Chapter Text
It is thus a temptation of minds of greater power to govern or constrain the will of other, and weaker, minds, so as to induce or force them to reveal themselves. But to force such a revelation … is absolutely forbidden.
To do so is a crime.
— J.R.R. Tolkien. “Notes on Motives in the Silmarillion.” Morgoth’s Ring (1993)
Who are you?
It felt like a huge and merciless hand, dragging him forward into a searing light, gripping to crush. It felt like molten steel shot through every vein, burning and paralyzing: he could not move, he could not cry out.
He could not lift his hands from the smooth heavy glass.
Who are you?
—✧—
“I need to stop,” said Pippin abruptly.
They had left the camp no more than ten minutes ago, Shadowfax’s smooth gait already eating up the miles. There were no clouds, but he did not dare look up at the stars. He did not want to see them blotted out by the great winged shape again.
“We cannot stop until we are well away,” Gandalf said, his voice grim. “The servants of the enemy are coming, and you must not be anywhere near Isengard when they arrive.”
Pippin shut his eyes and breathed, pulling in great slow lungfuls of cold air and trying to remember the taste of Treebeard’s draught, the smell of athelas. But Shadowfax lifted up unexpectedly to leap over a little stream in the grass, and his stomach flipped.
“I need to stop,” he blurted again. “Gandalf, please.”
“Peregrin–”
“I am going to be sick,” Pippin said, as loudly and as clearly as he could.
Gandalf said, “Ah,” and called Shadowfax to a snorting halt. He slid down to the ground and reached up, and Pippin shut his mouth and eyes tightly and held his breath until he felt grass beneath his feet. His knees buckled as soon as Gandalf let go of him, but he was going down anyway, so that was alright.
He hunched in the dewy grass on his elbows and knees and waited.
It was just as awful as it ever was, the feeling of one's body taking action against itself. There was a horrible foreboding gurgle, and then Pippin was coughing and retching where he crouched. His throat burned and his eyes watered and he spat bile onto the ground – and only then did he feel the hand on his back, warm and heavy. Gandalf was speaking to him quietly, but Pippin had no notion of what he had been saying.
“Finished?” Gandalf asked, but there was no trace of the impatience Pippin half expected in his voice.
Pippin swallowed, consulting with his body. “I think so.”
“Come away, then, my lad,” said Gandalf, and drew him back from where the contents of his stomach lay in a foul puddle in the grass. Pippin let him. He felt wilted and trembly, and he knew that his legs would not hold him. He accepted a mouthful of water from the skin Gandalf held to his lips and rinsed his mouth.
It was awful to find himself so helpless again. He lay sprawled back against Gandalf, panting and wretched and shivering in a cold sweat – but it was Gandalf, at least, and not orcs this time.
“Can you stand?”
“No,” Pippin admitted.
Gandalf nodded, unsurprised. “I am going to put you back onto Shadowfax,” he said. “Can you sit for a moment alone without falling?”
Pippin considered it. “I think so,” he said. “If he does not move suddenly. I am…” He rubbed his eyes. “I feel so strange.”
“I do not doubt it,” said Gandalf. “Shadowfax will not move, but hold to his mane if you feel unsteady.”
He lifted Pippin up, then, and Pippin shut his eyes against the sudden dizziness. He felt that he was tipping sideways with no notion of which way was up or down; he would fall, was falling, and Shadowfax was such a great height that it would hurt very much–
Gandalf settled behind him and wrapped an arm securely around his ribs, and the world reoriented. Shadowfax leapt into motion underneath them, smooth as glass, and inertia pressed Pippin back snug against the wizard.
For a little while he drifted outside himself. The nausea seemed to leave him alone so long as he did not think of the palantír, so he packed the entire night away carefully where he did not have to look at it. It was over, he told himself. It did not matter anymore.
But he felt as limp and wrung-out as a cold dishrag, and he could not stop shaking.
Gandalf was fussing over him, he realized distantly, wrapping him more securely in his cloak and blanket, drawing his own outer cloak around them both. Pippin watched the old hands as they gathered up the soft dense fabric and tucked it gently around him, and a lump rose in his throat.
