Saving Styles

I Can't

Hannah's POV

"What?" He said, barely above a whisper as his green eyes stared into mine.

I stood in front of him as the silence fell between us, he stared at me like he had never heard those words before. My emotions were all over the place, my mind reeling from all of the information it couldn't seem to absorb. How could one person survive so much? How could life deal so much shit to a single person? How is it that some people get to live the kind of life that I did, with good parents and a home full of love, while others grow up the way Harry did? It was some kind of sick imbalance in the universe that made absolutely no sense to me.

Despite all of the things he'd just revealed to me, I didn't see him the way he obviously thought I would. I knew he expected me to pity him, to feel bad for him and look at him like he was as broken as he felt, but when I looked at him I saw nothing but strength. Harry was a pillar of strength, like the only sturdy building that hadn't collapsed in the aftermath of a disaster. He hadn't allowed the world to turn him into an animal, even though that's how he was treated all his life. Through everything life had thrown at him, he somehow remained gentle and kind. He was still the kind of person that cared about other people, who put those he cared about before himself. He was by far the strongest person I'd ever met, and I couldn't possibly pity him when I was so unbelievably in awe of him.

I did love him. I knew it in the way I wanted to protect him, to keep him safe in the same way he did for me. I wanted to take away his pain and help him heal it, even before I knew what it was. I felt it in my body as he told me the pain he had endured, as he did his best to push me away and scare me with the details of his life. I knew it because no matter how much information he threw at me, thinking I would run away, all I wanted to do was run towards him.

The things that he had just revealed to me were heartbreaking, the idea of a child being alone in the world while the people who were trusted to look after him abused him hurt me in places I didn't know existed. I hurt for him, for every ounce of pain he'd suffered. I could tell by the way he spoke about it that he had no idea just how fucked up it all was, as if somewhere along the way it had all become normal to him. As if a seven year old witnessing his mother's suicide was a normal occurrence, as if being burned and cut was something all kids went through. The thought of it sent so many emotions through me I could barely sort through them, the anger that anyone could be so sick, the pain I felt for Harry and all the kids like him, the helplessness that I couldn't save them.

In some ways, Harry was right. It's not like I didn't know that there was abuse in the world, that shitty things didn't happen, but the degree to which he suffered was more than I could have ever imagined. It had popped a bubble of some sort, the one where I believed that there was good in all people if you looked hard enough. I had always wanted to believe that people weren't bad, that they just did bad things, but I suddenly realized that there was an undeniable evil within some people that could not be measured. I knew that realization was what he'd been trying to protect me from, that he was afraid it would somehow alter my view of the world and take away my belief that there is good in everyone. To some degree, it had altered my world view, but not in the way he thought it did.

I now knew the level of evil that existed, and the pain that it inflicted on its innocent victims. But more than that, I now knew just how strong people could be, how much they could overcome, and how important love was. Love is the only thing that can begin to fight that kind of evil, and above anything else, that's what Harry needed whether he thought he deserved it or not. He needed the love he'd been deprived of, to know that there were good things in the world. I needed to pop his bubble of darkness the same way he'd popped mine of light.