A/N: This is going to be a collection of One Shots from various characters at various times in their life, all inspired by lyrics from Anberlin's song, "Alexithymia."
Alexithymia: the inability to express feelings with words.
Don't believe anything you say
Anymore, in the morn, in the morning
Very slowly he opened his eyes. They met the painfully familiar surroundings of his childhood bedroom. Quidditch players zoomed in and out of the poster on the opposing wall. A stack of books in varying states of use lay on the desk, accompanied by discarded ink bottles and forgotten copies of the Daily Prophet. Brown boxes labeled with assorted, cautioning words were scattered haphazardly around the room. A lopsided tack board displayed aged lunar charts and numerous black-and-white photographs. Cloaks and other pieces of clothing were hanging sloppily out of the wardrobe. An empty bed next to his, still unmade, sat idle and cold.
Mornings were the worst.
He heard yelling echoing through the house. He tried not to make even the slightest noise. He belonged here for a while. He deserved here. Here with nothing but his thoughts and the steady hum of his heater.
He tried to forget, but he couldn't stop remembering. He wanted to scream, yell, rip, tear, cause a scene. Do something, anything. Anything that would make his heart stop the constant pulse of pain. Wouldn't it have been easier if he had gone, too? Shouldn't they have added this to the list of things they did together?
They had fought that as small children–being constantly associated with each other– as, he expected, most children would. He'd shone his first sign of magic when he'd become uncontrollably angry at being called... His name and he blew up the dinner tray in front of him. He told him that he'd give anything to not be born a twin.
Now, he'd give anything to have him back.
His mother had sobbed that day. She, apparently, didn't posses an Inner Eye, either. If she did, she could have seen how close they would become, how inseparable.
They were surely separated now.
His ceiling creaked, and bits of dust fell from it, landing on a box marked with "It's For Your Own Good That This Box Was Sealed With Magic, Ginny." He noted that the contents of the box were probably volatile by now (if they weren't originally) and that he should probably get rid of it, but who was he to throw it out? It was only half his; how fair was it to trash something not completely his?
For that reason, his room had stayed the same way they had left it before the War. Occasionally, when he felt like he could no longer live in the mess he had made himself, he picked up, always stopping when he found something not put there after the Battle.
He heard footsteps stop outside his door. He snapped his eyes closed, so when the door opened seconds later, only a sigh was heard before it was shut again. He wondered how long he could get away with staying in bed. Usually, his mother came in around noon, claiming she needed his help doing one thing or another. He figured she wasted all morning coming up with ideas to get him out of their room–his room.
More yelling floated through the thin walls. It seemed to be yet another bad day.
They are all bad days now.
He pulled his bed sheets higher to cover his shoulders and thought of bad days before the War and bad days presently. He never appreciated the gift of a day when nothing went right, when he had his other half to help take the edge off with, when they spent hours in detentions dreaming of their future and complaining about the now. Looking back, those were the days he missed most, not the purely happy ones, because he realized that his relationship with him had been so deeply ingrained and comfortable that any moment could seem a bit brighter.
He let his eyes flutter open again. The desk still was acting as a rubbish collector, the closet still had fabric coming out of every opening, the walls still held aged artifacts from what seemed like another life, and the bed next to his looked even lonelier from this angle. He choked back a whimper at the sight of a photograph of his uncles, Gideon and Fabian, bouncing himself and him on their knees. They couldn't have been more than a few months old because shortly after, he knew, his uncles were killed fighting together by a gang of Death Eaters.
Together like the way they should have gone, too.
It was curious to him that he and his brother never made any sort of plan for this. Of course, all their time in hiding was spent avoiding the topic of tragedy as there was so much of it happening around them they felt no reason to discuss it outside of mentioning the news. But in all the time before the War, in the time between all of those pranks and punishments they did together, he couldn't remember even one moment where they had thought about their deaths. Jokingly and on numerous occassions, they had both stated their mother was going to beat them to death with her broomstick, or even that, one day, Dad's muggle experiments would go haywire and blow up the Burrow, killing them all.
Reading between the lines of all of those brief memories, he began to piece together the absolute realization that they had never, ever thought that one would go on without the other.
He reached for his wand and pointed it at himself. His mouth turned up at the corners. If his mother were to walk in, he knew she would think he was trying to off himself, and though he had thought about doing that more than a few times over the past few months, he felt it was a duty to do what his brother couldn't do and live on.
"Tergeo," he spoke, cleaning his face of all remnants of the box of eclairs that he stole from Ron and ate in the wee hours of the morning. He nodded to the picture of his brother on the tack board. "This one's for you, Freddie."
He opened his door and found his redheaded sister posed to knock on his door. She blushed furiously and scampered up the stairs, probably on orders to wake the entire house. He passed a clock hanging opposite Percy's bedroom door. Just minutes past noon.
Mornings were the worst, but days he could handle.