Feel

Feel

By: Lady DeathAngel

            He got so tired of it sometimes. So tired of being who he was. So tired of having the weight of the world thrust on his shoulders time and again. Maybe it would have been okay if everyone hadn’t tried to pretend that this wasn’t his fight. If only they’d told him from the start that he would have to kill Voldemort or be killed by him, that he was the only one who could stop the dying and end the fear maybe he could have handled it. He would have known with no pretenses of being normal, with no hopes to dash against a stone wall.

            But he’d been yanked around so much in the past five years that he didn’t know who to even trust anymore. Dumbledore would have been the first person to go to a few months earlier. But now? He just didn’t know. The man who knew everything, or so it seemed, had settled back and watched this all play out like some sort of macabre tragedy of a play and chosen the final two acts to tell them all that it didn’t have to be this way. All to protect the so-called innocence of the Boy-Who-Lived. Always lived.

            Sirius . . . the name didn’t even bear thinking. He couldn’t stand it. The pain of it all, of replaying that one moment in history over and over and over again until he felt like clawing his eyes out and screaming until his lungs burst and he coughed up blood all over the pristine walls of his estranged Aunt’s home. He felt, often, that people thought he deserved it. Dumbledore had all but blamed Kreacher’s betrayal on Sirius when he hadn’t been in that house with him for all those weeks, hearing the House Elf’s mutterings. Had Sirius even told him that that Elf had never liked him? That he’d never been welcome in that house and that Kreacher wouldn’t have changed except, perhaps, for his dead mistress?

            Ron and Hermione were his best friends. Closer to each other than to him, he sometimes thought. And they didn’t know. He’d thought that maybe after the events at the Department of Mysteries they would realize how it felt to be the one who always had to face those sneering, masked voices alone. To be the one to face the most feared wizard of all time over and over, alone. But they hadn’t. Not really. They were sympathetic about Sirius and about the prophesy. But Hermione had written an angry letter demanding he stop sulking and be strong.

            “After all, Sirius was reckless and it wasn’t all your fault Harry. You can’t keep thinking it was.”

            That was what she’d said. That it was partly Sirius’ fault. Well, he supposed it was. It was as much his fault as his parents’ deaths were their fault. They’d loved him and died for him. That wasn’t his fault so much as their’s, right?

            Ron offered his condolences, but he bungled things when there was no pressure to be a good friend, and with Hermione probably beating him over the head with a proverbial stick about it all, he was even worse off.

            There was still Lupin. The last living link to his family. To those who had loved and died because of that love. But God he was scared. Scared to get close to him only to lose him too. He could trust him, he knew that. He had a friend in Lupin. Where he had a father in Dumbledore and more of a brother than anything in Sirius, he had a friend in Lupin. Someone who actually felt what he felt, who mourned as he mourned. He’d seen what it was like before when Voldemort had reigned and would tell him if he asked. He cared selflessly.

            He loved that. Cherished it and relished it and didn’t want to lose it. That was why he didn’t reply to his letters. He wrote Hermione and Ron, tried not to be bitter and angry. Tonks would send a note every so often asking after him and he would reply to those a well. They never meant anything, those replies. Stupid words on paper about Dudley’s new championship medals and trophies, the Dursley’s recent rat infestation and their subsequent purchase of a kitten with black hair and green eyes that had taken to Harry immediately upon his return to Privet Drive.

            It made everyone happy, he supposed. To think he was coping and not doing anything stupid. They didn’t know about the daily bouts of depression and his self-hatred and confusion and anger. They didn’t need to know. What was the age old adage? ‘Ignorance is bliss’?

            But Lupin wasn’t everyone. He knew. Or at least suspected. His letters were sometimes long, sometimes short, always concerned and, lately, divulging information about himself and his parents and Sirius. And the replies that Harry wanted to write he just couldn’t.

            He wanted to tell him all about how he felt. How he was tired of being the bloody Boy-Who-Lived. He was tired of not knowing until it was too late. Tired of killing off all his loved ones. He wanted to tell him how much worse the Dursley’s were, how horrified they’d been to discover Nyx, the kitten, resembled him to the point of being his animagus if his form were a cat. He wanted to tell him that he’d been out walking and Dudley and his gang had beaten him up, taunting himthe whole time, and had told the entire neighborhood he was gay because of his nightmares and the names he called out in the middle of the night.

            He wanted to tell so much because he’d never had anyone to tell except Sirius and even then he’d been reserved. He wished he’d told him more because Sirius had known what it was like to live in a house where he didn’t belong and wasn’t accepted and maybe he would have been properly angered by the abuse that so many, even he himself, sometimes thought wasn’t that big a deal. But he’d always kept it inside and now he felt like he was going to . . . implode. He had his flashes of anger and stupidity and he wondered if it was because he kept it all inside.

            But he wouldn’t tell Lupin because he didn’t want him worrying needlessly. He didn’t want him to get attached, and more selfishly, he didn’t want to get attached. He couldn’t bear it. Another loss for his sake and he would be gone. Utterly gone. Nothing left.

            He was already so tired. Ready to just get it over with already. He wanted to walk right up to Voldemort and curse his evil soul right out if his body and straight into hell, or wherever it would go and never bother them again. Some nights he wanted to carve up his sinister, snake-like face with any sharp object that would get the job done. He wanted for everyone to let him do his job and then he wanted to disappear.

            He was damn tired of being the Boy-Who-Lived.