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The Plan
They had all noticed but it took them until a shared evening to reveal that fact to each other. What remained of the Fellowship, with one exception, sat in the opening of a large tent on an evening when the truth of their collective observation hit them like an avalanche.
“He hasn’t slept in days,” said Merry.
“More like weeks,” said Gimli, chewing on his pipe stem.
“I asked him before the Black Gate,” said Pippin with a shiver. “He said, soon, after tomorrow, and it’s been more than a few tomorrows gone!”
“He says a lot of things,” said Gimli and was met with several nods.
“It’s not proper,” said Sam from further inside the tent where he was wrapped under furs next to Frodo. “A man’s got a right to a good rest, beggin’ your pardon, even a King.”
“Undoubtedly, Samwise.” This came from Gandalf, who had settled himself near them with an audible creak and groan.
A shadow passed between the rows of tents and they all turned their heads to watch. Even at this late hour, Aragorn strode rather than walked. They could always tell it was him, not just by his long steps but also by the weight of duty that dragged behind him like a wake and by the glint of purpose in his eye. In their sharing they had all remarked that the brightness in his gaze had less to do with ambition and rather more to do with the dark circles that hung beneath.
It was too soon for the weight of all he stood to uphold to bend his broad shoulders as it did. And yet here they were.
“You might consider,” said Gandalf, “asking him.”
“I have,” cried Pippin, indignant at having been ignored. “And it’s always the same, later.”
Others echoed his statement though without the indignation.
“I might suggest — ,” said Gandalf with a twinkle in his eye that no one saw, “ — that the time for asking is over.”
The shared resignation of the group shifted quickly to confusion.
“What are you saying, Gandalf?” said Gimli with a huff of smoky breath.
“What I mean,” replied the wizard. “But I’ll make it clearer for you, Master Took, so don’t be getting up in arms.”
Pippin grumbled but swallowed his criticisms.
“If asking has not yielded your desired outcome then, it is time you began arranging.”
There was a drawn out silence as the minds of those assembled arrived, in their own time, at the place Gandalf was leading them to.
“We are to make him sleep, then?” asked Merry.
Gandalf smiled. “You are to make him do nothing, my friend, for he is clearly his own master. But that does not mean he cannot be influenced. Make a game of it, if you like, though it shall be for naught but honour and I doubt he’ll thank you for it.”
The hobbits became cheerful at the chance of a game, so long had any of them gone without honest amusement. Having the chance for fun in the service of a dear friends’ rest only added to their enthusiasm.
Legolas, who had up until then been silent, tilted his head. “You sound as though you already know the outcome, Gandalf.”
“Do I?” Gandalf had taken out his own pipe and was pulling on it with more focus than it deserved. “Hardly the case. But I do intend to watch.”
It had been decided before any of them fully realized. They set about eagerly shaping the rules of the game. In the end it was arranged and hastily scribbled on a piece of torn canvas. The goal: get Aragorn to sleep soundly for at least seven uninterrupted hours and to wake on his own. Each would take a turn of two full days. If several worked together, that used up all their turns at once rather than one each. No interfering with whoever went next, no draughts,potions or spells, and no second chances.
Satisfied, they drew straws for the order. Legolas drew the first turn, which he took as good fortune.
Legolas
The problem, Legolas decided, was noise. Aragorn’s mind did not stop moving, it merely changed rooms when the current one was full. It was so filled with plans and petitions and tasks and arrangements and problems and notions and ideas that to offer it silence would be like sticking a bucket under a waterfall in hopes of containing the flood.
Silence was not the answer, but rather, noise of a different sort. Legolas thought to drown out the tempest of Aragorn’s thoughts with a persistent stream of less interesting ones. Like a river wearing away a stone, he would outlast the man’s mind until it relented and so slept.
That evening he drew Aragorn away to walk from the camp to the river and back. He talked easily of gentle, unimportant things. The way the light came through the willow trees as the sun set. A playful disagreement he’d had with his father about the naming of a mare. The length of time it took for a swan to raise a cygnet to fly and leave the nest and why it varied by lake.
