Betrayal
He wants to die, he thinks. To no longer be in a world so full of pain, terror, shattering hearts. To finally be unfeeling, so that he didn't have to experience his soul being ripped to shreds in the center of his chest, sharp and enveloping, every fleeting memory clamoring for mere milliseconds of his consciousness - James, climbing a tree, scooting along a branch to hang over the lake, but the branch breaking too early and one broken arm later, laughing uproariously in the infirmary; sitting in the Room of Requirement, brows furrowed with concentration, and the sudden feeling of being malleable as he was the first to transform into his animagus, James and Peter whooping and clapping him on the back while Remus' eyes shined in the flickering candlelight; a mere 18 months before when he felt as tender as a lamb and as proud as a lion all at once, eyes only for the tiny black-haired infant in the crook of his arm. This is what love must feel like, he remembers thinking.
He wants to claw out of his skin with the pain of it; he was simultaneously completely numb and felt as though he was being burned alive.
It wasn't that they didn't trust Remus to be the secret keeper- he was a more likely target, had other pressures and didn't want to add another, they thought. Peter was such an unlikely alternative, they thought. He would never be a target; one of the others would be threatened, killed first in their efforts to find James and Lily, and it would serve as a warning.
Until you've been betrayed, you can see, hear and speak the word - betrayal - but you don't truly understand the depth of the loss. Not a tangible loss; a vague, indescribable loss that clogs your veins. That you gave that person so much, truly trusted them, and all along they were stringing you along, manipulating you for their own maligned purposes. Like having the rug swept out from under you, missing the last step. The falling sensation that leaves you reeling with the suddenness of it. The kind of blow you never truly recover from, pieces of it hiding in the dark recesses of memories to surface again when the matter of trust is once again at hand. Do you trust them? Do you really?
Lily's hair seemingly on fire as her and James made their wedding vows in front of a burning sunset on a hill in Surrey; the actual burning of her locks as the three of them attempted to make a proper dinner with disastrous consequences. James' glasses slipping off his nose with reckless regularity, and the middle finger of his left hand he always used to push them back up; staring at the stars from the roof above the astronomy tower, pointing out Sirius, Orion, Regulus over and over to himself with James lying silently by. His brother. His only true brother in this end.
His lungs compressed painfully as the air left them.
Do you trust them? Do you really?