avelera:

*incoherent screaming*

*NOT BotFA EE spoilers*

The death scene is still awful. It’s awful that Bilbo goes home after. It’s awful that Bilbo has to watch Thorin die. It’s awful that Bilbo can’t even bear to look at Thorin once he goes still. The sound he makes is awful. 

But the look when Thorin smiles up at him and Bilbo’s face falls is so much worse than I ever realized. 

You have so many scenes where someone dies happy, knowing the person they love loves them back. Thorin is having that moment and he’s so at peace and content.

But you never see the other side of that. Until Bilbo. Until you see Bilbo and how he just understands Thorin to the bone and he realizes that Thorin is smiling because Bilbo is there, he is smiling because Bilbo is showing such concern for his survival, more concern than Thorin is showing for his own survival.

There is something worse than dying knowing you are loved. It’s watching, and knowing, like Bilbo does, that someone is dying happy because you just showed that you love them and there’s nothing you can do to stop them or make them fight. There’s nothing but that blinding flash of insight that you mean so much to someone and there’s nothing you can do but lose them and that they will be happy and you will be left alone with that realization. That you could have loved them back. That you do. That you are the one who is going to be left alone with this. That you have given them so much more than you ever thought possible and for them it is enough and for you that’s all it will ever be. 

And then Bilbo goes home because Thorin asked him to. Because Thorin doesn’t know that Bag End has been ransacked and it is as desolate and empty and robbed as Erebor was, and it is just as toxic. He doesn’t know because he just wanted Bilbo to be happy and live a long life, and he died happy in the knowledge that would happen, and Bilbo went home to be trapped in the same hell: that of a home that is no longer home and thieves at the door and madness waiting inside that Thorin had just faced only unlike Thorin there was no one there with him to pull him out, not for years. And Thorin wouldn’t know because he’s been living his whole life on the dying wishes of his loved ones, and wouldn’t understand without being shown that home was now a person for Bilbo, not a place. He wouldn’t have had time to understand. Bilbo never got the chance to tell him, because even he didn’t know until the exact moment it was too late. 

Just set me on fire nothing is worse than this