Aragorn listened. Aragorn said mm. Aragorn asked him a question about the maintenance of fisheries and trade routes and went off to find the answer when it was immediately clear Legolas didn’t have one.
Legolas stood on the riverbank alone and considered this only a mild setback.
The next afternoon he was more prepared, having thought of subjects that could in no way relate to the business of managing kingdoms.
Finding Aragorn in his tent, he offered his company. They sat across from one another and Legolas began again to talk. He spoke of the taste of frost on hawthorn berries. He described a game he and his sister had invented as children which involved a length of twine and how they still could not discuss it without coming near to blows. He told his tales in the same mild and even voice and, after nearly half an hour, could see that Aragorn’s attention began to drift, and snap back.
He was part way through a description of how to subtly shift the shades of ink from black to different black when a messenger arrived.
Aragorn sprang to his feet with a look of regret that seemed genuine and a murmured apology before going out to take the news himself.
Legolas drummed his fingers on the arm of his chair and decided that he was not going to be defeated by a swan story, a childhood game and, the postal service of Rohan.
He made his last attempt at nearly midnight because this was surely, surely, the time when nothing else could possibly demand the King’s attention.
He bade Aragorn walk with him back to the river under the clear night sky. There, they sat on the bank and tossed round stones into the passing ripples. In the same even tone as the last time Legolas began to describe the habits and migratory patterns of three distinct breeds of moth, in minute and attentive detail.
To his credit, Aragorn stayed, and listened, and even appeared to pay attention.
He went on for nearly three quarters of an hour as the moon rose higher the river burbled past. It was somewhere between the meteorological preferences of the second and third moth species that two things dawned on Legolas. The first was that there was no amount of distraction that could wrest control of Aragorn’s infinitely turning mind from himself for long enough that he might rest.
And the second was the urge within himself to take his friend by the shoulders and hold him under the river until he finally, blessedly, stopped.
The second thought came on with such alarming and appealing clarity that he stopped talking mid-sentence.
“Legolas?” said Aragorn, immediately concerned.
Legolas blinked. “I find,” he said carefully, “ that I no longer trust myself alone with you near water.”
Aragorn looked alarmed at the sudden turn in his friend. “That’s a bit extreme, isn’t it?”
“It is not — “ Legolas said, “ — unwarranted.” He stood up and inclined his head, as if formally conceding a game. “Good night, Aragorn. I mean that both as a courtesy and an instruction.”
He left a perplexed Aragorn sitting by the river and went quickly back to the camp, his hands clenched tightly at his sides. He returned to find the rest of the Fellowship still awake and awaiting his results.
“Not successful, then?” said Gimli who knew the answer from the elf’s face even before asking.
"Moths," said Legolas with uncharacteristic venom. "Centuries. I have centuries of experience to draw upon, every subject a mortal life is too short to exhaust, and when I finally get him beyond the reach of anything work-related, what did I give him? Nearly an hour on the migratory habits of moths."
“And?” prodded Gimli, not bothering to hide his grin.
“And I had the very sudden, very specific urge to drown him in the river.”
“That’s not against the rules,” said Pippin, brightening,
“It is against my rules,” Legolas said between clenched teeth, and stalked off to not talk somewhere else.
Gimli
Gimli’s approach required no cleverness or wit, which he considered its best quality. A man who would not stop thinking could at least be made comfortable while he did it, and comfort, properly and generously applied, put anyone to sleep eventually. This was simply true. Gimli had seen it happen to hardier men than kings, over shorter dinners than the one he intended to serve.
He spent the first day of his turn on preparation alone, and would have been offended by any suggestion that this was excessive. A meal hastily thrown together did nothing for anyone. He wanted meat that had been properly seen to, not merely cooked; bread worth the name; something dark and strong to drink that hadn't been sitting in a barrel since before the war out of neglect. He sourced, he argued with a quartermaster, he tasted from five different barrels before deeming the sixth acceptable. At one point, Pippin saw him shoulder-deep in a crate of herbs while a bemused Gondorian cook looked on and did not ask.
