Random Slashy Interlude III: Return of the Brandybuck
WARNING: This is slash, ie if you don’t want to know about m/m relationships, stop reading. Warning for readers of slash: Het content. Warning for readers of het: slash content. Warning for readers of other fandoms: Hobbit content.
Authors: Lady Alyssa and Random Dent.
Disclaimer: JRR Tolkien owns the Fellowship. Debt to ‘Father Ted’ in the characterisation of Gandalf. General situation debt to the ‘Young Ones’. Charlie Dimmock belongs to herself, and we mean no offence. Pussy Galore belongs to James Bond (in a very literal way) who belongs to Ian Fleming.
Rating: R (comedic violence; flatmate strife; Language; gratuitous relationship strife)
Story notes: Having never watched ‘Queer as Folk’ and Random Dent’s attempts to drink her way down Canal Street (the village, ie the gay bits for those who haven’t worked it out yet) in Manchester ended up with her getting completely sloshed in the first pub, so we are prepared to be corrected on anything we’ve got wrong.
Warning: Many of the things Merry and Frodo get up to in Manchester will get you a smack in the mouth if not worse, that is why this is a work of fiction.
“I think that its time we talked about something.”
“Ok. Ummmm. Wasn’t the siege of Acre fun?” Aragorn looked enthusiastic, as he always did before he started on one of his military anecdotes.
“No, I meant we need to talk about us. And what the hell do you mean, ‘fun’? Sieges aren’t supposed to be fun!”
“They are if you’re on the outside!”
“No they are not. You are trying to get me off the subject. This needs to be talked about.”
“Alright. Umm. I think you are a really quite nice elf.”
“ ‘Quite nice’. I merit a ‘quite nice’” Legolas had his arms folded.
“Umm. Very nice?”
“Nicer than Arwen?”
“Yeeeeees. But that’s not hard. Pippin’s nicer than Arwen.” Aragorn realised immediately he’d said the wrong thing.
“Ah. So back to kinky hobbit loving again are we? Just exactly how devoted were you to Frodo on the quest? And who was it who suggested we risk our lives running after, ooh yes I remember now, Merry and Pippin? Hunt some orc, my arse, hunt some hobbit more like.”
“No, no, I didn’t mean that. I meant that you’re lots nicer than Arwen because the average orc on a good day is nicer than Arwen.”
“Ah. The torrent of praise goes on. I am nicer than an orc, and Pippin. Forgive me if I do not melt at your feet. Why don’t you write me a sonnet, Shakespeare bloody well appreciated me!”
Aragorn was trying to oblige. “Ummm. There was a young elf called Legolas,
Who had the most wonderful…”
“SONNET! You uncultured idiot, not a dirty limerick!” Legolas turned round and crossed his arms, deliberately ignoring Aragorn. He did relent slightly after a few minutes. “Do you really think I have a wonderful…”
“Oh yes. And lots of other wonderful things as well. I’m just not very good at talking about it.”
Legolas relented. He turned round to see Aragorn smiling in a hopeful, yet also manic, worried fashion.
“We do need to talk. You been split up from Arwen for more than a century, but you’re still not over her.”
“Yes I am. She took the children, remember? Well, the children’s mortal remains. ”
“Why do you yell out her name in your sleep?”
“Those are nightmares, and really horrible ones as well. It’s not like I’m having … those kind of dreams about her.”
Legolas couldn’t resist the target. “Yes, we all know you only have those kind of dreams about Boromir.”
Aragorn looked sulky. “’Snot my fault. I was drugged.”
“Yes, yes I know. What are the nightmares about?”
“You’ll laugh.”
“No I won’t”
Aragorn looked doubtful, but told him anyway. “I’m in Harvey Nichols and I’m being chased by hundreds of seven foot tall cheese straws that all look like Arwen. And when we get to the lingerie section I’m trapped, and I can’t get out, and then I wake up.”
“If they let you into Harvey Nicks it must be a dream. Sorry, alright, the nightmares aren’t nice, but don’t you see? It’s all subconscious. If you’re still dreaming about her, you’re still thinking about her. I don’t know what Freud would have to say about the phallic symbolism of a cheese straw, but he had more one track mind than yours.”
“Of course I’m still thinking about her. We were married for a few millennia, I’m not about to forget about her overnight.”
Legolas knew it was time for action, but there was no way he was taking Aragorn to couple counsellor, it would just be too embarrassing. But the situation definitely required action and not the kind of action Aragorn would suggest, that had been the answer to everything for far too long.
