Fighting Fate // Mattheo Riddle ♣️

Chapter Twenty - Feeling

Word Count: 2,668.

Warnings: None. 

I hadn't had a proper conversation with anyone but myself in a week. A whole week after Malfoy Manor. I had kept to myself, getting to class early in the morning and going to bed late at night.

It was surprisingly easy. To cut myself off from everyone else. From Hogwarts. They had tried. All of them. Calling out to me in the hall or sitting beside me in class, but I couldn't hear them. Their words were hollow in my mind. There was only one thing it was consumed with.

I had almost killed him. I had wanted to kill him. That was the terrifying part. Not that I had the power to take a man's life, I knew that, but that I wanted to. I had wanted to.

"No you didn't," Barty told me, seating himself on the Quidditch stands beside me, his words sounding as hollow as every else's had.

It was the only place that was quiet. The only place where no one expected me to go. They argued. Crouch and Estrella. They argued like an old married couple.

"Of course she wanted to. He ruined her life," my mother replied, sitting on the opposite side of me.

"Oh would you shut up?" Crouch snapped. "You took control of her. That was you wanting to kill Pettigrew, not her."

I didn't pay them any mind. It had become a regular occurrence. Seeing them in my head. I knew I was going insane. I knew I was, but suddenly I didn't care. I didn't care about anything. I couldn't... feel anything.

"Black," a different voice graced the air, both Crouch and my mother being silenced.

My head turned slowly, watching as Blaise sat down where Crouch had been.

"Hey," I breathed. "You're out of your room."

There it was. The first sentence that wasn't a dismissal. The first time I had talked to someone other than the voices in my head. Someone who was real.

He nodded. "They told me that you're ignoring them," he started.

I turned away, smiling softly, as I stared blankly at the Gryffindor Quidditch players as they entered the pitch.

"I wouldn't call it ignoring," I replied.

He sighed. "Then what would you call it?"

I shook my head. "Waiting."

"What are you waiting for?"

I moved my head to look at the boy. His eyes were worried, looking at me as though he had never seen me before. As if I was a stranger to him.

"To feel something."

His forehead creased. "What do you mean Black?"

I –" I cut myself off, feeling my eyes water with tears. That absence of emotion was starting to vanish, but not enough. "I can't feel anything," I told him. "It's like... I can think and I can see. I can physically feel the world around me. I can smell the stupid leather from the Quidditch player's equipment, but I can't feel."

A tear fell from my cheek and Blaise reached forward to brush it away. "That's feeling," he told me in reference to the sadness in my eyes.

I shook my head. "I'm not crying because I'm sad. I'm crying because I'm not. Because I want it to stop. This feeling. I want it to stop."

Bringing a hand around my shoulder, Blaise pulled me into his side. "It'll stop. We'll work through it."

I stifled a laugh. "And how will we do that?"