Thicker than Water (Marauders Era) PART II

NOTE

UPDATE: So I know I'm supposed to update today, but I kinda forgot and went out this evening so... I got home 20 minutes ago and it's 12:30 am so.... yeah. I'd love to promise an update tomorrow, but I already have plans for tomorrow night, so it's looking like Monday night will be the next update. Sorry for the delay y'all and thanks so so much for being so understanding!! <3

TLDR at the bottom.

Hello all,

It's probably weird to have this whole thing in bold, but tbh it felt weird to write an AN in not bold so... here we are. I know today is supposed to be an update, but things have come up and I've decided I need to take a break.

If you read my last AN, then you know that I live very very close to (less than a mile from) the site of a mass shooting that happened on Monday where 10 lives were lost. And I knew 2 of them. It's been a really tough couple of days, in part because of the general trauma of something this awful and tragic happening so nearby. This was my local grocery store. I could have easily been there. My family and friends could easily have been there. The people who work there are people I've known my whole life. As silly as it may seem, that building was a constant and a normal in my life and now I drive past it to see memorials and shot out windows. And that's insanely hard to reconcile.

But the other part of it is that 2 of the people who died were people I knew. One was a special needs woman who has worked at the store for longer than I've been alive and she's always been incredibly sweet to me. It's hard to believe she won't be there next time I go to the store, playing with the ends of my hair while I help her bag groceries, something that has happened since I was old enough to reach the counter. But the more complicated part is that the other person among the victims I knew was my childhood bully. So I've spent the last few days listening to people singing the praises of someone who bullied and harassed me for a very long time and I genuinely don't wish to speak ill of the dead and he was very much getting his life together and cleaning himself up, but I am really struggling to reconcile the person I knew with the person everyone else is eulogizing and the end result is that it has been really really hard to focus on anything at all lately. So I'm taking a step back and giving myself a break because I need time to process all of this in healthy way.

I will be taking the rest of this week and next week off and will update again next Saturday when I will hopefully be in a better place and have my head screwed on properly again.

Thank you all for your understanding I will be back in a little while.

P.S. If you want to help, you can donate to the Colorado Healing Fund here (https://www.coloradohealingfund.org/). There are also several GoFundMe campaigns, but please be careful about these. Established charities have networks of care already set up and are much more reliable ways to help people.

TLDR: The Boulder mass shooting has been really traumatic for me and I've decided to take some time off. Next update will be Saturday, April 3