Limitation and infinity, essence and change.
I have not finished a story in 6 years, even though I am a person with a strong need to write. Writers block and everything it is composed of is beatable, and this is my proof! To anyone I used to talk about writing and stories with, in the small chance you come to read this, I hope you are still writing or doing something of equivalent joy and discovery. Feel free to message me any time. For anyone new: hi, hope you enjoy the drabble!
.Earth.
Gravel, gravel in his small throat as his father batters him with anger, pushing down the words he could spit back with. They burn down his throat and settle in his stomach like stones in a pond. Each one swallowed tells him something about the foundations of existence. Power is the only criteria of rightness. Know who is strong and who is weak. Strike lest you be struck. Severus Snape mines himself from the ground, carves his own bones, learns that even bullies cry when he throws dust in their eyes.
Severus made himself and it is he who unmakes himself, sends himself into exile to a dungeon entrenched in solid earth, under the pressure of a thousand years. Guilt sinks into the rock and is held there, a reminder he cannot flinch from.
His promises, his past and their price echo from the walls, unsaid but heard.
.Water.
Time comes in waves, depositing memories from years ago. They seem strange, sea-bourne oddities from another existence, but he picks them up from the sand and holds them to his ear and they tell the same story he hears every day. The crash of the tide is his only clock, an unhappy reminder that Sirius remains anchored, has always been anchored, will always be anchored.
The freezing sting of the cold water shocks him into aliveness. The realisation that not all is at it appears from the surface pushes him against the current. Sirius escapes, into a new tide. He lets it pull him and pull him until he unravels again, breaks against unyielding stone, dissolves into a new consistency.
Travel - fluidity - whims. He sticks to places with clear waters, a slowly changing man working himself loose. Vast tropical ocean stretches before him. Is any clock ticking? What are the tidings? The rush of the sea is his only answer.
Sirius laughs, and runs into his life.
.Fire.
Candles light one-by-one like stars. They guide Draco through all the dark moments. Light is magic, is a snap of fingers. Heat is a Latin spell, given power from a dead language the way fire roars through deadwood the fastest.
Draco has never seen an electric light with its all-encompassing glare, has never seen light without more shadow. It is warm gentle magic that assures him of his place in things, still-warmed desserts owled by his mother, words of praise from his father. It is the heat of the moment that calls him to defend it and himself. Fire burns all distinctions between self and legacy, between pride and fall.
The Room of Requirement sears from its core; having everything you want has its dangers. Draco learns that magic will never give him that. He cannot be a master, a superior. Wizards were never meant to control everything: magic is wildfire.
.Air.
Words travel fast, and harsh words faster, cutting off all routes, attaching an air of strangeness, of wrongness, of freakishness to him. Harry's life is sterility: no questions, no friends, no chances. As apples brown in oxygen, tension saturates his breath.
Running. Running from his cousin, running from his life. His aunt can stop him reading and drawing but Harry has an imagination through which thoughts slip through as fluidly as he runs. He is an aeroplane, he is a bird. One day, his real relatives will come and find him.
They do - or family of a sort, birds of a feather. They teach him to flick magic spells and they give him a place in a tower and a broom to fly on. He kicks off into the air, the rush of everything disappearing. Where there is movement there is change. Where there are air currents there cannot be stagnation. When Harry flies, there are no harsh words, no confinements. Just the fulfilment of hope and the promise of more, somewhere out there on the horizon.