something new to me. it contains some ideas i've been contemplating and, i don't know, other things. might be a little somber for some of you, but hey, if that's not your thing, that's totally cool.

WARNING: OOC-ness ahead. also, i don't own Harry Potter. there, i've admitted it :)

He had never feared heights. He found it ridiculous to fear something abstract. He understood arachnophobia or gerontophobia, the fear of old people. But he never quite got the concept of fearing closed spaces or open spaces or heights. He didn't see the point, as they could not ever be avoided. Spiders could be avoided, old people could be avoided. But heights and tight spaces? No, that would have made life too easy. If life was about being able to ignore that which scares us and have things our way, the whole point of struggling to survive or the whole survival-of the-fittest crap would have been redundant.

There was a beach beneath the cliff. It stretched out for miles and miles, the strip of golden-white sand beautifully inviting to those dreaming of a perfect day sunbathing and mucking around in mud. After the sand came the ocean that glinted green and blue when it was sunny and turned black and banishing under the clouds filled with rain. He found it somewhat ironic that he hated the beach but was now wistfully staring at it, squinting into the distance to keep up with the never-ending barrier of sand that curved away from him.

Then, and he could only see them if he bent his head all the way down, so that his chin was tucked into his neck, he saw the rocks. They were perched right at the base of the cliff. Some were long, some were smaller. Some were green with moss, others dry and hateful. But they were huge. Huge and really fucking scary. Really. Now, he didn't fear heights, but he did have a slight issue with rocks. He'd actually always hated rocks, especially when, as a kid, when the world was bright and dandy and the time hardly passed, the pebbles got stuck in his shoes and he could feel them digging into the soles of his feet. And he would limp through the annoying pain, earning glares from his graceful parents who did not get rocks stuck in their shoes.

Anyway.

He'd never, not even for a second, expected to find Hermione Granger at the edge of the cliff. He'd had a mental list – a novel, really – of people he would have expected to find, and Hermione fucking Granger had never even been a mere consideration on his behalf. He'd listed Finnegan, who'd lost half his limbs in a rogue explosion. Pansy Parkinson, whose face was burned off and whose sister died in her arms. That Lovegood girl, tortured and forced into murdering the wand maker in his dungeon. Weasley, the last one of his exaggeratedly-large family.

But not Granger.

Draco paused. He supposed he'd never considered Granger because she'd always been brainy. Smart people have a way of dealing with shit in a way others couldn't. Smart people didn't kill themselves. They had the brains to pack up and leave, to start anew, to put their goddam past behind them because that's the smart thing to do. They knew what to ignore and what to acknowledge. They knew that suicide was not a method of fixing but a method of ending.

He'd thought she'd been too smart.

'Granger,' he'd acknowledged slowly, not knowing why he thought a salutation was appropriate. Maybe he'd been curious to hear her voice. Maybe he was lonely.

'Hello, Malfoy,' she'd said, and it'd sounded very nearly serene to him. Her voice, that is. It had that edge of when you stop giving a fuck and decide to let things happen. That slight edge that people mistake for insanity. Because it's hard for them to understand that it is, in fact, possible to stop giving shits.

Now they were both at the edge. He felt a breeze tickling him behind the ears, by the hair curled around them. The hairs on the back of his neck stood upright, for some reason.

'Have you ever questioned immortality?'

He whipped his head to look at her. She could not be serious. She was asking him if he questioned immortality? She must have been way in over her head. Seriously off her fucking rocker.

'My own immortality?' But then again, so was he.

She quirked an eyebrow at him. 'I had no idea you were immortal, Malfoy.' She allowed herself a tiny smile. 'An arrogant prick, yes, but an immortal arrogant prick?'

'Why do you ask?' Truth be told, he had a problem with people like her. People like her were smart. So fucking smart, they expected every little thing to have answers. Smart people had this annoying habit of being convinced that everything had to have either a reason or an answer. Sometimes both. To them, the world and its details were packaged tightly, like supermarket items, just without expiration dates. And they had to be unpacked. They had to be pried open with teeth or knives or whatever to marvel at the contents. The packages could not be empty, they argued. Supermarkets don't sell empty packages.

So his problem was that he didn't consider himself a smart person. And it's really fucking hard being around smart people when you yourself are not one of them. It's like being on The Price is Right but you're filthy rich or something. He didn't know. He'd never seen The Price is Right.

She decided not to answer.