By the second evening of his turn, the very end of it in fact, the whole business of it was ready and laid out on a table in Aragorn’s tent. It was, Gimli would have admitted proudly had anyone asked, a very fine spread.
Aragorn ate well and seemed glad of it. Gimli attentively kept his cup and his plate full while regaling him with tales he was sure would warm his friend’s heart. At the start he was modest with his own drink. He watched, and waited, patient as a stone in the dark. Aragorn leaned back in his chair. His shoulder’s eased their weary stoop. His replies grew slower.
Somewhere past their third course his eyes stayed shut a moment longer between blinks than they should have. The next blink, a moment longer than that. Gimli watched the blinks get longer until they stopped and felt his chest swell with the force of a victory assured.
He wouldn’t say afterwards that he had shouted, but for lack of a better description he was forced to allow that there had been, just as Aragorn dozed off, a noise.
He leaned forward too quickly and knocked his cup against the edge of a platter, itself half full of ripe cheese, which gave a resounding clang. At the same time, he said something which he was later unable to reconstruct but that had certainly contained the word finally and had been said at a higher volume than was strictly necessary.
Aragorn’s eyes came open, mildly started by the noise.
“What’s the matter?” he asked, seeing the cheese lying partly off the platter.
Gimli panicked and insisted that they had been mid toast when Aragorn’s attention had drifted. “Won’t get away from a good time so easily, my lad,” he cried while throwing back his whole drink. Then he poured and threw back two more, to ease the sting of having totally, and undeniably flubbed it.
He did not remember the rest of the evening with any clarity except for at some point the scrape of a chair and the ends of his beard being removed from a bowl.
Gimli woke some time before dawn with bitter taste in his mouth, crumbs in his beard, and the impression of an embroidered table cloth on half his face. Aragorn was slipping out the entrance wearing a fresh shirt with a folio under his arm. There was little indication that he’d slept for more than a couple of hours.
He turned back when he saw Gimli stir. “You look a bit worse for the wear, my friend,” he said, unable to keep the smugness from his voice.
"I ate something," Gimli said, with as much dignity as he could summon, "that disagreed."
"You drank a great deal of something," Aragorn said, "that agreed with you enormously.”
Gimli said nothing further to this, on the sound principle that anything he said would only make the morning worse.
He stumbled from Aragorn’s tent some time later, squinting against the sunlight, and went to report his failure.
"He was going," Gimli said. "Truly going. Asleep in his chair by the third course." He rubbed at his temple and accepted the water that Legolas handed to him. "And I was so pleased with myself that I woke him shouting about it, and then drank enough in my disappointment to put myself under instead."
Pippin looked delighted. "So you had him. You actually had him."
"I had him," Gimli agreed grimly, "and then I lost him again to my own good cheer."
“On the bright side,” chirped Merry, “at least now we know where to find good cheese in this camp.”
Gimli let his head fall forward onto the table with a thud.
Merry, Pippin, and Frodo
Merry was confident that his theory was the soundest and, in being so, that his plan would work. He decided that Aragorn did not lie awake for any want of comfort or company. He lay awake because there was always one more thing — a report unread, a petition unanswered, some document still wanting a signature — and for as long as one more thing existed in the world, he would go and find it before he ever found his bed. The goal, then, was not to distract him, nor to wear him down by any clever means. It was simply to run out the list. Empty the day entirely, and there would be nothing left standing between the man and his rest.
Put that way, it seemed almost embarrassingly simple. It also required, as Frodo pointed out, that Aragorn not notice that some hobbits were quietly making off with his own kingdom's business behind his back. Somebody had to occupy him elsewhere while the rest of it was done.
"Faramir," said Pippin.
"He'll ask why," said Merry.
"Then we tell him why. Enough of it, at any rate."
