The Mill in the Mirror

TITLE: The Mill in the Mirror, 1/1
AUTHOR: Belinda, Doom’s Eyebrow (eyebrowofdoom@yahoo.com)
URL: http://www.dombillijah.com/~eyebrowofdoom
SERIES: Much belated sequel to A Storm of Moths
RATING: NC-17
PAIRING: Aragorn/Frodo
WARNINGS: graphic sex, m/m slash, interspecies. Here be dragons! This is a piece of pornography that treats hobbit/big person sex and the erotics thereof in an unflinching fashion. If you suspect this is not for you, you are most likely correct.
SUMMARY: Frodo, returning from his visit to Galadriel’s mirror, happens upon Aragorn.
NOTES: Predominantly movieverse.
DISTRIBUTION: List archives, yes. Others please ask.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS: Thank you to Lily Baggins and many others for long and undeservedly devoted cheerleading. Thanks to members of the now defunct "Word Painting" list for very early comments. And finally, thanks to Mordelhin for thrashing my indulgent expression into line.
FEEDBACK: Feed the kraken! Has suitably robust, fabled sea monster digestion.
DISCLAIMERS: This fic uses, without permission, material from the film, "The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring," and the book of the same name by J. R. R. Tolkien. No injury to copyright nor disrespect is intended; no income is received.


When I came upon Aragorn, he was descending one of the winding trails of Lorien as I ascended it. Out of the deep, rocky dale that held Galadriel’s mirror I climbed, through the great net of light that was over everything in Lorien, like endless strings of the lanterns that will hang on posts all around a birthday feast.

I did not see him before there came the voice. "Frodo?" Beyond the lip of the dale, among silvered trees, the path wound onwards, and there he was.

The last time he had called, "Frodo," to me had been beyond the eastern gate of Moria. I had been walking away from him, across a great slab of rock thrown up from the earth like a plate on the table of the foothills. There had been tears on my face.

"Aragorn," I said. "You are not asleep."

"Neither are you, Frodo," he said. He slung his hands on his hips in an easy sort of way.

We approached each other along the path. I suppose he thought I seemed unsteady, for he moved quickly towards me, and then he was crouching, holding me by the shoulders. "Are you all right?" he asked.

"What do you mean?" I said.

"You looked as though you would stumble," he said. He rubbed my shoulders. At last he said, "Shall I carry you back?"

I should not need to be carried. For how shall I bear the ring, if I cannot bear even myself? Many a time I would have refused his offer, even if in truth I could hardly stand. But there might be no more offers after this night, if I were to go on alone as Galadriel said: there might be none to make them.

I said, "Yes."

I hooked my arms up around him and laid my face against his throat. Then he was hoisting me up, hands under my rump, my legs splayed to either side of his hip. There was the leathery smell of him all over, and the faint sweetness of his scalp.

He straightened up with a huff of breath, and gave me a little wiggle to settle the burden. Then he started to walk, and I jigged up and down slightly with each step, like a pack slung loose and askew.

Perhaps I might have done better to have been a pack and not a useless hobbit. Aragorn might merely have carried me all the way, and he would not have had to keep catching me when foolishly I fell. Gandalf would never have said, "Let the ring-bearer decide." I would never have sent us into those mines.

Aragorn said, breath warm in my ear, "What has this evening brought you, Frodo? Did you go for a walk?"

The words vibrated in his throat against my cheek. "Yes," I said.

"Did you find anything interesting?"

In the mirror I had found smoke in the sky above the Shire; hobbits marched into a churning mill. "No," I said.

He walked, and I jigged on his hip.

"Well," I said, "it is all very beautiful here."

"Yes, it is," Aragorn said. And the long finger of a tree’s new tendril of leaves brushed his shoulder.

"Aragorn," I said, "let us not go back to the others."

His next step hesitated. "Then where shall we go?" he said.

"Somewhere no one will be," I said.

***

All through the long days of our assault on Caradhras, through the crawl of our retreat, our trudge through shale to Moria Gate, I had waited for him to do it again, to put his hands on me in that unaccustomed way.

