I saw fire, Thorin Oakenshield [SPOILERS — third impression]

Tonight — after I finished my grades and pushed the graphic “submit” button on this miserable semester four times — I just wanted to fall into your eyes.

They told me it would be $5 and I gave them my card and pulled off one of mom’s old gloves to punch in the numbers, third finger, fourth finger, third finger, second. I walked into the theater in my fleece and scarf and surprisingly dwarvish boots with a dusting of lake effect snow on their toes and I found a place to sit and peeled off the layers and leaned my head back and closed my eyes until I heard the movie starting.

And then I fell, Thorin, into your frightened and determined eyes as you responded to the thugs, into your earnest eyes as you insisted your father yet lived, your suspicious eyes as you evaluated Gandalf. I reeled with the shock in your eyes while you contemplated the nearness of Durin’s Day and flinched at the rage that shone from them in the Mirkwood. I dizzied in the vertigo of pride and shame and rage and fiery memories and incipient madness in them when you wished destruction on Thranduil’s people and rejected his offer. I grieved in your eyes for the failure of the men of Laketown to kill Smaug and I weighed the gravity and sincerity and manipulation in them in equal measure when you pleaded your case to the villagers of the lonely town.

I marveled at the cool detachment with which you told Kili to stay behind after the sheer terror in them when you saw him injured, and thrilled to their excitement when you saw the Lonely Mountain. I swam in their joy when you summited to the door and my heart plummeted just as far as it had climbed when you signaled your resignation and then let the key slip out of your hands. And I bathed in their love and wonder and affection and uncertainty of where to look when you re-entered the walls of Erebor and I saw their whites. My heart froze in their madness when you held Bilbo at sword point. My resolve to defend myself evaporated in the heat of their deathwish resignation — no clawing for breath, deciding to burn rather than to suffocate and the power and rage and determination of their insistence and then again the calculation and the ironic enjoyment of the deathly game you were playing, Thorin Oakenshield — and their pride when you insisted you would take back what was yours and get your revenge

and the last reasoning, critical synapse surviving in my mind misfired in the tension of the final time I saw your face on the screen, your eyes caught in the desperate play between jubilation and disbelief and the visual grasping for some index of what you had finally done, if you had done it, the overmanned look of frenzy and triumph and uncertainty

and I fell, I spiraled away from myself

And then I heard the song, and for the first time in quite a while, I let myself listen to it, I gave in the way I’d been asking myself to give in all night. And I saw Richard Armitage’s name, and I thought, you made me burn, you made me melt, you made me drown and now you will make me cry.

I layered the protection back on, piece by piece. The screen burnt, your eyes burnt, but I shielded myself against the outside where it was dark and cold. I could still see the fire, I could still see everything, I was still sunken in your eyes. The wind dried the tears on my face as I walked out to the car.

Was I shivering for fire or ice? Or both?

~ by Servetus on December 18, 2013.