Effects of a Rider chapter 50 - Of debts and saying goodbye
AN: Chapter 50 at last! I'm sorry it has been such a long wait but I stuggled to write this chapter as I felt, well that I have (for the moment at least) finished with this fic. I would like to thank everybody who's read and reviewed and supported me through the writing of this fic, I really appreciate it (espically Darkheart du Luc, The unfamiliar, Bloodredfirefly, Apersonhere, Batfink, J'aime lire, Shammage... the list goes on). I would love to write somemore but a bit lacking in ideas (for this fandom at least!) so any would be welcome. So enjoy.

I owe him. It's odd that you can owe a debt to a total stranger, but then again maybe not.
I owe that boy I never really knew, who I only met when he came to say goodbye.

It was at a school awards evening celebrating (using the word lightly in some cases) the results of our GCSEs, the kind which is approximately an hour two too long and which you have to endure in increasingly uncomfortable chairs as the evening drags on.
Time for the school to bask in the reflected glory of the successful students and blatantly ignore its failures.
He had been one of the latter.

He had not not been presented with certificates for achievement, attendance, effort or personality.
He was not nominated for his charity work or congratulated for his contribution to the school sports.
By the school standards he was a failure, a nobody. And he knew it. And unlike the true die-hard miscreants, he cared about it. That made it worse.

In his eyes, he was saying goodbye. I knew that I would never see him, in this life, again.
I started to move towards him across the room wanting to do something but halted when I became full of misgivings.

I did not know him – what on earth could say that could possible help him, comfort him?
What right did I – a total stranger – have of him? None.

Anyway, his friends and family would be around, they will talk to him, deal with him. That's what I told myself ( I never knew that the bystander effect could be so powerful, that I could be so selfish.)

I should have done something.
But I didn't. And I never did see him again.

I hope that someone braver then I did. I hope that he's still out there.
I owe him because three years later I saw it in one of my friends for a moment when they thought no-one was there. We talked, we cried, we talked. It wasn't easy or simple or fast. Eventually we smiled when we cried because it was a new day and while all was not well, it still was.

I owe that boy who said goodbye.