Story: The Fall

Author: Hawk Martin

Disclaimer: Character is mine, story is mine, but Harry Potter is not.  Insert sigh.

Dedication: To all those that think I should own Severus Snape.

A/N: One-shot story, and somewhat angsty.  This is more romantic than I usually do so enjoy.  Bwhahaha…

Summary: They say it is better to have loved and lost than to have never loved before.  Through the eyes of one individual, it is better to have lost than loved, for love makes you human.  Does the pain when you are without it?  Does your humanity?

Notes: None really.

Rating: PG.

Warning: I stick with the 'Do not read if illiterate' theory.

~"We that are true lovers run into strange capers; but as all is mortal in nature, so is all nature in love mortal in folly"----From As You Like It (II, iv, 53-56)~

I smoke my cigarette and close my eyes. You always insisted that it was bad for me, but I don't care now. Loving you was bad for me, as well, but you didn't seem so keen on stopping that.

My apartment taunts me; hisses in frozen delight. I'm alone, so the world can take relief in the subtle fact that I'm doing my job. Protecting them, even when I'm dying myself. But it doesn't matter. You're gone, and I'm alone, so everything's the way it should be. I guess.

Amazing how days like these seem to slowly melt into weeks...and weeks into months. I never needed to pay attention to time before; never need to reconcile with the bitter realization that time is all I have now. Time and drugs. Sex is obsolete and rock'n'roll is better left to the Americans and British.

You were always British to me, anyway.

My life is falling, slowly as every autumn leaves hits the ground with soft determination. As if they want to die, letting suicide take its path when people clear the leaves for something better--the grass, the innocent grass that lies naively underneath. What doesn't last for a lifetime needs to be destroyed.

So why hasn't anyone eliminated love yet?

Perhaps because it has lasted a lifetime, and more. It's lasted decades and centuries, personified in the stories and hearts of people. The very same people, mind you, that killed millions for martyred souls, for metallic truths, for no reason except the thirst to kill. Kill or be killed, as the saying goes.

Ironic, because I've done both.

The world is blurry now, a distant black and gray that I am forever blind to. The things that once made me laugh; made me smirk has been stolen by a God I'm supposed to thank. I am grateful for this existence. Or so I tell myself every night before the opium kicks in, before I begin to get sinfully grateful for something else.

I don't hate you for leaving. I should, I know, but I don't. I didn't love you for staying once, either. Indifference has seeped into my black soul, just as love once broke it. If I'm protected, I'm inhuman; if I'm dying, I'm mortal.

I don't think I will win, either way. And I don't want to.

A part of me blames myself for the entire endeavor; the other part is too far gone to care. I wonder how you feel, if you can at all. Are you guilty? Not likely. You've always been practical, and it's logical to assume that you were completely innocent in this.

You always were.

Smoke rises gracefully to the ceiling and I sigh. It's autumn, and I'm falling.

But falling for love or for death, I do not know.

And maybe I never will.