Obsidian & Bronze {Fred Weasley}

32. The loss of the locket

(A/N) TW: This chapter has mentions of depression and self harm, please be aware that I am trying to approach these topics in a sensitive manner and the topics discussed throughout the next few chapters will be heavy and not meant to for all readers.

Do not forget that there is always help out there if you are struggling, do not ever let anyone make you feel as though your struggles and mental illnesses are not valid! 

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It's strange. Strange being in a place you feel obligated to call home despite its persistence to be anything but. Grimmauld Place never felt like home, although that exact feeling was never something I grew accustomed to, whatever 'home' felt like, number 12 certainly wasn't it.

I had unintentionally alienated myself from a place I had never really belonged. Don't get me wrong, everywhere I went was swarming with memories, each room, each door, each creak of each floor board, each gust of bitter draft, everything, was drowning in memory, they just weren't my memories.

It was as though upon entrance I could see the lives, the genuine, happy, once untroubled lives of people who had lived there once before, or at least left a mark in some way, the sound of innocence and naivety trapped beneath the wall paper and the reflection of betrayal bouncing from every surface.

And I could hear her laugh, my mothers laugh, or at least the sound I had envisioned it to be, light and breezy although heavy all at once, soft and persistent, so fucking persistent.

Like a kind of alarm you can't quite shut off, or can't find the strength too, as though there was just as much torture as there was comfort to it, and no amount of balance allowed that to reflect into sanity.

When Dumbledore had suggested I take time to rest and refrain from returning to school until after the easter holidays, I hadn't quite acknowledged the implications of his suggestion, my agreement sort of slipping out before I summoned the ability to catch it.

And when Remus decided that it was too in his best interest to accompany Sirius and I at Grimmauld Place, in order to 'take care of me' despite my detest for pity, my discomfort only intensified, because in a place where I was being suffocated by my mums image, her memory nothing but a bedtime story, it was hard to escape the feeling of being watched, being mothered, and no one mothered quite like Remus Lupin.

When I was seven I fell off a muggle bike Remus had gifted me for my birthday, scraping my knee in the process, and Remus refused to let me move for three days, bringing each of my meals to his bed in which he let me sleep, and pouring me enough cups of tea to sink a large ship.

When I was ten, a girl in the village, no older than myself, had called me disgusting and a freak, and since this took place at at time in which I had not yet learnt to stand up for myself, Remus comforted me for hours, constantly assuring me of the faults in the girl's words. Except the thing I hadn't told Remus was that the girl had not called me those things, but it was Remus she had insulted after a particularly bad full moon, I just didn't have the heart to tell him.

And when I had my first panic attack, just before Remus was due to meet with Tonks when there was original speculation of Peter Pettigrew being very much alive, Remus showed no indications of hesitation when he cancelled his meeting with Tonks, and he stayed with me, and held me as though he didn't possess the ability to let go.

So when I enter a place, Number 12 to be exact, that reminds me heavily of a woman I never knew, that's drowning in the essence of being "mothered", you can imagine why Remus only intensified that situation, and I was rather quick to make that apparent.