"Pease porridge hot, pease porridge cold, pease porridge in the pot, nine days old!"
"Ruby." Fredegar Bolger crouched down infront of the small girl. "That's a beautiful song, and your voice is like a lovely bird call, but do you know what will happen if you distract us?"
Ruby shook her head, biting at the end of one of her braids.
"Well," Fredegar said. "We won't get these walls properly fixed up, and one night while you're dreaming of sugarplums or revolting old porridge or anything else besides the roof will fall in on top of your head and squash you flat as paper."
Ruby's eyes went big and round as hazel saucers and she redoubled the damage she was doing to her rust-red hair.
"Hush, Fatty," Merry called before finding the two of them in the sitting room. "You'll scare the wits out of the poor mite."
"She's not scared, are you Ruby?"
Ruby's eyes miraculously managed to get even bigger and rounder as she shook her head silently, looking up at her father as he came into the room.
"Don't worry, we're going to mend it up right proper, there'll be no squashed girls in this smial." Sam, shirtsleeves rolled back and cheeks flushed from work, assured the terrified Ruby; smiling at Merry and Fredegar and tipping his head back towards the room where the work was being done. "Come on, back to it, stop giving my lass nightmares."
"Go back and find the other girls, Ruby," Merry added. "Make sure my Molly hasn't caused too much havoc."
Ruby nodded, running back outside and around to where her sisters sat on the grass. The younger boys were playing some sort of hero-game a little way down the hill, Bilbo, Hamfast and Sammie were knights with Daisy as their damsel in distress. She didn't seem very distressed, however, and kept breaking character to steal a wooden sword, brandishing it high with a whoop.
Primrose and Robin had been trying to read a book together, but Robin was much faster at the task and Primrose felt that this was most unfair, considering the age difference, and was sulking. Ruby thought this was stupid, Ham had begged and begged to help his older brothers with the house-mending but hadn't complained when he'd been deemed too young. There were better things to do than grouch.
Rose-girl and Elanor were cooing over pudgy little Tom and baby Lillian, the toddlers looking bemused at the attention. Goldilocks, fanning her face with her wide-brimmed hat, watched as her older sisters doted on the pair. Tom was the youngest of Sam and Rosie's children, and Lil was the oldest (only, so far) of their grandchildren, Rose-girl's daughter.
Truth be told, Goldilocks loved them more than most anything else in the world, but knew that the rest of her family would tease her like anything if they found out. She'd spent far too much time in her own babyhood telling everyone she was never, ever going to have children. To be revealed now as adoring her dual roles of big sister and aunt would be disaster.
When hobbits were born to very young mothers, the baby was raised by what was almost a roster system of family and friends. It wasn't that tweenaged parents were disapproved of (though some of the local historians clucked their tongues and made pious noises), but that it was widely thought that the lass deserved to finish her own growing up before overseeing someone else's. So baby Lil lived in Bag End some of the time, and with her great-aunt Marigold and grand-uncle Tom occasionally. Sometimes Brandy Hall's inhabitants cared for her, and other weeks saw Lil in Tuckborough. The little girl delighted at the arrangement, as it meant lots and lots of adoring attention and a million new places to explore with every move.
It also meant that Lil Gardner was aware, even at her early age, of what Meli Took and Molly Brandybuck were capable of. Ruby had found them, like Merry had told her to, but hadn't had a chance to talk to them yet due to the tandem scoldings they were getting from Rosie, Estella, and Diamond.
"Of all the scrapes you get yourself into..."
"...have to repair the latches on all four gates, now..."
"...and to tell such a wicked fib to old mother Boffin like that..."
"We didn't lie," Molly grumbled when the three paused to breathe.
"It was as good as a lie, and you know it," Rosie retorted, but the girls had spotted the spark of merriment in her eyes and knew they were safe from punishment. For a little while, anyway.
"We didn't say a single untrue thing." Meli maintained.
And this much was indeed correct. Meli and Molly, one was hardly ever seen without the other unless a practical joke was in the planning, and Daisy and Sammie (likewise joined at whatever part of the body was chiefly responsible for troublemaking), had spent a very enjoyable morning sitting with the old farmers down on the main street, taking little puffs from offered pipes and listening to gossip and old tales.
