b2mem | An Unseen Question, by Rhymer

B2MeM Challenge: Middle-Earth marketplace 2015. The prompt was to create a fanwork that answers one of the questions on this test on the Tolkien Sarcasm page. I chose question 8 - if Frodo hung the Ring on a chain, why didn't the chain turn invisible? – and turned the question over to Middle Earth's sharpest minds. Well, to Merry and Pippin, anyway.

Format: Short story
Genre: Humour
Rating: G
Warnings: None
Characters: Pippin and Merry, with some Frodo, Elrond and Gandalf
Pairings: None

Summary: "The caterpillar started it." Merry and Pippin are infected with a sudden bout of investigative fervour. Can Rivendell cope with two lively hobbits whose hunger for answers threatens to surpass even their hunger for food?

The caterpillar started it. It was a--

"A caterpillar started it?" said Gandalf, doing that thing with his eyebrows. Elrond just looked, his silence as loud as the common room in the Green Dragon, but less convivial.

"Well," Pippin admitted, "it started with a caterpillar, and that's the same thing, isn't it." He said it with an intonation designed to discourage them from considering it a question.

The eyebrows and the silence surveyed him.

"It was a clothes moth caterpillar," Pippin added helpfully. "I didn't think you'd have them here. Clothes moths, I mean. They seem a bit… ordinary for you. Do you know about mothballs? If it does come to war, it would be a shame to go to your wardrobe to get your ancient battle robe and find it nothing but holes. It would undermine…" His voice trailed away. He moistened his lips.

"We know," said Elrond, "about mothballs."

Of course he did. His grandfather or great-uncle or third cousin had probably invented them. "There you are, then," Pippin said, reminding himself to be undaunted. "It was there without any right to be, so the caterpillar started it."

******

Frodo had fallen asleep on the settle again, surrounded by the remains of afternoon tea. Pippin finished the final pastry, licking the sauce of legends from his fingers. "I wonder…" he said.

"Shh!" Merry nodded meaningfully towards Frodo.

"He won't hear us," Pippin said, and then he stopped. He stared. His hand closed on something soft and delightful. He breathed in and out again, still staring, as his unthinking hand delivered wonders to his mouth, wonders wrought of lemon. "Look, Merry!" he breathed.

The caterpillar was crawling across Frodo's shirt, labouring across the silken troughs and ridges. Closer, ever closer it came to the gap between two buttons. Nearer, ever nearer it came to the place where the Ring, threaded onto its new chain, had peeped out from its hiding place when Frodo had slumped sideways.

"Are you thinking what I'm thinking, Merry?" Pippin whispered.

"Oh, I am!" said Merry. Good old Merry! They understood each other so well; could communicate, sometimes, without needing to say a word. Where would Pippin be without him?

Pippin grabbed another lemony morsel, just three; this was far more fascinating than mere food. He edged forward, hardly daring to breathe. It was almost there! He willed it onwards, urging it not to give in as it scaled the final mountain range.

Pippin and Merry both spoke at the same time, whispers layered upon whispers. Merry stopped first. "--invisible caterpillar," Pippin's voice said into the gap left by Merry's silence.

Merry blinked.

Pippin swallowed. "Um, what were you saying?"

"I said that now Frodo's asleep," said Merry, "he won't be wanting that plate of sausagemeat fancies next to his feet."

"They do need to be eaten fresh," Pippin agreed, "and Frodo's likely to sleep for quite some time. I wonder what herbs they put in the sausagemeat. It tastes--"

"But you were saying something else, weren't you, Pippin?" Merry said. "Nothing to do with sausagemeat. Nothing to do with food at all."

Pippin felt obscurely ashamed, as if he had failed somehow in his duty as a hobbit. "There's a caterpillar," he explained. "On Frodo's shirt. Look!" It was still climbing, he saw, and still on course. "I was just wondering what would happen if it actually crawled through the Ring. I wondered if it would become an--"

"Invisible caterpillar," they said together.

Merry laughed out loud. Pippin grinned.

They leant forward together. The caterpillar was almost there. Close, it was so close! It--

What were those herbs? Pippin reached for another fancy. As he did so, his hand brushed Frodo's foot.

Frodo started awake. Even before his eyes were fully open, his hand was clapped to his chest, patting, seeking. It closed into a desperate fist, and the Ring was gone. "I fell asleep," he said, his rueful smile at odds with the panic in his eyes. "What are you two fellows up to?"

