Ashes to Ashes

Armies do this.

He's sixteen and a half, rooting purposefully through the settlement's destruction. Even through the black silk drawn over the lower half of his face, the acrid air chokes him. There's nothing left here, not even screaming.

Shadows

Peregrine Took is no good at sneaking. Maybe it's the big fuzzy feet, or maybe it's the worried little sniffles between attempts to hold his breath. Either way, Boromir keeps scrounging for kindling under the sad icy scraps of old snow, offering Pippin the small mercy of choice in whether to speak of whatever has him so much on edge, or simply to slip away and pretend he's stayed in camp with the rest of the party.

The not-quite-silence stretches. His own boots scuff on the rocks as he crouches to gather another bundle of moss and furze and offer a brief,equally arid thought of thanks to whatever powers might be that the mountainside hasn't thawed in a very long time. A leathery sound tells him Pippin's doing the nervous-foot-scuff thing.

A Use for Hobbits

He sleeps in short shifts, folded under his cloak like a soldier laid out for burial. The reassuring familiarity of cold earth bears him up; cold earth and stone; the floor of a cave, he knows in waking moments – knows too that the entrance is just a smidgen narrower than the span of his outstretched arms, that Strider can stretch out full-length across the cave but couldn't if he were much taller, that the crevice at the back doesn't extend any further than the light of a candle and that the crevice in question is just wide enough to hold the two older hobbits in a sort of granite cradle.

He knows it's snowing. The air has that whispering hush to it. He knows it must be cold, though for his own part he hasn't been warm since he lost Osgiliath.

He knows he's a very long way from home.

All of this rests at a level close to the subconscious – mental muscle-memory, perhaps. It certainly doesn't account for Legolas urgently nudging his arm and whispering “Wake up. Wake up,” and then, after the half-second it takes to accomplish that, before he can make a sound, “Shhh.”