“You are being very kind to me,” he said, subdued.
“Far kinder than you deserve, I daresay,” said Gandalf. “There's nothing like a Took for making trouble, but you have outdone all your family tree, my lad.”
Pippin did not answer. At another time he would have risen to the barb, offered up the wide-eyed wounded innocence that had gotten him out of many a scrape, perhaps found a way to slyly imply Gandalf’s culpability instead of his own – but he was sick and frightened, and something still hurt somewhere deep, something he did not want to think about.
Gandalf shifted and looked down at him. Then he reached in underneath his cloak and took Pippin’s small cold hand in his own. “I am not angry with you, Pippin,” he said quietly. “I told you I forgave you, and I have.”
Pippin shut his eyes. Gandalf's hand was very warm, and after a moment he turned his hand to wrap around it in return.
“I know that you did not recount everything that passed between you and the Enemy,” Gandalf added after a little while. “I did not press, because I think it would have hurt you badly to make you speak of it there before strangers, and it was not important – at least, not in the same way as those things that I did make you tell me.”
It was not a question, not exactly, and Pippin huddled down and did not answer. But the silence stretched, expectant, broken only by the steady rhythm of Shadowfax's hooves, and at last he said, “You don't need to worry about me. I don't really remember it.”
The wizard made a soft hm noise. Pippin felt the thrum of it in his shoulders. “I have heard you say that about a good many unpleasant things, my lad. I do not believe your memory is nearly so faulty as you like to claim."
Athelas, thought Pippin desperately. The sun through the oak leaves over Tuckborough Lane, the fog pouring down off the Misty Mountains. The smooth-rough texture of Treebeard’s bark. “You can believe what you like, I suppose,” he said out loud.
“Very gracious of you,” said Gandalf.
Pippin took a slow breath and stared straight ahead between Shadowfax's ears. His heart was tripping over itself. “I don't remember any more than I told you.”
Gandalf was quiet for a moment. “When it comes back to you,” he said at last, almost gently, “you may come to me, if you like.”
“Alright,” Pippin said, trying to sound unbothered and jaunty. He only managed a sort of brittleness. “But I do not think it will. I am not very bright, you know, and there's more than half a chance that anything anybody says to me will fall right out of my head again, even…”
He faltered there. He could not speak lightly about it yet.
Even so, it was enough to head off the dangerous softness. Gandalf snorted and let go of his hand to flick the tip of his ear. “You are a fool, Peregrin Took,” he said. “But that is not the same as not being bright. If I showed you a hundred doors and told you of a hundred different dangers locked behind each of them, I believe you would remember them all perfectly and then go directly to the door leading to the most interesting trouble.”
Pippin rubbed his stinging ear, a little curl of reluctant warmth unspooling through the lingering horror. “Gandalf,” he said, and paused. He wanted to say something clever and impertinent back, something that would make the wizard sputter and huff like a rusty old tea kettle, something that would fix this and take them back to the comfortable back-and-forth of the journey before Moria. But all he said in the end was, quietly, “I missed you.”
Gandalf wrapped his arm around Pippin again and held him tightly in wordless answer.
He woke with a jolt, disoriented. Terror bore down like a boot on his chest and he was suffocating.
He did not know where he was. He was indoors, properly indoors for the first time in weeks, wrapped in his own blanket with cloth bunched up under his head for a pillow. There was tiled stone beneath him and a wall at his back, and the mingled light of fire and dawn played golden over dark pillars and walls. It was some sort of entryway to a great house, perhaps, but he could not remember how he came there. There were people about, he could hear them; a Man ran past in fine leather armor and jingling mail, but he took no notice of Pippin. Gandalf was nowhere in sight.
The fear crushed down again. Somebody cried out. Men came running through the open door and cowered down inside it. Nazgûl, somebody whispered, and the word spread like the rustling of wings.
Pippin pushed himself up and scrambled frantically back against the wall. The blood was loud in his ears, but it could not drown out the shriek, somewhere high above, the high horrible wail that he had heard first within the borders of his own Shire. He covered his ears with both hands and shut his eyes tightly, curling in on himself until all he could hear was the sound of his own harsh breath.
