If you don't find self-injury or suicide acceptable or are going to insult or depreciate it in any way, go now. This story is very dark and involves the said subjects.
I don't own the Potterverse or the Marauders, but I do own Katie and what I have written.
I shook my head, unable to comprehend what had happened in the past day and a half. Lily and James killed by Lord Voldemort himself, and Peter killed by Sirius for betraying him. Out of all people to betray them, it was Sirius…
A bang came from the front of my small flat. Taking out my wand, I peered into the living room. A figure stood there in a dark cloak, completely still.
I stood up and ran over to the person and grabbed her arm when I recognized her quiet sobbing. "Katie," I murmured, relieved to see her.
Before I could say anything else, I noticed a sticky substance on her arm and my hand. I flipped on an electric light and gasped – it was blood.
Katie sagged before me, her sobbing increasing volume. I caught her and lowered her to the floor, tugging the sleeve to her cloak up. Several jagged cuts littered her arm, from pin-prick sized ones to ones that extended all the way down from her wrist to her elbow.
"I'm s-sorry," she murmured faintly. I knew immediately from the second that I had seen the cuts that they were self-inflicted, probably because of the deaths and incarceration of her best friends.
I pulled out my wand and started muttering healing charms and spells. "Bloody fucking hell," I said angrily in between spells, "Katie, how could you do this?"
"Prongs and Wormtail are dead," she slurred, her eyelids flittering. "Lily is dead…what happened to Harry?"
"He's being sent to live with Petunia…Katie, stay awake," I said, shaking her shoulder. She didn't respond.
Having mended her shredded arm, I picked her up in a reverse piggyback and placed her on my bed. She didn't stir; she was in a deep state of nowhere, escaping from the world she had come to hate so much. I retrieved essence of dittany from my bathroom and dipped a bandage in it, and then rested her arm on it.
I knew that she had started hurting herself during our first year of Hogwarts, but I never said anything about it until months after seeing the first cuts during Transfiguration. We hadn't been friends back then – we just knew who each other were. It was only when I asked her why she did that to herself did we start talking to each other.
She started relying on me, as I did unto her. James, Sirius, Peter, and I all became her best friends; however, she never, ever told them why she would never wear short-sleeved shirts, no matter how hot it was. I was the only person that she would come crying to after she did what she needed to do to survive her depression. I was the only person she would allow to dip her arm in dittany essence overnight.
At any time except for those times she was the happiest person, as long as she was with her friends. Her friends were therapeutic, she confided in me, and they were her reason for living. Nobody thought that the crazy, lovable, always-energetic Prefect that everyone knew and envied for being a Marauder was on the brink of dying every other night, just as nobody thought I could be a werewolf.
We considered her a Marauder, although she was a female. Katie was just one of the guys, to everyone except me. She was something so special; we knew exactly what each other was thinking before having to say anything. Even though Padfoot, Wormtail, and Prongs knew I was a werewolf, only Vixen knew how it hurt me inside to see them hurt because of me at the full moon every month.
I sighed, stroking her hair. Her closed eyes were swollen from crying. I loved her, but I knew that we could never be together. I was a werewolf, and a poor one at that – I would never be able to give her the happiness that a normal, wealthy wizard could. Someone like Sirius, who had shown an interest in her for over a year but gave up when she said that she wasn't interested in having a boyfriend.
I curled up next to her and pulled the covers over us, exhausted from the past two days. In only seconds I drifted into sleep.
I woke with a jump after remembering the previous night and looked next to me. Only tousled, empty bed sheets were next to me.
Sprinting to the living room, I breathed a sigh of a relief at the curled up figure on the couch. "Hey," I said gently, approaching her and sitting at her feet.
She didn't answer for a small while. Finally, she spoke up. "I'm sorry."
Every time at Hogwarts, she would wake me up and apologize the morning after. 'I'm sorry, I didn't mean to upset you,' she would tell me, tears welling in her eyes.
"It's…not okay," I said. "I can't afford to lose you, Katie. You almost died last night."
Her body stiffened at the words. I knew it was hurting her to hear me say them, but she needed to hear them. "I know," she said quietly. "It's what I wanted, for the most part."
"You wanted to leave me here, all alone?" I asked, my voice growing louder. "You honestly thought that that was the answer? To leave me here and all of my friends dead?"
At this she started crying again. "I don't want to deal anymore, Moony." She turned her head to me. Tears were spilling from her dark, bloodshot eyes, her voice thick from crying so many times before. "I don't see a point anymore, with all of them dead, and Sirius is in Azkaban-"
"I guess I mean that much to you, huh?" I stood up and turned away.
"You mean so much to me, Remus," she whispered. "That's why I came here instead of just lying down on my bed like I planned."
"You planned this." I stated those three words frigidly. "You planned on killing yourself in case this shit would ever happen?"
"No, Remus – I didn't mean it like-"
"Is this always your answer, Vixen? Anything wrongs happens, and this is always an alternative to just waiting for it to pass over?" I was yelling by this point, my fury at Sirius and Voldemort for killing my friends being directed at her.
For a while, it was silent. Neither of us could find any words to say to each other.
"We could both go, you know," she said, standing up. "That way, we could see Lily and James and Peter again in heaven…I know they miss us," she murmured, touching my shoulder.
"I plan on staying here," I retorted icily. "I have missions with the Order. So do you."
"In case you didn't notice over the past few days, but the Order did a really good fucking job at keeping them alive!" She screamed. "Did you notice that Voldemort fucking killed them, or have you stayed in this house so long that you didn't notice-"
Unable to take her words, I turned around and pointed my wand at her. "They joined the Order because they wanted to fight him," I growled. "Get out of my house. Now."
Fear and pain welled in her eyes. Saying no more, she turned and Disapparated to who-knows-where.
The days following, I saw no sign of her. At the large funeral held simultaneously for Lily, James, and Peter, she didn't show. I didn't stay long for the services – only long enough to see them lowered into the ground and buried.
Whether she followed her plans to join them in heaven or not, I never found out. She never contacted me again, however, leaving me to believe that she did. Having no family and no friends, she probably wouldn't have been discerned from any of the other carnage of Voldemort's rising power.
Even though our fight had angered both of us, I still missed her.
