90 Harry's POV
"Dada?" Buzz asked, staring out the door, such a confused look on his face. It would have been cute if it wasn't for the reason he looked like that.
"It's okay Buzz, Daddy needed to go outside for a bit, and uncle Dougie is with him, he'll make sure he's okay." I smiled at the child, picking a piece of spaghetti off his face. How he got it in his hair i would never know.
"What did we do?" Danny whispered too, ashen faced.
"I don't know." I really didn't, I wished I did, "Maybe it got too much, he tried to make a big step, and it was too much. Whatever it was, Doug seems to have an idea."
"Do you think he'll be able to fix it?" Danny looked ready to leg it outside to step in. I didn't blame him really, Dougie wasn't the best of us to offer comfort. He tried his best but he was a bit awkward.
"I think this time he will be fine. He's had experience with panic attacks and all of this." I remembered clearly the anxiety, the fear. His tiny face so filled with fear and frustration at his own brain, it had torn my heart apart to watch him like that. I'd had my own fair share of anxiety too over the years, but Dougie… Dougie had had all the other problems to go with it. The depression and low self worth, the need to relearn how to be 'him' again. Thinking about it, maybe Dougie was the right person to talk to Tom…
"I, I hate her, Harry." Danny glanced at Buzz, but the boy was playing with his meal, so wasn't paying attention.
"Huh?" I looked up from the baby to my friend.
"I hate her. I want to hur- I want to find her, and find out why, why she would do this to him, why she would dare to destroy him so much. It isn't fair. He's so... He's Tom." Danny's knuckles went white around the table edges.
"I don't think there's reason to it, not really. I think she just... It just is the way she is." I sighed, I couldn't be sure, but that was the only explanation I had. What else was there? That she found it fun? That she thought it funny? The idea of that was too horrifying to contemplate.
"We should have noticed." Danny growled, "we should have done something." He stood up abruptly, storming out of the room. I let him, knowing he needed space. We all did, sometimes. Everything felt wrong, like we failed at everything we tried to do, we all needed time to cool down.
"Looks like it's just you and me now kiddo." I stroked Buzz's hair. The boy smiled at me, oblivious to the tension of this entire house. I was grateful for that, I'd hate to think that a child so young was being affected by all this. He didn't deserve to know what his mother was like, or what she did to his father.
It was bad enough that we were left with the guilt of it all, a child so innocent shouldn't have been left with it too. We could handle it, do what we could to sort Tom out and give him support, Buzz couldn't do anything. The only thing he could do was provide Tom with a distraction from what was happening. Though even that was difficult, thanks to all the things his mother had put into his father's head.
At least he could give Tom reason to keep on trying. Keep on fighting to get better. I was starting to doubt he'd be fighting at all if it wasn't for Buzz. He looked so defeated most days, like he was barely holding on, and today just proved to me that he had so much work to do before he was even ready to even try to take any kind of risk.
"You'll convince him to keep going," I wiped Buzz off, kissing his hair, "he will do it for you." I was sure of it. Tom had to do it, he couldn't carry on like this. He had to get better, he had to.