Merry turned this over. "He's fond of Aragorn. He'll want him rested a good deal more than he'll want the whole of our reasoning."
"Take Gandalf with you. It'll sound a good deal less like a plot if he’s there,” Frodo said from his bed at the back of the tent.
“But Gandalf’s not playing,” said Pippin.
“I’m not saying he needs to play,” reasoned Frodo. “Just that you use him for a bit of added authority, I’m sure he wouldn’t mind.”
Gandalf, as it happened, did not mind accompanying the hobbits to petition Faramir. Though he insisted on remaining silent for the sake of fairness.
Faramir listened to what Merry and Pippin proposed with clear interest and no small amount of amusement. He liked Aragorn and had also noticed his worrying tendency to overextend himself. He readily agreed to spend the day walking Aragorn through matters of the resettlement; matters genuinely in need to discussion that could, with a little care and pacing, be made to take considerably longer than strictly required.
Having finished with him they turned again to Gandalf.
“We might need your help with some more things,” said Merry. “Folks aren’t likely to just hand things off to us hobbits without a wizard nearby to say it’s alright.”
“They might hand it off to me,” said Pippin, brushing a hand over his Gondorian livery vest.
“They won’t,” Gandalf and Merry said at the same time.
Gandalf agreed to follow the hobbits and did so with the air of a parent watching children build something terribly ambitious out of blocks.
They began at first light. Faramir led Aragorn off toward the resettlement camps, on matters genuine enough to hold his full attention, and the three hobbits set at once to emptying everything left behind him.
Frodo took the correspondence, which he could do sitting up in bed. He met with the clerks to sort what was truly urgent from what merely wished to appear so. Pippin took the petitioners, standing at the tent flap with a borrowed sternness that served him a good deal better than he'd expected, and turned away three merchants, one minor lord, and a man with a lengthy complaint about a mule. Merry took the army itself in hand — the supply, the picket rotations, the endless small frictions of several thousand men still working out how to be at peace with one another.
By mid-afternoon, the three of them were quite convinced they were winning.
Then word came, by way of their co-conspirator in the field, of several complications.
Faramir notified them that, while walking the resettlement camps precisely as intended, Aragorn had found the funeral lists. Or rather, they had found him. A steward had asked after his signature in passing, for grief has never known that it is meant to wait for a better day, and he signed them there and then, standing in a half-built street. Later, before Faramir could steer him elsewhere, he found a dispute between two houses over land left unclaimed, and a message from a border patrol that took immediately, and by the time Faramir brought him back near dusk, he had generated, entirely on his own account and with the very best of intentions, very nearly as much work as the three hobbits between them had managed to clear.
The hobbits met that night and reconsidered their plan.
"It isn't a list," Merry said, half to himself. "It's not a thing that can be emptied. He goes looking for more of it. He always will."
"Then what, exactly, were we doing?" said Pippin.
Merry thought about it with his thumbnail between his teeth. He thought about the easy, unthinking way Aragorn took up tasks, the lists, the land disputes, the letters, none of it delegated to anyone because it had simply never once occurred to him that it could be.
"We were trying to shape his day into something one person could manage," he said slowly. "We ought to have been finding him more people to manage it instead."
Gandalf smiled from his seat outside the tent.
On the second day of their turn, the whole plan had changed. Frodo stopped sorting correspondence and began instead to identify, among the clerks he had been quietly meeting with, which ones were truly capable of deciding things for themselves rather than merely relaying them onward. Pippin stopped turning petitioners away outright and began learning instead which of them might safely be redirected to somebody other than the king — a captain here, a steward there — and permanently, not merely for the one day. Merry spoke again to Faramir about which parts of the army's daily friction did not, in fact, require a king's attention at all. Faramir willingly obliged.
None of it produced seven hours of unbroken sleep. It produced, instead, three very tired hobbits and a working list, not of things to be cleared away, but of people who might be trusted to hold a piece of the load without first running to Aragorn about it.
