I. Descent.

Through every night, in all of Juli's dreams, he sees him falling.

The circumstances differ slightly. Sometimes Juli is standing at the foot of the bridge, or by the dark fringe of trees on the embankment; sometimes he is almost close enough to touch.

And sometimes he tries. To touch, to call out. To save him. Sometimes he can only watch, spellbound and appalled, as the tragedy is enacted once more.

These minor variations are inconsequential, meaningless. The themes of snow and night and death remain constant, and the climax is always the same: a piercing cry, the small figure falling, and a squeal of brakes as boy meets train.

He is never close enough to hear what he says, what last words are torn from his lips as he plunges headlong towards oblivion. Only a white rush of noise, the wind in the trees and the leaves, and then…

He always jerks awake at the moment of impact. His subconscious never forces him to view the aftermath, and for that he is profoundly grateful.

It's the descent that matters, anyway. Both archetype and type of all the falls that came before and after it, like being caught between two mirrors. Unstoppable. The implications inescapable.

The wings are singed and Icarus falls, his sun-bedazzled eyes turned blindly skywards as the dark wave parts to receive him, like Phaeton thrown from his father's chariot, like Sappho leaping from the Leucadian cliffs. Struck down and swallowed by the sea.

And Juli thinks…the collapse of empires, of Eden lost and Troy in flames, Hector's boy hurled from the ramparts and Adam tumbling from grace with his mouth still full of pips, his chin sticky with juice. Wide-eyed and uncomprehending.

And Lucifer, brightest star of his Father's eye,
Hurled headlong flaming from the ethereal sky.

…but, in the end, all of these other figures and trajectories and half-formed subtexts melt away into the frigid dawn, and Juli is left with the thought of Thomas – tiny in all that air, falling incomprehensibly into darkness.