downfall
When your eyes meet with the ruin of the Potters' home, you don't know what to feel. When you take those careful, surprisingly grounded steps inside, you don't know what you'll see.
You have been hurt before, Sirius Black, but do you know how it really feels? Sure, you've been abused by your parents, outcast by your brother, hated by many, lost a few loves. But as your gaze rests on the lifeless form of your best friend - you realise that, for the first time, your heart truly cracks.
Tell me, is this the sound that the heart makes as it breaks? Like a slither of glass, shattering into jagged pieces of pain. The sound of a thousand guns shot, or a hundred bombs dropped, fails to come close to the sound of a broken heart resounding in your ears, pounding through blood and vein.
And is it meant to hurt this much? The force like a blow to the gut with an invisible, icy fist. It throws you over at first, it invades your lungs, cold and gripping and it tenses your body in inexplicable numbness.
But then it stops, it finishes. All the pain, the numbness, the sorrow, the invisible shards of glass pinching at your soul; it dissolves. And it is suddenly replaced with a force which surges through your body; hot anger, fury, rage, sickness, disgust, guilt. It simmers quickly, clouding your mind with thoughts of destruction and violence and revenge.
If only someone had been there, if only someone had grasped your shoulders and looked you in the eye and perhaps poured some cold water over your head, maybe you would be okay.
But then, in a cacophony of pain and nausea, you realise that someone is there. The ice to your fire, the calm to your storm, the clarity and light of your life; he is there.
But he is lifeless, unaware. He cannot help you, he cannot stand up and pat you on the back and give you a smirk and make things better.
Your ice, your calm, your clarity; it lays with him on that floor. And so perhaps that is why you ignite your fire, unleash the storm and flee into the darkness with the image of one little rat glaring in the embers of the blaze.
You are your own downfall.