'It's funny, you know,' she said instead. She looked back at the sea staring calmly up at them. 'How the world goes on even when you're desperately wishing for it to stop. Even if you're dying or your friend is dying or there's a war going on somewhere, the world keeps turning. It's a rather sadist fact, isn't it? Like the world enjoys seeing you suffer.'

He did not say anything. He kept his mouth shut, but then again, he had nothing to say.

'You'd want the world to acknowledge the fact that you're in pain. Have the spotlight on you for a few minutes, you know? But you don't. Have the spotlight, I mean. That would just be rude, I guess.' She sniffed.

That was, he felt, when he knew he had to say something. The thing with smart people was, even if you weren't smart and felt like you couldn't contribute to their intelligence, you always had to say something. To boost their intelligence, to challenge them, or even to remind them just how stupid you were in comparison to them. Either way, with smart people you just had to fucking talk. It was the only way you could save them.

'Why would that be rude?' He felt that that was enough to mask his own stupidity.

He watched her shrug from his peripheral vision. 'You can't have the world stop turning for one second just so you can get your shit together.' She looked at him, right there and then. 'If that could happen, the world would never turn again. And we,' she turned away again, 'would be fucked.'

'I think it's better that way. To not have the world stop for us,' he said, not knowing why he'd decided to continue a conversation like this. Again, maybe he wanted to hear her speak. Maybe he wanted the world to stop.

'Why do you say that?' she asked.

'Because we'd know. Because since when has life been about knowing when other people are going through shit? When has life been about reminding people that you're going through shit? We're selfish people, Granger,' he paused, 'but we're not self-centered.'

'So what is life about then?'

The breeze had evolved into a fully-fledged wind that was now whipping and thrashing the clouds and sea below, sending waves crashing into the rocks below, foaming white as rabies. He watched the wind play with her curls. They slapped the sides of her face, once, twice, until she caught a particularly rambunctious lock of hair and tucked it impatiently behind her ear. It almost made him smirk.

'I don't know. Why must it have a meaning?' He spied a pebble at his feet and decided to give it a good kick. He watched it skid along the ground and fly out, over the cliff. It splashed into the water about ten meters away, disappearing into the angry lapping of the waves. He barely heard it kerplunk.

'When did life ever become about having a meaning?'

'When you're on your deathbed and you're wondering why your life turned out the way it did,' she said, though as an off-hand suggestion.

He shook his head. 'That's stupid. When you're on your deathbed you don't think. I've been at deathbeds, Granger. I've seen them die. They don't give two measly shits about you or about life. They're dying. That's all they think about.'

'But we're not all the same, Malfoy,' she reminded him. 'How do you know you won't be thinking of how your life turned out? How do you know I won't?'

This time he did smirk. Because he had nothing to lose. 'Because we're smarter than them, Granger. Because we know there doesn't have to be a meaning.'

That was when she raised her chin defiantly. See, another thing with smart people is, if you call them smart and then proceed to tell them what they'd do because they're smart, they get really fucking pissed.

'I want life to have a meaning,' she snapped. 'Unlike you, I am an optimist.'

He snorted. 'Optimism has nothing to do with this, Granger. But tell me,' he said, turning to her, 'why do you so desperately want life to have a meaning?'

She did not answer right away. Maybe because he'd hit a nerve. Or maybe because these questions took time. But then she mirrored his actions, and turned her body around completely, so that even her feet were pointing in his direction.

'Maybe I want something to believe in,' she said quietly, looking him right in the eyes. He vaguely noticed the color of her eyes. They weren't as dark as he'd imagined them to be. How odd.

'You have a God, believe in Him,' he said.

'It's not the same.'

'Isn't it?'

She shook her head slowly, and unglued her gaze from him. She looked down, instead, at her feet and hands, frowning. 'It's just unfair, that's all,' she finally said. Their gazes met again.

'What?' He was getting impatient now.

'Just that, I don't know,' she waved her hands around, exasperated, 'if I believed in God I could have someone to blame. If life doesn't have a meaning then it just is for the sake of being. It wouldn't do much else. The rest then would be the work of others, like God or Satan or something.'

'Then why don't you believe in God?' he said. Honestly, if only she could have been less smart. A lower level of intelligence leaves more room for simplicity. That's what he liked to believe.

She shrugged. 'Because then it would be too easy. And all of this,' she gestured at their surroundings, 'is anything but easy.'

