Saving Durin {Hobbit/Thorin}

Chapter 53: Azog's jazz hands

Chapter 53:

Azog's jazz hands

Within the cavernous and patterned walls of the Lonely Mountain, the clicking of famous strides, long gone, holds the remaining memories of ancient heroes; dwarves of long appenditures and notorious portraitures traversed these same walls as they fell through the hands of life, and into the infinitesimal legends of history. Their forgotten tears of a serene yore radiate through my mind tonight, in the form of enthused dreams and picturesque visions. And though it is an illuminating notion of begotten times and personas, the sheer knowledge of their failures and victories awakens me from a disheveled sleep, head upon a musty pillow and Thorin missing from my side.

And it is a strange occurrence that chills my bones in abnormality, to find Thorin gone from my side, hands missing from my hips and no heartbeat melody in my ear. His smell of fire and oak lingers in the pillow to my side, but bears no weight to Thorin's actual presence and comforting touch. So, as I awake from my fitful dreams, I am saddened and scared by my lone persona in this bed.

Instincts in grasp with a seconds breath, I quickly rise from my cuddled horizontal position, eyes squinting in search for my beloved dwarf king. And as part of me expects to find him in danger, I cringe back at his writing form in the sitting area of our room. His shirt is missing, as he evidently has no intention to walk the halls, nor leave this room altogether. No, it seems as though Thorin has fallen from his subconscious, as have I, within the dreary minutes of early morning.

If not for my heightened senses in the cold of the room, I would have missed the King Under the Mountain altogether. The night is dark upon the Ereborian walls, giving us no hinting luminance to what lurks in the corners, awaiting our fears of darkness. Winter, by contrast, seeps in from the closed mahogany door, sending chills up my spine with no relief in the fur coverlet of the bed. The only sounds, like that of scratching, mirror Thorin's miniscule movements across the parchment, the occasional plunk and tap-tap from the reignition of ink upon the stylus. I yearn to reach out to him, grab his hand and pull him into bed, but with my clouded mind, no thoughts become actions, and I just sit idly by.

No one knows how long I sit there, absently listening to Thorin's scrawling in the corner of the dark room. It may be just seconds, minutes in a rare case, but I expect hours with the strange tide of this moonless night. The state of the bed, in this lonely bedroom of ornate blues, is like limbo, time scrunching and stretching at the whim of heart, but no recognition of mind. I think of nothing, but everything at once, as a partially conscious state of rest eases over my raised head, like a sweater. It's gratifying, yet tiring all the same, as hours pass into minutes, which pass into seconds like the repetition of a wristwatch.

"What are you doing, Thorin?" a voice asks from the canopied bed of blue and gold, where I sit with the world upon my pale shoulders. It surprises both Thorin and myself, his form jumping as I recognize my own husky voice as the one which spoke up.

"Writing," Thorin responds, folding the parchment to return into the cavities of his desk. He gestures for me to join his side, upon the armchair in the lighter, but still placidly dark, area of similar color. "I woke up earlier this morning and I could not find my way back to sleep." Begrudgingly, but with all the haste that love concocts, my feet patter across the stone ground, like a little mice couple, to join Thorin's side. His hand grabs mine, touching it gently and with all the care in the world before pulling me forward and onto his lap. I sit with my back nuzzled into his chest, head in the hair upon my shoulder and no one around.

"Was that your diary?" I ask with an awakened personality of my previous years. Though sitting on the bed did little to release my mind from the confines of sleep, conversing with my lover gives me a whole new consciousness in these early hours of the morning. And thus, with no intention of doing such, I find myself stringing Thorin along in my playfulness.