DISCLAIMER: I do not own any of Tolkien's characters or the world he created. The only character of mine (Jorryn) has decided to take a holiday in Tolkien's Middle-earth. No copyright infringement on any of J. R. R. Tolkien's works is intended.

AUTHOR'S NOTE: This chapter is for all the fans of Merry and Pippin. I promise you, I had it written before I ever saw the movie! I just heard a rumor that the duo was going to get into mischief in this way, and I found that something like that would be true to their characters. :) Please enjoy.

To EVERYONE — WOW. You guys are incredible. I cannot express to all of you how grateful I am that you have taken the time to read and review my little story. :) It is the greatest gift for an author to receive. I just hope that I can live up to all of the tremendous praise you have given me. Thank you so much.

9

When they first saw me duck into their hole, Paladin and Eglantine Took held expressions that were beyond surprise, and I'd immediately worried that I had walked into the wrong house. Though Pippin appeared promptly behind me, his two parents seemed to become only increasingly confused. Three hobbit-girls, Pippin's older sisters Pearl, Pimpernel, and Pervinca, had frozen at the sight of me, their small, pretty eyes opened wide with terror and disbelief. I was fortunate to have Frodo and the others at my side, or else the meeting would have been blanketed in uncomfortable and endless silence.

During my entire time in the Took home, Pippin's parents would never talk directly to me; it was always, "Ask the Lady if she wants a drink, Peregrin," or "Pearl, see if the Lady can sit in that chair," or "The Lady won't want two helpings of that porridge, Pimpernel," but worst of all was when Pippin had at last retorted loudly to one of these roundabout comments, "Mother, Father: she does have more than half a brain, and furthermore, she's got a name — Jo."

I had found that the Tooks were incredibly hospitable and cheery people, once they opened up, and I thought later that Pervinca became somewhat attached to me. I was doing her hair before we left a few hours after arriving. I told her that her brother Pippin was the one to ask about hair, and the hobbit-boy had blushed. As the day reached the evening, we said goodbye to Peregrin, who was staying home, and thanked his family for lunch. Merry left us when we reached the East Road, a mile from Hobbiton, for he was heading back along it to Buckland. And Bilbo gave me a pair of boots the moment he could slip them to me in private.

"I heard you talking to Meriadoc this morning, so I got you these. They are of Dwarven make, and they will suit you nicely." He confided as I eagerly pulled them on, "They're better than any Mannish type of shoe, I believe. These will survive anything you put them through, Jo, and I know how you like to dash off to adventure…" he had smiled.

The next week or so was cloudy, and it seemed to me that the sky had decided to dress like Gandalf for a change. Covering the landscape in a damp blanket, rain fell intermittently between days, leaving Frodo, Bilbo, and me to burrow into the Hill with books and invitations and warm fireplaces. Party Business was everywhere now, in the form of acceptance letters from everyone Bilbo had invited to the Party. He had written on the invites, "Responses Requested," and the hobbits of the Shire met that request head-on. I was soon finding envelopes of every kind in impossible places, like in my bed or underneath a teacup or stuck between the pillows of the couch in the main sitting room. They were mostly one-liners: "Thank you very much, we will be present at your Party," and the like.

Since we were in such a dormant state, I was curious about things and I tried to figure how long I'd been in the Shire and what the date was at home by counting days. I had lost track long ago and I called on Frodo for help while we both sat reading in his favorite study. "It was the tenth day of Afterlithe," the hobbit remembered quickly, "when we found you. And today is — "

"What?" I interrupted blankly.

"Today is the seventh day of Wedmath," he repeated, realizing why I was so confused. "But that's in the Shire calendar — if you go by the common reckoning of Middle-earth, it would be about July…" He bit his lip as he struggled to convert the days. "… July twenty-seventh."

I shook my head, boggled. "Thanks anyway, Frodo." I still thought his count was off, and I had figured it should have been August at least. And I was close — after much figuring and lots of paper, I found that I had been in Middle-earth for about twenty-seven days, and that particular day would have been July 30. I announced to Frodo that I was "going by Jo-reckoning," and that's what we agreed to call it. He then explained to me that there were thirty even days in each Hobbit-month, which was why our figures differed.

