{Thirty-Five Owls}

XXXII

January of 1996, perhaps--

Albus--

Fifty years. I have been here fifty shit-scraping years. And in all that time, you--you of all people--never sent me sweets. Just the smell of them made me shake with joy. It was the most glorious thing I've tasted in my life.

Fifty years. My body is a skeleton pecked with sores, I can barely remember how I could have been beautiful once. I'm the only inmate alive. The guards have left. An ancient house elf shoves the food between the bars. Even the charms on my watch are fading. The hands waver, the calendar's nearly dead. I think an owl takes three days or so to get from Hogwarts to here? More, perhaps, these days? Is the world expanding beneath me? Is that why I've become so distant? So it must be sometimes in January, the sun's in about the right place.

But I am nothing to you anymore but an ear. Writing ancient lovers tearful letters in your Christmas sherry again, Albus? Back & forth we go, back & forth. Your hand hasn't even changed. I'm running out of parchment. Most of my correspondents are dead. I've read every book in this room a dozen times. I suppose Fawkes is still there? Everything as it always was?

I don't bother to sleep anymore. If I read Gertrude in delirium, she almost makes sense. Words of one, two syllables. Listen to me.

Poor Albus. I'm barely even angry with you anymore. Scheisse, I almost feel sorry for you. You never had children, did you? Never married, never settled down? You'll just die and take It and the Potter boy with you, leaving nothing but pretty birdsong & a bag of candy.

But this means you have something in common with me. You and I--we fall in love with people better than us, and we do it badly. I let you win that duel because I thought you would save me, you betraying bastard, and you left me to rot instead. You don't care about anyone but the boy anymore, I know. But you will not break me. You will not break me.

We're getting too old. We belong a century ago by the millstream, Albus, not rotting away in our towers caught on the horns of the world. We belong at the beginning, where our brilliance is not weighted by responsibility, our beauty not marred by age. Before the consequences start breaking us.

I've stopped thinking of you, those times in the past. I've tried to stop thinking of anything, really. Just back & forth across my cell. Words over the door. Triangles and circles and lines.

You're right. One boy, at least, should walk away with a good life. Ours are long, long destroyed.

Gellert