thinking of a late summer evening pre lotr canon when pippin’s just reached his tween years and merry is a few years shy of coming of age and they’re bounding about the yard causing all sorts of mischief while frodo, who’s definitely of age but chooses when to care about that, part joins in and part watches on to make sure no one loses an eye. and off to the side bilbo and gandalf, who’s come around for one of his visits, are sitting on a bench smoking their pipes. and bilbo watches the faunts (they’ll always be faunts to him) play about with a warm sorrow squeezing his chest. he blows a smoke ring and watches as gandalf follows, his stream of smoke shifting not into a boat or a bird or a butterfly as usual, but into a uniquely angular dagger, which passes through bilbo’s smoke ring and transforms, as it does, into a feathered arrow. and bilbo turns to gandalf as the smoke fades into the night air and sees his old friend watching the faunts, his face half fondness and half a familiar grief, and the sight loosens the words perpetually lodged in his throat whenever he sees the faunts.
“they remind you of fíli and kíli too, don’t they?” he asks, and gandalf turns to him with a sad smile, and bilbo wonders if he was always so old.
“that they do,” gandalf says, and his eyes drift over to an empty patch of the garden and he goes somewhere else, for a moment, far away. bilbo follows his gaze and he can almost see them, those two young dwarves with grins that lit up the fading night, and he hears an echo of laughter that rises from somewhere long past and lost.
“it’s a shame,” gandalf adds with one of his half smiles. his eyes meet bilbo’s, once more bright and present. “they would have loved to meet them, our dwarves,” and bilbo’s laugh sounds remarkably like a sob.
“they would,” he agrees, turning to the faunts once more. merry has got a protesting frodo in a headlock and is mussing up his dark hair, when pippin tackles the two of them into the grass in a pile of laughter and limbs. “i can see it.”
they’re both quiet for a moment, going back to their pipes, and in the stillness those images seem to rearrange themselves into another, larger and clearer, picture. this time, neither of them bother with any smoke shapes, merely releasing long gusts of air.
“on the other hand,” gandalf adds, his words coming out a bit quicker than usual, “perhaps it’s for the best that they never met.”
“yes,” bilbo says, his eyes wide with horror from visions of his beloved garden trampled and going up in flames. “definitely for the best.”