"Do you miss it?" Frodo asked softly.

"What, my home? No, not really… not when I look up and see you." I flipped through my book distractedly (it was a new, meandering work about the history of the Elves of Middle-earth), and it was a few seconds before I realized that what I had just said came out in a way I didn't mean for it to… Not when I look up and see you. Frodo was blushing radiantly, his head ducked under his spray of curls. "Sorry," I murmured quickly and awkwardly. The apology was all I could muster.

"That's all right," he coughed.

That night, I couldn't sleep. I was restless. My frank comment to Frodo had stuck with me all day, so that whenever we looked at each other, we both went red. Though I probably looked like a cherry-colored, grinning idiot, Frodo continued to hold his adorable boyish looks, even when embarrassed. I wondered then, lying in my bed too hyperactive to sleep, if what I had said to the hobbit had really been an accident. I grinned evilly in the dark.

Pushing my blankets back, I snatched my Dwarf-boots from a hook on the wall and decided to take a walk. Under most circumstances I would've been scared to wander in a strange countryside at night, but I was in the Shire, and I doubted that anything would harm me in such a place.

Bag End seemed open to me in the night, and I ventured past Frodo's and Bilbo's rooms as quiet as a hobbit. The smial's front door was exactly how it had been described in The Hobbit; round, painted a deep green, with a doorknob positioned curiously in the center. I ducked under the frame and shut the door silently behind me, standing up to breathe the cool night air as I walked down the steps leading to the narrow dirt road. Robert Frost's poem, "Riding through Woods on a Snowy Evening," came to mind, and even though I had understood after reading it before, I could relate to the words even more now, when I was alone in a secret place and content just to stand and listen.

The sky wasn't completely dark, but rather a shady sort of blue, and there was a faint breeze in the air. I didn't pull my boots on, but walked on the grass that was tickling and cool under my feet. I was comfortable and safe; however, I didn't know my way around, and I was wishing I had brought a lamp or a candle. I nearly jumped out of my skin when I first saw a cow nonchalantly chewing on Bag End's grass roof. The front lawn of the Bagginses' home, past a short wooden fence and the road leading to Hobbiton, was wide and lush and was the resting spot for several more cows. On the Hill sloping up above Bag End, chimneys peeked up from between trees. Far away, looming like great black guards, were the Mountains.

The drizzly weather of the last week had lifted, Just for me, I liked to think, and I could see the stars so clearly that I almost could reach up and snatch them out of the velvetiness. Some were unfamiliar constellations, further impressing on me how far away I was from home. Drinking in the beauty of the sky, I sat in the grass I leaned my head back until my neck cracked, and finally spotted a pattern of blinking stars I recognized.

"You look like Orion!" I called softly to a line of scattered, faraway dots. "I didn't expect to see you here!"

"We didn't either," I heard a distinctly lilting voice say, amusement hinting in the words. "What do you mean to gain by snooping around at odd hours, Jo?"

Merry and Pippin were standing in the shadows of the trees, empty gunnysacks slung over their shoulders. They stepped into the moonlight and came to look down at me.

"I could ask you two the same thing, little hobbits," I smiled, pushing myself up to my elbows.

Pippin tilted sideways to match my view and looked up. "Who were you talking to?"

I pointed at the uneven stars, which were arranged in a way that gave the ancient warrior a belt and an hourglass-shaped body. "Orion! He was always my favorite constellation."

"Orion?" echoed Pippin doubtfully, plopping down next to me. "Our name for him is Menelvagor, the 'Swordsman of the Sky.' "

Merry dropped into the grass. "He was the guardian of our world, in the Old Times."

"Of course you would have different and more difficult names for him," I said, fascinated. I waved at a constellation just coming up from the edge of the horizon. "What about the Big Dipper? Those seven stars?"

"The name for it is the Wain," Pippin replied, quirking his head to the side. "How funny; I have just now realized that it looks like a dipper. We always thought it was a wagon."

"People like to make things simple, where I come from," I sighed, smiling faintly at my memories of lost nights at home, nights that were much like the present one, spent wondering with friends about the secrets of the universe. "How do you know so much about all of these stars?"

