"Oi, you!"
Do you know that instinctive moment when someone calls out and you turn your head, because somehow you just know they're referring to you? Well that particular sensation didn't occur to Joseph Norton on this particular day, sitting on this particular step, and in fact he wasn't at all aware of anyone's presence behind him until he was smacked upside the head with a newspaper by a large middle-aged woman. Even then, there was too much thought cushioning his brain for the impact to have any real effect.
"You've been sitting outside my pub for three hours," Mrs. Burkowski growled at him, giving him the same stink-eyed glare she gave him every time he sat outside the Leaky Cauldron, on this very step. Just as he had that day, the day his life began. Somehow, and he wasn't quite sure how the two went together, he also considered it the day his life ended. The one he lived anyway. Ever since that day he had been a bystander in his own life.
That was the day he met her.
Mrs. Burkowski had been there then too. That was the first time he received her look of disapproval, only at the time it had fazed him much deeper. Today he could care less, but if he looked back far enough he could recall a time when it mattered what people saw when they looked at him. When anything mattered but her.
They were always her in his memories. To him they were one in the same, two halves of the perfect girl. It would have made very little sense to someone intruding on his thoughts. How could two women, two who had probably never even met for that matter, be one? It was simple. They just were.
Joey could remember being in love; or at least, he thought he could. He was sure it was a warm feeling, burning at times, but perhaps the warmth in his memory was simply the absence of the cold inside him now; the nothing. Also, he was fairly certain at one point he felt closer to the clouds than the ground. But that too could have been his imagination.
Of one thing, however, he was absolutely positive. And that was that at one point, for one brief moment, everything in his life had been just right. For one tiny flash of time, all the aces were in his hand and he was on top of the world.
Then, he reminded himself as he pushed himself up off the sidewalk and began the trek home, you fell.
Dream On - Aerosmith
Disclaimer: No, I do not own Harry Potter. That honor belongs to JK Rowling. I also do not own Joey, believe it or not.
This story is dedicated to my friend Joooeeeyyy (With that many letters. I'm sure of it.) who asked me to write him into a fanfiction. All I heard was CHALLENGE, and being me, I of course leapt at the opportunity. Hope you approve Joey!