That first morning after, when I had woken in the crevasse to the clink and ruffle of his seeing to the provisions, with bright snow and blue sky at his back, he had smiled at me so without hesitation that it seemed that surely I had but conjured his phantom the night before, in that twilight country where one wanders during cold and fretful dozing -- conjured his phantom to turn to me in such strangeness. For I had conjured other phantoms in that country before: once I had thought Pippin had found an apple in Hollin that disappeared when he bit it, and would reappear later, and I could see it happen, but Merry said Pippin was hiding it and kept calling him fibber, and getting crosser and crosser, and then I couldn’t seem to speak, and then it seemed that something that flew through the air in Hollin was following us, trying to get the apple, and Pippin kept throwing it up in the air, boasting, and surely the thing would see. And then I had opened my eyes to our camp in the snow, and felt no jolt of awakening.

But in the evening after that first morning, when Aragorn lay down beside me in camp, I found I almost trembled with the thought of what he might do. Then I knew it had been real. Could I, indeed, have imagined such a thing – his breath so quick and loud along my scalp, that I’d have to lick my fingers, that he’d hold my shoulder so hard, and sigh into my hair? But he only put an arm about me that night, both of us still wrapped in our own blankets. As the cold closed in, he withdrew it, and I could hear him working the numbness from his fingers inside his bedding.

By day as we trudged on, it seemed to me that the trembling that had come over me had not left. I found I wanted to look at him as he wiped the wetness from the waterskin from his beard, to watch the thickening of his heavy arm as it flexed. I thought of his eyes upon my back as we walked, and the skin there was like a cluster of insects waking.

For one of the brief, wary fits of sleep we had in Moria, I contrived it so that we would lie beside each other, but he would only kiss me briefly on the forehead, then softly, chastely on the lips, before closing his eyes.

But there was to be no more of that, no more of any of that. There was a long way yet to Mordor -- the Anduin ribboned the leagues, and if I did as I ought, I would be alone upon them.

***

"Somewhere no one will be," I had said.

He paused, standing still. "Ah," he said, but I could not read his voice.

Then he said, "There are no elf-dwellings down in the woods this-away." He began to walk again, downhill, picking his way among rocks.

My skin felt slightly too small for my body. "That is good," I said, almost under my breath. I had no fear that he would not hear me, for my lips were against his throat.

He walked downhill, and it made me jolt as I rode against his hip.

Beyond the bottom of the hill, at last we came to a place among the trees where it was somewhat darker, and echoingly quiet -- his footfalls swished and crunched. A little further on, the ground took on a mossy carpeting, and here he stopped. He tried to put me down on my feet, but when I clung to him with my legs, he saw he would have to kneel and lay me down on my back. Then I was on my back, and he was above me, and I would not let him go with arms or legs.

"Frodo!" he protested, with the cadence of a laugh.

I touched his whiskers, but he tugged my hand away and took it into his own. "Frodo," he began again.

I began to touch his other furred check with my other hand, and he had not a hand spare to stop me, for he supported himself on one elbow. The hand of mine he held, he tried to put aside, but I took hold of two of his fingers, and he could not.

"Frodo!" he protested as I slipped my fingers into his hair.

"Won't you...?" I said. He opened his mouth to speak, and I kissed him.

For a long moment, he pressed his lips against mine in return, then broke away. "I feared I’d imposed myself, before," he said.

"No," I said, "no." His neck curved warm under my hand.

"No?" he said. There was a smile about his eyes.

"No, I mean, I don't see," I said, "I don't see why..." I gave him a kiss, and then another. The second time I did not take my lips away, but opened my mouth against his, and when his mouth opened in tandem, I slid my tongue inside it, the way he had done to me that time in the crevasse.

There came a great, sharp moan from his throat, and I pulled away. I said quickly, "Oh, I..."

But he was saying, "No, no," and the second "no" was garbled, for he was putting his mouth back on mine. And then it was as I remembered, his great, slick tongue filling my mouth, curling around mine. I put my hand on his face and I could feel his jaw working, opening and closing.

Not a little breathlessly he said, "You do not feel that I am choking you, do you?"

"No," I said, and my mouth was already open and back on his. And now my tongue was reaching out and his had drawn back in, and he was using the tip of his to play with mine as I slid it around inside his mouth.

My gasp was muffled by tongue when he began to rock his body against me, warm and terribly heavy.

