warnings: smoking addiction, death, suicidal thoughts, mention of violence, depression.
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CIGARRETTES OUT THE WINDOW
From his earliest memories, Theodore lived inside a drifting veil of acrid white smokeāa haze he loathed long before he could name it.
His father seemed to give off more smoke than a locomotive. Wherever the man went, the stench and murk clung to him like a second cloak, his fingers perpetually curled around what looked, to a childās eye, like a polished twigāthough Theodore would later learn it was a cigar.
And Merlin, how he despised it.
At seven, everything about Christian Nott invited his sonās hatred. Theo knew his fatherās tread the way others know a storm rolling in: one heavy footfall after another, nothing at all like his motherās quiet steps. Worse, he could read those sounds. The softer they fell, the harsher the beating that followedābecause Christian delighted in surprise when a bad day demanded a target.
Theo would stare out windows, envious of older wizards swooping overhead on broomsticks, their feet nowhere near the floor that betrayed them. The mere idea that his own stride might echo his fatherās made his stomach lurch. How the man ate, occupied space, even breathed set Theoās nerves aflameābut nothing matched the revulsion he felt watching him smoke. Christian would exhale lazy rings straight into his little sonās face, and Theo, coughing and swatting at the air, dreamed of the day he could wield a wand and burn every cigar to ash.
Then, one remarkable afternoon, he found his mother doing the same. His gentle, flawless mother sat with a book open on her lap, a slender cigarette holder poised between her fingers. Theoās grey eyes flooded. Why her? Why couldnāt she be free of it? Was his father forcing her? Or, worse, did she enjoy it? Noāshe couldnāt. She was nothing like him. Why did grown-ups love something so vile?
Phoena, ever attuned to her son, heard a single hiccupped sob. The book slipped closed. Rising from the sofa, she blanched at the betrayal glistening on his cheeks. She crushed the cigarette at once, shame coloring her voice. She knew how fiercely Theodore hated smokeāknew whom he blamed. Kneeling, she folded him into her arms, fingers combing gently through his hair. She whispered that this would be the first and the last time. A tender lie, easy for a child to believe, enough to restore her perfect halo in his budding imagination.
Theo never again saw his mother lift a cigarette to her lips.
It was one of the reasons, perhaps the clearest of them all, whyāten years onāTheodore had come to despise himself.
Each day, he watched his reflection shift ever so slightly, the lines of his face bending toward the familiar silhouette of a man he wished he could forget. He had long since stopped looking in mirrorsāafraid of how closely he might now resemble the very figure who had dismantled his life.
After his motherās death, Theodore didnāt grieve; he unraveled.
Grief, after all, might have been gentler.
Like a curse passed down through blood, the depression Phoena had fought so valiantly to fend off settled into her sonās bones with a quiet, monstrous permanence. In its shadow, Theodore came to a revelation that shook him more deeply than any death: his mother had lied to him. And Merlin, how he understood her.
With the clarity that only suffering could sharpen, he saw her not as a mythic figure cloaked in strength but as a womanāa tired woman, hiding cigarettes in drawers and behind bookshelves, breathing in smoke as if it might save her from drowning.
He couldnāt blame her. If he were her, heād do the same.
He turned to ruin the way one turns to prayer: with desperation and devotion. Women, liquor, and most of all, cigarettesāthose burning, bitter little comfortsābecame his daily sacraments.
The first time he smoked, he was thirteen. Mattheo had offered him one, and they shared it beneath the stars atop the Astronomy Tower. They spoke of everything and nothing, their silence deeper than their words. Theodore had stared upward, wondering if his mother might be watching from whatever heaven or void sheād vanished into.
The habit grew quickly, ferociously. The roles reversed; Mattheo began asking him for cigarettes.
He smoked so much that even Dracoācold, composed, unshakable Dracoāwarned him he was going too far.
But Theodore didnāt care. He had long stopped pretending to.
Cigarettes, weed, cigars, even Muggle vapesāthough he detested the last, dismissing them as āartificial trashā compared to the real poisonāfilled his drawers, lined his pockets, spilled from his backpack. Exotic brands, wizarding or Muggle, didnāt matter. If it burned, if it numbed, it stayed. He no longer cared that he had become what he once feared. He no longer cared that his lungs were darkening, that his life was narrowing like the final draw of a cigarette. In fact, most nights, he hoped for it.
Cigarettes were his preferred poisonācommon, quiet, deadly.
Weed, he saved for when the thoughts became too loud. He welcomed the dissociation, the weightlessness, the drifting mind that remembered nothingānot his grades, not his father, not the cruel, gentle ghost of his mother. It gave him silence. Peace, even.
Charutos, thoughācigarsāhe avoided. They were too heavy with memory. Too much like Christian. Even now, the thought of it gave him chills.
He was falling. And he knew it.
On bad daysālong, cruel, aching daysāhe smoked over two packs alone in his dorm room, watching the smoke dance like spirits in the low light, only to disappear into nothing. Even Mattheo tried to stop him. But it was useless.
They didnāt understand. None of them understood the ache that lived inside his chest like a second heart. None of them had seen the only person who ever loved them collapse into death. None of them carried that kind of silence.
And so, sometimes, when the castle slept and it was just him and the memory of her, he cried.
He cried for the life his mother never got to finish. Cried for the boy she had raised, who had become a guy full of vices and ghosts. Cried because he was lostāanchorless, drifting.
He cried because he knew, in his marrow, that she would be disappointed.
He whispered apologies to the dark, promises into the smoke. He told her he would say it all again, properlyāsoon.
When the cigarettes finally finished what the grief had started.