"We didn't fail because we did it badly," Merry said that evening, as the three of them put the finishing touches to their lists. "We failed because there is more of it than a single person can manage. There always will be. And he’ll always go looking for it."
"The answer was never doing his work for him at all," agreed Frodo. "It was seeing to it that fewer things needed him in the first place."
"How does he even want it, though? All of it. Every single day,” said Pippin, with a pencil tucked behind his ear.
Nobody among them had an answer for that.
They delivered their lists to Aragorn the next morning, placing them atop the rising pile of new correspondence that decorated his desk. The first page was a summary, which set out, in three different hands: four clerks Frodo believed could be trusted with real decisions and not merely errands; a note from Merry naming which of the army's daily disputes Faramir's captains might settle perfectly well without reference upward; and, in Pippin's own hand, underlined twice for emphasis, the suggestion that somebody be given standing permission to say not today on the king's behalf.
Aragorn looked over their suggestions with genuine interest and to their great delight, agreed to take them on board immediately. His smile reached all the way to his tired eyes.
“I’m truly grateful, my friends,” he said. “You have surprised me in the best possible ways and I won’t forget it.”
The hobbits assured him it was no bother as they left the tent, but not quickly enough before Pippin blurted out, “you could listen to us about taking a nap as well.”
“What was that?” asked Aragorn over the shushing from the other two.
“Nothing, Strider. Carry on,” said Merry, shoving Pippin out of the tent with his foot.
Samwise
Nobody told Sam that it was his turn. He hadn’t even been a part of drawing straws, which was fine since he was generally the last to claim anything for himself and minded it very little.
He watched the others take their turn from the quiet safety of his seat. Legolas returning wild-eyed past midnight and raving about insects. Gimli looking vaguely green and swearing off cheese for at least a week. Merry, Pippin, and Frodo asleep in the middle of the day under a heap of paper. He’d seen all this and drawn his own quiet conclusions.
That evening, Sam made tea.
It wasn’t a strategy, mind. Only tea, the same as he'd have made on any other evening, because the pot was there and Aragorn was sitting alone in his tent looking like he’d been the victim of too many impossible sums and it seemed to Sam a plain sort of unkindness to let a friend sit like that with nothing warm in his hands.
"You've had a day of it," Sam said, setting the cup down within reach.
"I've had a good many days of it," said Aragorn, and something in his voice had worn thin enough by now that he did not trouble to hide it, not from Sam.
Sam did not sit across from him in a chair, the way the others had done, asking things or offering things or taking liberties. He settled himself down upon a supply crate instead, the way he might have sat on a log in the Shire with nowhere particular to be, and said nothing but a soft “oh?”
And Aragorn began to talk.
It came slowly at first, the state of the granaries, a decision about the southern road he had not yet settled, small ordinary things and the stuff of reports half-read in haste. Sam did not ask questions. He offered no opinion on the granaries, nor the road, nor said any of the things the others might well have said, about how he oughtn't carry it all himself, or how matters would surely look better come morning. He only made a small sound now and again, a sound that said I'm listening, and nothing more besides.
Aragorn got up at some point and paced a while, still talking, the supply lines giving way to the funeral lists, and the funeral lists in turn to something older, that had no report attached to it. Faces he could still see plainly enough, a promise made to a dead man's kin that he had not yet found the courage to keep. Sam let him pace. He did not try to still him, nor draw him back toward his seat, nor make the standing-and-talking of it into anything requiring management. He only kept the tea warm, and got up to refill the cup, and let the man's own legs decide for themselves when they were finished.
When they did Aragorn did not return to his chair but instead joined Sam on the ground, with his back against the crate, drawing his knees up in the fashion of a much younger man. He went on talking, his words getting slower as the lists and worries spilled out of his head and into the warm place that Sam and the teapot had made for them. More spaces appeared between his words, longer spaces, spaces that he did not rush to fill.