********
“Mr Gamgee?”
Sam looked down from the ladder he was using to trim the top of the hedge in Mrs Arbuthnot’s garden.
“Yes?”
Mrs Arbuthnot went into stage whisper “I thought you ought to know that next door are getting Ground Force in tomorrow.”
Sam froze. “Mr Gamgee, are you alright?”
“Ground Force?”
“Yes, you know, with Alan Titchmarsh.”
That hadn’t been who Sam had been thinking about, but the whole concept of … her being next door. He let go of the ladder. Luckily, due to Sam’s gardening expertise there was something soft and yielding for him to land in: the compost heap.
The wheels of his mind were turning faster than a hamster wheel turned by a hamster on too many performance enhancing drugs.
//weacheeorrrrghooeewrghehahahahahahahahahahahahweeeeeeorghurrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr rrrwrororghurrrrrrrrrrghurrrrrrrr…Charlie! No, wait, get a grip on yourself. You have to look smart. No, not too smart, or else she won’t think you’re a proper gardener. Lush and verdant, think lush and verdant. How on earth do you look lush and verdant? Damn, going to have to ask Pippin how to talk to women. Second thoughts, no, will ask Frodo, he’s in the WI and hasn’t been assaulted by anyone female. Except Rose of course…//
“Mr Gamgee? Do you need me to call an ambulance? You’re looking very poorly…”
It was at this point that Sam realised that he was still lying on the compost heap and beginning to sink into it slowly.
*****
“Merry, don’t you think it’s time you came out of the central heating cupboard.” Frodo was feeling a little uneasy about the role reversal issues involved in this; he wasn’t used to seeing a crisis from this side of a door.
“No! Pippin doesn’t love me because he only likes girls.” Merry could be heard sniffing and then bursting into tears again.
“No, Pippin doesn’t love you because he’s deeply in love with himself and there isn’t room for anyone else. Please come out of the cupboard.”
The door opened a bit and Merry stuck his head out at the same time as Legolas walked out of his bedroom.
“Coming out of the closet again, Merry? I thought the whole incident with Lord Alfred Douglas made it abundantly clear which team you batted for.”
Merry withdrew back into the central heating cupboard. “Why did you have to bring that up? I thought we agreed never to mention it ever again?” He started sniffling again and Frodo, for lack of any better ideas tried to push another tissue under the door.
“You can’t stay in there all weekend, we’ve got plans remember? The whole weekend ahead of us…”
“Plans?” Asked Legolas.
“No plans, no plans whatsoever that you would be interested in. Sod off.”
But Legolas wasn’t willing to let the matter drop yet, so Frodo decided to get into the cupboard with Merry as a means of escape. However, Merry took this entirely the wrong way.
“Mmmph, not now, Merry, this is neither the time nor the place. Eeeouwh! I said no, look I’ve got a regulator gasket stuck in my back.”
“Ok, later then. You did get round to washing the costumes, didn’t you?”
******
Later that night, in a casualty department in Manchester:
“Again? This is the third one this evening.”
“Third what?”
“Really short drag queen in near-drowning incident.”
“Maybe there’s some kind of theme night on in the village.”
“What? All acts under five feet tall?”
“I don’t know, why don’t you ask them, the other two are probably in a better state to answer questions by now.”
“Whit d’ye mean ‘the ither two’?” A very small, very cross, very wet, and because it was a canal he had fallen into, not terribly pleasant smelling Pussy Galore sat up and tried to be threatening at the doctor.
“Ah, obviously not a theme night then. Could someone either restrain or sedate this one and I’ll go talk to the others.”
“Oh, I like that, ‘someone restrain or sedate him’. I wonder who that someone is going to be?”
******
“Go on, enlighten me. Is it National Drown a Short Arse Drag Queen Day and no one’s told me?”
Merry and Frodo looked hurt. “Look, we told you, we fell in.”
“Bloody stupid place to put a canal,” said Merry, with feeling.
Both of them neglected to mention that the reason they fell in was because they had stepped out for a breath of fresh air, started kissing and lost track of where the canal was.
Up to that point their evening had been going well. Estella and Lobelia (“the North’s biggest, smallest drag act!”), had given a highly successful first performance of their new Abba act; even though Abba was done to death, Estella and Lobelia liked to think they did it particularly well.
