7. Hope and Memory

"I'm here, Pippin," Merry said. "Aragorn summoned me, and I came as quickly as I could."

He wondered if Pippin could hear him. He looked very small, little and broken, and Merry's heart ached with a pity that was yet too deep for tears. Quietly he knelt next to the cot, and very gently lifted Pippin's shattered right hand-his sword hand, the hand that had felled a troll ten times his size-and kissed the chilled and blackened fingers. How badly is he hurt? he had asked upon his arrival in Ithilien, and Gimli had looked away and said, He is not in any pain, an answer that was not an answer at all.

Pippin opened his eyes. The corners of his mouth curled up, and Merry smiled in return, though he felt as if a knife were twisting under his heart. "Well, there you are at last." He tried to laugh a little. "I've been waiting for hours to tell you 'good morning', and now it's afternoon."

Pippin was far too weak to laugh. He had been fevered, and he had bled, and though the bedding had been changed again and again, the stains remained. Even now he was bleeding inside, a wound that could not be healed. He was slipping away, inch by inch, moment by moment, and neither Merry's great love, nor hope, nor Aragorn's skilled hands, could hold him.

Pippin’s pale lips parted and his voice emerged as a mere whisper of sound: Frodo?

"He is well and safe," Merry lied. The words stuck in his throat. No one knew what terrible end Frodo had come to, but Sam was in a tent not so far away, a thin and battered shadow of the hobbit Merry had known in happier days. Livid marks of clutching fingers marked his throat, and he sat like a ghost, empty-eyed, and never made a sound. "He and Sam are resting, as you should be if you are to get better."

Tired, Merry. Pippin closed his eyes wearily, and then opened them again. Home now?

"Yes," Merry choked, and inside him something was tearing and twisting, breaking into jagged shards, and he thought he would die from the pain of it. Surely no one could hurt this badly and live. "You may go home now. Fly away home, Pippin. Sam and I, we'll be along as soon as we can."

Merry began to sing softly and brokenly, a simple Shire-song of green hills and warm, tilled earth, and the bees in the heather, and little rivers sparkling in the sun. Pippin's eyes opened wide, wide as if he could truly see the hills of home, and he made a small, glad sound in his throat, and then he sighed.

Merry's voice hitched and stopped. There was a deep stillness now in the tent, and he did not need to look up to know that kindly death had taken Pippin away, far from grief and pain, to some safe, green place where he could not follow.

Merry rose up unsteadily and leaned over the cot, reaching out a trembling hand to close his eyes. Pippin seemed almost to be smiling in his deep sleep, and for a long while Merry looked at him. For all the long days of his life, he would keep that last, bittersweet image of Pippin's beloved face in memory: Beautiful he seemed then in the hour of his passing, and full of peace, a youth beyond the reach of time.

(More stories to come...)

Written for Embitca's 100 Ways to Kill Your Lover Challenge, where the challenge was to do in your favorite characters. And yes, I do hate myself a little for this.