Author's note: A one shot for the sake of one shots. I tell you, it's exhilarating and completely lazy of me to not worry about a plot...which is why I spend some time writing little essays like this to get my mind flexible and focused for "I Am Just A Flea!"

No one in particular here, though I may tell you I imagine the two characters as Hermione Granger (big surprise) and Blaise Zabini. Draco Malfoy didn't seem right here. Malfoy's is so personalized and familiar with Hermy—this narrator is almost aloof and seems never to have talked to her.

But if you can think of any other pairing (except things like Hermione and Snape—I'm sorry but I don't really approve of fifty-year-old greasy mean bullies paired with seventeen year old girls—and I think most people get thrown off by Snape in the movie, who is too good looking for the Book Snape…anyway) tell me about the pairing you get when reading this. (Oh but don't just review by putting "fluffyxdobbie" because that's not a review and it sends me into fits of depression.)

Yeppers, well, have fun reading.

Disclaimer:

I Do
Not
Own
Harry
Potter.

Beyond the Tides

"There are only two ways of telling the complete truth--anonymously and posthumously."

Thomas Sowell (1930 - )

To tell the honest truth, (for there are dishonest truths and ambiguous truths and truths that only fill half the cup), I wasn't used to it. I was totally alienated by it, and I think I even wrung my brain, figuratively, and literally if I could, in the absence of familiarity.

She was, in the very essence, the complete corroding of my life. My past life. The rotting of my flesh would have been welcome in contrast to the rotting of my soul and mind and lifestyle which she doled out like "that!"

She was bursts of color where there shouldn't have been.

She was a shimmer of light in a world I was fairly certain was dominated by black and grey and the gloomy atmosphere of dungeon hearths.

She was all of the snarky and witty and oblivious counterpart I had tried to reckon my soul with—the devil I even bartered to get myself to that infinite and great level of self-awareness, cool bravado, and utter and complete indifference to the world and your own part in your fates obscurity.

And yet, she didn't even blink when I walked past.

As though she saw right through me, saw right to the core. She could have torn my heart apart right there in the corridor, ripped open my flesh and exposed the insect that I was, metaphorically, underneath the skin that I shrank away in.

She knew she could have had me then and there, could have tortured my fractured and pixilated mind until naught was left but the shell of a lonely ghost—the outline of a fading skeleton of a monster, rotting in the sun until the desert air overtook it and the winds carried time and moss to bring it down.

She knew she could have turned my head instantly, in a snap of her fingers I would have been at her whim.

And yet she did nothing.

Nothing.

As she walked by, without so much as a word, I was left staring carelessly "out at sea" to hum and mutter and fidget as I walked back to my room.

I knew then I was nothing in her scope of existence, which I had no chance in, and it was definite. Unlike the fairy-tale depression the hero sinks into, when he "knows" he can't win her love and yet he does anyway for a glorious and blockbuster ending, I knew in my heart it wouldn't end up my way.

And that was what I wasn't used to.

Author's Note: "Sank oo, sank oo, veddy veddy mudg."

That's what I sound like because I have a wee nose-cold.

Bummer.

Grazie infinite for reading this, ti amo, per quel che mi riguarda you're the best bunch of people there are!

Toodles my lovely little flying monkies.