Thicker than Water (Marauders Era)

8 January, 1978 - Confession

**

As time went on, things got easier for Lavinia in the Potter house. Or the days did, anyway. The house was bright and warm and full of a careless laughter Lavinia hadn't known to exist anywhere else. It was strange to her, that any home could be so blithely happy and not think twice about it. But none of them seemed to notice this thing that was to her utterly out of the ordinary. Well, Sirius at least understood where she was coming from, but they didn't talk about it much. Indeed, they didn't talk much about anything at all and sometimes Lavinia wondered if, for all that even Regulus believed he would help her, Sirius thought the job was done.

It wasn't that he wasn't nice. During the day he was more than understanding and she knew that at least part of his absence at night was a product of her ridiculous sleep schedule, but sometimes she found herself missing the constant of his presence while she was stargazing.

Because for all that the days had been getting better, the nights were a different story, and in the darkness of them, Lavinia found herself waging a silent war against her own head more often than not.

It was strange, in part because it was simply odd to be able to leave her room without fear of punishment and in part because her normal nightly routine now felt almost dirty. It felt wrong to slit her wrists in this house which seemed somehow too clean for it, like it hadn't been touched by the kind of darkness that haunted Lavinia, pulling her to pick up her potions knife in the wee hours of the morning. The result was that she ended up sitting in the bathroom for long periods of time, thinking and battling with herself before she inevitably ended up leaving- sometimes bleeding, sometimes not - to go down to the living room and watch the stars from the window overlooking the garden.

Most nights she did this alone, though Black never failed to offer to stay up with her. She always refused, hating herself for it, but unwilling to give up those hours in the bathroom, whether because she wanted to chance to fight and win on her own, or because she so desperately wanted to lose so she could remember the sharp clarity of metal against her skin. And when she slipped out of her room well past midnight, he was never there waiting. Not that she blamed him. She suspected that by the time she'd finished fighting, whether winning or losing, the rest of th house was already asleep. She didn't mind much, however. It was good to have space to think. And she had a lot of thinking to do.

It wasn't just her family. She knew she'd made her choice and knew also that unless she was prepared to take a whole lot of pain, that choice needed to be final. But she hated that she had a deadline. Because no matter how hard she thought about it, no matter how many arguments she formulated in her head, no matter how much sense it made to stay away, it was never quite enough to convince her.

If she didn't go back, she was throwing it all away. Her family. Her friends. Her future. And while it shouldn't have meant so much to lose a future she'd always felt trapped in, it also meant losing Regulus, and she hated that. It meant losing Eloise and her oblivious humor. It meant losing Thomas and his teasing and the blossoming relationship that made her feel rather warm inside. It meant losing Severus and whatever shred of her heart still held onto the boy he had been. It meant losing William. Forever.

Because if she didn't go home for Easter, there was no going back. She would be throwing away the life she'd always known and casting herself into Merlin knew what. She didn't have plans. She'd never thought much about what she would do past Hogwarts because she'd never had to. She didn't know what she might want to do with herself if given the opportunity to pursue her own career.

It felt like the whole world was spiraling out in front of her and it was endless and unknown and utterly terrifying. So was the idea of going home, of course, but it was so much easier to accept a known pain than facing the prospect of a future she had never before considered.