Thicker than Water (Marauders Era)

3 July, 1979 - Useful

When Lavinia woke the next morning, she didn't immediately understand why someone was holding her hand. And when she blinked the bleariness from her eyes, she didn't understand why Sirius was fast asleep in a chair next to her bed. But reality didn't remain suspended for long and its return was one of the most painful things Lavinia had ever experienced. She felt as though she were pinned to the mattress by the weight of yesterday's memories. She wanted to go back to sleep. She wanted to not think. She wanted anything other than the awful thoughts worming their way through her skull.

Getting out of bed was too much. Moving was too much. So she simply laid there and waited. For what, she didn't know. For the world to end maybe, though it felt like it already had because Regulus... Regulus...

Lavinia rolled over, her arms bending awkwardly to keep hold of Sirius's fingers. Despite the strange angle of her shoulder, however, she didn't dare let go of his hand. Part of her felt like he was a lifeline, a tether, and if she left go she would be swallowed up by the abyss she could feel gaping below her.

As it happened, she did get out of bed, if only because both Remus and Sirius insisted. She planted herself on the couch and tried not to hate the world for daring to move on as normal. For daring to exist like nothing had happened.

That was perhaps the worst part: that aside from the hell in her head, nothing much had changed. She hadn't seen Regulus in over a year so his absence wasn't noticeable in everyday life except for the gaping hole in her chest where he had always been. And no one else was really grieving because she was surrounded by people who had never really known Regulus, much less cared about him.

If she tried, she could almost pretend that she'd never received that letter, that she was just waiting for a reply still. That one of these days, an owl would come soaring in through the window, or Paris would leave for a few days and come back with an envelope tied to his leg.

But then, of course, reality set in and she went tumbling into that void, spiraling and crushed under the weight of renewed grief. It would happen at the smallest things, when his name popped into her head as she thought of something she would like to tell him, or when she remembered some little moment they'd shared. And each time, it was like a switch was flipped and the floor fell out from beneath her feet.

The evening of that first day, she got a letter from Mr. Hayes telling her in no uncertain terms that she was not to come to work until she was ready and to not worry about them or the ward as they would manage. It was most important that she come to terms with her grief.

Come to terms with it. That was what everyone kept saying. In time, she would come to terms with it. Like she could ever make sense of this hole in her heart. Like she could ever accept the death of her best and oldest friend. Like this pain was finite and would simply wear itself out so long as she stuck it through.

But she did stick it through, if only because the worry she saw in her friends eyes was enough to remind her that there were still people she cared enough about to live for. Enough to fight through this for.

So every morning, she forced herself to get out of bed. Every morning, she dragged herself into the living room with all the ease of pulling teeth. And every morning she tried to do one thing more. Not for her own sake. If left to her own devices, she was reasonably certain she would have just stayed in bed until she wasted away, but she couldn't stand the heart-wrenching concern in Sirius's eyes. She hated the way he always tried to smile for her, though it never reached his eyes. She hated that when he thought she wasn't looking, his head dropped down into his hands and his shoulders slumped in a manner that screamed at an exhaustion that went beyond a lack of sleep. She hated that she was still hurting him. That her pain kept bleeding over. That she didn't know how to make it stop.