"Stealing your afternoon tea," Pippin said, cramming sausagemeat fancies into his mouth and trying his best to look young and incorrigible. As he had hoped, the panic in Frodo's eyes eased, and his smile became fond and genuine.

"Oh look," said Merry loudly, pointing at the floor. "A caterpillar. I can see it. There."

******

Snow was falling a dozen leagues away. Bare branches shivered in the wind, whispering of the coming cold. Like a dark strand on a loom, shadow was woven through the singing.

"And one of the periain is darting around on the high slopes like a leaf on the wind," said Lindir.

Bringing his thoughts back from distant places, Elrond looked up at the heights. "Master Took is trying to catch a rabbit, it seems."

"And, being mortal, he cannot merely bid one come to him," said Lindir, "but must do this… toing and froing." He said it in Westron, a phrase doubtless learnt from Bilbo.

Up on the slopes, Pippin paused in his chasing and bent over, doubtless gasping for breath.

"Why does he wish to catch a rabbit?" asked Lindir. "We have given them everything they could wish for."

"Perhaps because it eludes him," Elrond said. "Men ever desire that which they cannot have. They strive to attain that which is hard to reach. Of course," he added, "Master Peregrin is no Man. But he is young and lively and he has been pent inside for many days." He smiled. "It is better that he chase rabbits than wreak havoc in our halls."

Having recovered his breath, Pippin was off again, racing through the heather.

"What will he do if he catches one?" Lindir asked. "Bring it back here? Keep it as a pet? Mortal young ones like to do that, I believe." He stepped forward, grasping the railing. "As Estel did with the baby goat."

The snow crept closer. Branches rattled like bones.

"The injured goat," Lindir said. "The goat that soon recovered, thanks to the herblore that Estel had learnt from you." It sounded faintly accusing.

Elrond winced inwardly. Nobody who had lived through those hours would ever forget them.

"Rabbits are swift and quick to panic," Lindir said. "May I suggest that the House of Elrond has, and has always had, a No Rabbit Policy?" This, too, he said in Westron, perhaps echoing something he had encountered in the world of Men.

******

"A No Rabbit Policy?" Pippin echoed, when they stopped him at the bridge.

For the hundredth time at least, the rabbit kicked his bruised ribs with back legs as strong as a donkey's. It squirmed and squirmed, and this time, he stopped fighting it.

"Oh," he said, as the rabbit went bounding away.

******

It was easy to fall asleep in Rivendell. If dreams came, they were gentle ones, and they left him with nothing but a memory of softness. Most times, even waking was pleasant; just drifting smoothly awake, lapped by song.

A small sound caused Frodo to open his eyes. "Oh," he said, smiling. His hand closed on the chain around his neck, and he forced it to unclasp again. "Good…" He frowned. "Morning?"

"Afternoon," said Merry. His smile looked somewhat forced. Cradled in his arms was a--

"Kitten," said Frodo. "You have a kitten."

"Well, yes," said Merry. "Yes, I do. Pippin tried a rabbit first, but that came to nothing. Did you know that Rivendell has a No Rabbit Policy? But then I found a cat behind the kitchens, a serene elven cat. Perhaps it's employed to keep mice out of the larders."

Pippin grinned. "It didn't keep us out of the larders."

"No." Merry and Pippin exchanged a quick grin, and sighed together in happy remembrance.

"Do elves need cats to keep mice away, anyway?" Pippin said. "I thought they would just…" He waved his hand in circles. "Magic them away, or ask them politely to leave. Mind you," he said, "they do appear to have clothes moths, so maybe they can't…"

"The kitten," Frodo reminded them pointedly.

"Ah. Yes." Merry glanced down at the bundle in his arms just as it decided that it was no longer content to be a bundle. It squirmed. Merry fought it. "I followed… the serene cat… out into the valley, and I found… another cat and a… litter of kittens, so we--"

"Brought one here," Frodo said.

It was a lengthy battle. The fortunes of war ebbed and flowed, favouring first one side and then the other, but at length the battle came to an end.

"Or tried to," Pippin said sadly.

******

They consoled themselves over blackberry tart.

"I think its paw was too big for the Ring, anyway," Pippin said.

