Cicatrices- Marks That Remain

Puffed Rice Cereal

Happy... Wednesday? I will not be available for the rest of the week, so... Y'all get your chapter Super Early!!!!

Warnings will be in bold at the foot of the chapter, in case some of you want to avoid spoilers. Those of you who want the warning, you can do a quick scroll to the bottom before you read the chapter.

Let me know what you think, and, as always...

Enjoy!

Tick tick tick tick tick tick tick tick-

Harry woke the next morning to a half-empty bed, a cold flat, and the infernal ticking of the ceiling fan running too fast.

The world felt deeply, cosmically wrong, to Harry. Everything was too still, his head ached, and his skin was some terrible numb static. He spent an imperceptibly long stretch of time scowling at his ceiling fan, feeling as it blew his hair into his face and chapped his lips.

He'd only had the luxury of sharing a bed with Draco twice. And now, a bed devoid of his warmth left a gaping hole in Harry's chest. His brain rotated between silently numb and flipping through the argument over and over, picking apart all of the ways that Harry fucked up, reinforcing the idea that Harry had well and truly ruined everything.

Eventually, Harry's eyes began to sting, certainly because of the blasted, overworking fan. Harry blinked, turning over in bed to avoid being hit in the face by the fan's stream of air.

Teddy's cot was sitting neatly folded in a corner.

"I think we can all agree Teddy needs to learn to eat like a normal young boy."

Harry scowled more, feeling the bile roll around in his stomach. His headache worsened.

Andromeda will never let me near Teddy again. The thought had been whispering maliciously in Harry's ear for the entire night. It filled Harry with a thick heaviness that he was all too familiar with. The feeling that he was never going to see someone again, that he'd had yet another good thing ripped straight from his grasp. Again.

And it had been his fault. Harry knew. If only he'd held his tongue, controlled his temper, not yelled at a room filled with nearly everybody he knows.

Unbidden, Harry remembered Sirius. It had been rather the same, he told himself subconsciously. Harry had been the reason why Sirius died. Harry hadn't been able to stand someone else seeing inside his brain. Harry hadn't ever let Snape truly teach him occlumency, and then Harry basically led Sirius straight to a pack of death eaters, because he'd been convinced that he needed to save Sirius from something that wasn't even real.

Why on earth would Harry's brain bring that up again? God, he'd done well not to think much on it for five years...

Harry almost couldn't believe that his stupidity had taken away the most important people in his life twice-over.

"Sure. I'm clumsy and I wet the bed until I was thirteen because I was forced to piss my pants in a dark dank cupboard for eleven years of my life. While starving. Begging for the smallest, most pathetic scraps of food, just so that I could feel even hungrier after scarfing that down!"

Harry groaned, squeezing his eyes shut, trying not to let the mortification make his stomach even more upset. I can't believe I said that. He had never shared those things with anybody in his life. And yesterday he'd thrown it down into the center of a filled room like it was a bomb, a weapon he could use to justify why Teddy should never have to suffer more than the war has already forced him to.