It's always late at night that it hits you. Just as you're about to go to sleep, you're about to actually give in to the quilt, to the mattress, and the darkness, your mind is going to release, and then -

Sometimes it's a welcome thought. Sometimes it's useful, helps you get things finished in time, or it's a great idea you need to put down. Sometimes.

Rarely.

Sometimes it's mostly neutral, and it's just getting rid of it that counts.

Sometimes.

Most of the time, though? It's one of those haunting thoughts. One of the ones you don't know if you'll ever get over.

You don't know if you could, you don't know if you'd still be you without it. A small pearl of paranoia, anxiety, sadness that has formed in your core, something which you've nurtured and created without wanting to, without even knowing it.

They don't really have a face anymore, they don't really have a name, they've just become a shadow that hangs over you as you curse yourself for not knowing better, for not saying something else, for acting as yourself.

You were so much younger then and oh, if you could go back, if you could rewrite the past, give yourself a different line, played another role...

It probably wouldn't have made a difference. They wouldn't have liked you any more, they wouldn't have stopped their reign of terror (but was it terror, really?) and they certainly wouldn't have been any kinder to you.

You tell yourself that, late at night, when you seem to forget the fact that time travel does not exist and that it was just one person, and that you have many friends who are worth so much more than the cruelty of a child (they will always be a child)

And maybe they think of you. Maybe they regret what they did. Or maybe they didn't care enough to remember. Maybe they had other things to worry about.

You will sleep, eventually. Maybe tomorrow night it'll be something good.