FicWad

I had a friend.

When I met him, I think I might have been five, six, something like that. He never asked if he could play with me, and I never asked if he wanted to. He built an extra tower on my sandcastle. I gave it windows and crenellations. We worked for the rest of the day on it, and by the end, it was a glorious creation, worthy of holding eternity.

Of course, it didn't. The waves washed it away.

He was a Prince.

Two days after that, older boys came down to the shore, and laughed at me as they always did, and I wished for Father's sword as I always did. But while normally they kept shouting and pushing me until they got bored (and if I cried, as I sometimes did, they got bored much later), he turned up... no older than me, not much bigger, but at a word from him, they shuffled away.

His parents sold him.

I asked my mother where he was, why he didn't come down to the beach any more, and she wouldn't tell me. Even when I pestered her, demanding to know (or I wouldn't eat my vegetables or I wouldn't go to bed or I'd scream as loud as I could or I'd take Father's sword and cut my stomach open), she wouldn't tell me. It took me two or three or four years to find out what had happened to him: a rich man had given his family - always poor - enough money and rationalisations to buy their child.

And then he died.

I stormed to the rich man's house and demanded to know where the boy was. He slammed the door in my face. It took two more weeks to find out that he'd died, drowned for a girl. How Princely of him. Knowing that... I loved him and I hated him more than I'd ever loved or hated before.

I hadn't held on to him, I realised. I hadn't held on hard enough, long enough. If I'd been stronger, if I'd had more sure, if I'd had more than the fury and conviction and half-formed love of a child, I knew I'd still have him.

I had a friend. He was a Prince. His parents sold him, and then he died.

I resolved that I'd never let anything slip through my fingers again.