9th of August 2027.


Rose had decided to start her year abroad the Muggle way, by travelling on a plane. She was first travelling around parts of America and was to spend her first few days in Orlando, Florida, where she would be reviewing Muggle theme parks and tourist attractions, particularly the theme park based on the Statute Of Secrecy's most enormous double bluff of all time. Rose had just boarded her six hour flight and settled down to do some thinking before she started reading the multiple paperbacks she'd packed to keep herself occupied.

The last week had passed in a blur. After telling everyone she'd be away for the next year, Rose was surprised at how affectionate so many of her family and friends were being towards her, her mother in particular. That had really annoyed her, actually. Her mother's attention annoyed her because she only had it because she'd be leaving, if she wasn't going anywhere they'd fall into what had become their regular pattern of duty visits every few months which would have all been awkward and forced and annoying. Her father, luckily, was his usual drunk and irrational self and Rose found herself quite glad of that, which maybe didn't make any sense. It was perhaps that her mother's hypocrisy bothered her and she liked that her father hadn't changed or pretended anything would change. Sad, though, she supposed. She really hoped that he'd get over all the bitterness and regret he still seemed to be carrying around for far too long, she hoped he'd stop mourning the loss of Hugo and instead begin to live in his memory, to start being the man she and Hugo had thought he was when they were too small to realise how broken their mummy and daddy were.

The night before she'd left, Rose had gone out for a meal with Lily, Dom, Cat, Al, James and Al's girlfriend, Melody Greengrass, who was incidentally also Scorpius's cousin, she'd actually been good friends with Mel while at Hogwarts and it was nice to catch up with her. The meal had been nice and Rose had once again been filled with warmth that she was once again close to these people who meant to much to her and that they were there for her if she needed them to be. She had Scorpius too, she supposed, but she didn't want to think too much about him if she could help it. Their conversation had hopefully been enough closure for them both for the time being and she needed to stick to her decision to be okay with being mostly alone for the next year, it was the right thing for her and for Scorpius as well, she couldn't hurt him anymore and if that false hope had been hurting him, she hoped she'd helped it stop.

Looking out of the window at all she could see of the very white sky, Rose felt very calm. It was like the blankness of her outside surroundings at that moment represented her newness, was that the word for it? Yeah, her newness. She could be anyone in these places she was about to visit, she could be anyone and anything and that was beautiful. The chances and possibilities stretched before her and she felt ever so free. She had finally done it, she had finally got out of a bad situation and had found something entirely new, somewhere entirely unknown. She had done what she'd really wanted to do when she'd thought she wanted to kill herself.

Maybe she'd never wanted to kill herself at all, maybe all she'd wanted at that time was to be new and free and to start again. Maybe that was all there was to it, but it was the darkness she couldn't quite repress that told her the only way to be free like that would be to give up on life altogether, that it was life that was making her feel so lost and alone and trapped, not her situation. Faulty thinking, the healers tended to call it, and with the assurance that the potions they'd prescribed would help rationalise those thoughts, they'd sent her on her way. Why she'd ever started taking those useless potions she'd never known, all they'd done was make her all the more paranoid and afraid that the walls truly were closing in. Hugo had taken the same medication since he was thirteen years old, she had discovered, he hadn't wanted to want to die and he had looked for help, it was just that the help most likely wasn't good enough. She wondered if her brother had ever gone to see any of the disappointingly useless mental health healers she'd seen for a while, she wondered if they'd helped or if they would have helped him had he seen them, she wondered if they had made him more sad or if they would have lead to a speedier death of his. She'd never know though, that was the thing with people dying too soon, they left too many questions behind. Rose wasn't able to prevent the single tear that fell from her eye when she blinked, but she hastily wiped it away and hoped that the man in the seat beside her hadn't seen- she didn't want to appear weak even to strangers.

Thinking about Hugo was unavoidable. She'd kind of repressed it for so long that only now was she really mourning her little brother. Maybe it was healthy to be doing something she should have done a long time ago, as with all the things she was only now doing. Perhaps it was right that she let herself think about him and feel sad about him and wonder what he'd be doing or saying if he were there with her. Probably something nice. That had been the thing with Hugo, he had always been such an optimist, always so quick to see the good in everyone and never able to comprehend the bad. He had done only good and said only good and had smiled through it all, cracking jokes and making sure everybody else was okay. He and Cat must have been so perfect together, Rose thought, if only she'd been paying more attention to him at the time she'd have seen them together and that would have been so nice. Hugo had been the epitome of sunshine and brightness and kindness and goodness, he had believed in everything and everyone and he had been so fun and alive. The problem was that he couldn't cope with the ugliness and darkness of the world a lot of the time, it broke him into pieces how badly some treated others, how so many atrocities had happened for no good reason. Hugo had been too idealistic and that had made it impossible for him to cope with the reality that people messed each other and everything else up. Rose imagined that the darkness inside of Hugo was something he couldn't control, she remembered periods of time from when he was just five and would get that anciently sad look in his eyes and would just sit still and silent for far longer than was normal for energetic, smiley little boys. Hugo had been bright and happy, but the depression had been anything but, the depression had slowly but surely extinguished all the light inside of Rose's beautiful baby brother until it was all gone and so was he.

It was then, sitting in that seat on that plane somewhere in the sky, that Rose came to terms with her brother's suicide the year before. He was gone, that was certain. And he had left behind a shattered family that became increasingly shattered once he'd gone. He'd left behind a beautiful girl who shined as brightly as he did and believed she would now only ever know second best. He had left behind the sunshine and the laughter and the beauty he couldn't help but find in the world around him. But he had also left behind the part of him that made it hard to enjoy everything else. To kill off the poison he'd had to kill himself, it seemed. To get rid of the voices that made him think he was alone and unwanted and that all the smiles in the world would never compensate for his daily pain, he'd had to go away for good. That was what he'd written in the note he left behind. And that was sad, so so sad. It was sad that nobody had noticed the signs, it was sad that mental health healers tended to be full of shit and that medication didn't help, it was sad that they'd all believed his smiles and hadn't thought to look beneath the surface and think deeper, that they hadn't even fathomed that the happy boy wasn't completely okay at all.

Rose knew right then that giving herself away to misery willingly had been the worst possible thing she could have done in response to Hugo's death. Instead of letting the sadness win, instead of encouraging her own destruction, she should have tried to fight it, should have felt glad that for her, the sadness came as a response to grief and it wasn't a part of her as it was with Hugo. Of course, she had then gone on to own the sadness, the darkness, but she'd had to let it in at some point and she'd been almost glad to do it if only because it meant she could lock herself away and keep herself safe, if only because she genuinely believed sadness was a legitimate reason to shut everything and everyone out. She had all but let go of that now and right then she was more sure than ever that the needed to get on with fully becoming free. She would do it, she would try to let go of the past, maybe even try to forgive her parents. She would learn and she would grow and she would move on. Enough was enough and it was time to live the life that had been taken from her brother by the darkness without an adequate name over a year ago now.