autumn | severus snape

seven

When Ophelia returned home sometime in the early morning, the world was still and grey and unforgiving.

She had sobered up enough to regret everything.

Her keys missed the lock twice before she got the door open. She slipped inside the quiet house and locked herself in her room without even taking her shoes off. The second the door clicked shut, she sank to the floor.

She bit down on the sleeves of her shirt to stop herself from screaming.

The night kept replaying in her mind. Over and over. The look in the boy's eyes. The grip on her arms. The weight of being reduced to something small and powerless. Maybe he hadn't been sober either. Maybe he wouldn't even remember. But she would. And he'd do it again, to someone else, and someone else after that.

That thought felt like a knife digging into her brain.

She tried to focus, but everything felt heavy. Like trying to run through water with her lungs half-full of sand.

She needed a distraction, searching desperately through her room, trying to find something to bring her back to reality. And then she froze, she had definitely found something. Her hands shook as she picked it up from her bed, where it lay so innocently.

"Ophelia,

I'm not really sure why I'm writing this letter. I think the main reason is that I need closure. I need to know why you left me. I understand that you were hurting, I understand that you had to move. I know how helplessly you begged God to bring Peter back to you.

But why didn't you tell me? Why didn't you give me a chance to be there for you?

We could have done the long distance thing, we would have survived it. And even if we didn't, you know I would have come with you. You know I would have dropped everything, I would have thrown away my entire life just to be with you.

What I have realized is... you never loved me, not like I loved you. And realizing that late, cost me more than I can say.

You are just an ordinary girl who I mistook for someone special. But you were always meant to break my heart.

Maybe one day you'll feel guilty. But until then, consider me a stranger, one more casualty of whatever storm lives inside you."

Tears spilled before she even finished reading.

It wasn't signed. It didn't have to be.

She had thought Vincent was the love of her life, they had been friends since they were ten years old. On her fifthteenth birthday, he had begged her to marry him. She had, of course, turned him down. But then he asked again her next birthday. And she promised.

Eighteen. They were going to get married when she turned eighteen.

Then Peter died, and everything else, everyone else, faded into silence.

Ophelia hadn't told Vincent she was moving to England. Hadn't told any of her friends. Because they weren't just her friends, they had been Peter's friends too. And she couldn't look any of them in the eyes without the guilt of what she'd done consuming her. Only Daniel knew. Daniel, who had been there that night. Daniel, who had seen what she had done. He was the only one who could understand.

She clutched the letter to her chest and thought about the day she met Vincent. She had tackled him for stealing her bike. They went crashing to the ground, almost got run down by a cement truck on its way to the new housing development. If she thinks about it she can still smell the cloud of concrete gas and the burning of the tires. She had him pinned to the ground. In his defense, it looked just like his bike, same brand, but he had a bell on the handlebars.