The doctor looked at the two very small drag queens, still wearing their sequined dresses (no one had been able to persuade either of them to take them off). They didn’t seem to be that drunk, but perhaps their little swim had sobered them up. It wasn’t like this was an unusual sight on a Friday evening. The doctor thought about this again, no, people falling in the canal was normal and one wet and confused drag queen provided the occasional bit of entertainment for the department, but three in one night was definitely not normal by anyone’s definition. If it was, then it wasn’t anyone he ever had, or ever wanted to meet.
*****
“Do you think we should have intervened?” asked Aragorn.
“No, it was Pippin, he was fighting. He can look after himself and some of those women were pretty big, did you really want to get pulled into that?”
“Well…no. But what if they managed to kill him, or do him some serious damage?”
“He’s immortal, all it’ll do is really annoy him.”
Aragorn and Legolas were sitting on bar stools in a pub as far away as possible from where they had seen Pippin getting into the fight. There was a small collection of glasses in front of them, split evenly between pint glasses and those containing paper umbrellas and some suspicious lumps which were possibly some kind of cherry. Legolas was starting to lean towards Aragorn a bit, but not enough to cause too much comment even in a pub that didn’t have a name like the Blue Parrot.
“But immortal Elves can get killed, so what if immortal Hobbits can too?”
“He’s been around Gandalf far too long, he’s learned things.”
“Yeah…remember when they beheaded him?”
The barman looked up from polishing a glass, memorised the two men having the strange conversation in case their faces ever turned up on ‘Crimewatch’ and went back to very diligently pretending to not pay any attention whatsoever.
“Well, if you remember right, it wasn’t a proper beheading. I’ve never seen such an incompetent executioner.”
“Imagine beheading the priest who’s there to give the last rites…”
The barman decided it was really time for his break.
“But it would have been interesting to watch, I mean his brain has so little to with his body that he probably would have run round and round like a chicken until the blood supply ran out.”
The barman decided he’d never really been cut out for pulling pints. Maybe he should apply for something a little safer, on an oil rig or in a bomb disposal squad, for example.
*****
Pippin sat back and fondled one of his false breasts absentmindedly. He had no idea how he’d actually acquired them, or any other part of the Pussy Galore costume for that matter, but he felt that this was something he could get used to. The Pussy Galore costume that is, not being in casualty, although given his past record of what happened to him on a Friday night, maybe get used to casualty departments was a good idea too.
However, there was the question of the other two short drag queens. His curiosity, and other things, were awakened by this concept. It could be an interesting way to round off the evening…
Pippin got up and started squelching round the casualty department in search of the other two diminutive drag queens. He wasn’t sure where to begin looking, but decided that logically they should be behind one of the many curtains, it was just a matter of finding out which one.
He pulled back one of the curtains at random. “Hey! How’d ye get that stuck in there pal?”
It was only Pippin’s quick reflexes that saved him from the hurled abuse and bedpans. He decided to try a more subtle approach, next time he would look under the curtains instead of pulling them back. You never knew when you might get the chance to look up someone’s skirt at the same time.
Three curtains along, Pippin was met with what he was sure was the skirt he was looking for. It was purple and sequined and he shuffled some more of himself under the curtain to get a better look at the face attached to the skirt. This, however, was not what Pippin had been looking for.
“Merry! Frodo! Whit the hell are youse doin’ here?”
“What the sod’s tha doin ere…Pushy?” This last comment was added in a very bad Sean Connery accent, in fact, even worse than Sean Connery’s actual accent (only a Scotsman could get away with a Scottish accent that unconvincing).
“And what’re you doing here wi’ him?”
“What do you mean, ‘with him’, it was you that started the argument.”
“It was you that… brought him into it and started ignoring me, and it was you in the dog collar and leash!”
“I thought you liked the dog collar and leash, they were your idea.” At this point Merry burst into tears again, although thankfully all of his mascara had washed off in the canal and so it couldn’t make tracks down his face.”
Frodo jumped into the argument to defend Merry. “This is all your fault, Peregrin! If you’d treated him like he deserved to be treated instead of going off with all those other men, women…things, none of this would have happened!”
“Whit d’ye mean, ‘my fault’ ye little house breakin’ hoor! Ye’ll sleep wi’ anythin’ than comes through the door.”
“What about you? There are hard working prostitutes who get through less men a night than you!”
Merry held his hands up in an attempt to get the others to stop, the well known gesture that precedes all drunken fights. Pippin tried to push him out of the way so he could get a better shot at punching Frodo for that last comment, but that was what finally pushed Merry’s tolerance of Pippin’s behaviour too far and he lunged at him.
