I wrote this because I'm struggling through a similar situation at the moment, and I really needed an outlet for my feelings. Harry Potter is one of my favorite characters, and I would hate for him to suffer through this kind of pain, but unfortunately he's the bearer of my bad news anyways. I wasn't quite sure how to end it because honestly I don't know how this type of situation ends. But there it is...
Everything Harry Potter belongs to J. K. Rowling. The idea belongs to me (unfortunately).
Okay
Harry had just finished a book. He wasn't sure how he felt about this book, mainly because of a large fault early in the plot: the main character, a boy a little younger than Harry, had been completely blindsided by the fact that his parents were getting divorced. He had absolutely no idea of any tensions between his parents, no idea whatsoever that their marriage had failed. Harry found this rather difficult to believe. How could someone not notice if his parents weren't getting along? Surely, the stiff silences and bouts of shouting in the late night would have made it obvious that something was wrong.
That was how Harry imagined all failed romances went: it was inevitable that there would be fighting and crying and breaking down long before two people in love gave up their way of life together. When people fell in love, he was convinced that their worlds collided together in a crash of passion; often they knocked parts of each other loose, or cracked the other person in some way. (After all, that was the danger of forcing two lives together quite suddenly.) But, in the cases of real love, the two lovers always mended and healed each other in the places rubbed raw, because it only made sense that real love healed much more than it broke.
Harry believed this was how love must work, for he was sixteen, almost seventeen, and felt by now that he had lived long enough to begin to understand some of life's greater mysteries, including love. Therefore, it came as a great shock for him, on that very same day, when his parents, Lily and James (always Lily and James) sat him down in the living room and announced that they were getting divorced.
Harry experienced a moment, or perhaps several moments, of blank numbness; the only thought that passed through his head was that he now perfectly understood how the character in his book had had no warnings of his parents' divorce. Harry glanced rather wildly between his mom and dad, searching for any sign that this was a cruel joke ("Maybe Uncle Sirius put them up to this…"). Lily's face was pale, her brows creased with worry, and her eyes, Harry's eyes, showed concern (and pity) for her son's reaction. Harry couldn't bear to be pitied now, and turned quickly to his father.
James would surely never let Lily disappear, especially not when he fought so hard for her in the first place. Harry felt his stomach lurch unexpectedly, however, when he caught his father's eye. James' face flushed, and the rims of his eyes were red. Incredibly, horrifyingly, James' eyes were watery with unshed tears brimming dangerously close to the surface. Never, not ever, had Harry seen James cry. This, more than anything, forced Harry to unwillingly realize that his parents were serious, and this wasn't a game.
He opened his mouth to speak, but no words came out. To his intense embarrassment, tears sprang to his own eyes. He wiped furiously at them, and suddenly both his parents were hugging him, smoothing his hair from his face. Harry didn't want their comfort. He wanted to yell at them, rage at them, and force them to realize they were madly in love and would never separate. But he felt desperately torn because he was sure he couldn't say such things to his parents. This caused him to cry harder, and harsh, angry, despairing tears flowed thickly down his cheeks.
They whispered soothing words to him, trying to reassure him. "It's not your fault, you haven't done anything wrong. Believe us, we thought long and hard about this decision. It was very difficult to make. We love you no matter what, and we promise things won't be terribly different. We just need all of us to be happy, and this is the best way, in the long run."
At that moment, as he struggled to breathe through his sobs, Harry was positive he would never be happy again. The two people who were supposed to be his foundation, his most constant support, were going separate ways. His entire world was breaking at the seams. He felt, without a doubt, that nothing would ever be the same. There was a rift now, an almost tangible division between—between—
He wasn't even sure. Everything, he decided. Everything was shattered and in pieces, and he had no idea how to fix it.
Nothing drastic happened immediately after that. Both of his parents stayed in the house ("Just for a little normalcy, for a little bit longer."), and went about life as usual. But Harry suddenly found himself between his two role models. From them on, they hardly acknowledged each other's existence in the house. They were polite when they had to be, but James and Lily were avoiding each other. Both felt that they were a burden on the other, an unwelcome intruder during a time of mourning. Harry stayed miserably in his room most of the time. His summer break seemed to stretch endlessly in front of him (it was only the middle of June). How could he stand three and a half more months of living in a house with two strangers?
He felt divided because both of his parents wanted to be with him, but not at the same time. Harry found he had only so much energy he could dedicate to his parents. Often he felt too tired to deal with the range of emotions he experienced around either of them, and avoided them both when he could.
On the outside, Harry appeared quiet and a bit lethargic for the next several weeks. However, torrents of emotions raged inside him, and he felt overwhelmed by the sheer amount of feelings a person could have at one time. He was angry that his parents had given up so easily. He would have preferred the two of them shouting and insulting each other, fighting over everything, because that would have meant that they still had passion, they still cared. Instead, it was as if their love had slowly drained away from them, so slowly that maybe they hadn't noticed, until quite suddenly it was gone, and too late.
Harry also felt a half-crazed, overpowering desire to draw their love for each other out again. He was sure they just needed to go on a date, spend some more time together. Or, Harry convinced himself that if he behaved and didn't bother his parents, Lily and James would fall in love again. Because of these ideas, it was many weeks before Harry miserably accepted the fact that no amount of effort on his part could fix his parents' marriage.
