There was a beast in Theodore Nott's belly, reaching up through his esophagus and tickling his gag reflex. The beast was hot and harder than rock. It made his insides feel humid.
Theodore ignored it. He was good at ignoring things.
There was one question which he desperately wanted someone to ask him, so he could give the answer he whispered to himself sometimes before he fell asleep.
"No," he would say, gazing straight into his interrogator's face. "No. I've never cried."
It would be a lie.
They would make some exclamation, and ask with wide eyes if there had ever been a time…as a child, surely, he must have…?
"No," he would maintain. "Not even a single tear." He would pause, and then say, with firm conviction, "And I never will."
That part – he knew – that part, at least, would be true.
"I never will." He whispered it under his breath as a mantra. He thought it as he inhaled, as he exhaled.
When he and his sometimes-girlfriend Daphne made love (they seldom did anything else together), he murmured it despite himself into her dark, messy hair or into the curve of her shoulder, which smelled – not unpleasantly – of cheap peach-scented perfume beneath the sharp odor of sweat and sex.
"Hmm?" She dragged a fingernail lazily over his collarbone, not drawing back to really look him in the eye. "Theo? Did you say something?"
"Nothing, Daphne, baby," he started to reply, but her hot mouth was already on his.
When they slept together, he often felt the beast twist and writhe in his gut, and rise in his throat and obstruct his breathing. He guided Daphne's hands to circle his neck, then, so he could feel like he was being strangled by something real and tangible. He found it instinctual and necessary. Daphne found it "kind of kinky."
He could have told her his lie, but something held him back. Maybe it was because the only time he called her "baby," the only time they ever really exchanged even a few brief words without tension or argument, was when they were naked together. Maybe it was because she seldom made eye contact with him, and he wanted the person he lied to to look at him, to search him for some grain of falsehood and come up empty-handed.
Maybe Daphne already believed his lie without being told.
Instead, he told her other lies. He told her he had dreams: about making love to her; about strange, fantastic scenarios which he made up as he went along. Once, in a fit of jealous anger, he had told her that he'd dreamed of sleeping with his boss' secretary.
In reality, he didn't dream. When he was young, he'd had nightmares, but he hadn't dreamed in years. He honestly couldn't remember what it was like to dream.
He remembered what it was like to cry, and he wished and pretended that he didn't.
He didn't remember the nightmares – their monsters, their horrors, his own fear – but he did remember waking from them. Sometimes he would jolt out of his sleep with a small scream, and sit upright on his bed, sweating and panting with his eyes open wide in the darkness. Sometimes he would find himself curled into a tight, protective ball under his covers, and shiver, and squeeze his eyes shut again, and try not to breathe.
Invariably, he started to sob.
He couldn't help it. He tried so hard to stop the tears, but nothing helped. He cried no matter what, so he tried to do so quietly, to not wake anyone else.
Sometimes, his father came in. Mr. Nott was a big man, looming and dark with a presence both powerful and solemn. He did not quiet the room he entered: he silenced it, and could deepen the mood with a glance. When he came in after a nightmare, he sat on the edge of the bed and gazed unblinkingly at the wall, away from his sobbing son. He did not move, but there was a burning in his eyes and an expression on his face that made Theo's stomach turn from shame.
"This is nonsense," he said once the tears stopped. "This crying: it's nonsense and it's weak." Theo felt the heat rise in his cheeks at the emotionless rebuke. He looked down at his pajamas and bit his lip and wiped the snot from his nose. "It doesn't do anyone any good; it doesn't serve any purpose. No one needs to cry." His voice came from his chest, slow and flat. "Your mother never cried. In all the years I knew her, in all the years she was alive, she never cried. She was a strong woman, your mother. I would hope to someday be half the person she was, and she never cried."
And then his father would rise and leave, face smooth, moving out the door as though under the Imperius curse. Theo could never fall asleep again if his father came in after a nightmare.
Sometimes his step-mother came in. She always knocked first, before creeping quietly across the threshold as though worried to wake him, even though she must have been able to hear his quiet wails and choking breath. She knelt beside him and ran her fingers through his hair as if afraid he would bite her. She whispered that it was alright, and gave him a piece of peppermint candy to soothe him back to sleep.
His step-mother was a small, pale woman, and could not have been more unlike the little he remembered of his real mother. She had wispy, fair hair that was constantly contained in a long plait down her back. She blinked too much; her eyes were watery and always seemed a little too wide, though perhaps that was because she had almost no eyebrows. She moved cautiously, with the darting, frightened motions of a mouse. Her voice was hesitant and almost inaudible, and her laugh was too high and too tinny. She never closed her eyes or moved her head when she laughed; the only movement was in her thin, pale lips. She was a kind woman, but Theo suspected that his father didn't love her.
He didn't know whether his father had loved his real mother. He supposed that he had. Theo hadn't really considered the question of whether they loved each other until after she died, and then his father only spoke of her on the nights when he came in after one of Theo's nightmares, as an anecdote to explain why one shouldn't cry.
Theo did not remember much of his mother. He still held on to a few scattered memories without context, and a firm picture of her in his mind: of a tall, striking woman with broad shoulders and full lips forever set in the straightest of lines, of an upraised chin and eyes that flashed fire. But the individual memories were few and far between, and not all of them pleasant.
A few weeks before she vanished, his parents were arguing. He must have been about four, but whenever he remembered it, he felt that he must have been older than that. He did not trust memories, strange and slippery things that they were.
