prologue; danny & hope "i'm too young to lose hope"
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It happens constantly. Hope finds immense joy in teasing her little brother, Danny, and so it is nowhere near uncommon to hear her taunting him. "You're too young to understand," she tells him at age nine, holding imaginary information over his head that he would never actually know.
When she's eleven years old a letter arrives for her and he asks eagerly what it is. She refuses to tell them, not evening knowing herself due to the fact that she hadn't opened it yet. "You're far too young to understand!" She laughs as he chases her around the house until they collapse together onto the sofa and open the envelope.
During the summer holiday he keeps asking her what she's thinking about. She blushes every time with fail, telling him "you're too young, you wouldn't understand." She doesn't want to admit to her childish fantasies about the boy from her school with the kind eyes and big brain. She's only thirteen, it's just a silly crush anyway.
He runs after her as she enters her bedroom, stopping her from closing the door. "You won't get it, you're too young," she says, shutting the door in his face. She knows that it's rude and she almost wishes she hadn't, but how could she explain this too her little brother? How does she tell him that she's fifteen and already wants life to be over?
She sprints into the hospital, searching frantically for Danny and her father. "You're too young, you wouldn't understand," they tell her when she asks what's wrong. But she doesn't need them to explain it to her, because right in front of her is her little brother, and he's barely breathing.
"He was too young," she hears someone whisper at the funeral. "He couldn't possibly have understood." She lets herself cry freely in front of other people for the first time in a long time. That's her little brother they're lowering into the ground. That's Danny.
"I'm always too young!" She shouts angrily at her father. "I'm sick of waiting until I'm older to understand!" She's seething, ready to just end it all. No one will tell her anything and her father will barely talk to her at all, telling her she'll understand once she's his age. She has two picture frames on her bedside table instead of just one, now. She just wants her brother back.
"Too young to understand," she mumbles to herself as she wipes viciously at the tears falling from her eyes. "Too young to understand love, and death, and life..." She traces her finger over the picture of her mother, sighing. She wishes she could join her family. She's certain who her father was before Danny died is dead, too. She wants to be with them. She wants to be gone.
Her fingers play with the ribbon on a still wrapped present that was meant for her sixteenth birthday that she can't bring herself to open. Hope had been drifting away before, but the day her brother died the string keeping her attached to the earth finally snapped. She finally gave up. She didn't have to hide how much she hurt inside anymore, she had a reason to justify it.
But no one at Hogwarts knew that. They were all expecting Hope to be happy, like she'd been pretending to be when she last left them. And she wants to give that to them. She wants to keep up the act, fake the smiles and laugh when expected. She doesn't want their pity, and she doesn't want to force her troubles upon them. She doesn't see the point in burdening them when they're such happy and carefree people. But Hope was fragile, like glass, and she'd been broken.
Hope's name had lost its meaning.
__________ a/n is it really a story written by me if it doesn't have a tragic backstory? (answer: no, no it is not)
