Dragged Down Into Darkness

Dragged down into Darkness...

He couldn't allow himself to slip any further than he had done. Gasping. The intake of air consuming his lungs, a burning and stinging sensation washed over his entire body. Weak and cold, he felt exposed, he felt naked under all the fabric.

The pain was ethereal and he clutched his chest, hoping it would stop. A hand found its way to his shoulder. A very cold and unresponsive hand. He wasn't even sure it was there.

‘You have done well my friend. I’m sorry.’

His words sounded real, he wanted them so badly to be real!

Burning, stinging, lashing biting, grinding, aching and yearning.

“I need you...” he whispered into darkness.

‘You saved me once. I’m forever in your debt, even in death.’

“Thorin...” The tears fell, his tiny hand clenched and made an impact on the hard wall, thud, as it fell against the dried and stony surface in anger. Again and again, he hit the wall.

“I need you!” He shouted.

Breaking, he fell to his knees.

Broken.

“I love you” he whispered into darkness.

Silence befell the blackness. No reply from the fears in his mind, no reply from his ghostly imagination. The paranormal strain on his shoulder had gone. He gasped a deep inhale, and cried himself into a heap on the floor.

He was sure of it. It was like marble laced with ice on his cheek, a cold and dead hand illuminated by a mystic force of extrasensory perception, or just a tortured imagination.

Bilbo didn't care what it was. He needed to hear it. He existed that moment just to think it.

“I know young Hobbit.” Snap. His chest stopped heaving... “I love you too...”

Breath flooded back in. The pain did not subside. But something kept him from cascading eternally inwards into an eternity of insanity.

For just a small second, the flash of Thorin’s face made itself present in the absence of illumination.

He wasn't the same Hobbit anymore...