“Just leave it, he’s not worth it!” cried Frodo, grabbing hold of Merry’s arm as he brought it round to punch Pippin.
By now the entire casualty department, doctors, nurses, receptionists, cleaners, patients and relatives had gathered round to watch the fight. It wasn’t every day you saw three short men in drag fighting and they’d even given up trying to be subtle, it wasn’t as if they would have noticed anyone else at this point anyway.
Someone briefly considered called security, but abandoned the thought as they wanted to know what happened, and even if they had it wouldn’t have done any good because the security guards were already there watching the fight with everyone else. The medical staff had decided that however long it would take them to patch up the three drag queens at the end of the fight would definitely be worth the entertainment gained from watching it.
*****
“So, who was that you brought home last night?” Gimli asked Sam over breakfast the next morning.
“No one.” Sam tried to hide behind the cornflake packet. “More tea?”
“It looked like a woman to me.”
Sam, knowing exactly what Frodo was doing that weekend, could think of several answers, but decided to keep things simple for Gimli’s sake. “It wasn’t. There wasn’t anyone in the house last night except you, me and Gandalf.”
“Och and the fact that you nailed Gandalf’s chair to the floor, nailed the sitting room door shut and pushed the welsh dresser in front of it to make it look like we haven’t got a sitting room, does that have anything to do with the girl you brought home last night?”
Sam blushed and tried to will the floor to swallow him. “It was just a friend from work who came round to look at a few of my antique gardening books.”
“A friend with unrestrained bosoms?”
Sam had got up from the breakfast table and was busying himself around the kitchen filling a tray. “I can be friends with who I want to be friends with.”
“Och I’m sure ye can.”
“Anyway, I’m going. I’m having second breakfast in my room. Alone.”
“Alright, I believe you, just don’t spill any of that honey and yoghurt on your ‘antique gardening books’.” Only those who have heard a dwarf attempting to put on a suggestive voice will know exactly how far one sentence can make a person’s skin crawl, so our readers should for once be glad that we have never tried to actually get this shown on tv.
Sam went for the sensible option and ignored this comment and went upstairs with his ‘second breakfast’, which also inexplicably contained a single red rose in a vase.
*****
Aragorn and Legolas sat cross-legged on the double bed in their hotel room, a tray of breakfast marking the boundaries between each other’s territory.
“Do you want…sugar, in your coffee?”
“Aragorn, how long have we been living together? You know I don’t take sugar in my coffee, I don’t even drink coffee, it’s tea with lemon.”
Aragorn looked like he was going to start crying like a girl and Legolas really couldn’t deal with that now. He tried to make vaguely soothing noises, if only to stop Aragorn from making the high pitched wailing noises again because they went right through his head and made his hangover so much worse.
“But you know I love you and I don’t love Arwen any more and you’re really really nice and I’m not really over her and I’m so so sorry and I really like you and I should be over her because you’re so much nicer and much better in bed. And, and, on you pointy ears look cute, but on her they’re just stupid.”
Legolas paused. This was probably about as close as Aragorn was ever going to get to ‘shall I compare thee to a summer’s day’. Legolas realised that he probably should be grateful and that asking for anything more coherent than this would be a bad idea.
“Aragorn. I like you. A lot. You’re the only person who I’ve ever liked enough to bother having the…messy…parts of a relationship with. But, I get the feeling that I’m a replacement.”
“You’re not a replacement for Arwen! If I was trying to replace her I’d ask you shout and swear at me and hit me over the head with heavy cast iron frying pans. And you definitely never ignored me when I was trying to have sex with you.”
Legolas paused again. He couldn’t quite figure out how anyone could ignore Aragorn when he was trying to shag them. There was the beard for one thing. And the heavy breathing could really put you off even the most interesting magazine article.
“Aragorn…why did you ever start going out with Arwen in the first place.”
“Well, you know how it is, I was young and naïve and she made me sign this legally binding contract which said she could eat my liver and both my kidneys if we didn’t get married before I was 100. And every time I saw Eowyn I kept getting this weird mental image of Arwen coming towards me with a great big knife and fork and it was so off-putting.”
Legolas took back all his earlier wishes to spend the rest of his life with elves. No matter how strange the rest of the Fellowship were, none of them had ever tried to eat his internal organs.
“Ok, Aragorn, I think we can make this work.”
Aragorn looked so happy that any policeman meeting him in the street would have dragged him down the station for random drug testing.
“You really mean it?”
“I only lie to Gandalf, and occasionally Pippin.”
