a sorta fairytale
by Silvia
Consequences are a concept that no one else seems to understand, and you feel impossibly older sometimes, a lot of times. It can be lonely.
It's lonely but you don't want to let it go, though it would be so easy, because it feels like a twisted sort of edge. Fear – it can do great things for a person, in the most unexpected moments.
Fear, they think they feel it, but they don't, because they can botch things and break things and do everything wrong and have a reset. They can redo time, and that opens up a million second chances.
You were going to die and then a bird cried and then you didn't.
You think sometimes that Malfoy can feel it like you can, because he's just so mean that he must be frightened. It only makes sense.
You wonder what might have happened to him, and it's this nagging curiosity that makes you watch him and want to talk to him someday. You think there's some alternate world where that's something you do, you and him.
You would say, "I would never jump off that ledge," and point, and he would say,
"Funny, isn't it?"
"It is," you would say, and lay back beside him on the grass, and maybe there's a sunset. "They could fix me," you say, in this picture. "It isn't. It isn't that."
"Yes, it is," he would reply, and watch you, pulling himself up to balance on one elbow. In your mind, how you picture it, he looks like a prince.
It's terribly silly, but you see it anyway. And it's not all that silly in your head. He's so pale and serious.
"It's. When I would be falling," you try to explain, and you would struggle with it, though you know he knows, and that. That fits so perfect into all of it. "I couldn't take it. I wouldn't know it would be all right, right then."
And he would nod, because you wouldn't need him to say anything. And you would lay like that, beside him, and watch the clouds roll back.