Gammer Boffin had arrived on the scene as midday approached, Sammie and Daisy had wandered off to go look at the new clothes at the tailor's with a promise to come back soon. Meli and Molly were having a wonderful time pretending to be crotchety old things, and when Mrs Boffin asked if their mothers knew that they were smoking pipeweed, Molly and Meli piped up quickly that "Rosie is the one who told us to come here". At breakfast time the four of them had been mixing salt in with the sugar, and Rose-girl, in a fit of exasperation, had told them to go out of the house and not come back until lunchtime. So it wasn't a lie, not really.
And if Frodo Gardner hadn't walked by at just that moment and heard the not-lie, the two girls might have gotten away with it all, too.
The saga of the gate-latches was another matter entirely, and nobody could get a straight answer out of the pair as to what exactly had happened, save for the fact that whatever it was wasn't their fault. Estella and Diamond and Rosie gave the girls as much of a telling-off as they could bear and then sent them down to play the hero-game with the others.
Ruby sat down with a sigh, feeling all stuck in the middle with no special accomplice to play with. Then Bilbo saw her on her own, and shouted for her to come and join the game. Goldilocks watched the girl's face light up, and smiled behind the brim of her straw hat. It was amazing what a small kindness could do for the temper at that age.
Goldy considered herself very old and regal. She missed it, sometimes, being young. It seemed she hadn't really appreciated it enough, worrying too much about the state of her dress or whether the boys could see her pretty curls. She knew that her sisters expected her to spend the whole afternoon lying there being all swoony, daydreaming about Farry Took or some other young hobbit. For the moment, Goldy found that idea uniformly dull.
"We want to go down to the river, Mum," Molly said to Estella, puffing from running up the hill with her three usual accomplices. Meli went over to tuck flowers into Lil's dark mop of curls, and Daisy flopped down on her back to watch the clouds drift by above the Shire. Sammie was offering to help Primrose with her reading, he had a natural knack for teaching and liked to help people learn things.
"Oh no, you'll all end up covered in mud if I say yes to that."
Goldilocks sat up, the wind ruffling her skirts and making the yellow flowers all around her sway gently.
"I'll take them," she offered, not knowing exactly why the impulse had struck her. "Make sure they stay clean."
Daisy grumbled under her breath, something about boring spoilsports who didn't know how to have fun. Rosie grinned, nodding.
"All right, Goldy, you keep an eye on them," she told her daughter, winking slyly and turning back to her conversation with Diamond. Sammie had caught the unspoken communication and raised his eyebrows quizzically. Goldilocks just smiled, and put her hat on her head.
Nobody seemed particularly shocked when the four children and their babysitter returned from their walk soaked through, Goldy's curls caught with sticks and leaves and wind-knots in a way that meant she'd have frizz for a week. It was plain that this fact didn't trouble her at all, and Rosie smiled to see her daughter behaving like the little girl she still was.
"Bath time for silly sausages," Rosie ordered. "That includes you, Miss Goldy. Into the tub with you, and then I think you can all go to bed. I don't want you catching a cold or anything like that."
Everyone was sleeping in one of the biggest store rooms while the bedrooms were strengthened, and as far as the children (and the adults too, though they were less inclined to admit it) were concerned it was a wonderful treat. Daisy, Sammie, Meli, Molly and Goldilocks all changed into their night clothes and snuggled under a big blanket with blue flower-patterned patches all over it.
"Sing us a song, Goldy," Meli begged. "You have a pretty voice, my brother says so."
"Hmm?" Goldilocks said sleepily, exhausted from laughing and play. "Oh, all right, I suppose. If you're going to be a flatterer like that, you wheedling little toadie. Let's see..."
Goldilocks thought for a little while, then sat up, her voice high and clear and soft in the quiet.
"Meli, Molly, Daisy and Sam
Went to the river and opened the dam.
Baggins, Gardner, Brandybuck, Took
Lent over the edge to get a good look.
Fair hair, black hair, two for dark brown
Smiled at each other before they jumped down.
Four little hobbits, all in a row
covered in water from head-top to toe.
Crow, canary, sparrow and lark,
They are my candles that light up the dark."
"That's a nice song." Molly's words were broken by a wide yawn. "But you shouldn't say that, the bit about Sammie being a Baggins. Daddy says that only gossips with nothing better to do care about that at all."
"I'm allowed to, Gardner's have special permission. Don't we, Sammie?" Goldilocks asked. Her younger brother smiled and snuggled in against the already-dreaming Daisy.
"I'm going to be a Gardner someday." Molly declared. Meli made a hmphing sound and said she was going to stay a Took for ever and ever because it was the best thing to be, but before an argument could start in earnest they all fell into a contended sleep.