Chapter Text
“This hobbit was a very well-to-do hobbit, and his name was Baggins.”
It’s been a year. One whole year as Mr. and Mrs. Bungo Baggins.
He realizes this almost immediately after opening his eyes on this particular spring morning, burrowed beneath the quilts of his luxurious four-poster bed, sunlight creeping in through the small half-circle window to ease him out of sleep. His wife is snoring softly beside him, dark curls half-covering her face, loveliness in hobbit form. If you’d asked him one year ago what he’d hoped his life would be today, this would be it…
“Mirabella, it’s my turn! What could possibly be taking you so long?”
“Stop shouting and give me a moment! My hair is a bird’s nest this morning.”
“You say that every morning!”
…except he’d leave out the part about his wife’s two younger sisters moving into their modest smial one month after the wedding. And also the part about that aforementioned four-poster bed — yes, the luxurious one — taking up nearly his entire bedroom. He thinks he remembers the floor being red tile. Or is it green? There’s only about three square feet of it showing between the footboard and Belladonna’s vanity, so it’s easy for him to forget.
Ah, he was right the first time. It is red. He swings his feet over the edge of the bed and walks to the wardrobe. It’s a short walk. Barely a walk at all, in fact. More like a single step. Once he’s opened the door as far as it will reach before it bumps into the bed, it takes him three tries groping around amongst the tightly packed garments to finally find his patchwork dressing gown. And of course, as soon as he tugs it from its hanger, an entire row of Belladonna’s dresses collapses in a heap on the floor. “Sticklebats!”
Belladonna stirs in the bed behind him. “Were those mine?” she mumbles.
“They were,” Bungo sighs, crouching down to gather up the fallen frocks. “Can you really not part with any of them? I don’t think I’ve seen you wear half of them since the wedding.”
“Hmm, so a whole year then.”
Bungo turns quickly, his early-morning fluster briefly replaced by a broad smile. “You remembered.”
Belladonna is sitting up now, yawning herself awake and stretching her arms over her head. The ceilings are so low she comes this close to brushing them with her fingertips. “Of course I did.” She smiles back at him sleepily, hair a mess. Bird’s nests seem to run in the family.
And what family would that be, you ask? Why, that would be the Tooks. They have a certain reputation in the Shire, and it’s definitely not for remembering important dates, at least not before their first cup of tea. Bungo, on the other hand, is a Baggins through and through. And the Baggins name comes with a certain built-in respectability. Sensibility. Responsibility. Predictability. Plenty of other bilities. Order and normality are his dearest friends.
Unfortunately he’s outnumbered in this household by the three remarkable daughters of Gerontius Took. The word “remarkable” just got stuck to them at some point and now it’s practically Shire law to refer to them as such, no matter what your opinion of them. Whether the connotation is good or bad all depends on the speaker and their tone of voice. When the Old Took uses it, for example, the word becomes tinged with pride and unmatched affection. Coming from Mungo Baggins, Bungo’s staunchly conservative father, it drips with disdain and astonishment. Bungo himself is probably the only hobbit in the whole of the Shire whose use of the word falls somewhere between the two extremes.
The sisters’ shared remarkableness, good or bad, nonetheless caused them to fuse together at some point. They’re rarely apart, and when they are it’s not for very long. Even their names are connected, forming a perfect circle, or rather a particularly audacious flower crown: Belladonna, Donnamira, Mirabella. (Bungo would be lying if he said he didn’t occasionally stumble over his tongue when addressing them — for which they of course mock him relentlessly.) This inability for the sisters to extricate themselves from each other is of course what led to their current unsatisfactory living situation.
Bungo finishes replacing the dresses and ties his dressing gown securely over his nightshirt, and by the time he turns around again, Belladonna has fallen asleep sitting up, head drooping forward, face disguised by a curtain of hair. It happens every morning, and Bungo smiles as he makes the (very short) trek to the bathroom. At least some things are pleasantly predictable around here.
If only he could have also predicted the shriek that would soon greet him upon opening the bathroom door without knocking first. Donnamira, having finally reclaimed the room from her younger sister, is not entirely decent, although thankfully all Bungo sees is a bit of extra calf. It’s still enough to make him blush to the tips of his ears. Many awkward apologies later, he’s back in his bedroom with Belladonna awake and laughing at him.
Bungo grumbles something under his breath and grabs his comb from the vanity before sitting on the edge of the bed and getting to work on the tufts above his toes, the same warm chestnut as the curls on his head. He’s barely begun the detangling process when Belladonna bumps him with her knee on her way to the wardrobe, causing a very unpleasant tug-of-war to be waged between the comb and his foot hair. He sucks in his breath, wincing.
“Did you hurt yourself, dear?” his wife asks distractedly, searching through the racks for her own dressing gown, the one with the red rose pattern.
“I hurt myself every morning, in some fashion. I’ve begun to look forward to it,” Bungo retorts.
“You should try one of those boar-bristle brushes. They’re gentler. Gandalf uses one on his beard.”
“I am not interested in discussing Gandalf the Grey’s beard before I’ve had my breakfast, thank you very much.”
“My goodness, someone’s grumpy.”
Bungo sighs. “Realizing you’ve spent an entire year battling three Took lasses for the bathroom each morning tends to do that to a hobbit.”
