We will meet again ~ Fred Weasley

- Warning Signs -

"One strange moment could be dismissed. Two could be coincidence. But eventually, there were too many to ignore."

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There was a strange connection between exhaustion and emptiness.

Katherine had learned that the hard way.

Sometimes she couldn't tell which one had arrived first. Whether she was tired because she felt empty, or empty because she was tired. The two seemed to feed into one another until everything inside her became blurred and indistinct, leaving her with nothing but a heavy body, an exhausted mind, and the desperate desire to sleep until the world stopped asking things of her.

Usually, sleep helped.

Usually, a few hours beneath the blankets were enough to take the sharpest edges off whatever she was feeling.

Not today.

Katherine lay beneath the covers with her eyes stubbornly open, staring at the ceiling as the light behind the curtains slowly darkened.

She was no longer as frightened as she had been that morning.

Now she was angry.

Perhaps anger was easier.

Fear left her helpless.

Anger gave her somewhere to put everything.

She couldn't understand what Fred was doing.

If she had done something wrong, then fine.

She could accept that.

She wasn't going to pretend she was incapable of making mistakes. She knew herself well enough to recognise that there were moments when her emotions became too much, when something small could flick a switch inside her and suddenly she was no longer thinking clearly.

Fear came first.

Then anxiety.

Then the instinct to run.

Or, sometimes, to lash out.

She hated those moments.

They were the moments when she felt least like herself.

She could look back afterwards and recognise exactly what had happened. She could understand why she had reacted the way she had. She could acknowledge that whatever had triggered her hadn't necessarily been the fault of the person standing in front of her.

But understanding it afterwards didn't make it easier to live with.

There was still a frightened part of her that had never learned how to believe that people stayed.

A part that still waited for the next loss.

The next goodbye.

The next empty chair.

The next person who mattered becoming someone she had to remember rather than someone she could reach for.

Katherine knew she had things to work on.

She knew healing wasn't something that happened simply because the war was over.

Her body hadn't received the message that it was safe.

For years, it had been trained to anticipate danger.

Fight.

Run.

Hide.

Protect.

Survive.

And now everyone expected her to wake up one morning and simply become normal.