“Are you all right, Frodo?” Pippin said for the third time that afternoon.

“I’m perfectly fine,” said Frodo.  “You, on the other hand, don’t appear to be.”

“I’m not,” said Pippin.  “I have a baker’s dozen of questions for you that I’ve been holding off on, but you haven’t been opening up to anyone and now I’m worried.”

“Terribly curious, more like,” said Frodo.  “I don’t have to tell you everything, Pippin.  Least of all those things.”

“No, but you should tell someone.  Sam, at least.”

“I don’t need to tell Sam.  He already knows.”

“Frodo…”

“All right,” said Frodo, sighing.  “Ask away, but bear in mind you won’t like the answers.”

Pippin looked down at his toes.  “What—what was it like at the Fire?”

Frodo nodded.  He’d expected that.  He looked out far onto the Pelennor below, and hoped he’d be able to tap into those shadowed memories and express this well.  “Picture yourself coming face to face with all the worst parts of you, all the bad things that you’ve thought about but haven’t done, and you’re doing them all at once, and you know it’s you, but you can’t do a thing about it, and you don’t know if you particularly care to try.”

“Oh,” said Pippin.  “You—you know it wasn’t really you, Frodo.  Right?”

A corner of Frodo’s mouth quirked up.  “Wasn’t it?”

“No!  It was that horrid thing, making you—”

Frodo smiled thinly.  “Yes, your horrid curiosity, making you drop that stone into the well—”

Pippin’s jaw dropped, and he took a step back.

“I told you you wouldn’t like it.”

“No, that’s not what it’s like at all!  And anyhow it all worked out in the end!”

“Should you have done it, then, because it all worked out?”

“No, but—”

“Neither should I have, then.”

“It wasn’t your fault!” Pippin blurted out.

“I never said it was.”

“Now you’re contradicting yourself.”

“No,” said Frodo sadly.  “No, I’m not—at least, not in my own mind.  I just lack the words.  Maybe they don’t exist.  But you needn’t worry about me, really, Pippin.”

“I do so!  You’ve just proved yourself horridly scarred by all this—really, bringing up the stone in the well?  That was cruel!  You’d never have done that before, Frodo!”

“It was cruel,” said Frodo.  “And I shouldn’t have said it.  I’m sorry, Pippin, but I don’t quite understand it myself.  Which is why I work it out, safely, on my own, with no dear cousins in the way for me to frighten.  And I’m not wallowing in it, I’m working through it, and there’s something wonderful about that.”

Pippin snorted.  “Really?  What’s that, then?”

Frodo smiled, a genuine smile that melted Pippin’s heart.  “In working things through, I’ve come to realize I’m missing something about all of this.  There’s something I haven’t figured out yet, and it’s something marvelous, and I don’t know what it is, but I intend to find out.”

“How do you know that, if you haven’t figured it out?”

“I’m still alive, aren’t I?”