“You did choose the place yourself,” Belladonna points out, as she’s wont to do whenever they have this conversation -- which is quite often, by the way.
Bungo has his usual answer at the ready: “Because you wanted to stay close to home, a request I was perfectly happy to fulfill. What I didn’t anticipate was that ‘right down the road from the Great Smials’ wasn’t nearly close enough to satisfy your sisters, or that the only available real estate in Tuckborough would be the size of a hatbox. And speaking of hatboxes, they’ve fallen on me twice this week. Do you really need all of them?”
Belladonna, who’s finally excavated her dressing gown and pulled it on, ponders this. “Well, I suppose I could just wear all my hats at once every day, and then I wouldn’t need the boxes to store them. Maybe I could even start a trend! Not a single head would be without at least three hats across the whole of Westfarthing.” And with that she bends down and kisses the tip of his round nose.
Bungo attempts to stifle a smile and fails. “If you think one kiss on the nose is going to fix this, you’re wrong.”
“Don’t be silly. Nose kisses fix everything,” Belladonna answers over her shoulder as she barges into the bathroom with no shame, despite it still being occupied by an audibly displeased Donnamira.
“Maybe you should start kissing the walls to see if they expand,” Bungo mutters, turning his attention back to his feet.
Clang! Clang!
…
Clang!
“Is it absolutely necessary that Togo join us for breakfast? Can’t you take him into the parlor?”
Although he is not a hobbit, Togo might as well be considered the fifth member of the family, or rather just another “space-taker-upper,” as Bungo refers to him — only in his head, of course. Togo is a brown thrush Mirabella discovered in their front garden last month, flightless due to an injured wing, his family nowhere to be found. Mirabella, possessing an enormous soft spot for all animals and especially birds, insisted they nurse the poor creature back to health. That’s how he ended up in the kitchen (no dining rooms in this hatbox) whiling away the hours cracking nuts on the bars of his cage — hence the clanging.
“Very well,” Mirabella sighs, getting up from the table and carrying Togo’s cage into the adjoining parlor. This solves absolutely nothing, of course. The house is so small that if Belladonna dropped a pin in the kitchen while Bungo slept in the master bedroom it would wake him up with a start. He may or may not know this from personal experience.
Clang! Clang!
He did some clanging of his own on the bathroom door earlier this morning, and after a few politely forceful requests to please let him have his turn, Bungo was finally able to wash up in time for second breakfast. First breakfast doesn’t exist in this place unless they opt to rise at an offensively early hour. Forgoing one meal a day when you have six others to enjoy may not seem all that consequential, but Bungo’s tightened braces and rumbling stomach would beg to differ.
Clang! Clang! Clang!
Bungo doesn’t comment on the bird any longer, at least not vocally, although he can’t help stabbing his tomatoes a little more violently than usual.
“What’s on the schedule for today, dear?” Belladonna asks, most likely sensing his tension.
He perks up at that. “Going down to the market to talk to a butcher about a slogan. Some new ham product. Pre-sliced.”
Bungo Baggins is in advertising, in a way. He’s been coining sayings and proverbs for as long as he can remember, and a few years ago local merchants took notice and started paying him to come up with catchphrases they could use to advertise.
“How dreadful.”
Donnamira does not approve of Bungo’s line of work, and makes a point of saying so whenever he discusses it. He’s endured enough battles this morning just trying to make it to the breakfast table with his appearance and sanity intact, so he chooses to bite his tongue. That doesn’t stop her.
“I saw a poster in the market the other afternoon announcing that a hobbit was selling his hill up in Hobbiton.”
He expects something more after that, but she simply shakes her head in dismay and returns to her plate.
He can’t stop himself. “…And?”
Donnamira drops her fork and heaves a long-suffering sigh, lacing her fingers together on the table. “A poor, honest landowner plagued by hardship is forced to sell, and he stoops to advertising next to fliers for milliners and requests for post office workers. So crass.” She returns to her meal, obviously feeling sufficiently superior.
Bungo stares at his eldest sister-in-law as she delicately spears the potatoes on her plate. “Well, I apologize that such crass endeavors paid for this hill over your head. And the bandages for Togo’s broken wing. And the food on your plate.”
“That’s mostly my money, dear,” Belladonna informs him from across the table, hiding her smirk behind her teacup.
It’s true, of course. While the Bagginses are well-off, it’s nothing compared to the Tooks’ wealth, and even though Bungo does contribute something from his work, his advertising profits don’t afford him much more than a few extra drinks at the inn each week. But he likes to pretend it makes a difference, if only to grant himself even the barest hint of control that he so desperately covets, and which is hard to come by in this household.
Bungo opens his mouth to reply to his wife, but he doesn’t get a chance to defend his pocketbook on this particular morning. Any further argument concerning money or advertising or birds clanging in their cages is averted thanks to a sudden insistent knocking on the front door.
Mirabella, who has abandoned the table in favor of accompanying Togo in the parlor, volunteers to answer it. Bungo silently hopes it’s not another Took relative ready to move in. He’s fairly certain Belladonna’s brothers can manage without her, but the alternative has settled itself in the back of his mind, coaxed out of hiding to torment him whenever a visitor comes calling.
Mirabella gasps with delight. “Uncle Gandalf!”
Sticklebats.