Work Text:
Pippin sat with his knees drawn up and the ball between them. He bent low over it, looking like a greedy child stooping over a bowl of food, in a corner away from others. He drew his cloak aside and gazed at it. The air seemed still and tense about him. At first the globe was dark, black as jet, with the moonlight gleaming on its surface. Then came a faint glow and stir in the heart of it, and it held his eyes, so that now he could not look away. Soon all the inside seemed on fire; the ball was spinning, or the lights within were revolving. Suddenly the lights went out. He gave a gasp and struggled; but he remained bent, clasping the ball with both hands. Closer and closer he bent, and then became rigid; his lips moved soundlessly for a while.
- The Two Towers XI. The Palantir
The world outside disappeared and the inside of the globe filled his whole view. Huge wings flew out of its depth where fires blazed at the top of a spire; Pippin tried to pull away from the globe, terrified that a winged beast would emerge from it and snatch him. But he could not move. He was bent over the orb, like a hundred-year-old stooped tree that had grown into its immutable shape. The Palantir was not going to let go of his eyes no matter how desperately his mind tried to shrink away.
The wings filled the whole sphere, blocking out everything else. When the darkness parted, Pippin unexpectedly found himself high up in the air. Dark, enormous shapes circled around him, but their vast undulations could not obscure the flames emanating from a cat's eye behind them.
Pippin's body was posed differently. He was no longer sitting on the ground. Pippin was tied to a spike, and he somehow knew that this was one of the spires of that horrible tower, Barad-dur, the ones that were as tall as mountains, with the gaps between them as deep as chasms. Pippin's arms were bent around the edges of the spike and tied behind it; the sharp edges were cutting into the soft flesh of his forearms; similarly, his legs were spread out, frog-style, bent at the knees and tied together behind the spike as well.
The flaming cat's eye drew nearer, consuming all his field of vision. Pippin scrunched up his eyes against the unbearable brightness; he expected those flames to scorch, however, they seared him with bone-deep, damp chill of dread. And even with his eyes screwed shut, he could see the dagger-like vertical pupil. The pupil then tilted horizontally, towards him, sticking out of the flaming eye. It morphed more and more into a dagger. Its tip moved forward slowly, causing Pippin to die a thousand deaths as it approached.
"Tell me everything." The voice was like a drone of a deepest pipe, and carried both an echo of an underground cave where you were to be buried alive, as well as a rustle of a poisonous worm that has burrowed into your eardrum. Pippin somehow knew it came from the flaming eye, even though it was everywhere. It was around him and inside him.
The dagger hovered, pointed at his throat, and there was nothing Pippin could do to avoid it, tied up as he was. A very small, distant part of the hobbit's mind understood that this was a vision, a hallucination, and was fascinated by it with the carefree admiration of a young boy for cool things. The rest of Pippin was about to lose his mind in panic.
But the blade did not plunge into Pippin's neck, like he expected. Instead, it cut through the collar of his shirt, and continued downwards. Its tip hovered a hair's breadth away from Pippin's skin, slicing through the fabric like through butter. The two sides of his shirt fell apart; then it continued through his pants and underwear, dissecting them with the same precision while sparing his flesh.
Pippin's clothing now hung off of him in rags. He was splayed out and exposed for the whole world to see, including his squishiest parts. Somewhere below that spike there were armies of orcs; there were the Nazgul, there were their lieutenants, subordinates, and lackeys of all sorts. They could all see him. And as horribly ashamed and helpless as he was, he was also thrilled. That was the strangest thing.
The Eye spoke again. "Will you now tell me what you know? Or do I need to do to your mind what I did to your clothes?"
Pippin remained silent, but not entirely out of bravery. His helpless exposure before the all-seeing Eye - first of his body, and soon of his mind - both terrified and excited him. Pippin had been the most insignificant hobbit, and no one of note had ever looked at him and really tried to understand the intimate corners of his mind: not even Merry, good friend though he was; not Aragorn, and definitely not Gandalf. And now that the Eye was focused on him, the deadly-sharp pupil poised to cut him open, it glowed with hunger for Pippin's secrets, a hunger he was never a target of. It promised pain, but a pain of a kind that would elevate him to the previously unknown heights of existence.
"Where are you?" the Eye's voice said. "Who else is with you?"