"Smoky's paws were very dainty," Merry protested, "and soft as silk." His hands throbbed, blackberry juice stinging in the cuts. "Until they turned into knives," he said ruefully.

"But if the paw was too big, we could have turned her around and poked the tip of her tail through…" Pippin frowned, clearly struck by a thought. "Does it have to be worn on the finger? It's a Ring, so that's where people wear it, but would it still make you invisible if you put it on your toe, or…" He circled a sticky finger around the end of his nose, then grabbed a lock of hair and gripped it with a circle made of finger and thumb.

The long scratch along Merry's forearm was still slowly oozing blood. "It was probably for the best," he said. "I overheard Gandalf saying something about how the Ring tries always to bend its wearer to its will. Do kittens have strong will?"

"That one did," Pippin chuckled, "when you were fighting it. You were beaten by that little kitten."

"We were taking too big a risk," Merry declared. "Smoky was such a tiny kitten. It we had managed to get her to wear the Ring, she might have been subjected to the will of Sauron immediately, and become evil. An evil, invisible kitten."

Pippin grinned.

"That was why I let her go," Merry said, investing his voice with determination and resolution. "Because I realised this just in time."

Pippin's grin turned into a laugh. Merry tried to hold out, to preserve the fiction, but it was impossible to resist for more than a few moments.

They laughed together for several minutes.

******

"Seriously, though," Pippin said, as they rested after a hard day's labour repairing things, cleaning things, sweeping things up and lavishing apologies on everything else, "how does the Ring decide what gets turned invisible?"

It had rained for several days. For some reason, Gandalf had seemed enormously keen on them going outside despite this fact, muttering something about "out of mischief," or words to that effect. When Pippin had pointed out that outside had rain and inside had cake, Gandalf had started to talk about scouts, and whether it was too much to hope that they would return ahead of time. "Odd," Pippin said now, remembering it, then shook his head briskly, returning to the present.

"We haven't been able to test it on rabbits or kittens or caterpillars," Pippin said, "but perhaps we can experiment with something less… wriggly."

"Frodo wears it on a chain," Merry said, which hardly seemed relevant.

There was a loud crash somewhere, and somebody shouted something in elvish. (Pippin did not know elvish, but he had heard those words before. He had repeated them to Bilbo, but Bilbo had answered that he must have misremembered them, because the closest sense Bilbo could make of them was, as he put it, 'an impolite word applied to a cat.'")

"The chain is not invisible!" Merry declared portentously.

"It's an elven chain," Pippin said. "Perhaps it's elf magic." He frowned, trying to pin down memories from the past. "He used to wear it on a chain attached to his belt, with the Ring tucked into his trouser pocket."

Merry nodded. "I saw that chain."

"So did I, so it wasn't invisible." Pippin bit his lip. It was hard to think, especially so many moments since supper. "That wasn't a special elven chain. Although it could have been a dwarven one?" He shook his head. "It certainly looked like a normal, everyday sort of chain."

"But how did he fasten the Ring to the chain?" Merry said. "He said that he kept it on a chain because it had a habit of changing size and trying to slip off the finger, so he kept it tethered to so it couldn't run away no matter how it mischievous it felt."

"It was a normal, everyday chunky sort of chain," Pippin said, plucking a thick stem from the flowerpot on the sideboard. He formed a circle with the thumb and forefinger of his left hand, and passed the stem through it. "Imaging slipping a ring on your finger if there's already a chunky chain running through it."

"Perhaps there was a clasp." Merry plucked a slender stem from the pot, pushed it through the ring formed by Pippin's fingers, and twisted it into a small loop. Taking the thick stem from Pippin's other hand, he threaded it through the loop. "The clasp is attached to the chain, and the clasp goes around the ring. When Frodo puts the ring on, his finger is sharing space with a slim clasp, rather than a thick woven chain."

"It's still awkward." Pippin tried to wave his arm around, but was pinned by the stem. "When you're wearing the Ring, your hand is tethered to your belt. Imagine trying to defend yourself…"

They fell silent. The stems fell to the floor. This time their thoughts were the same, beyond all doubt.

Weathertop.

Pippin swallowed. "The new chain looks even shorter than the old one. And this time his hand will be tethered to his neck, and that's even worse than his belt. And I thought elves were meant to be wise."