Even indoors, even with all his senses muffled, he thought he could point with perfect accuracy at where it was circling overhead. And, he realized with a sudden sick lurch, in another moment it would be aware of him with the same precision.
It was looking for him.
The air stirred. Fabric brushed his feet and large hands gripped him by the arms. He cried out and struggled.
“Only me,” said Gandalf, very close. “Hush, Pippin, it is only me.”
Pippin opened his eyes and stared up at him. Then he dove forward to hide in the wizard's robes.
He was never sure after how long it lasted. He could never remember it very clearly. The fear built into a delirium and details blurred and bled together. He only remembered the terrible precision of the threat. The Black Rider knew his name and the shape of his mind, it knew the cruel promises that the lord in the tower had made to him, and with every cry that came to them on the wind it was calling directly to Pippin.
Somehow it never quite found him. He could feel it groping, searching, the stabbing ice of its thought trying to pin him down. But it could not touch him. Every time it came close to fixing on his mind it slipped off again, redirected firmly like the north end of two lodestones pressed together.
There were arms around him, he realized distantly. He was not entirely in his body; he had sort of… floated off from it. It was still there, shaking and heaving for breath, hands pressed uselessly over ears. It just had nothing to do with him.
But there were arms around him. *
A voice was rumbling through him, familiar and comforting even though he could not make sense of the words. The Black Rider shrieked again, reached out once more to find him. His heart jerked horribly sideways and his insides flooded again with ice – but it could not perceive him.
High above, the Nazgûl wheeled away. The heaviness lifted from the air.
Pippin did not move. He did not open his eyes. But at last a rough gentle hand took hold of his wrist and drew it carefully away from his ear, and he did not fight it.
“There, my lad,” Gandalf said quietly. “Breathe a little slower for me now, if you please. It is gone.”
Gandalf was sitting on the floor and holding him, his cloak wrapped around him. Pippin could not remember being picked up. He could hear people talking in low voices, beginning to move around again, and he realized in an absent sinking sort of way that they could see him there, huddled in Gandalf's arms like a frightened child.
He did not care, he decided. He was not likely to see any of them again after today, so it did not really matter.
“It is gone,” said Gandalf again. “It did not find you, and it will not. You are safe.”
That left the question of whether Pippin minded Gandalf seeing him so frightened. But that pony had long since slipped its traces: he could not stop shivering, and he rather suspected that the wizard could feel the hammering of his heart where his hand moved steadily over Pippin’s back. There was nothing to be done for it, in any case. He could not stand. He did not think he could move.
So he kept still, curled up and tucked close against Gandalf, feeling shaky and sick and utterly drained.
“It was here for me,” he said at last. “Wasn't it? It was looking for me.”
“Yes,” said Gandalf. “They are looking for you. But there, my lad, you already knew that they would be.”
He sounded serious, but bewilderingly calm. Pippin paused, then said hesitantly, “They'll find me.”
“That they most certainly will not,” said Gandalf. “Not unless you walk outside and shout here I am loud enough to be heard from the clouds. That is not a suggestion, mind you.”
Pippin did not answer. The sound of his own name in the Nazgûl’s voice was still ricocheting in his mind, formed out of syllables which he had never heard and could not remember but that had meant him nonetheless.
Gandalf looked down at him, and his face softened. “Yes, they have your scent,” he said. “They came from Mordor for you, to bring you back to their master. But that is why you are here with me, dear boy, and not back with Théoden’s retinue. You are hidden. They will not find you.”
“Hidden,” Pippin repeated.
“Entirely hidden,” Gandalf answered. He ran a hand over Pippin’s head and then shifted to get up to his feet, still holding him. Pippin let him. It was terribly undignified, but he'd been carried around so much in the past fortnight that he was almost getting used to it.
And there was something about being hunted by Black Riders that made one desperately want to be held.
“Are you hiding me?” he asked as Gandalf carried him further into the house.
“Well reasoned,” said Gandalf.
“How?”
“By magic.”
“Gandalf,” said Pippin reproachfully.
“I do not know what you think you would do with a more precise explanation if you had one,” said Gandalf. “I have taken your spirit within the sphere of my own and hidden us both from their sight. Does that satisfy you?”