He thought about it. They had gone full- circle now. One more thing he noticed about smart people is that while they search for answers – insist on the existence of answers – they very often find themselves surrounded by more questions than when they started. And that was, he thought, the reason why many geniuses went insane. He found it quite ironic, really.

'Granger,' he said then, understanding a little bit more than he had minutes ago, 'this is about Potter, isn't it?'

She stared sadly. She bit the inside of her cheek, then her lips, then her cheek again. She took deep breaths. 'I didn't mean to,' she whispered suddenly, still looking him straight in the fucking eye.

He could not look away. Jesus, that would have been something, though. To look away before things got heavy. To avoid the storm. The rocks at the bottom of the cliff. But that was exactly what she had been saying. That would have been too easy.

'They forced me to, I couldn't fight it,' she was saying, murmuring her words as though trying to comfort herself. It was strange, watching her mutter to herself, knowing that at that moment she wasn't seeing him anyway. 'I couldn't fight it. I couldn't. I was forced to. I didn't mean to.'

'I know, Granger.'

She tore herself from her thoughts and let out a laugh. 'Who'd have known. Who'd have known I would be the one to end it. Fuck, I didn't,' she said. Her voice was about three pitches higher. 'I didn't. Fuck, Jesus, I didn't.'

He figured he could have touched her then. Maybe held her hand. Patted her back like his mother used to do. But that would have been too easy. He was not easy. He wasn't. And neither was she. There was too much shit. All he could do was talk.

'So if you believed in God you could blame Him for Potter's demise,' he said slowly. When she didn't give any indication that he was right, he knew he'd hit the bull's eye. 'But war isn't simple,' he went on, watching her, 'and you can't push all the responsibility on an omnipotent being. That would be too easy.

'Do you regret it?' he found himself asking her. What a stupid question, though. What a stupid fucking question.

But she gave him a look that silenced his thoughts. Really, this girl was too fucking smart for her own good. She was going to get herself killed, really.

'Harry? How can I regret something I had no control over?' Something shifted in the way she was looking at him. 'Do you know, I spent sixteen weeks hiding in my flat.' There was a hint of something close to amusement in her voice. Her pitch had, meanwhile, gone back to normal. 'I couldn't come out. I starved myself. I lost my wand.'

He nodded. He'd known. He'd known a lot of things, more than he cared to admit.

'When I did come out, I knew what I had to do.' Yes, she'd known. Come out here. By the cliff where the sand meets the water and pointedly ignores the rocks. Where the sky never ends and the wind blows fiercely. Where God watches from above and does nothing, where life is for the sake of being.

'What about you?' she asked him.

The clouds moved languidly away from them. He figured he might as well answer. 'Like I said, I've seen deathbeds. Enough to last me a lifetime.'

This time she was the one who nodded. Like she understood. She did, that was the thing. She understood perfectly well, and maybe that was why he decided he was fine with her being there with him. Maybe that was why the bottom of the cliff didn't look so daunting anymore.

Simultaneously, as though that settled the conversation, they turned back to the cliff. He faintly registered her shoulder touching his.

The sea was raging now, but the sun continued to shine. Foam and algae engulfed the rocks below. He felt her wince as she watched the waves massacre the boulders.

She spoke again. 'Do you think we'll reach the sea?'

It felt like a joke to him. Maybe it was.

He thought it better not to reply. It had, perhaps, not even really been a question, and she did not press him for a response.

Then, suddenly, because sometimes you can't control your own head, he thought of God again. And of life being anything but easy. He thought of her hiding and of Potter dying at her unwilling hands. He thought of Pansy with no face and he thought of himself, sprawled against the wall as he watched his mother die.

And then he thought that sometimes, the worst decisions were the easiest ones. And sometimes even the best of people can't save you from them. Now, Hermione Granger could have been the best of people or she couldn't have, but either way, she couldn't save him. But for some reason her being with him canceled everything else out.

Because sometimes you don't have to be alone, even if things aren't easy.

'Granger,' he said before he could forget, 'why are you jumping?' He gave her a sideways glance. 'Is it Potter?'

She pursed her lips. She looked like she wanted to shake her head but thought better of it. 'They burned my parents. While I was hiding.'

He nodded again, absent-mindedly. There was no need for anything else to be said. Then, swiftly, their fingers met and after that he felt no more.

The sun pierced his pale face and the ground shook beneath them.

He never reached the sea.

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