Lightning

By: Provocative Envy

OOO

Author’s Note: You’d think as a college graduate, practically an adult, I’d stop doing this—but no. Insomnia strikes, and I find myself writing characters named Hermione and Draco. Due to the fact that I am now being paid to write things that aren’t fanfiction, I can’t promise this will be updated with anything remotely resembling regularity; however, it will probably be more often than you’d think, since I don’t believe in sleeping pills.

Anyway, I’m playing around with a new format in this story—the ludicrously short prologue, as it is, takes place after the story itself; the story will just lead up to the ending, which will overlap with the prologue. So I’m not actually just going to post like half of a seemingly random page and then go with it. There is an order. I promise.

OOO

PROLOGUE

“I love you,” he whispered, holding me tightly, acting like it wasn’t a good-bye, pretending that its permanence was illusory—his breath was warm against my ear, his voice rough, and he was so close to me, so very close, I could hear every inflection, every distortion, in that simple, meaningless phrase.

Keep breathing, just keep breathing, I reminded myself inwardly, awkwardly, all the while holding my breath, waiting, waiting, to see the rigid lines of his retreat.

“Please, look at me,” he implored, his desperation not nearly as palpable in the ensuing silence as he would have liked it to be. “Please.”

I remembered the times he’d made me cry, warned me not to, the times our bare legs had entwined themselves in his bed sheets, and all the while I’d felt ashamed, disgusted, atrophied, in the aftermath. There was no cure for false love, no truth to remedy the pain it inflicted; for every kiss he dropped on my waiting, expectant, bloodless lips, there were ten insults, ten memories of insults, to remind me that his perfection was all a part of my imagination: my stupid, vivid, curiously incoherent imagination.

“Hermione.” My name, finally, there it was, his last chance to make things right between us, his final attempt at both reconciliation and apology.

“Just go,” I replied, my teeth gritted, my jaw clenched, every muscle and every joint I possessed locked in a furious battle with my natural inclination to move and my utterly unnatural desire to feel nothing, do nothing, let numbness overtake me to such a degree I couldn’t feel his embrace any more than I could feel his kisses, his pleas, his love.

I wanted to feel nothing, absolutely nothing.

“You can’t possibly be blaming me for this,” he choked out, his hands, which had been so tightly gripping my elbows, dropping to his sides, his eyes flashing a brilliant silver before returning to the dismal gray-blue of my nightmares, my dreams, my everything—he was about to tell me his heart was breaking, like it would solve anything, and I was about to tell him that mine was already broken. And had been, ever since the night of that precious, pitiless rainstorm, the one that had simultaneously brought us together and torn us apart.

“There are a lot of possibilities you never considered, aren’t there?” I said, my accusatory tone more effective than the words themselves. I glanced away, blinking back tears, wondering how I’d gone from prodigy to pathetic all in the space of a few weeks; I had had everything, everything.

OOO