“Of course not,” said Pippin, but he still felt strange and foggy and had to shut his eyes for a moment. He could feel Gandalf turning to the side, hear the sound of his footsteps changing as he entered a corridor. There were voices as they passed doorways, more men speaking in hushed voices. “Is this Minas Tirith?”
Gandalf snorted. “Good gracious, no,” he said. “This is Meduseld, the seat of Théoden. The people are returning home from Helm’s Deep and Edoras must be ready to receive them. I must return to council, my lad, and you must sleep. We have a good deal more riding ahead of us.”
The sound of the air changed again. They had come to a great mead hall, Pippin saw when he opened his eyes, but the table was spread with maps and ledgers and there was no smell of food at all. Five or six men were clustered around the table with their heads bent down; only one looked up as they entered.
“You'll do very well here,” said Gandalf, turning to the side. He pushed back a curtain covering a little alcove in the wall just inside the door. There was a serving cart stored there on its wheels: he rolled it away and knelt to set Pippin down. “Sleep, now, if you can. I will be close.”
“Wait,” said Pippin, and grasped at Gandalf’s sleeve before he could depart.
Gandalf paused, and Pippin realized with a rush of embarrassment that– that Gandalf was important, that he was needed by many more people than Pippin, that he himself was nothing but an inconvenient burden. He met Gandalf's eyes and quickly let go of his sleeve, his face burning.
“Aren't you going to rest?” he asked. His own voice sounded very small in his ears.
Gandalf reached to spread out Pippin's blanket. “Soon,” he said. “In an hour or so. Once I know how the land lies.”
Pippin did not lie down. His throat felt tight, and his heart was still pounding sick and heavy, and he was fighting the entirely unreasonable urge to beg Gandalf to just let him sleep under his chair until he was finished so he would not have to be any further away.
“Here, my lad,” murmured Gandalf. He was unclasping his long grey cloak and spreading it to cover Pippin. “You are safe here. I will not go out of earshot without waking you. Go to sleep.”
The cloak was deliciously warm where it settled around him. It was of the same make as his own cloak, the smooth dense weave the Lothlórien elves made of mellyrn fiber, and it smelled not unpleasantly of horse and tall grass and the wind before a storm. Pippin buried his face in it and let Gandalf's big warm hands coax him to lie down.
“Close your eyes,” Gandalf said. “Breathe deep until you feel calmer, and have some water. I will be nearby.”
There were a lot of things Pippin meant to say. But his thoughts felt very tossed about and disordered, and all that came out was, “You smell like Shadowfax.”
Gandalf let out a short breath of surprised, amused affront. “And you smell of Entwash and trouble,” he said. “Good morning, Peregrin.”
Pippin bunched up a fold of the cloak for a pillow. “Are you still hiding me?” he asked as Gandalf got to his feet and made to depart.
The wizard paused for a moment and looked down at him, his hand on the curtain. “I have not stopped for a moment,” he answered. “Not since you came back to us.”
“Oh,” said Pippin.
“Go to sleep,” Gandalf told him, and closed the curtain.
—✧—
Who are you?
The presence that bore down on him was vast, older and stronger than he could comprehend. There was a piercing, alien intelligence there, a mind that saw the world in levers and gears and knew just where to press to bring it into alignment with its will. And its focus was all on him, alight with cruel amusement.
It would tear him apart. It would crush the breath out of him, fill his veins with fire. He was nothing, only the barest scrap of life, but his pain could last forever. A heartbeat of agony could be spun out into an age.
Unless he answered. Unless he let it in.
The pain built, redoubled. He could not hear the silence of the sleeping camp, his own stuttering breath, the urgent drumming of his pulse in his ears. He could not feel the cool night air against his skin – only flames, licking up from the stone at his hands and arms, searing without devouring. Only the unyielding grip on his mind, the brutal prying at the walls around his thoughts.
Time slowed. Hours passed, and years. There was nothing but the agony, nothing but the horrible desperate loneliness of unending pain, nothing but his own foolishness reflected in black glass.
Pippin shattered.
A hobbit, he answered at last. The door opened, and Sauron flooded his mind.