He couldn't remember what they had been arguing about, and was almost positive that he had not known at the time either. They talked almost too quietly to be audible, in sharp, dangerous voices.
Theo sat on the marble tile, coloring absently on a piece of parchment under the watchful eye of a house elf. He scribbled thoughtless, colorful squiggles that slithered across the page in smoothly rounded hills and valleys, forming a never-ending landscape of rainbow colors.
The tense back-and-forth at the kitchen table stopped suddenly, and Theo looked up. His mother leaned across the table, arms folded underneath her breasts and eyes glinting. She whispered to his father, a stream of hissing words that Theo could not make out. Her face was blank.
His father stood abruptly, violently, and slashed his wand across his chest in an angry gesture. There was a loud bang, and his mother tumbled out of her chair, landing heavily on the floor beside Theo. A small expression of shock passed across his father's eyes, his mouth pinched in what might have been guilt.
Theo dropped the parchment and began to cry.
His mother did not look at him. She gazed straight ahead, toward her husband's face but not quite into his eyes. Her lips were pressed in their usual straight line, her eyes betraying no emotion, not hurt and not anger. Smoothing the surprise out of his face, his father matched her expression, his face a mirror to hers. They stayed like that for a long second. The room was quiet except for Theo's small, sniveling sobs.
"Shut up," his mother finally said, twisting to look at Theo. "Stop that, there's no need to cry."
He stopped.
She got up, matter-of-factly, and brushed her robes off. Taking a glass from the cupboard, she filled it with water and then sat back down at her place at the table. She sipped calmly, with the air of one who cannot be disturbed by anything.
His father sat down across from her, holding his body and face peculiarly still.
The silence lingered another moment, then his mother put her glass down on the table, and said, "Well. What now?"
"I'm not sure," his father replied. "I'm really not."
"I'll put Theo to bed then." And his mother took him by the hand, led him to his room, and tucked him in with the same efficient manner she always did.
He cried a great deal after she disappeared. His father did not cry at all.
Theo did not like thinking about his life when he was so young. It seemed to him that he spent those years doing nothing but crying. Remembering made the beast angry within him, and then it would sink its teeth into the lining of his stomach and spit acid. The pain in his abdomen would become so great that Theo would have trouble standing.
It was too cold in Theo's flat; his muscles were stiff, but the cold made him lethargic and he didn't want to get up to stretch.
He sat on the corner of his bed wearing nothing but a towel, and had been there since Daphne left his flat in a huff several hours ago. The towel under his thighs was still slightly damp. Goosebumps dimpled his arms and legs, and his eyes were dry and sticky in the cold air. He knew it must be getting late and that he should be getting up – he was supposed to be going to a Christmas party at the Ministry that evening with Daphne, though it seemed now he would be going without her if he went at all – but he couldn't summon the energy. If he didn't start moving, he would be late, but any anxiety had disappeared into a cool numbness.
His body felt curious and alien. He was cold, he knew he was cold, but somehow he did not actually feel cold. Perhaps he had been sitting so long that he had begun to become part of the room, and he did not feel properly cold because in actuality he and his surroundings were the same temperature. He turned the idea of this around in his mind, enjoying it vaguely before discarding it. Theo felt pleasantly distant from himself, enjoyably empty. His body felt like a stone, a cold and immovable piece of tasteless furniture in the room. He felt rather like an abandoned house, unchanging without occupants, quietly taking up space in the world. It was a nice feeling. He wanted to remain there forever, not feeling and only occasionally letting a stray, experimental thought glide across the surface of his consciousness. Nothing troubling, nothing disturbing, just nothingness…
The thought of Daphne, sitting on the floor as she had been earlier that day, crying as she screamed at him, flashed across the nothing-peace of his mind and was gone.
Theo started abruptly. He had not eaten since dinner the night before, and was suddenly aware of his hunger. Reluctantly, he got up, and stood there a minute as if he had forgotten what he meant to do before securing his towel more tightly around his waist and heading, joints stiff, to his kitchen.
He discarded his towel in his pile of dirty clothes and brought a flask of firewhisky and some saltine crackers with him back to the bathroom. He gazed at himself in the small, poorly lit mirror. Daphne often complained about that mirror if she was forced to put on make-up or brush her hair in front of it. Reflected in it now, he felt the beast in its stomach twitch, loosen its coils slightly. He closed his eyes shut against the Theo staring at him from the glass, and, sightless, he took a swig of the fire whiskey before opening them again.
He studied the reflection with cold, objective eyes. White skin under curly dark hair. A body that had once been lean and scrawny lapsing into the softness of middle age come too soon. His eyes were dark and wide, unpleasantly bloodshot and unblinking. Feeling rather nauseous, he looked away from the mirror unsteadily.
He didn't like looking in the mirror. He always felt as though he couldn't recognize himself, as though there was a gleam in his own eyes that was totally unfamiliar. It left him with an unpleasant sense of vertigo, and a taste of iron in his mouth.
"The Christmas party," he muttered to himself, and took another lazy swig of firewhisky. "Come on, Theo. Pull yourself together, you've got that thrice-damned party to go to."
For a long moment, he didn't move, rolling the taste of the firewhisky around his mouth, enjoying the momentary heat it brought to his chest and stomach. The edge of the bathroom counter dug into his hip; his feet were numb against the cold of the tile floor.
Finally, he moved, walking dreamily towards his closet as if asleep.