Fallen Empires/Broken Bottles Form A Star

I didn't mean for it to happen like this. At the beginning, I denied that my addiction ever even existed.

I was fine; of course I was – as the eldest son of Harry Potter, I could probably get away with murder as long as I pretended that it didn't happen. People wanted to believe me. They wanted to believe that alcohol was used by me for nothing more than recreation.

Especially my family; they wanted to believe that I was all right the most.

However, when it got progressively worse, and when I was hit on all sides by wisdom from those cleverer than me, I ran.

I thought that running would make things easier than staying and letting them fix me. Despite Al's words of patronising intelligence and my parents' unconditional kindness, I didn't want them to see me fall apart. I didn't want to rely on them any more than my siblings did.

In short, I was scared of looking like a failure.

I still maintain that I had it the hardest, though that is no excuse. Despite being the youngest of us three children, Lily was fiery, smart and frankly hilarious. She wasn't one to shy away from bluntness or proving herself right in an argument, unlike Al, who was as shy as they came and buried himself away in books and schoolwork instead of going out and socialising. They could both handle the pressure of being Harry Potter's children in equal, though different, measures – Lily held her head high and shot down anyone who commented on her unwanted fame; Albus ignored it and found solace in Transfiguration theorems.

I, on the other hand, loved being famous. I didn't care that it was a by-product of being my father's son; I just loved the attention. I revered it. That made me idiotic and naïve, thus I consequently conclude that I had it the hardest.

If you had asked me a few years ago, when I was on the brink of turning sixteen, whether I would exchange fame and attention for a quiet, peaceful life filled with happiness and love, I would have thought you were crazy to even think of asking such a question.

Fame brought me happiness and love all by itself; I did not need peace to do that for me. I found out from day one who was a true friend and who was not; I also, perhaps more dangerously, found out that alcohol could solve almost any problem as long as you had little time and lots of money.

And boy, did I have the right amounts of both. I was entering my first NEWT year when I realised that there was something that could take away stress quicker than a flick of a wand. Everybody around me was constantly studying, cramming up on facts and diagrams that were sure to come up in the exams next year; I, on the other hand, with my father's fortune in pocket, found an escape from the panic through the musty Firewhiskey bottles in the Hog's Head.

After that, it kind of escalated.

In the first few months, drinking was something that gave me a buzz; it was something that I recommended to my most studious friends due to the way it took away your problems and left you with nothing more than blissful emptiness. I don't think it caught on with the other boys in my dormitory, but I didn't really care. As much as I bragged about it, I was happy that drinking was my thing.

Nobody else deserved that high as much as I did.

Before I knew it, I had broken. I failed my NEWT mocks at the end of my sixth-year because I was so preoccupied swigging alcohol in dingy bars with men three times my age; I couldn't hold down a part-time job for more than a few weeks due to my increased restlessness that occurred whenever I had been away from drink for mere hours; to top it all off, the summer I was due to enter my seventh-year was the summer I left home for good.

I've already told you that I ran because I didn't want to let my family fix me; that much did not change for many years. At seventeen, I was cocky. I thought that my younger siblings were beneath me, especially Albus – with age surely comes increased knowledge, and I was the oldest. Therefore whatever words of advice Al had to offer me went in one of my ears and out of the other.

I ignored every single person who tried to reach out and help me, when instead I should have taken the outstretched hand and let it pick me up from the ground. I should have listened to my brother. I should have let my sister surround me with jokes and love instead of shunning her, pushing her away because she was of seemingly no real use to me. The only use to me was alcohol, and since my parents could not provide that without arguing with me – it was my mother who gave Lily her fierce attitude – I threw their support back in their faces and left home.

I regretted it as soon as I had crossed the doorway, but there was no way I could turn back and admit I was wrong. I was too proud to admit that I needed help; even more so from those who didn't understand.

Because nobody else understood what I was going through. No one understood the sheer depression that surfaced whenever I wasn't drinking; nobody seemed to understand the constant craving – the constant need – for alcohol that was slowly driving me insane. It changed me, but I didn't notice … and when people pointed it out to me, I hated them for it.

I told myself that they were the ones who had changed; after all, loads of people like to drink alcohol. Why on earth does that give my family the right to lecture me on safe drinking?

I was wrong, of course. There are plenty of people out there who would have given up every second of their life to help me if I'd only chosen to accept it.

Instead, I left.

I was a young adult and I had nowhere to live. What had become of me? I will admit that, before I left for good, I stole some money from my mother's purse. Not too much. I stole a lot more from the people more distantly around me to fund my addiction, but it was stealing from my mother that brought the first pang of melancholy.

As it was too late to admit I was wrong – after all, I would not let my pride be taken away from me, too – I spent my years stumbling through bars and inns, savouring the emptiness that alcohol now brought and detesting the loneliness soberness threw at me in the grotty hours of the morning after.

I think that I knew all along what I was doing. I think I knew even then that there was no way for me to get out of it on my own. It was then when I first began to truly regret what I had done.

I couldn't even remember why I had turned to drink in the first place; all I knew was that I was completely and irrevocably broken.

Once I had realised that, at the vague, blurred age of twenty-something, I crashed to earth. It was relief, since I had fallen for so long, but it didn't make the impact hurt any less.

I saw Lily's face in the beautiful women who frequently haunted the classier pubs that I entered in to. I saw Albus's piercing green eyes in one barman in London; I saw my parents' unconditionally loving relationship everywhere. I saw those that I needed in everyone that looked me in my drunken eyes.

It was driving me insane, though there was nothing I could do. I couldn't go back.

I reminded myself that I still had my pride. If I had my pride, I was invincible. Nobody could touch me, or harm me, because I was the son of Harry effing Potter and I could be anyone I wanted. It was nobody's business but my own who I drank with or which women I slept with; just like in the beginning, I didn't care for anybody's opinion but my own.