Merry bent to pick up the stems, tidying them away. "When you were watching the caterpillar, did you see if the chain went right through the Ring?"

Pippin tried to picture the scene. He had been eating lemon cakes at first, and then sausage meat fancies. If he concentrated on the taste, it might make the memory clearer. "I don't know," he admitted.

"Well," said Merry, "it's obvious what we need to do now."

Pippin nodded. There was no need to say it out loud. He and Merry--

Then he remembered their misunderstanding at the start of all this. Best make sure. "Find out if there's a clasp and if there is, if it's invisible?" He moistened his dry lips. "Or get some sausagemeat fancies?"

******

It was never truly dark in Rivendell. Even when the sky was clouded, the valley shimmered with the faint glow of starlight.

"What are you doing?" Frodo asked. He had not been asleep, not this time. As the weeks passed, not even Rivendell was enough to keep the thoughts at bay.

"I… That is, we…" said Pippin.

"Er…" Merry added.

"We were checking on you," Pippin said. "On your wound. Because we might be leaving soon, and…"

Glistening starlight showed the collection of items in Merry's hands. When Merry saw that Frodo was looking at them, he thrust them hastily in his pocket. "Just… things," he said. "We happened to have them with us when we were passing."

"Um… Goodnight," said Pippin.

"Goodnight," they all said, all voices together.

******

"Things?" Pippin asked, afterwards.

"I was talking to that nice elf in the library," Merry explained. "Tegoldir. He said that it's always important to classify things properly and to be systematic."

"What does that mean?" Pippin frowned at the unfamiliar word.

"It means…" said Merry, who was older and wiser, leader in all their games. "What would we learn, really, if we found that there was a clasp, and it was invisible?"

"That the clasp is invisible," Pippin said. "But Frodo woke up before we could discover that."

Merry began to empty his pockets. "A metal chain," he said. "A stem, part of a plant." He laid the items down on the table as he named them. "A leather thong that used to be part of an animal. A lock of hair that used to be part of a hobbit."

"Ooh," said Pippin. "Clever!"

Merry beamed. "One by one, we poke them through the Ring and note down what happens, and then move on to…"

"Hair that's still attached to a hobbit! A live animal! Then everything on two legs: goblins, trolls…"

Merry shuddered. "Best not. But it worked on Gollum, and he was a… thing. So you don't have to be a person. " He tilted his head to one side. "It probably would have worked on Smoky."

Pippin sighed. "It's a pity Frodo woke up. Why didn't we think to try when he was asleep for four days?"

******

"Golf?" Frodo asked.

"Golf?" said Sam.

"We Tooks invented it," Pippin said, "although for some strange reason, we prefer not to talk about it, almost as if inventing it was a mistake. Anyway…" He swung the stout stick, crudely carved into a club. "The rain has stopped, and we've been idling around inside for too long, just eating, and we've got a difficult journey ahead of us."

"Good exercise." Merry backed him up, nodding enthusiastically.

They ran around for a while, gleefully swinging and hitting and thumping. Behind them and above them, Rivendell seemed to be uncharacteristically noisy, lots of voices all speaking at once, incomprehensible things in elvish, probably nothing.

"Hot exercise," Pippin said, taking off his coat and unfastening his top few buttons in a hint-filled manner.

Several more minutes passed.

"Very hot indeed," said Frodo with a wry smile, his fingers working at his top button.

Pippin and Merry leant forward, quivering on the balls of their feet. "Ah," Pippin breathed, and "Oh," said Merry.

"And that's the end of the game," Pippin said, "as the Tooks play it."

Frodo and Sam stared at them.

******

It appeared to be a delegation. Elves from the kitchen were there, and elves from the library. Elves from the halls and the gardens, and elves who liked to craft things, things that they preferred not to be broken.

"When are the last scouts expected?" they asked.

Before mortals, elves often tried to appear impassive. There was nothing impassive about them now.

"Perhaps the Fellowship can depart without waiting for them?" they suggested.

******

Pippin opened his door to a somewhat sheepish Merry. "I…" Merry raked his hand through his hair. "I appear to have annoyed an elf."

"But they're wise and serene and ageless!" Pippin cried. "How can little fellows like us do anything to annoy them? Why, I believe they barely notice us most of the time."