"I thought I was imagining this before," he said, looking down. His teeth shone in a smile.

Between my legs, I was as full as a syphon, and it was his thumb that held the end. "No," I said. "No." I knew I had turned pink when he kissed me in a circle on both cheeks.

He rocked against me another time, and another, quite slowly, and it almost hurt me, he was so heavy, and I shivered.

My heart beat in my chest. He began to kiss my neck, and then the ticklish spot just under the corner of my jaw, and then behind my ear.

He sat me up and unbuttoned myrt. rt. I stopped him for a moment, that I might fish the ring on its chain from my shirt to drop it into the back of my collar, so it would hang down my back. When I looked up at him, the mirth was quite gone from his face. He slipped the shirt off my shoulders and lay me down again.

He looked me all over, and his eye caught the scar from the Morgul knife. He began to kiss all around it very gently. I gasped aloud when he ran the tip of his tongue along the line of the cut. "It is not too tender?" he said.

"No," I said. He did it again, and it was liked opening a seam over a bag full of tiny, tickling feathers.

Then he moved his mouth across, and what he had done with his tongue in my mouth, he did now with his tongue in my navel. It was as if his tongue were inside my belly, for all my insides began to clench and contract. And I could not help but begin to buck.

He held me still, and I found I was wriggling helplessly against his hands clamped aside my hips, and his tongue was making me squirm and squirm.

I cried aloud, "Oh."

Then his warm weight was moving up my body again, and his mouth was on my nipple. There was the bright hurt as he sucked, then the softening of it. Then he bit down on the tightened nub of me, and it was like a dropped jar shattering on a floor, and I was the floor.

When I lifted my head to see if I could look down at him, at his mouth on my skin sucking gently now, I felt lightheaded.

Then he had his hand on the front of my breeches, and he was kneading and rubbing. My mouth was open, but no sound was coming out.

He said, his voice gravelly, "Shall I?"

I closed my mouth, and opened it again, and got out, "Yes."

He was slipping one of my buttons out of its buttonhole, and then the next, and the next, and he took my breeches off. I did not have a stitch of anything on, and everywhere was air on my skin.

He was kneeling upright, undoing the ties down his chest. That layer came off, then the others. He kissed my heated cheek, then found my mouth and pushed his tongue deep inside. My hands discovered the contours of his bare shoulders and the roundness of his upper arms. There was warm, hairy skin against my belly.

Then he was up on his elbow and moving his hand down my ribs and down my side, down the crease at the very top of my leg. Then he had his hand on me, actually on me, around me at the root and quite swallowing me entirely, his grip warm and tight and rough.

I stroked the hair on his chest the way I might a pet’s. Gently at first and then more roughly, against the grain, my fingers tangling. He was pushing my lips open again, his tongue inside like he was digging for something buried. If I were flint, I would have sparked for his hand on me so brisk.

I was igniting, becoming molten. I would soon burst from my containing skin.

I reached for the front of his leathers. "Ah, yes!" he said. He was up again, and turning around, undoing his boots and leathers.

"Let me see!" I said. My voice was sharp and strange. I sat up, and he straddled my legs. There was the length of him, dusky and swollen, the hood of him gathered back. The span of my fingers strained around.

He sighed low in his throat, pressed my face into his chest and stroked my hair. I nuzzled, and found skin to kiss amid the fur on his ribs. I moved my fingers along the firm thickness of him, over the little bit of wetness at the end. His hand splayed on the back of my neck. His ribs rose and fell.

Above the beating of his heart in the great cavern of his chest, I heard the chirp of night birds in the trees, and the soft chafe of my fingers.

I said at last, "Lie with me properly."

His hand tightened in my hair. "Elbereth," he said softly. "Do you mean...?"

"I know of it," I said.

"You do?" he said. It was two low beats of a drum in his chest against my forehead.

"Yes," I said.

His fingers tickled down my back. He said ever so softly, "You are very little, and I am very big."

"I want to," I said.

For a time his thumb stroked my ear. At last he said, as if to himself, "What do I have...?" He reached for his discarded tunic and fumbled about in it.

"Here, yes," he said, and he had something in his hand. Then he pushed me down and he was lying on me again, rubbing himself against me, the heat of him burning into my belly.

