You do not have the sense to be Daedalus.

You never knew a middle ground, and that is all Daedalus is: cautious—not too low, not too high; straight ahead, ignore all other directions. He succeeds; oh, he succeeds, but he never knows the glorious highs; he never rubs shoulders with the sun or rolls in the salty foam. He flies, he lives, he is safe; he succumbs and gives up the wings to a being that does not exist.

In his sense, you think scornfully, he is a fool.

(Daedalus knows sense. You do not know sense—you do not understand sense, you do not see the point of something that restrains you—thus you do not know Daedalus, nor do you want to.

Sense, you have realized, holds you back. It would be sensible to live your life quietly, it would be sensible to wait and see, it would be sensible to think things through, it would be sensible to think about it thoughtfully, it would be sensible not to try, it would be sensible not to go first, it would be sensible not to take a chance, it would be sensible to do nothing at all and watch everyone else do what you wouldn't, because you were sensible. Sense is a pale and muted colour that pales even less and cowers before a striking, reckless black.)

You know what it feels like to be Icarus, to soar and to laugh as green light blinds the insides of your eyelids and to care nothing of the world in which you live in besides you and your power and the people who fall before it and never get back up—you have experienced a time when you have known for sure that the sun was grateful for your presence near it and you knew this was the right thing to do, to rise up and up and up on the strength of your own confidence and triumph because there are other options than straight ahead, and straight ahead, you think, you cannot go very far.

You know what it is to truly plummet—to realize the sun doesn't like your company (is it jealous of your power, or does it laugh at it like you laugh at everything you encounter?) and can turn against you, to make your triumph turn bitter and the shine and light in your darkness extinguish and go dank. You know how to be Icarus better than Icarus himself, because Icarus lasts in the murky depths of the ocean for only a flash before drowning, and the cold dark of Azkaban is living but not—an eternity filled with horrors and going on forever.

You can never bear to watch yourself fall—to watch yourself fall is to realize your mistakes, and to realize your mistakes is to realize your weakness, and what is realizing weakness but sensibility and self-doubt? You have no room for self-doubt, no room for weakness, no room for anything but green and black and power and laughter, lovely, manic laughter.

And then you are unlike Icarus; a dead man cannot receive a second chance, but you can.

Once again, it is time to soar.

This, my friends, is what I like to call a pretentious fic that would love to be amazing or literary or something (and in case it's unclear, which it probably is, it ends when Bellatrix escapes Azkaban with all those other Death Eaters). Also, yay run-ons.

I love how I never even mention Bellatrix's name in this besides a couple references to Black. It's ridiculous.

Observation number three (since I seem to be using this author's note as a means to ramble): I can't seem to write anything above one thousand words these days. Hmm.