Background Check
Years ago, when Pippin was just entering his young adulthood, he had started realizing the differences between what was a normal lifestyle and what was, dare he think, unhealthy. Before, everything that happened to him struck him as a common occurrence between every family. Daddies hit the boys and girls when they were bad. Sometimes the children didn't even have to be bad, just take it and don't tell anybody. That's what he had been told. Take it and don't tell anybody. The scar on his shoulder was, from that certain day and every day since, a scar obtained from falling out of a tree. The day he broke his arm was because he was being bad and was trying to reach a high drawer on the dresser, and it fell on him.
Then he started to realize that Merry never had stories of his dad hitting and beating him. Pippin kept to himself, now almost embarrassed of his problem. He felt weak and alone (save his sisters, who felt nearly the same wrath but only half as often, as Pippin had a way with displeasing his father).
Merry had become suspicious. The same stories of falling out of trees and running into doors had been overused, and especially due to the fact that Pippin never got in quite as much trouble when he wasn't around. Even in the youngest years of Pippin, Merry's mother had her own sneaking suspicions. One time in particular (at about five or six years into his life) that she remembered was when she was changing his shirt and on his upper back was a large and, how else to describe it, an awful burn. Either by accident or otherwise this child had been pressed against a red-hot stove pan (hence the familiar logo found on most locally made cookware). She remembered the tiny wince he had made when she lightly brushed her hand against it, and when asked about it he looked to the ground and quietly but assertively said, "I fell."
There wasn't ever really much worse than the time his father had grabbed him and pressed the pan to his back. It was a drunk impulse, and it would have never happened if Pippin hadn't been eating in his room as he had been told not to time and time again. Therefore, there was really no need to report it.
As he grew older, realities began to hit harder. Entering his tween years, at the beginning of his knowledge of sexuality, he endured the psychological pain that came from the abuse of his sisters.