#soft sad

ℎ𝑖 𝐼’𝑚 𝑔ℎ𝑜𝑠𝑡.𝑡𝑥𝑡 👻

𝐼 𝑝𝑜𝑠𝑡 𝑎𝑏𝑜𝑢𝑡 ℎ𝑒𝑎𝑟𝑡𝑏𝑟𝑒𝑎𝑘, 𝑒𝑥𝑖𝑠𝑡𝑒𝑛𝑡𝑖𝑎𝑙 𝑑𝑟𝑒𝑎𝑑, 𝑎𝑛𝑑 𝑜𝑐𝑐𝑎𝑠𝑖𝑜𝑛𝑎𝑙𝑙𝑦 𝑠𝑜𝑚𝑒𝑡ℎ𝑖𝑛𝑔 𝑓𝑢𝑛𝑛𝑦 𝑏𝑐 𝑐𝑜𝑝𝑖𝑛𝑔 𝑖𝑠 𝑤𝑖𝑙𝑑

𝑔𝑒𝑛𝑑𝑒𝑟: 𝑆ℎ𝑒/𝐻𝑒𝑟

𝑎𝑔𝑒: 20𝑠

𝐼 𝑜𝑣𝑒𝑟𝑠ℎ𝑎𝑟𝑒 & 𝑡ℎ𝑒𝑛 𝑑𝑖𝑠𝑎𝑝𝑝𝑒𝑎𝑟. 𝑤𝑒𝑙𝑐𝑜𝑚𝑒

The first year Harry moved in with Sirius and Remus felt surreal. Harry was focused on enjoying every minute of it because he was constantly waiting for the other shoe to drop. For something else to happen that would drag his godfathers back out of his life. 

But it hadn’t happened yet, and so on his birthday  he found himself not at Privet Drive but still at Grimmauld Place with a tall cake slathered in icing being placed in front of him, adorning with glittering candles and magical font that was writing and unwriting Happy Birthday Harry!

And he remembered that first cake from Hagrid. How no matter how squashed it had been it had been absolutely perfect. No amount of spelling errors could replace the fact that it was his. Sure, there were egg shells in the batter and the icing was so sweet you could feel the granules of sugar gritting against your teeth, but it was the first time in a long time that anyone thought he was deserving of something sweet.

For years, Harry had watched birthdays from the other room. Salivated over fancy bakery cakes that he would only get to taste by trying to discreetly lick any crumbs off the plates before putting them in the dishwasher. He watched glittering presents be unwrapped over and over again and every moment was a silent reminder to him ‘you are not worthy of this.’

But then Hogwarts happened, and after years of loneliness he had friends. He had family. It all felt so overwhelming to find somewhere that he finally belonged. To finally have a home and parents who cared for him and loved him. In some ways, Voldemort made it easier. Voldemort was evil and cruel. Voldemort hated him. Voldemort wanted to destroy him. Voldemort believed he wasn’t worthy. Voldemort was familiar. The pain and fear of fighting for his life was comfortable. The joy and comfort of being loved was terrifying because what if one day they woke up and realized the Dursley’s had been right all along?

Harry’s hands shook as he tried to hold them steady in his lap. The wax was pooling off the candles and onto the cake. His godfathers looked at him expectantly. 

“Are you going to blow out the candles love?” Sirius asked. 

And Harry did, in five slow shaky breaths because he didn’t want to disappoint them. 

“Did you make a wish?” Remus asked as he reached for the plates. 

Harry nodded. Please don’t let this end.

Remus started to slice up the cake and passed the full plates around. Once Harry had his in front of him, he just stared at it. Unable to bring himself to eat.

“Something wrong love?” Sirius asked. “Remus wanted to do chocolate but I convinced him that you’d prefer cherry chip. Wrong choice? I can whip up a new one or we could run out to a bakery and get you something else?”

Harry squeezed his eyes shut, fighting against the tears that were threatening to push their way past his eyelids. “You didn’t have to.”

“It’s your birthday love,” Remus said softly. “Everyone deserves cake on their birthday.”

Harry opened and closed his mouth. His head aching from all the thoughts and feelings that were screaming for attention, that were screaming to be believed. “But cake is,” Harry stopped himself. His aunt’s voice ringing in his ears. Cake is for good boys.

“Harry?” Sirius said, pushing up from his chair now to kneel next to his grandson. 

Harry’s breath came out in short rattling breaths, panic swirling around him, and he was hyperaware that he was ruining it. That he was making a mess of what was supposed to be a nice day between the three of them. He forced a trembling hand to scoop up a slice of cake but he was shaking so bad that it fell to the floor before he could get it to his mouth.

