.