******
Frodo and Merry sat leaning against each other on a bench at the station waiting for their train home when they heard a familiar voice.
“Thanks fir givin’ me a lift tae the station, and fir last night.”
Simultaneously they opened their eyes and were treated to the sight of Pippin in a summer shirt and shorts made for someone about a foot and a half taller than him, and because there was no way that a man’s shoes would fit him, the 60s high-heeled boots that came with the Pussy Galore outfit. However, their attention was taken up more by the person Pippin was with. This man made nonsense of all the clichés as he was indeed camper than Butlins, bent as a nine bob note, gayer than a tree full of monkeys on nitrous oxide and queerer than a threpney bit. Except that he was so much camper, so much more bent, gayer and queerer as to render the similes meaningless.
“Wow! He’s actually camper than Celeborn,” said Frodo metaphorically picking his lower jaw up off the floor.
“Did you see that? How do his wrists manage to stay on?”
“I honestly do not think I have ever met anyone that camp.”
“Really? But you’ve known every influential writer since the novel was invented and were hanging round gay bar when they were still called molly houses.”
“Hey, I’ve been doing it much longer than that.”
“Oh, yeah, the symposia. But you don’t really notice it when everyone else is at it. If it wasn’t for you an Plato falling out you’d be mentioned in every major philosophical textbook standing a corner saying everyone’s your best mate and trying to pull.”
“Look, me and Plato had issues.”
“It’s your own fault for trying it on with Aristophanes, everyone knew he was only into women.”
“He wrote plays, he was around men in drag every day, what was I supposed to think?”
Pippin came and sat on the other end of the bench. Merry and Frodo looked over at him and narrowed their eyes.
“Nice evening?”
Pippin grinned, or more accurately, leered. “Great. How was yours?”
“Before or after we fell in the canal?”
“Oh. Somebody didn’t get laid last night.” Pippin whistled innocently.
Merry decided to improvise. “Well, actually it got better after we fell in the canal. I got to punch you, the two doctors who betted on me winning the fight split their winnings with me and we met these very nice male nurses who offered to take us out for a drink when their shift finished and it didn’t exactly go downhill from there. How did you spend the rest of your evening?”
“Well, Ah don’t remember exactly, but what ah do remember was pretty nice. An’ then this mornin’ Ah woke up in this huge flat, Ah mean really huge, an’ it was oan the 6th floor, except Ah didnae notice until Ah wis sick over the balcony. An’ then, whitisface, Ah think Ah’ve goat his name written doon oan a piece a paper from when he gave me his phone number, he gave me some a his clothes an’ a lift to the station and was very nice aboot the whole balcony thing. Well, Ah’m noat sure if he wis bein’ nice or if he hadnae actually noticed…”
*****
Vladivostok Airport, 2 ½ months later:
“Are you sure this is right?”
“The report said that someone fitting the description of a mentally unstable man from England was living in left luggage locker 47, so we’d better at least have a look.”
“How big is this guy if he’s living in a left luggage locker?”
“About 3 foot 10.”
“Oh, right.”
Merry and Pippin had productively used the time of the train journey home to settle their differences, and, after Frodo fell asleep, to, shall we say, start shagging in the toilets.
Frodo had not been terribly amused by this prospect as when he woke up he had missed his stop and he could still hear Merry and Pippin in the toilets. In fact, he had been rather upset. So upset that he decided not to go home. It was Sam who had alerted the local police and the local police, who on the advice of every psychiatrist in a 20 mile radius, had passed the description on to Interpol. While Frodo wasn’t maliciously violent he could cause a bit of damage when people upset him as much as Merry and Pippin had.
The policemen knocked on the door of the left luggage locker.
“Hello, anybody home?”
The door opened and Frodo greeted the policemen in flawless, yet more than a little dated Russian.
“Good day to you, sirs, and a fine one it is at that.”
The policemen exchanged looks. This was probably the one they had come for.
“And what’s your name?”
“Ivan Ivanovich.”
“Yes, and my name is Catherine the Great and this is Ivan the Terrible.”
“You jest sirs, but I am in good sport today.”
“Ah, I see we have a little Pushkin on our hands.”
“Pushkin? But he does not live to the east, in fact, he does not live at all for I saw him die. I did warn him not to sport with the wife of his superior, but he would not listen.”
“He thinks he knew Pushkin?” whispered one policeman to the other. “This is definitely the one we came for.”
“It could be worse, he could think he knew Ivan the Terrible…”
“Don’t give him ideas.”
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