Oh, it kills me inside. I can't bear to lay beside her, but she'd be hurt more if I didn't. I've woken to her crying before, she says she doesn't care what happens…she just wants to be with me, and sleeping beside me gives her the best fucking sleep she's ever had, and I can't understand that. She puts up with too much, I don't deserve her. She curls into my warmth and I gently touch her cheek, it's bruised and cut and yet she kissed me afterwards.
How can she stay with me? I'm a broken man, and I'm just breaking her.
I don't want to.
But I can't help it, I can't stop it. She involves herself, and then somehow she's in the way and she gets injured…not that I'm blaming her, oh no. I just can't think of the reason as to why I let myself hurt her again and again…

I've been out of work for almost half a year. Six months. The days pass and I only notice when she's crying. She still works. She comes home and she cleans up after me. Anything that I've broken or smashed. She cooks me dinner and then she takes me into her arms and just holds me. Isn't it supposed to be the other way around? It's like that in the movies, the guy is sitting oh so suave in his arm chair, a glass of brandy in his hand and a lovely lass in his lap, curled up and inhaling his musty scent…
And instead it's me sobbing into her jumper, and she's soothing me, kissing and petting my hair, and it's just…uncanny.

How come I just want to die when I have her?

Because I shouldn't have her.

She deserves better. Sometimes she cries because she can't handle it anymore, I manage to catch her at times, but at the same time she snuggles into me because she loves me, and I just can't understand or comprehend that. She'll be sobbing but holding me and nuzzling into my warmth, and it's only a warmth that she can feel because I feel cold.
I love her.
But she shouldn't love me.

Puddlemere United…I can't even remember why they took me on in the first place. It's hard to believe that one day in my far past I was actually good at Quidditch. That I taught the legendary Harry Potter. ME. I don't fucking believe you, you're the one who's cutting your wrists at this very moment! Not me!

Oh sometimes…sometimes I remember my times back at Hogwarts. It's all in ruins now, you know. Dumbledore was killed…people were attacked…muggle borns slaughtered…and I sit back and I think…I was once all a part of that. I remember how Quidditch was my life and I laugh…I'd spend hours in the shower after a lost game and I think bleakly about how I should just end my life there once and for all, as if that's the worst life could get? Ha!

Oh I have my Feather, I shouldn't be so depressed, I shouldn't be so broken. That's what I call her, you know, Feather. Because she flies like one. So light…so delicate…just floating without purpose. She hated Quidditch, but loves to watch a game, and loves to fly on a broom as long as there's no purpose to it…

Oh there's blood everywhere, I can't stop laughing. I'm writing, writing, writing because she likes me to. I have cute writing, she says, and I think it's funny to write with my own blood. That's what quills do, you know? You see it on those muggle movies about the Devil, every time he makes you sign the contract with a quill and your own blood…I'm heading straight for the devil you know, because I broke my promise to Feather.

I said I wouldn't kill myself.

Feather, her real name Simone, comes home to find him bloodied and broken on their bed. She doesn't really remember much after she registers him there, dead on what is now known as their final resting place, but she winds up collapsed beside him, and she's broken too, because she wasn't able to save him. He was once so happy, and then he just broke, started drinking…didn't turn up for team practise…yelled and swore at his friends until they didn't contact him, didn't keep in contact with his family...would just cry and sob all night.

She finds out why after he's been dead for hours, she hadn't understood before, not even after his long, mumbled 'explanations' which were more of rambled rants, but now it's oh too clear, and as she reads through the journal he'd been writing in as he was cutting and pushing his blood out and away from him, she's not crying for some reason, but she never realised that it's because she just can't feel anymore.

She realises now why he was so certain that he was scum, as if he didn't deserve his life. She sits, growing colder and more numb by the hour as she reads, until finally she stops. She doesn't register herself breathing any longer after she reads his words because now she can't comprehend that the world is real and she understands why he wasn't acting as if he was in the living world anymore, now she's fallen to that to, all through the knowledge of why he's committed suicide, and so she picks up the same blade he'd once held in his cold hand.

The whole reason for this?

He raped a girl when he was out drunk with his Quidditch team.

Simone has to read and re read that part ten or so times before she finally accepts he was being serious when he wrote that. That it wasn't a cruel joke. That he hadn't lived for almost a year and a half after with himself after doing such a thing.

And so she kills herself as well.

Because he wasn't able to tell her. He should have been able to tell her everything.

Because the girl got pregnant from it.

Because Oliver had cheated on her for crying out loud!

Because she hasn't been able to help him at all, and he hasn't been able to tell her.

Because in the end, he had died alone with his horrible secret,

And so she died with the secret that she was carrying his child…but none would live, and none should.

Blood was so pretty in the moonlight.

This is a challenge for FictionNET ( http / sycotic . org / fnet ) If you're looking for a nifty (mostly based on Harry Potter) writing forum, join Fnet and say that Keladryie sent you. It's seriously worth it.

Challenge: HP Challenge 08 - The Obligatory Angsty One

And here comes the first HP writing challenge of the new year; the obligatory angsty one!

Now, it's traditional to have regular angst challenges - or if it isn't, it's a tradition I'm determined to start right now. So, to channel all those remaining Winter Blues, here's a nice angsty one for you to get your claws into:

Write a suicide fic.

For those of you that would like more definition, here it is:

Write a story, meeting the below word requirement, in which a character in the HP universe commits suicide. You can set it at any point - the suicide, the reactions after it, the build-up to it - but the character must attempt to commit suicide by the end of the story. Whether they succeed or not is up to you.

For that reason, we are giving this challenge a minimum rating of PG-13. If the rating of your fic is R/NC-17/whatever, state so in the comments to let our younger/more squeamish members know before they click the link.

Let the blood flow! (or not. Whatever works, man.)