Sam did not fill the gaps between them either. He had learned, while tending both a garden and a master, that waiting quietly was not the same as doing nothing. The gaps in the words grew longer still. Aragorn's shoulders came down bit by bit, the way a wall comes down over years, until there was less of him upright and more of him resting against the crate. Still he talked but by now the sentences had stopped reaching their own ends.
Somewhere past midnight he stopped talking altogether. He slid, by careful degrees, from sitting upright to leaning to lying half against the crate with a blanket folded under his head that Sam had thought to slip there, and fell asleep in the very middle of a sentence about a promise he meant to keep. The words had simply run out of him entirely.
Sam sat very still a moment, just to be sure. Then he eased the cup gently from between loose fingers, and drew another blanket over Aragorn's shoulders. He settled himself nearby with his own bit of mending, on the reasoning that somebody ought to keep half an eye on things, and it was really no trouble at all.
Still before dawn, Pippin found himself unusually awake and stepped out for a bit of air. The gentle glow from under Aragorn’s tent drew his curiosity and when he poked his head through the flap he found Sam sitting upon the ground beside a still-glimmering brazier with a piece of mending in his lap, Aragorn asleep beside him, breathing slow and even and entirely undisturbed.
Pippin did not, to his lasting credit, shout outright. What came out of him instead was a strangled sort of noise that brought Merry running, and Merry's noise brought Legolas, and Legolas' low startled laugh brought Gimli, still wrapped in a blanket he flatly refused to be parted from and demanding, to know what in the blessed thunder was going on.
"He's asleep," Merry hissed. "Properly asleep. He's been asleep for — Sam, how long has he been asleep?"
"Since some while before midnight," said Sam, not looking up from his mending. "Couldn't rightly say the hour."
"That's near enough six hours already," said Pippin, working the sum out on his fingers. "That's — Sam, you might actually have done it. You might really have won."
"Weren’t trying to win anything," Sam said, mildly. "Only seemed a poor sort of evening to leave a friend sitting up alone with his thoughts, and nobody to hear ‘em."
“Then it doesn’t count!” cried Pippin.
“Absurd,” said Legolas, who was the only one actually whispering. “Of course it counts.”
“But he has to mean for it to count,” countered Merry.
"Keep your voice down," Gimli told them, in a whisper considerably louder than his own ordinary speaking voice, and the four of them carried on in this fashion for a good minute or more, arguing with increasing urgency over whether it counted, whether Sam had needed to be trying for it to count at all, whether the rules said one single word about intent.
"It counts," said Gandalf, from somewhere just behind them, in a voice not raised in the slightest and somehow heard perfectly well by every one of them regardless. "Seven hours, unbroken, waking on his own. That was always the whole of it. Nothing was ever said about the trying."
They turned as one. He stood with his arms folded looking like he had been waiting a considerable time for someone to say what he knew to be true all along.
"You knew," said Merry, with the dawning, faintly injured look as he realized he’d been made part of an experiment.
"I suspected," said Gandalf. He looked past them all to Sam, still bent over his mending as though none of this business concerned him in the slightest. "Off to your own beds, the rest of you. Disagree if you must but do it somewhere else and in silence.” As the others departed, Gandalf leaned in to the tent and gentled the light of the brazier by a fraction with a wave of his hand. “Well done, dear Samwise.”
Sam, for his part, had gone rather pink about the ears, and was studying his needle with determined concentration.
"Didn't do anything the rest of them couldn't have done," he said. "Just let him talk himself out, is all, and didn't go trying to hurry it along."
“And a good thing, too.” Gandalf let the tent flap fall closed.
Sam waited until his steps had faded completely and the camp had settled back into its ordinary night sounds. Then, he permitted himself a small, private, entirely unhurried sort of satisfaction, the kind he might once have felt over a row of vegetables that had finally taken after weeks of doubtful weather. Having done that, he picked his needle back up, and worked on a while longer by dim glow of embers with his sleeping friend beside him, well pleased, in his own quiet fashion, with a job properly done.