It was nights like these that she thanked herself over and over for becoming an animagus.
It was nights like these, when everything piled up, high, so high, far above where she could see the top of it.
It was nights like these that she flew.
She could sit in her bedroom, on the floor, in the dark, with her eyes closed. Sinking into blackness, silence, nothing. Nothing. But nothing didn't exist as a human. Because there was thought. There was always thought. Thought always ruined everything. Thought was man's greatest advantage and greatest downfall.
Animals were lucky in that they had no thought. Their lives may be a little more dull, a little more simple, a little less comfortable, but they didn't have the burden of thought weighing them down.
The day she first cast a corporeal Patronus, she knew. She remembered being surprised at how small it was, how could anything so little be a force against anything? But it was more powerful than she had realized at the time. She did see the beauty in it. The grace, the poise, the sheer agility. She could not see the power, but she could see the opportunities. She knew that day that she would become an animagus. It wasn't a question of morale, or resolve, or determination. But a mere question of time.
She bipassed the paperwork and did it all illegally. This way, she was less human. This way no one would know. This way she would be fully and completely free.
She sat on her roof. Midnight blackness. Winter silence. Creeping, disquieting, parasitic thought.
Her bones shattered momentarily in a brief spasm of pain, and reformed, smaller, hollow, weightless. She felt her thought dissolve with her skin, and her liberation grow in with her sleek brown feathers.
Whirling around in the air, soaring, climbing higher and higher, falling back down, stopping to rest in the highest branches of one of the bare trees surrounding her. Taking everything into sight, not stopping to think, ever. Thought was poison.
Flying was her vice, her escape, her thoughtless philosophy. Flying was freedom and love and home and everything she wanted from the world. More than once she wished she could fly forever, never having to return to reality or-depending on your perspective-leave reality.
For this was real. And that life she had left behind was beyond a falsity. It was surreality, and not the good kind of surreality. The kind of surreality that you can't keep track of, that you lose yourself in, a never-ending house of mirrors that maybe fun at first, until you realize there exists not exit, and you have nothing to do but cripple on the floor and cry.
Her exit was up. The air. The sky. Forever open to any and every possibility.
Nights like this, she didn't cry, she didn't run away, she most certainly did not think.
She flew.
Nights like this, she was free.
