Sean drowns every four and a half minutes. Though variations in environment and company alter the average, it never strays far enough to be reconsidered. It suffices. Which normally wouldn't be good enough, but there are some things even he has to let go of. The final leg of that particular race to perfection would be too much.

He drowns and, sometimes, he drowns in front of people. It starts in the very center of his stomach and snowballs upward to lodge painfully in his throat. The world comes to a neat stop just beyond his eyelashes. Things blur fantastically. He either babbles something he shouldn't or stops talking entirely; either way it's trouble.

And how can things be any other way, when there's so much to think about? Not a day passes that doesn't contain at least two public events for him. With each event comes a dozen questions—why is he here, what does it mean, who does it mean something to, and how will he get from here to there without disappointing whoever is ahead on his schedule?

It's so much action that he is very often deprived of his own reaction. He feels and sympathizes and gets angry later when it's over, when he doesn't have to be there, look this way, right through here, Mr. Astin, the cameras are located there and there.

His initial intentions have been shunted by the enormity of his promises. He is there, but only physically. So he drowns. It is the culmination of his goodness gone awry. It is the sum of all the love, want, and purely selfish need to be there that exists in his heart.

Still, it has only taken him truly under a few times. Those few times, luckily enough, were never in the very middle of an event. He thanks whoever may be listening for the blessing of adrenaline, finds the nearest sturdy surface, and collapses.

Guilt is the only thing he can feel afterward. Inevitably someone who cares reaches for him—the pretty backstage assistant with a bottle of water in her left hand, his assistant Steve full of silent comfort because they don't even need to talk about it anymore, or maybe just that kid across the way who toddles up all sucked bottom lip and asks him if he is Sam Gamgee—and this is when he realizes that he has forced another to take care of him.

It's easier when Christine is there, when it happens at home. In the evening, typically, after three solid hours on the phone, two more on the computer, and a shower that lasts so long he's surprised his skin hasn't slid right off his bones by the time it's over.

He'll stumble into the kitchen or the hallway and she'll be there, soft and warm and smelling of powder, and he'll tuck his cheek to her breasts and breathe so carefully his lungs feel on the verge of shattering. She'll hum nonsense and card her capable fingers through his hair. All the quiet strains of her solid presence tug him from the chaos that splinters into shards inside his chest.

He carries the ghosts of everything he's done inside him, she explains. He can't cope with the reality that things are finite. Even as he enjoys the very activities that drive him crazy, he mourns their loss. He's been in mourning for New Zealand since day two of filming. He falls in and out of emotion this way, often half in and half out of one or the other, so torn as the feeling plays his body that he's not sure whether hate is love or love is hate. "I loved it, but I'm glad it's over." "It's really sad that it's over, but I wouldn't change it." Every speech is a different variation on the same theme.

Enter: the monkey wrench. (And isn't that ironic?)

He drowns and stares at his cell-phone. He hits speed-dial before he can even decide to do so. Elijah answers and Sean hangs up, panicked. Doesn't want to expose to Elijah to this and yet at the same time needs comfort more than anything. So when the phone rings and a confused Elijah is on the line, he answers. It's so much easier to answer than call.

It takes fifteen seconds for Elijah to catch on. It takes one hour and forty-five minutes for him to get away from his friends and to Sean's neck of the woods.

There is no excuse here. They're alone and Sean is forced to admit as he has been every time this happens that there is something about Elijah, something that draws him back from the edge like nothing else. With everyone else it's like a warm lull teasing him forward—with Elijah it's like being thrown head-first into ice water. It brings him so sharply back to the immediate that he's left wide-eyed and shaking. It's like being taken by the throat and shook until all he feels is the shaking. It is all that severity with no actual or apparent severity—and that impresses Sean. Elijah only has to be in the room for this performance to run. Sean knows without a single doubt (and he has thousands) that he'll never have that kind of power.

His mind races. He remembers something suddenly. Something to do with Elijah. His fingers leaf through the pile of papers on his desktop blotter and he comes up with an eight by ten glossy of himself in hobbit costume. He turns it over, spies the writing done in silver Sharpie, and tilts it so that Elijah can see.

Elijah stares back, unsure of what to make of that. Sean can only sink to the edge of his desk and clutch the smooth paper until it's a mess of jagged folds.

"I don't remember where the signing was," Sean sighs. "I don't know why I wrote it. I do know that it is about you. That's all I know. That's all that ever seems to make sense."

"And as far as I know," Elijah replies, "I've never been left anywhere. You want to refresh my memory, Astin?"

He is dragged promptly back to the room. His vision clears and Elijah is standing there in a hoodie and a pair of jeans, smelling just faintly of beer. Elijah's words swirl several times around Sean's brain before settling legibly. The knots in Sean's chest come undone.

Sometimes, the opposite of drowning is falling.

(Moving on is simple, it's what we leave behind that's hard. — Sean Astin)