Chapter Text
When Pippin and Merry were fourteen years old, they were playing near the river. Not in the river, of course, because that was dangerous.
Well, they weren’t supposed to be in the river, but…
“Merry! Look!” Pippin cried, pointing to the bed of water. “What do you suppose that is?”
Merry peered at the shoreline. His brow furrowed. Something shiny and steel-y was in the water.
Pippin trotted down to the river. He was a Took, after all, and the thing seemed to beckon to him. Merry, after a moment’s hesitation, joined him.
“Be careful,” he called halfheartedly. He was supposed to be keeping Pippin away from the river, but he was a Brandybuck, after all, and he wanted to know what was in the water.
Pippin waded in and pulled out The Thing.
The Thing was rather like two poles taken and connected, one half-perpendicular to the other.
Pippin peered down the hole in the center of it.
Next to him, Merry pulled out another one. “What on earth…”
Pippin flipped The Thing around and fingered the part that looked (more or less) like a button.
He pushed it.
Merry let out a weird gasping noise as The Thing shot a bolt of fire out of it. Pippin recoiled as the thing rocketed backwards, narrowly missing his face, and flew out of his hands.
Pimpernel came running out of the house. “Merry and Pippin, I leave you alone for two minutes -” She grabbed Pippin. “Are you okay? What’s wrong, where does it hurt?”
“I’m fine,” Pippin said, squirming in his sister's firm hold.
Merry turned his own Thing over in his hands. “I wonder if this does the same thing…”
“What?” Pimpernel said, turning to face him. Her eyes widened as she processed the sentence. “No, don’t- ”
Merry pushed the trigger.
The three of them watched, open-mouthed, as The Thing fired a bolt towards the Tooks house, smashing through a window. Merry distantly heard a dish fall over, a woman scream, and a cat screech from inside.
“Pa is going to kill me,” Pimpernel whispered.
“He probably will,” Merry agreed helpfully.
“LET’S DO IT AGAIN!” Pippin yelled.
“What do you- NO! ” Pimpernel screamed. “ GET BACK HERE!”
By the next afternoon, there were a few answers and even more questions.
Nobody knew what the things were, and, even more worrisome, only Merry and Pippin could use them. Pimpernel tried, Hamfast tried, even Frodo tried, but none of them could get them to work.
Merry and Pippin, however, could use them flawlessly. After a bit of experimenting (with the willing help of Bilbo Baggins), they discovered a few things. First, The Things didn’t actually shoot fire, they shot little metal pellets that went so fast and so far that they looked like fire. Second, nobody could get rid of them. Once, Merry’s father had tried to throw them away, but Merry and Pippin found an identical set the very next day.
Bilbo helped them name the parts.
The narrow bit where the pellets came out was called the ‘Barrel’, because Bilbo said it reminded him of their narrow escape from Mirkwood.
The part that they held was the ‘grip’, which was easy enough to explain. The pellets were called ‘bullets’, because, when they told Farmer Maggot about it, he said, “That’s a load of Bull!”
The magazine was what stored the bullets, because Merry mentioned ‘storing’ and Pippin heard him say ‘stories’ which made him thing of the newspapers which made Bilbo think of magazines. The ‘clip’ was the thing that was clipped onto the gun. It held the bullets before they were put in the magazine. The ‘slide’ was named so because it slid back and forth to reload. The ‘receiver’ received bullets, the ‘safety’ was the mechanism that could keep the bullets from shooting so that Pippin didn’t accidentally kill himself, and Bilbo had even discovered what they called a ‘sight’- a mechanism that helped them know where to aim.
And The Thing itself was called a ‘gun’, because Pippin said that was the noise Merry made when it fired for the first time.
“I did not!” Merry said indignantly.
“Yes you did!” Pippin insisted. “The bullet fired, and you started to gasp, but you were so surprised that your gasp gasped, and you were like, " Guhn-! ”
“No I wasn’t!” Merry said. He turned to Bilbo. “I really wasn’t,” he insisted.
Bilbo nodded indulgently. “I’m sure you weren’t.”
To Merry’s eternal disappointment, the name stuck.
Over time, Merry and Pippin discovered a few more things. First, their guns never ran out of bullets. Second, they were extremely deadly and not to be used unless absolutely necessary.
Third, there were other types of guns.
“What’s this?” Pippin wondered aloud a few years later.
Merry halfheartedly peered over his shoulder, then double-taked at what Pippin had found. “Is that another gun?”
Pippin pulled it out of the ground. “I believe it is.”
This gun had a much longer barrel, maybe double the size. Merry rifled through the ground and found another one nearby.
They looked at each other and smiled.
“It appears we need to pay Bilbo another visit,” Merry said.
Upon closer examination, the new guns were not the exact same. Merry’s gun worked better for long-distance, while Pippin’s was more accurate.
“What’ll you call this one?” Bilbo asked Pippin.
Pippin peered down the barrel, giving Bilbo a near-heart attack. “I was thinking ‘long-gun’, because it’s long, but that’s kind of hard to say, you know? Long-gun. Long Gun. Longgun. Longun. It just doesn’t vibe right.”
“What about Shotgun?” Frodo suggested.
“Because it shoots?” Bilbo said. “That seems kind of obvious.”
“No more than Long-gun,” Frodo pointed out. “And easier to say.”
“Shotgun,” Pippin said thoughtfully. “I like it.”
“I’m calling mine a ‘rifle’, because I rifled through the ground to find it,” Merry said, proud of the name.
“What about your old ones?” Bilbo asked. “It would be rather confusing to keep calling them guns.”
“Handgun,” Merry said confidently.
“Pistol,” Pippin said at the same time.
Merry gave Pippin a look. “Why ‘Pistol’?”
Pippin shrugged. “It was the first thing to pop into my head.”
Frodo scratched his head. “So, which one?”
Merry and Pippin looked at each other and shrugged.
“What’s the difference?” Pippin said.
“I honestly don’t know,” Bilbo replied.
“Mine can be a handgun, yours can be a pistol.” Merry said firmly, and Pippin nodded in agreement.
“Pippin’s pistol. That sounds perfect to me.”
Bilbo helped them make holsters for their guns - soft leather slings, rather like an arrow’s quiver, that hung the longer guns on their backs. They were loose enough to swing the gun to the front easily in a pinch, but tight enough to not fall off. The smaller guns went in the front, on a little holster off the belt.
And thus the two hobbits were armed and loaded and ready for anything.
Twelve years later, Merry and Pippin were doing what any responsible hobbit would do on a Saturday.
“Go, go, GO !” Merry yelled, shoving Pippin in front of him.
“Here, hold this!” Pippin handed Merry his rifle and bent down.
“Pipp, now is not the time!” Merry said as he watched Pippin yank a few extra carrots out of the ground.
Pippin stood back up, carrots safely tucked into coat. “I’m just getting a few extra! Pervinca likes them!”
A scythe peeked over the top of the bushes. “GET BACK HERE!”
Merry and Pippin flinched, looked at each other, and then reached for their guns.
Pippin fired his pistol into the air (No, they weren’t going to actually shoot anyone), and Farmer Maggot’s scythe hesitated.
Merry grabbed Pippin’s hand and yanked him in between the over-the-head tall grass, and that was where they ran into-
“Frodo!” Pippin cried. “Merry, look, it’s Frodo Baggins!”