I was right. That was, in itself, an intrinsic fact. There was no other explanation for why my siblings or friends didn't persist in finding me after I had left; they must have known that I was right in relying on alcohol so much and they just didn't want to admit it.

Somewhere along the way, I began to wish that I had listened more. Once I had driven myself crazy with personal righteousness, I began to wish that I had listened to my sixteen-year-old instincts that had told me years ago that this was wrong. I began to wish that I had listened to Albus's rants about how alcohol poisoned people's bloodstreams and caused more problems that it solved, or Lily's soft words of encouragement that she had given me years ago as she slipped her warm hand into mine and led me back from Hogsmeade on the rainiest days when I was most drunk and couldn't stand up without a stubborn thirteen-year-old girl to help me.

I wished so desperately that I had cared to listen to my mother's yelling and my father's serious tones about how this was doing me no good.

I found out too late that all they were trying to do was help me, but they couldn't. I wouldn't let them. My family was waiting for me to need them and to ask them for help, and yet … I hated them for it.

I couldn't stand knowing this. I buried my mistakes in the bottom of broken bottles once more and tried, for the last time, to walk this road on my own. I distinctly remember having one slurred conversation with a landlady who had Rose Weasley's bushy red hair about why I had to suffer so much. The landlady just smiled sadly and probably gave me the line she'd rehearsed for so many other drunken customers who asked her the same thing: 'Everybody suffers, but you've got to find the things worth suffering for.'

What she said got to me like nothing else ever has.

I was suffering by having this addiction on its own, so why suffer even more by trying to get myself out of it? It was too painful knowing that I was wrong, so why continue thinking that way and philosophising over the stupid things I have done? Surely it would be a lot easier to drown myself in liquor, as I had done for so long, than to admit my mistakes and accept support from those who were right all along.

That thought frightened me. It scared me that there could potentially be no way out of this; that there could be no way out of the thing that had brought me so much torment for uncountable aeons.

Without even asking for it, as though it was an answer to my unspoken questions, I was hit with a present day image of my family. My parents in our kitchen; my father leaning across cabinets to tuck a strand of red hair behind my mother's ear before kissing her on the nose with the kind of tenderness that he had always exerted to us even at the times we least wanted it. A nineteen-year-old Al sitting in our front porch with his pet snake, the sunlight glinting harshly off his glasses and into the eyes of passers-by as he turned his head to talk to Lily, a young woman of seventeen, who in turn would be perched on our front gate with a book in hand as she gossiped to Al about her long-term boyfriend. Lily would smile, the spray of freckles on her nose stretching out as she beamed at my brother, and silence would resume as they both privately hid themselves into waiting on my return under the pretence of reading or looking after reptiles.

I could feel that my absence had affected my family the most – behind every line on my father's face was concern; beneath my mother's hazel eyes stood worry over where I was and whether I would be okay. My brother would lie awake at night wishing he could write to me to apologize for being so pedantic years previously; Lily would choose her boyfriends and the male figures in her life based on whether they held the same humour that I did at the beginning, or on whether they looked out for her like I used to … Because of me, maybe she wouldn't realise that the boy who's right for her is completely different.

The fact that my actions could have had this much impact on my family's lives hit me with the force of an oncoming Hogwarts Express.

The pub that I was in – some backstreet place called the Four Beaters, filled with rowdy men and curvaceous women – suddenly seemed completely empty.

It was nothing special, just another place in another town. I'd lost count of drinks and time; there were strangers everywhere; and I couldn't take it.

I cursed myself for being so idiotic as to throw away the one lifeline of support that being sober offered. My family had been nothing to me, and I probably them now, and if not for my own effing stupidity and naivety I could have been sitting with them at that moment, whole and well, with nothing clouding my mind but stresses of a career, or a wife and family of my own.

Instead, I had tossed that out of the window with the black bin liners barmen emptied at the end of each night shift.

At that point I concurred something that perhaps I had known all along, but had ignored and pushed away for fear of looking weak. There was nothing I could do to save myself on my own; that was correct … but perhaps, as the landlady who bared resemblance so much to my cousin Rose implied, saving myself was something worth fighting for. If I couldn't do it on my own, hell, I'd just have to get somebody else to do it for me.

With that thought in mind, I grabbed the moth-eaten rucksack that used to be the schoolbag I used in my sixth-year and had since then become a recluse for empty glass bottles and a few bare essentials, nodded sullenly at the drunkards paying as much attention to me as they were their own damaged lives, and headed out the door.

Unlike in my visualisation, the front porch was empty save for two entwined figures. The first to come to my attention was the distinctly familiar girl sitting on the fence, her face blushed and her hazel eyes focused on the person standing beside her.

Lily had her arm around a tall, sandy-haired boy who was roughly three years younger than me; he turned his head to kiss her on the cheek and I recognized him as Lysander Scamander, a quiet, down-to-earth boy who was the complete opposite of me and exactly the kind of person I would never have known due to my addiction to alcohol.

I saw, with fleeting desperation, my little sister throw back her head and laugh, almost falling off the gate in hysterics at a joke her boyfriend had relayed to her. It was as she steadied herself that she saw me and, stubble three days old and newly sober eyes bleary, I met her gaze for the first time in years. She dropped her arm from around Lysander's shoulders and stood, knitting her eyebrows together as she silently tried to piece together my return.

It was her voice that I heard first, piercing my addiction with weapons as sharp as the jagged edges of broken bottles – weapons like compassion, things that I had craved for so long but had never seen.

Her mouth formed one word, but it took me back to sixteen, to a time when everything still had the possibility of being fixed.

It was then when I knew truly how much I'd needed them, as my sister cocked her head to one side and spoke.

'James.'