Merry sat down heavily. His hand reached out blindly for the table beside the chair, but the plate that rested there held nothing but crumbs. "We both saw the Ring the other day."

"There is no clasp," Pippin said. "The chain is threaded right through the Ring, which must make it awkward to wear, but perhaps it's a very thin chain."

"Yes." Merry passed his hand across his face. "It's too late to find out if the clasp on the old chain was invisible, so we have to work with what we've got. So I thought… 'Merry, my lad, it's an elven chain. Perhaps it's special.' So I went to find a blacksmith."

"Do elves do metalwork?" Pippin asked. "I thought they were all about trees and leaves and wooden things. I thought it was dwarves who did things with metal."

"That's what I told him," Merry said, "the elf I found in the forge. I apologised for troubling him, and said it was only because I couldn't find any of those dwarves. He seemed… offended."

"Really?" Pippin raised his eyebrows.

Merry cleared his throat. "Some elves, it seems, are very good at metalwork. Famous for it, in fact. They made the rings, you know."

"Elves made the Ring?" Pippin shot to his feet.

"No, Sauron made the Ring," Merry said, "but elves made other rings that were almost as special but less evil. I think my elf might have been friends with them, and he…" Merry sighed. "Anyway, it was an honest mistake. Anyone could have made it. He looked like a poor struggling sort of smith. When I got there, he was looking very solemnly at a broken sword, so I said…" He shut his eyes, looking pained.

"What?" Pippin prompted.

"I said, 'Never mind. Everyone makes mistakes when they're learning. The next one won't break.'"

"Oh," said Pippin.

"Oh," agreed Merry.

"Strider's got a broken sword," Pippin said. "He showed it to us in Bree when you were having your walk. I wonder if he bought it from here and it broke the first time he used it."

"Well," said Merry, "I moved on to the next elf, and I screwed up all my courage and asked him if there was anything special about the chain they put through the Ring, and he looked inscrutable, which was no help at all."

"They do that," Pippin said, "don't they."

"So I moved on the next elf," said Merry, "and I asked him why the chain doesn't go invisible, and he said 'because.'"

"Because?" Pippin echoed. "That's no answer."

"I think he was going to say something else, but the first elf came back with the broken sword, so I suddenly remembered that I was late for something important, and left."

******

It turned out that, despite appearances, it was quite easy to annoy elves.

"Or perhaps," Merry said sadly, "it is difficult for most people to annoy elves, but we have managed to do it somehow."

The list of grievances was surprisingly long.

"Well," said Pippin, "a caterpillar started it…"

******

"Are they very cross with us, Gandalf?" Pippin asked, finding him afterwards in the starlight.

Gandalf said nothing.

"It's just because…" Pippin began, but how could he say it? How could he say that they were afraid? They had clamoured to go on this quest, so how could they say that they feared it? How could he say that the singing and the stories had been enough at first, but soon had become less than enough? How could he say that he chafed, desperate to start, but desperate at the same time to be back home? How could he say that they had needed something, some silly, ridiculous project, to distract them and keep themselves from lying awake every night staring wide-eyed into the future?

"I know the reason," Gandalf said gently, "and so does Master Elrond."

"Oh," Pippin said. "So." He licked his lips. "So while you're here, why isn't--?"

"Because…" Gandalf said.

"Because?" Pippin asked. "Because what?" But Gandalf merely patted Pippin gently on the head, and stood to leave.

He was smiling, though. It was enough.

******

The end

******

Note: I have to admit that while considering the issue of chains, I got entirely distracting by considering the dramatic climax of the entire novel. (I urge you to stop reading now, for your own sake.) When Frodo claimed the Ring, did he pause to remove it from its chain or pull the chain over his head? I very much doubt he would have had the time or presence of mind to do so. He tells us way back in chapter two that he keeps it clasped to a chain to stop it treacherously embiggening itself and slipping off while he's wearing it, and this, more than any other moment, is a time when Frodo would very much want to make sure that the Ring didn't slip off his finger. (Kind of embarrasing to drop it when you've just made such a dramatic claim.)

But if the Ring was still attached to its chain when Frodo put it on, how did Gollum manage to bite it off so easily? I have been shamefully diverted by the image of Gollum crunching through the finger only to be defeated by the bite-proof elf-wrought chain, and ending up dangling awkwardly from Frodo's neck, caught there by the mouth like a fish.