Princeton Avenue (Issues) - 2/5 for the Five Drabbles Competition at HPFC.
What is a man, who lays a hand on his lover, and calls it tough love, tough love
Your roots grow in the cracks of the alleys, college park made you
Man enough to see, man enough to see, there ain't a goddamn man in me
(There ain't a goddamn man in me)
Frank only ever had very fleeting moments of lucidity.
He spent a portion of precious time trying to piece his existence together. It was with great sadness that he realized, time and time again, that he remembered the torture more than his family. Bellatrix and her husband, all the Death Eaters, Voldemort himself - he hated them. They were not women and men, they were barely even human.
Much of his time was also spent trying to convince himself that closing his eyes wouldn't cause him to fade from existence. It never worked, because a part of him knew that the next time he realized he was awake, far too many days would have slipped through his fingers.
He was falling through the cracks of time, losing everything that might define him.
There were no stirrings of magic inside of him. He hadn't been able to save his wife. He had left his baby son behind.
He'd never said goodbye.
In those moments - usually over before they even started - he sometimes saw Alice sleeping. Sometimes she mumbled. Sometimes she screamed.
Not once did she recognize him enough to have any conversation. Perhaps she'd extend a candy wrapper to him - and then conscious thought would be just out of his grasp and he'd fall back into the memories of agony that froze his mind and crushed his heart.
He was happy they weren't dead, but sometimes he wished it over the emptiness that filled him when he recognized that his whole existence would always be the hospital wing. He'd watch them both age, seeing it in little bursts as though they were both strangers to him even though he'd once known her better than anyone else.
The thing he missed the most was love.
Somehow it always came back to love.
Love.
So simple. It was silence, comfort, and a lightness in his soul.
So complex. It could change from a spark to a roaring fire. It was understanding. It was a million memories that boiled down to one person. She'd made him the happiest man in the world. Then the feelings would loop back to hatred of the Death Eaters.
His sanity, family, and love was gone - stolen. Frank wished, in the heartbeats of time that pushed his mind to break through to reality, that it all might be fixed someday.