there's no use crying about it

nature vs. nurture has never been more perplexing than in the rosier family. when you grow from rot, does that make you rot too? can healthy leaves be found on a diseased plant? ultimately, though, the leaves don’t survive on their own, so does the distinction even matter? the rosier name is rot and disease and expectations, and you, my boy, are just another leaf.

it’s hard to say how much of you is truly you, not just an amalgamation of every rosier before you, a stitched-together patchwork of legacies you never had a choice in carrying. you were never raised to be a person. you were raised to be a rosier. and you understood that from the beginning. every expectation laid before you, you met without hesitation. every role handed to you, you played without question. you were bright, capable, well-mannered, everything a son of your family should be. everything except happy. because beneath the accomplishments, the perfect veneer, there was nothing. no shape to yourself that wasn’t outlined by someone else’s hand.

you started insisting on being called evan after your mother died. she had called you evo in her softest moments, the only person who ever made you feel like more than a name. your sisters still use it when they speak to you, a lingering ghost of the warmth you lost, that all of you lost. when she left the halls became bone chilling, the air thin and almost impossible to breathe. your father hardly calls you anything at all. he’s always believed that being an individual isn’t of great importance. a rosier should not concern themselves with personal identity. it only gets in the way. and so you learned to sacrifice every facet of yourself. to hold your tongue when you wanted to speak, to mold your wants into something more acceptable, to carry the weight of your family name without ever asking if you wanted to.

your friendships, like everything else, are carefully maintained illusions. you have plenty of them—everyone does, when they carry a name like yours—but they are surface-level things, reflections of yourself in other people rather than real, tangible bonds. the ones that manage to sink deeper, the ones you allow yourself to care for, you hold onto too tightly. you press until they crack beneath your fingers, then scramble to piece them back together before they slip away entirely. and when you learn that things still break even if you let them go, you decide that maybe it’s better to cut your losses than to cut your hands.

school is a monotony of do this, go here, say that, succeed. there’s no challenge in it, not really. you do what is required, you excel where you’re meant to. but it’s the moments outside of all that—the stolen hours beneath the stars, the firewhiskey burned down to the last drop in a stolen bottle, the reckless decisions that taste like freedom—that keep you from suffocating. it is the closest you ever come to choosing something for yourself. and so you grasp at it, even as you tell yourself you’re only indulging in a temporary escape, that none of it is real. because if it was real, if it mattered, then maybe you’d have to admit how much of yourself you’ve lost along the way.

leaving school is like stepping off solid ground and realizing you were never standing on anything to begin with. you float, directionless, until the path unfurls before you once more. the ministry. the most practical choice. your test scores and aptitudes see to it that you find work, that you fill a role, that you function. and so you become an obliviator, methodical, efficient, invisible. it’s not about power or purpose; it’s about order. it’s about wiping away the mess, making problems disappear, restoring clean, quiet normalcy. you’re good at it. of course you are. you do the job well, without fuss. without feeling.

you are guarded, impenetrably so. you have to be. the world doesn’t get to see the soft edges. it only sees what you allow: the sharp tongue, the controlled temper, the irascible way you push people away before they can get close enough to see the cracks. you’re shallow, they say. you keep things on the surface. but what they don’t realize is that’s not vanity, it’s armor. the shallowness is the shield you’ve built over the hollow places inside you. because when you dig too deep, when you feel too much, the rot is right there, waiting.

so you chase the same distractions, the same empty reprieves. late nights, bright lights, the blur between exhaustion and intoxication where the mask slips just enough that you can almost pretend it isn’t there. these are the only times you feel something close to human. you catch glimpses of a life that could have been yours, should have been yours, if you had been born a person instead of a name. but the name always wins. it always pulls you back into place, into purpose, into expectation.

and so, of course, you find yourself here. a death eater. the most obvious and the most preposterous choice. because of course, this is what you’d do. of course, this is the path you’d take. you’ve never needed to think for yourself before. you’ve never had the option. this is what was expected. and you have never failed to meet expectations.

they tell you this is real change, a revolution, an upheaval of everything that has held you in place. and maybe, for a moment, you let yourself believe it. maybe, for a moment, you think this could be something different. but then the words turn to actions, the ideology to orders, the whispers to blood on the ground. and suddenly, the reality of it presses in against your ribs, suffocating in a way you didn’t think possible.

a small, desperate part of you wonders what it would be like to stop, to step away, to choose. but the rest of you knows better. the rest of you understands that there was never another path. that this was always how it would end.