I stumble back home, and the tears I apparently can't control start to spill. They run down my cheeks and I don't know why. I don't understand why.
It's just another argument.
But no, it isn't.
It's the last one, isn't it?
We were never able to talk. Just talk.
We were just able to fuck, in hate, resentment, and anger. To insult each other, tear each other apart, shout and scream.
It had hurt, for months.
But every time we've asked for more. Every time I've come back. Every time he's come back.
Asking for more of this sick, twisted way to feel something. To fill that empty space in my life. To try and forget about everything that always surrounds me, always suffocates me.
I take a quill and write to Harry that I won't be able to make it, to postpone to another time.
Then, I take a shower, I wash our night off. I wash his hands off my skin, I wash his smell off my body.
But the feeling of emptiness that grips me then will stay, I know it.
And oh it stays. All day. All night. And the next day too.
Before I know it's been a week, and I don't know whether he's come back and chosen to forget all about this, or has definitely moved out the country.
I know he has nothing to keep him here.
I think, I kind of hope, a pointless hope, that I was what was keeping him here.
Why, I don't know. Because it doesn't make any sense. Because he hates me. Because he's only been trying to feel something too.
He's gone either way. And I'm alone now.
Alone with my job, my acquaintances, Ron's disapproving stares, Harry's sad ones.
And I don't want to see any of them any longer, so I decline every invitation, lock myself off the world and work.
I just work - for an entire month where I don't dare go past his company to see if he's still there, ignoring me, or if he's gone.
Because either way, it hurts.
It hurts more than when we used to hurt together.
It takes me a month to realise, or to stop denying, but I miss this. All of it. The shouts, the lashing out, the sex, the pain.
I miss him.
It's when something is taken from you that you realise how much it mattered, isn't it?
Well, he mattered. He's been my escape, my way to lash out and scream, without fear of being rejected. Because whatever he said, whatever I told him, we always came back for more. His door was always open. Mine is still.
But he doesn't feel the same, or is too stubborn to admit it to himself, and we can't speak anyway.
So I am left alone, and I go back to that bar, for some obscure reason that I won't try to formulate. I am pathetic enough as it is.
He's never there. He's gone.
I keep going anyway.
Blaise Zabini is there once and I have to leave because he provokes me, calls me names from another time, from a war that is far away from us now, but that I can't erase from my mind. It does things to me that frighten me. I don't want to do anything I'll come to regret though, so I go away, but only after tossing the contents of my glass to Zabini's face.
I won't go back.
It's been two months now, and sometimes, when I hear a noise in my flat, I find myself jumping up to the front door to see that no one is there.
It's too much. Too much pain that I am willing to suffer.
So tonight, after two months, instead of going out, I go to his place.
I can still apparate inside, the wards are still in place, I'm still allowed in. He didn't change them.
It gives me a tiny second of hope when I land in his corridor, but as soon as I step in the living, I realise he's really gone.
A thick layer of dust has settled on the furnitures, the chairs are covered with thick white linens. When I frantically run to his study I find it empty but for the desk and the chairs, even the bookshelves have been emptied.
I can't breathe. I need to calm down and try to draw a breath. It comes in shaky and weak, and comes out worse.
I run to the bedroom. He's taken the sheets, and only the mattress is left.
I cry. I spend a long moment crying there, pathetically, in his house, alone.
And then I pick myself up from his cold floor, and I hate him. So much I want to scream. I walk back to the front door, and there, stuck to the wood, is a dusty piece of paper.
Tell me to stay.
Well it's too late now, isn't it? He's gone. I'm desperate, miserable. I take the note and apparate back home. Tell me to stay. I didn't. He thought I'd come back that day. Maybe he hoped I'd come back.
But it took me two months. And now it's too late. I can't bear the sight of his handwriting, so I toss the paper on the floor and apparate away.
I land in a secluded street in muggle London and walk. Emptily, pointlessly, I walk. I wander in the streets for hours, until I don't know where I am any more. And I keep walking. I stop only when my feet hurt so bad it's distracting me from the other pain. I sit on a bench, and watch the Thames. Until the sun goes up.
Until I'm too tired to apparate back.
I fall asleep, there, and it's a kid's cry that wakes me up. I walk back home and it takes hours. I climb the stairs slowly, my feet hurt so bad. I open the door, take a step in, and something's off.
I still have reflexes. My wand is drawn, my senses alert, the wards are untouched.
But something's off.
I walk around my small place, and maybe the couch is slightly ruffled, but I never sit there. He used to sit there. But he's not here, the place is empty.
I come back to the living, and check on the wards again, nothing's amiss.
Something's off, and it takes me an hour to figure out what.
The note, the note I took from his door, it's on the coffee table. I threw it on the floor.
He came. I missed him! He came!
I wasn't there!
The wave of rage I feel at that moment makes me break a whole lot of useless things. Picture frames crash to the floor, a vase explodes against the wall, everything that laid forgotten on the kitchen table is thrown around.
I only stop when there is nothing left to break, my breathing rasping, echoing in the still and poisonous air around me.
The feeling of emptiness that has been holding me in its clutches since that day is making me sink.
He came back.
He did. I wasn't there.
I cry.
I scream.
And then, my brain wakes up.
He came back.
How?
The wards at his place, they must warn him.
I go back to his place, in a desperate attempt at making him come back. Again.
I stay a few minutes in his corridor, and then come back to my place. I wait.
I wait hours.
He doesn't come back.
Eventually I fall asleep, in the mess I made, in tears I don't understand. In despair and anger.
