Written for the Hogwarts Games Competition
Prompt used: a brown leaf
The rain had slowed down to a drizzle, but the wind hadn't stopped. Most of the leaves had turned red or yellow, though some of them had already faded to brown. A man looked out of his window and realised that it was autumn.
He tried to remember all the autumns he had seen, but he found that he couldn't. They just sort of got mixed up in his head and formed one big autumn. One day, however, stood out clearly to the messy background of leaves and rain and cold.
It had been a beautiful September day, the time of year when autumn has already started but summer still lingers, fading but hesitant to say goodbye. Two people were making their way to their favourite restaurant: a young woman, relaxed and smiling, and a young man with a small black box in his pocket, calm on the outside but in reality nervous as hell.
He was going to do it. Today, he was finally going to do it. It had taken him weeks to gather enough courage to even enter the shop and now that he had found a ring he was determined not to waste any more time. That determination didn't make it less nerve-wrecking though.
He spent the whole evening waiting for the right moment, but it just wouldn't come. The young woman asked him a couple of times if something was wrong, he seemed a bit distracted and why wasn't he eating? He had ordered without thinking, the same three course dinner he always ordered. Turns out it's quite hard to eat with your heart in your throat. In the end, he decided to just get it over with, and if she said no, well, even a broken heart would be better than this damned uncertainty.
That thought calmed him for a second, it calmed him enough to reach into his pocket and grab the box, but the nerves returned worse than ever the moment he got down on one knee. He looked up at her and opened his mouth to say the speech he had practised and practised and practised, but no words came out. So he tried again. This time, he managed to speak, but the speech was completely forgotten, like it never existed at all, and the expectant silence that had fallen over the restaurant was only broken by two little words.
"Marry me?"
One moment of silence, filled with more doubt and fear than he would ever feel, seemed to last forever.
And then she said yes.
Yes, that was a day he could remember as clearly as though it was yesterday, but it hardly outweighed the thousands that had vanished from his memory. He was getting old.
He didn't feel old. Until now, faced with autumns he had seen but could not remember, he had never actually realised his age. He had lived without feeling the years. He had witnessed the world he knew fade away, become a story in the history textbooks of children. He had buried friends, and children of friends. He had seen his name on the front page of the newspaper when he celebrated his six-hundredth birthday last week. And yet he didn't feel old. Until now.
His eye fell on last week's paper. In bold print it declared that Nicolas Flamel, the Man Who Conquered Time, was celebrating his six-hundredth birthday.
He smiled, but it was a sad smile. Conquered time. As if. Forgotten about it, more like. And it seemed it had forgotten him as well.
He wondered how long it would take him to forget this autumn as well. It had definitely taken him a long time to notice it. He looked out of his window again, as if in an attempt to notice as many details as possible before this autumn would join the rest, and saw that the rain had stopped.
A man looked out of his window. It was autumn. The wind blew. And single brown leaf let go of its branch and fell softly to the ground.