“I’m sorry,” Harry said as he fell to his knees to start cleaning the cake up off the floor, using the edge of his shirt to do so. “I’m so sorry. Cake is only for good boys. I shouldn’t have - I don’t get to - I’ll go to my room.”

“Harry,” Sirius said, as he moved to sit in front of him again, now with Remus at his side. “You don’t have to be good to deserve cake or a birthday or presents. You don’t have to be good to deserve anything. Our love doesn’t have to be earned.”

Harry stopped furiously cleaning the hardwood for a moment. “Y-you got me presents?”

“Of course dear, do you want to open them now?”

Harry’s eyes flashed back to the cake on the table and he watched them fill with fear again.

“You don’t have to choose,” Sirius told him. “We can finish cake first and then do presents if you want.”

Remus reached out slowly to rest his hand on Harry’s knee, watching carefully for any flinch or sign of discomfort. “You get both darling. You’ll always get both from now on.”

Harry reached up and wiped the traitorous tears off his face. Good boys weren’t supposed to cry either. Unless you were Dudley, then you could cry all you wanted. 

“Do you want to have your cake now love?” Sirius asked.

Harry nodded and got up to go back to his seat. Sirius and Remus went slowly, trading off taking bites of their own slices so that Harry had all the time he needed. At first, he moved his fork slowly towards the plate before shovelling the bite into his mouth as if he was scared of getting caught. Eventually, he settled down into a calmer rhythm, methodically making his way through the slice of cake. 

“Would you like another slice?” Sirius asked when he finished. 

“No, that was perfect. Thank you,” Harry replied, but Sirius didn’t miss the way his eyes flashed to the cake and made a mental note to try again after presents. 

Harry had a hard time with presents too. He couldn’t seem to stop crying no matter how hard he tried. He seemed in a constant war with himself between wanting to run and hide every gift away before someone could take it and assuring his godfathers that he didn’t need it and they could return it if they wanted to. Sirius and Remus never yelled, never got frustrated, they just simply told him over and over again that they’d bought them for him and the items only had to be returned if Harry wanted to pick out something else. 

When asked what he wanted to do next, Harry managed to sheepishly ask if they could watch one of the new Muggle movies that Remus had gotten for him. Drained and emotionally exhausted, Harry was asleep fifteen minutes into the film. Sirius simply turned the volume down and pulled another blanket over him. 

“I’m going to kill them,” he said quietly to Remus. 

“Remember how many times I said that about your parents love?”

Sirius deflated. 

“I know you want them to hurt as badly as Harry is hurting. I do too, but that anger gets us nowhere. It is right and valid and justified and we’re allowed to feel it, but Harry doesn’t need it. Maybe one day, he’ll transition to being pissed off and mad about the childhood that was stolen from him and he’ll need our anger to stand alongside his, but what he needs right now is your gentleness, Sirius. He needs our kindness and softness because he’s never had that before. He needs to believe he is worthy of good things.”

“I just want to make his hurt go away.”

“Did yours love?”

Sirius paused, feeling that familiar ache flare up inside of his chest. That dark space that still held onto his parents words and beliefs of him no matter how much light he poured into it. It was a stubborn knot of scar tissue that healed in the best way it could. “No,” Sirius said softly.

“But we can make it hurt less. We can try to make it so it isn’t the first thing that he thinks of at the beginning of the day and before he goes to bed and whenever someone tries to do something nice for him. We can try and have our voices in his head be louder than theirs.”

Sirius thought back to his teenage years, in particular to the time right after he’d run away from home. He thought about how hard he’d tried to prove himself to the Potters so they wouldn’t hate him, how often he’d flinched at the sound of broken plates and cups and started apologizing even if he wasn’t the one who dropped it, how often James, or Euphemia, or Fleamont, or Remus had to hold him and assure him that what happened to him wasn’t his fault. That they weren’t going to hurt him the way his parents had. How their voices still lived on in his head even now that so many of them had passed. 

“I don’t think I ever said thank you Moons,” Sirius noted as he brushed a lock of hair out of Harry’s face and plucked his glasses off so he wouldn’t break them.

“You don’t have to love. I wasn’t doing anything extraordinary. None of us were. We were just being decent human beings.”

Sirius nodded, watching his godson and remembering what it felt like to be just like him. “It felt extraordinary to me.”

Love after so many years without it feels like fields of flowers finally opening in your chest and there are so many, and they are so unfamiliar, that you think you’re going to suffocate. Then someone shows you how to hold them and you learn for the first time that the whole world can be bouquet.

When it become evident that Harry wasn’t getting up anytime soon, Sirius picked him up in his arms to get him settled somewhere more comfortable. Remus trailing behind him as they moved up the stairs. Sirius laid him in bed and tucked him in gently. He turned to see Remus setting all of Harry’s gifts next to his nightstand so he would be sure in the morning that no one had taken them.