❝Can you hear my heart breaking inside my chest? Can you hear my screams? Because I don't think you can, and that scares me even more, because what if no one saves me?❞
ORDER of the PHOENIX,
DEATHLY HALLOWS
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𝖈𝖍𝖆𝖕𝖙𝖊𝖗 𝖙𝖜𝖊𝖓𝖙𝖞-𝖙𝖍𝖗𝖊𝖊 what must be done
✦
ISOLATION ONLY BROUGHT him more pain. Maybe he deserved it, maybe he deserved the pain for not knowing his sister was a murderer and Death Eater, maybe he deserved it for naively ignoring all the warning signs Jasper presented him before betraying him, or even for allowing Thea in his life at all. Maybe he deserved to be alone, at least there he couldn't hurt anyone with his presence or be hurt himself.
Yet, when he looked around at the faces of his family, it seemed his isolation had hurt them. As he turned away from them, they only tried to reach other further only to be turned away by him. He didn't want to hurt anyone, he didn't want to be hurt anymore, but his isolation only brought them pain.
It reminded him of Maia, of when she turned away them all that fateful summer in 12 Grimmauld Place. He was hurt when she turned away from him, and now he was turning away from everyone else. The gut wrenching feel in his heart knowing that he couldn't do anything, watching his sister (when she was his sister and not a traitor) wither away without a care that everyone else was breaking because of her actions. It was a selfish thought then, and now he felt selfish for repeating the cycle, especially with how Nancy bit her lip and muttered about him joining her in a ghost form soon enough if his behavior didn't change.
He felt like a selfish prick, withering away until his features were sunken and more pronounced than they should be naturally. He knew the others didn't view him as selfish, the same way he never viewed Maia as selfish when she went through that until after the fact under some rage of being put through that stress, but he still felt selfish. He made them worry when they should be focusing on the war, he stole attention away when they needed to prepare themselves for fighting – not watching over a pain-filled boy.
He didn't want to be selfish anymore. It took a month to really open up, but the smiles on his mum's face made it all worth it. The cheer in Calypso's when he asked if she was free after work one day, the way tears filled in Sirius' eyes that he was going to be alright and not just another child lost to the Death Eaters. He was going to be alright. Everything was going to be alright.
Eventually, anyway.
It took much longer than a month to truly be back to the boy he used to. It took so much longer because there was too much to work through, enough where his mum even made him go to therapy once a week to work through the trauma he went through.
(She admitted to him, that night when she was a little tipsy, she had done the same after the first war. A young woman, barely even starting her twenties, losing her boyfriend and best friends in the span of a week and then being thrust into motherhood because she couldn't leave them to die. It put a lot into perspective for him, and he appreciated her so much afterwards although he felt even guiltier for his destructive behavior before.)
