slide away {lorenzo berkshire}

74. never grow up

"To die will be an awfully big adventure"
- J.M. Barrie

~~~~~~~

Cassie Avery

His screams had etched themselves into my bones.

Four days later, and I could still hear them.
Four days since my mother smiled while she broke him apart. Four days since the sound of him had made me want to crawl out of my own skin. Four days since I realised that guilt could be louder than a heartbeat.

And Lorenzo still hadn't woken up.

Sometimes, when the hospital wing was quiet, I could hear his breathing - soft, unchanging. It should have comforted me, should have been a reminder that he was still alive, but it only made the panic worse.

Because what if he never woke up? Or what if he did, but he wasn't him anymore?

I thought about what he'd once told me. About Neville Longbottom's parents. About how they'd been driven mad by the Cruciatus, how they'd been tortured until their minds had splintered and drifted somewhere far away. He'd whispered it to me in that hushed, guilty way, like it was his responsibility to confess because it was his mother who did it. Like he needed me to know what kind of blood ran in his veins.

And now it was Lorenzo lying there - pale, still, his face too peaceful for someone who should've been laughing, teasing, alive.

And it was my fault.

So I stayed with him. Every night.

Madam Pomfrey had tried to throw me out at first, muttering about him needing rest, about how she couldn't have students crowding her patients. But I'd found ways around her eventually. I was relentless. Persistent. Pathetic.

The first time, I fainted in Charms and refused to "come round" until she dragged me here.

The second night, I told her my vision was blurry - then deliberately walked into a door to prove it.

The third time, I convinced Blaise to hex my ankle so I could limp in dramatically. He refused at first, and Onyx was furious at him when she found out, but he caved eventually.

By the fourth night, I had to start getting creative, so I started coughing so violently in the Great Hall that Snape himself ordered me to the infirmary - though I may have slipped some sneezing powder into my own pumpkin juice to help it along.

Now Madam Pomfrey didn't even ask. She just rolled her eyes, waved me towards the bed beside Lorenzo, and muttered about how teenagers were more work than a plague.

And pathetic as it was, I didn't care. I'd invent a thousand more excuses if I had to. Because I couldn't leave him. I just couldn't.

I'd lie on the bed next to his, watching his chest rise and fall until the sky turned pale through the hospital windows. Sometimes I talked to him, half expecting him to tell me I was being dramatic. Sometimes I just... listened.

I hadn't seen the boys. They'd kept their distance since that night. And I hadn't gone to them either. Not because I didn't want to - God, I couldn't stop hearing the things I'd spat at them, couldn't stop picturing Theo and Draco's tear-streaked faces, couldn't stop seeing the way Mattheo's face had cracked when I told him Lorenzo was better without him.

The guilt gnawed at me like a parasite, but I couldn't face them. Because what was I supposed to say? Sorry I blamed you? Sorry you had to watch it happen too?

No apology would fix it. Not while Lorenzo was still lying there, trapped between breathing and silence.

"Cass - Cassie, seriously, are you even listening?".