Then he was up, and guiding my knees apart, and fiddling about with something in his hands. Then his finger was trailing along between the cheeks of my backside, tickling, and it made me all at once want to close my knees, though I did not. His finger was warm and wet and ticklish, and then he was pressing and rubbing on one particular spot and I wanted to close my knees again.

"Shh," he said, though I had not made a sound. Then his other hand was moving up my thigh until it held my knee, and then the finger that had been rubbing was pushing.

I knew what it felt like to have something coming out of that place, but nothing had gone in before, and I said, "Oh."

And then I said again, "Oh," for he did something inside that startled me. I had not known of this warmth that burrowed and spread in the centre of me. Then he put his mouth on my member: he quite devoured me, and I wondered if I was not truly somewhere else, if perhaps I was looking at this through the mirror.

The intrusion of another finger was sharp and terribly too big, and I made a noise. He took the second one out and just put the first one back in, and I was made of warm butter for it. When he tried with the second again it was not nearly so bad, and then he began to rub inside me again, and my member disappeared into his mouth and reappeared until I could hardly watch.

Then there was another, and I was a bottle stopped with too big a cork, and certain I would shatter. But the hurting stretch and the hot, brimming loveliness were different instruments playing the same note, and I was bucking up into his mouth and onto his fingers. He kept rubbing me inside, and his mouth kept eating me up. Heat broke out across my chest, and my legs and arms began to tremble.

The air was cool on my wet skin when he took his mouth away. His breath came hot on my stomach. "I think it must be now, or never," he said, his voice shaking.

He got himself over me, and I ran my hands down the warm hills and valleys of his arms, and he bent down and kissed me, his tongue swirling around in my mouth. He stroked himself -- his hand was slick.

There was the big, blunt nudge of him up against me, and the pushing. It was brilliantly sharp, and hopeless, for he went nowhere. At last the great bulk of him was breaching me, ever so slowly. The burn was astonishing. Still there was more of it.

He said breathily, still on his elbows above me, "Oh." I marvelled at the space he had driven open inside of me, jagged-edged with hurt. It was as if my very beating heart would flutter against the tip of him.

"Frodo," he said, and he reached to stroke my jaw, and I rubbed my face into his hand. Then he began to move outwards, and it was like trying to get your feet out of thick, sinking mud. At last he was pushing back in, but that was worse in its own way, like a wedge driving between braced planks.

He was sighing, his voice liquid and warm. "All right?" he said.

I thought I could say, "Yes. Yes." And I did. In he went slowly, and out again, and then it wasn’t like the sinking mud or the wedge and the planks, it was just like me, stretched awfully wide, but me nonetheless.

After a little while of it just being me, the place inside he had found with his finger began to waken again. With his great, thick hardness pressed up against it, moving against it, it began to spark. Then I wasn't me any more at all -- I had become slick, spinning clay, and he was a potter with his fingers in the centre of me, smoothly pushing my insides out, and the potter's wheel was spinning faster and faster. "Do you like that?" he demanded, and his hips struck home again and again.

And I said, "Yes, yes!" He took my ankles in one hand and lifted them high, and I discovered I could be stretched even wider. Then he threw my legs apart again, and rode me hard at a gallop, and there was sweat on my flanks and foam at my bit.

I bit his wrist. Fluid was falling wet and heavy on my belly. I could find nothing to hold onto -- his forearm was too thick. My body clenched around him, and the agony of penetration came afresh. He cried out as if struck, and pushed in so hard that I cried out too.

When he withdrew, it was as if he were taking a part of my vitals with him, and I feared for a moment that the space he had opened in me was too great to close again. But I was intact, though hot and strange.

There was the warm weight of him on me, like a whole soup cauldron on my chest. The air was rushing out of me. The blood in my ears was like a head full of bees.

When he was bare and panting with exertion, he smelled less like leather and more like crushed straw. And there was the smell of the forest floor, the bruised moss sharp and green. When I looked up at the stars through the canopy of the trees, I could only see the Shire and the smoke and the mill. I could only think of the leaving of them all.

"Ah!" Aragorn said. "You are cold!" And he pulled his cloak over us.


-end-