Pippin said nothing. The dagger of Sauron's Eye pierced Pippin's memories. Searching, probing. Bringing forth glimpses of past events he had not thought of for a long time. Dancing at the Lost Pony pub with Florence, a curtain of her copper hair flying - the vision flashed and was gone. He braced to be split open by Dark Lord's anger, but the probing tip was gentle. It - He - does not want to destroy my mind, Pippin thought. He is treating my memories gingerly because they are fragile, and a forceful approach would ruin them. It terrified him, the knowledge of his fragility, the knowledge of how he was at the mercy of the Dark Lord and how one flick of his Eye would turn Pippin into a blubbering idiot. But it also made him feel cherished and precious: it was he, the most weak and ineffectual hobbit, who was compelling this carefulness, this delicate touch, in the most powerful being in the Middle Earth.
Pippin did not want to reveal his answers. He wanted to hang on to this newfound power. He also realized that if he resisted too long, the Dark Lord might throw caution to the wind and pry Pippin's memories from him by force. This realization made the game he was playing all the more exciting.
The knife dug deeper, and uncovered memories that Pippin had tried to forget. He squirmed with sudden embarrassment.
A vision of Aragorn's hands crushing the athelas leaves into hot water and washing Frodo's wound with it. A vision of Aragorn's fingers on Frodo's shirt; how he pulled the garment carefully from Frodo's shoulder, baring it. And how Pippin in that moment craved for Aragorn to bare his shoulder in the same way, to pull away layers of fabric and expose the flesh; and how envious he was of Frodo.
The Dark Lord's sudden laughter susurrated in Pippin's head. Pippin was so embarrassed that he squirmed mentally, his mind shrinking away from the dissecting knife of the all-seeing Eye. He tried to push them down, vainly seeking a place where the blade could not reach. His efforts seemed rather laughable and desperate even to himself, because, as a little hobbit, there was very little space within him to hide anything, physically or mentally.
But he did his best to stuff the memories of the Fellowship's march into the deepest corners of his little soul. If the Dark Lord wants to find them, let him perform an equivalent of carving a miniature likeness of a royal palace of Gondor into a pearl.
"Do I need to expose more of your petty secrets before you answer my questions?" said the Eye.
Pippin sensed that he had pushed the Dark Lord's patience to its limit. He tried to stall.
"I am sorry, my Lord, but can you remind me what you asked?"
"You fool!" the Eye growled. "What was I asking, indeed? Are you in Mordor? Where exactly? But why am I bothering to ask when I can see for myself?" The dagger in Pippin's mind twisted. With a cry of pain Pippin realized that a twist of a knife was not just a metaphor. As it brought up the images from his past, it scrambled them. It sliced his memories askew and caused their bleeding edges to join in unexpected, unrelated ways. The figure of the dancing Florence suddenly developed hooves and kicked at his face, very nearly missing his jaw; Pippin realized that he will never be able to look at Florence the same way again, even if he gets home.
This again distracted him from answering.
"You are determined not to make it easy for me," the Eye said. "You are enjoying this game, foolish hobbit, don't you? Well, we shall see you playing it when you are questioned face-to-face. It will happen soon!"
A great fire expanded and filled Pippin's field of vision. Then with a strangled cry he fell back and lay still.
* * *
"You are not telling the truth," Gandalf said. "He has corrupted you. As little time as your mind spent in his grip, the Dark Lord managed to subvert it all the same."
Pippin was pretty sure that was not the case. He wasn't really hiding any secrets from Gandalf regarding what he saw and heard in the Palantir, or what he told the Dark Lord, which is to say, hardly anything of essence. The only thing he was hiding is how the Dark Lord made him feel. The thrill of being laid open, searched, examined. The delicious pain the dagger-Eye inflicted. That was something he could not speak about.
"If you won't tell me, I'll have to get it out of you by force. That's really unfortunate, Pippin, but the fate of the Fellowship and of the entire Middle Earth depends on it."
And now Pippin realized that the horror of this night was only just beginning.
We shall see you playing it when you are questioned face-to-face. It will happen soon!
When the Dark Lord first said it, Pippin assumed he was sending for Pippin to be brought to Barad-Dur for questioning. He thought that was the most terrifying prospect in the world. Instead, such an interrogation was going to happen much sooner, at the hands of Gandalf. Gandalf will learn how Pippin felt about the Dark Lord. Gandalf will find out about the fearful pleasure that Pippin had experienced for the first time in his life, and who gave it to him. The notion of Gandalf finding out and judging him was a greater horror than anything the Dark Lord could inflict on him.