"Frodo is the one who told me, and he learned it from Bilbo, who probably learned it from Gandalf. Gandalf could tell you much more than I can."

I played distractedly with my hair, admiring the planets, moons, and suns of distant galaxies. After a minute, I looked to the hobbits, and said, "Well, you know what I was doing, now. What are you up to?"

Merry acted as if our midnight meeting was a normally planned happening, and he proceeded to explain, his unfilled rucksack over a knee. "Pippin stayed at Brandybuck Hall yesterday, with me. We got bored after a bit and headed to the Green Dragon Inn over in Hobbiton; but pipe-weed and ale can get monotonous too, you know."

"So we decided to come over to the merry old Hill for a bit of fun," Pippin said with a huge grin. When he was elbowed by Merry for exposing too much, he grumbled, "It wasn't my idea, Master Meriadoc!"

I eyed the pair and their sacks. "Do you want me to go back to bed?"

"No," they said together, "you're quite all right."

"To be honest," admitted Merry haltingly, "we're — well, to be honest — we are heading to Odo Whitfoot's vegetable patches."

I clapped a hand over my mouth to cover a laugh. "You're stealing vegetables!"

"We are not stealing!" corrected Pippin. "It's merely Whitfoot's tribute to the great Took and Brandybuck families."

"Is that it?" I giggled. "That's why you need to collect your tributes in the middle of the night, slinking along like burglars."

"Exactly!" they said. "Would you like to come?"

Hence, by some twisted coincidence, I found myself tiptoeing behind a couple of young hobbit thieves, until we came in a few minutes to a thick patch of carrot, tomato, cucumber, turnip, potato, pumpkin, and squash plants winding up creepers. The moon glared down on us as though it was an all-seeing eye that knew what mischievous deeds we were up to.

"Not as good as Farmer Maggot's," Merry declared, inspecting a cabbage, "but good enough." And with that, the hobbits began to uproot carrots and pick the smaller veggies off vines, stuffing them gently into their soon bulging sacks. I kept watch from the cover of a large tomato plant, seeing only an owl and a few fireflies, and another cow, but no one found us trespassing on Whitfoot's garden.

"Hmm," murmured Pippin, dusting a potato. He found a lump in it and threw it over his shoulder, dissatisfied. "Who do you plan to dance with at the Party, then, Jo?"

"Me?" I frowned at the sudden question. "No one will ask me to dance!" I knew this from previous encounters at parties and having to pair up with the nastiest, most unpopular men because no one else would ever bother to ask me.

"I will," said Merry immediately.

"And I will, also," grinned Pippin, brushing hair out of his vibrant emerald gaze.

"I'm too tall for you," I pointed out. "And I don't know any of your dances."

My friends waved this away. "You outgrow us by a mere hairsbreadth, dear Jo," Merry corrected. "You will look so Hobbitish by the time of the Party that no one will notice that you are a Lady — that is, unless you want them to."

"Don't go acting like a Man on us," Pippin warned.

"I wouldn't dream of it."

"The dances are easy enough, and you are sharp enough to learn them quickly, so it isn't a problem." Merry grinned. "You aren't trying to get out of going, are you?"

"Of course not," I retorted, "I just don't want to make a fool of myself."

Merry burst into laughter. "You, Jo? It is impossible for you to look a fool, dear Lady, as long as Pippin is there to act as the goose of the Party."

Merry and Pippin dragged the lumpy sacks and me away and back into the trees near Bag End, where they plunked down and emptied the bags to separate their bounty. When they tried to shove a pile to me, I shook my head. "I can't. Bilbo would want to know where I got them."

The pair shared an increasingly playful, wicked look. "Tell Sam you took it from the Gaffer's garden," suggested Merry with a snicker.

"You nasty little hobbit," I smirked, pursing my lips resolvedly and thrusting the vegetables back to them, "he'd be crushed. I couldn't play such a mean joke on Sam."

"You're too sweet, Jo!" Pippin reprimanded gently.

By the time I stumbled back into bed, thankfully not waking Frodo or Bilbo, I was too tired to notice that the hobbit robbers had sneaked a small cabbage and a carrot into my boots, which I had never put on during my time with them.