This inevitably led to him feeling angry again. He was almost seventeen years old, for Merlin's sake! How could his parents do this to him now, of all times? Now, he was old enough to comprehend exactly what was happening, and realize with crushing devastation that there was absolutely nothing he could do about it. Sometimes he spitefully wished they would have divorced when he was younger, so he would have a small chance of forgetting the pain he suffered. However, deep inside, Harry understood that the extrication of two lives so closely entwined was bound to hurt no matter how old you were.
So then came Harry's next phase of thinking, when he guiltily realized how much James and Lily must be suffering as well. Even if they were no longer in love with each other, they certainly still cared, and it was bound to be as difficult for them as it was for Harry. But Harry felt selfish in his own pain and often tried to shut his guilt away. He furiously though they deserved to feel pain for how they were ruining the family and the guilt would eat at his insides once more when he immediately recognized he did not wish this amount of suffering on anyone. (Especially not his parents!)
Harry moved through this cycle of emotions daily, and he struggled constantly with the helpless feeling they left him with at the end of the day. He desperately wanted to comfort his parents, and be comforted in return, but he did not know the words to say, and so they remained unspoken.
In fact, Harry had no idea what to tell anyone. From the night his parents told him about the divorce, no one mentioned it. Harry knew that other people knew, such as Remus and Sirius. (How could they not know?) He noticed the pitying, sympathetic looks they threw his way whenever they visited. But they never acknowledged his pain any further than this, so neither did Harry. He didn't even know what he would want people to say to him, anyways. It was not going to be okay. He might survive this ordeal, but he was not going to be okay again for a very long time.
Every day he thought of more things that would change, and Harry felt like a knife stabbed him with each new epiphany. As his birthday drew nearer, he had realized that he would eventually have to split his birthday between two houses because James and Lily would not keep this façade forever. And then he realized it would be the same for Christmas, Easter, for any holidays, even for normal days because he expected to live equally between his two parents. Harry's heart ached whenever he thought of how painful it would be to pack at the end of a few weeks with a parent, knowing they would be alone in a house without anything but their memories while he visited the other parent. More often than not, Harry had to fight back tears at this revelation.
Yet another thing he struggled with, as time wore on and it got closer to the first day of school, was that Harry had no idea how to tell his friends. He didn't know if he should, but he felt like, if anything, this was the kind of situation where best friends were a necessity. Some days he was determined to tell his friends of his troubles, and he would resolutely pick up a quill and some parchment, ready to write. But then he would hesitate because the truth was so hard to admit. Writing the words out on paper would make them real, and Harry did not think he was ready for that. So he would shut his quill and parchment away, and save the letters for another day.
He hadn't cried since the first night he heard the news, but he did come dangerously close. There was one distinct moment that he had felt his heart crack into several pieces. It had occurred exactly two weeks after that fateful night. James and Lily had been perfectly cheerful around Harry, so he had tried to appear the same to them. He would smile and occasionally laugh, even managing to forget his dread for a few minutes. But eventually his smile would slide off his face like water, and he would disappear into his thoughts.
On this particular day, Harry had been home alone because James and Lily had to run errands. He forgot exactly why he had gone into James' room in the first place, but he clearly remembered that he had almost left the room when a picture caught his eye. At first, Harry thought it was a picture of him and James when Harry was a baby, and he had started to smile at seeing it on his father's nightstand. However, when he picked it up for closer inspection, Harry's heart dropped into his stomach, and he hastily shoved his fist in his mouth in an attempt to keep himself from sobbing aloud.
It was a picture of Lily and James, either when they were first married or right before, and they were both laughing and grinning happily at the camera. It was blatantly obvious that they had been madly in love at the time. Harry couldn't comprehend that the couple smile exuberantly in the picture was the same couple that could now hardly be in the same room with each other. It was at that moment that Harry realized how much his parents had lost when they stopped loving each other. It must be the most painful torture in existences to realize something a person previously cherished above all else was now shredded and frayed, fading away with the wear of time.
While the pain never got much easier in the following weeks, Harry eventually realized that he could grow from this pain. First of all, he vowed not to make his parents' mistakes. He would notice long before it was too late that something was amiss when he got married, and he would try his best to always communicate, even if it was uncomfortable. And second, though it was a bit harder, Harry knew he would need to forgive James and Lily if they ever wanted to move past this trial. He understood that, if James and Lily truly no longer loved each other, it was better for everyone if they separated. Harry did not want his parents to suffer and forfeit their happiness for his.
It was with these solemn revelations in mind that Harry went down for dinner on the night of his seventeenth birthday, the last of family dinners together for a while. His mother was moving out of the house the next day and going to live with a friend until she found a house of her own. Lily and James had finally decided they couldn't live in limbo any longer, either. And even though Harry's chest ached with the thought of his mom leaving, he nonetheless confessed to her later that evening, before she went to bed, that he was glad that she was going to be happier. Lily graced him with a rather watery smile and drew Harry in for a hug.
Standing there, hugging his mother despite the fierce sorrow flooding the back of his mind, Harry felt a bit of a spark in his chest. He wasn't sure exactly what it meant, but he thought it was the beginning of being okay.