Feedback: please

Note: No relation to the country song of the same name. ;)

Thanks: To Ossian and Sheltie for reading and reacting.

Disclaimer: Do I really need to tell you that I'm not making money here? I thought not.

Is it possible to meet your soul mate when you're eleven? When you're too young to even have heard of such a thing, much less believe it exists? I met my soul mate on a train when I was barely eleven years old. Barely away from the oppressive relatives who tolerated me, I was happy only to have escaped Privet Drive, both eager and scared.

It was then I met my soul mate.

Even most wizards scoff at the idea -- that you can meet someone who is so different and so the same that they fill in all the empty places. They get under your skin until you don't even know where you begin or end anymore. You don't see those kind of things when you're eleven. You don't even know to look.

I didn't.

I didn't realize it then. Or in a hidden away chamber where he fell so that I could go forward. Or any number of the times he's sacrificed for me -- saved me. Isn't that how it happens? You don't realize... I realize it now. Standing on a cliff, overlooking the sea, I know.

I thought I saw him today at King's Cross and my eyes burn just at the memory.

The crowd was bustling every which way, as it usually does at mid-day. I was there to see a young wizard to the train, a favor for Hagrid much as he had done for me. Only I actually saw my charge as far as the train: through the gate and onto the platform.

It had been years since I was last there. My own final journey along those rails was finished many years before. Hogwarts behind us, Ron, Hermione and I had crowded into a sleeper together and refused to let anyone else inside. It was the last chance we had to pretend as though nothing were changing.

Even though everything had already changed, was changing.

We had faced Voldemort. We had stood together -- truly together unlike so many of our past adventures and scares -- to end his burgeoning reign of terror over our world. The papers wanted only to think of me, to tell my story, but in truth without them I would have fallen.

It is as complicated, and as simple, as that.

So how is it, half a life later I find myself here -- cursing my half a life? I fought the exposure our battle brought. I hid myself away from it, taking solace for a while with Sirius and Remus. Even after my godfather was cleared he was no longer one for crowds or spectacles. It was easy to hide from the prying eyes with them.

Not that Hermione or Ron let it slide easily. No, they badgered me incessantly at first. Hermione, busy with work at the Ministry, must have worn her poor owl ragged. Ron went as far as to appear on our doorstep many times. Sirius would simply smile and let him pass. I didn't realize until years later how sad that smile was when he would look at us.

Yet the day comes when the letters are few. The visits are fewer. And in the swirling eddies of life you let it slide. You smile fondly on what's past while hurrying to keep up with what's present. And you don't stop and regret it until the day comes that the regret does no good. When it is as useless as all the hurrying through life can be.

They say the truest friends never change, even if everything else does. I'm not sure who this they is. One wonders if they must live inside a snow globe, protected from the world by a dome of glass all the while enchanted by the sparkling white. Seems a far cry from the real world. But you hold it in your heart all the same. That you don't change, your friends don't change.

Yet we changed. Time changed. Distance changed.

I stopped hiding eventually, went to London and became a respectable wizard. I was still the boy who lived, forever he who defeated the dark wizard but I slowly became more. A teacher, though not at the school I had loved, it gave me a quiet life, far from the news. It was something I continue to crave greatly.

Oddly enough, it was Hermione and Ron who did make the papers on occasion. Hermione, quickly climbing the ranks of the Ministry, appeared from time to time looking seriously outward from the photographs.

Ron... Ron's was most surprising. Shocked me, actually, when he told me that he was going to Romania. Time and again over the years we heard Ron tell stories about Charlie. About his brother Charlie and his dragons. I never imagined Ron would follow him there. After all, following one of his brothers seemed the last thing Ron would want. He spent so long in their shadows, you could see him longing to be free.

But I was surprised yet again the first time I visited him there. He was... at peace with the dragons. It was as though they calmed the side of him that was never quite sure, never quite satisfied. It warmed my heart to see it, even if a part of my heart died at the same time.

I couldn't explain then why it did. I can now, though. Thoughts rambling all over the place, cold from the brisk wind that blows in from the channel, now I can be honest with myself.

It was seeing him there, needing but needed, that I realized he didn't need me anymore. I know he thought I never needed him, but he was wrong. We needed one another when we met and for all the years after until that moment.

And in the end I never realized how much I needed him to be with me and even to need me. I never knew truly how much he filled in the empty spaces. I didn't see until I was only half complete and he too far away to reach. For how could I ask so much of him, when he was so obviously not so lacking? How could I be so selfish?

I envied him then. I envied him that completeness as much as I'd often envied him his family. I had discovered love in the very moment I rediscovered loss. I realized soul mates do exist. However our chances of knowing them, holding them, are neither infinite nor something to be tossed away lightly.

I had made it just as far as this cliff, the day I decided to take a chance and see Ron again. I had wanted to try and bridge that gap I had let grow between us to see if maybe he felt the same pull toward me that I did toward him. That perhaps he hid it as I did. I had made it just this far before I knew... Before something inside of me snapped so sharply I almost crashed my broom into the choppy waters below.

I learned later that one of the dragons he so loved had been cursed, a charm Ron was trying to counter to save the dragon itself. The dragon was saved. But in its place Ron was not. Charlie hadn't been able to reach him in time, although it was he who brought the news to me.

In truth I do not remember many of the weeks after that. To know I had come so close, so horribly, cruelly close... A day, even half, more would have been enough. I'm left with questions, doubts, self-recriminations. The memories that ghost along beside me silently, yet painfully sweet.

I wanted so badly to believe what I saw today. Who I saw today. He was there, standing on the other side of the platform. There was a flash of red hair, fluttering dark robes and the bubbling of laughter so familiar -- the one that was always a sure sign of trouble. My heart ached, shattering at the sensation, no less painfully than it had that day over the cliffs.

I barely managed to lead my charge as far as the train, I was so intent on the image before me. The sunlight catching my eyes, I blinked... and he was gone. It felt as though he had truly been there a moment before. I knew, even as I stared, that it wasn't him. Yet my heart wanted to believe. It longed to be complete.

Walking home that eve, leaving behind the platform and the children that rode the train, I relived so many of the adventures we shared together. I found my flat, more by happenstance than any determination on my part, and grabbed my broom. I was at the coast, staring over the painfully familiar waters before I had time to even think on it.

It was here I that I realized lost my soul mate, far too soon after finding him. It was long after I had left eleven behind me, long after the excuse of innocence had fled.

I realize it now. Shouldn't that count for something?

fin