Pandora’s warning
“A lot of people tell me that I’m a bit dreamy.” Pandora said, walking side by side with Regulus on the way to Muggle Studies, “I think they mean it as an insult, but I like the idea of that. Of being somewhere else.”
“Somewhere else?” Regulus asked her, “Or anywhere but here?”
She smiled sadly but didn’t respond, “I had a dream,” she said instead.
Regulus hums, paying attention but not as much as he should.
“It was about you,” she told him, “you were dead, deciding that it was better to drown instead of burn, even though it would end the same.”
Regulus looks at her, Pandora looks tired and concerned.
“Why are you so disappointed in my choice to perish?” Regulus asked Pandora.
“Because if you’d choose to burn you would have died with sun-kissed lips, instead of teary eyes.” She said, her tone light but her words anything but.
“What are you implying?”
“I’m not implying anything.”
“Then what are you saying?” He corrected himself.
She sighed and looked at him with some kind of sad relief, “Maybe all boys who love the sun are destined to fall to the sea and drown.”
She stopped walking and turned to him. “You must find your sun,”
“Why would I choose to find my sun if that is my doom?” He replied.
“Are you familiar with the phrase ‘it is better to love and lost than to have never loved at all’ ?” She said, her hand gripping Regulus gently.
“Yes,” he said gently, curiosity lacing his normally neutral voice.
“You are a poet, Regulus, love means something different to you than it means to us.” Pandora said to him, “You are willing to let yourself burn just to be loved. Like Icarus,”
“Are you seriously comparing me to him?” Regulus asked, indignantly.
She laughed softly and continued walking, “Maybe poets did him wrong. Maybe he laughed when he fell.”
“Maybe he bared his teeth to the world, not caring how the wax and the sun alike burned his skin,” Regulus said, amusing her.
“Maybe he was happy when he drowned,” Pandora mused.
“Maybe Apollo let him fall, so that they could be together in a better world.” Regulus finished.
They turned the hall and as they reached Pandora’s classroom, she said, “Find your sun, Reg,”
“But what if I fall?” Regulus whispered,
“But what if you fly?” She asked.
———-———
The next morning, Regulus wrote in his journal. The journal itself was a simple thing. Leather bound, with his initials embroidered on the cover.
Maybe Icarus knew what he was doing, maybe Apollo had undone all the stitches that held him together, just to watch him fall.
Maybe when he was falling, he laughed, and he drowned, water filled up his lungs and choked his laughter.
Icarus knew what he was doing. The sun did too.
What is love if not the things you fall for, you drown for, you burn for?
Icarus was not a tragedy, he was a lover whose love was too strong for him to survive.
—last night, I dreamt of Icarus laughing