Secrets and Masks

72. Volatile. Merciless. Cold.

TW; discussions about grief and death

4th July

Can a person go mad with grief?

It's a fucking horrible thing, grief, and it doesn't affect everyone the same way.

It makes some people sob uncontrollably but it immobilises others. It hollows some people out until they're an empty shell and makes others violent, but can it actually make a person go insane? Can it actually shatter a person so completely that it makes them lose their grip on reality?

Daphne Nott had never thought so.

She may not have even been alive for thirty years yet, but she'd thought about grief a lot. She'd spent weeks thinking about it after her mother had died and she'd helped Draco through his when his parents had been killed.

And she'd thought about it almost constantly when her name had been Mustang.

Whenever she'd poured Crouch a drink, Daphne had stared at the bubbles in his glass and thought about her sister. She'd wondered if Astoria was going to fall apart after her 'death'? She'd wondered if she was going to follow in their fathers' footsteps? If she'd lose herself in bottles of whiskey and wine just like he had after their mother had died?

When Crouch had Death Eaters around for parties, Daphne would stare into their masks and wonder if Theo was among them, if he'd managed to move on and have somewhat of a normal life, or if his grief had swallowed him whole?

For a long time, she'd been plagued by those thoughts. She'd laid awake in the stables thinking about it until eventually, in her own way, she'd sorted through them.

She'd always been a very visual person. At school, she'd learned by watching what her teachers did and then picturing herself in their place, and she hadn't outgrown it when she'd entered adulthood. When she'd made battle plans for Voldemort, she'd had to scout the area first so that she had a clear picture in her mind. When she'd forged attack strategies, she'd practiced them with Draco or Theo or Blaise beforehand so she knew exactly what to expect when she faced the real thing.

Visualisation was how Daphne had always sorted through things in her mind and for some reason, whenever she pictured grief, she imagined a big, glass mason jar that had a little tap attached to the side that - when twisted the right way - would let some of the liquid escape.

Maybe it was because she knew the human body could be as breakable as a thin piece of glass. Or maybe it wasn't as poetic as that. Salazar only knew why that particular image came to her but whenever she thought about grief, that was what she pictured. She imagined grief as red wine and the human body as a jar. Imagined it filling up and up with every fresh loss that a person endured.

After Daphne's mother had died, her father's grief had consumed him. His glass - his wine jar- had become completely full of it. He didn't have room for anything else. Not his children or his estate. Not his job at the Ministry or his responsibilities as a father. He hadn't had room for anything else other than his grief, and there'd been so much of it that it'd started to overflow. He'd been bursting at the seams for a long time and he'd never found a way to channel it. Rather than finding a way to undo his tap, he just stewed in his grief. Rather than finding a way to carry on for his daughters, he just filled himself up with pills and Firewhiskey until eventually, he burst.

That was the thing about grief. If you didn't find a way to overcome it, to channel it, it would only be a matter of time before it broke you.

Daphne had always known that Theo was going to survive without her because he knew how to channel his grief. It might've felt all-consuming at first, it might've filled his jar to the top, he might have been ready to burst with it after her execution, but she'd always been confident that he'd find a way to channel it - or 'turn on his tap', if she was sticking with that metaphor. She knew it'd take him a long time, she knew he might never truly be rid of his grief, but she knew he'd be able to turn the tap to a trickle and bit by bit, the grief that felt like it was filling him would slowly dissipate until he felt like he could breathe again.