102 Harry's POV
Tom looked exhausted the next day, practically dead on his feet, like he hadn't slept a wink all night. But that didn't stop him, he was already cleaning and getting on with jobs with more energy than usual somehow. The only difference was that he was doing everything one handed, as Buzz was being held in his other. The poor child was refusing to leave Tom's arms, tiny hands clinging to his top, head curled into his shoulder. It wasn't a shock really, after Tom's actions at bedtime yesterday, but it was still quite worrying to see.
Little boys like Buzz should have been running around, happy and energetic, not curled in their parents arms all day out of fear, or worry, or whatever he was feeling. It wasn't right.
It also wasn't right that said parent was rushing around the house, desperately acting like nothing was wrong, when it was obvious that he was internally panicking. But I didn't understand why, why did Tom feel this way after yesterday? Why did he feel the need to be even more excessive when it came to cleaning and tidying, why did just matching an outfit with his son have to freak him out so much? It was an outfit, not a death sentence. Nobody had been hurt, nobody had been upset, it had just been a matching outfit. It shouldn't have freaked him out like it had, it didn't make sense!
"Nothing makes sense in the depressed mind." Dougie sighed, worriedly watching the oppositely dressed Fletcher's hoover the front room floor. How Tom was managing to do everything one handed, I didn't know, but he was.
"Yeah, but this isn't right, surely." I didn't understand, I wanted to understand.
"My guess is that he feels like he needs to prove himself, after yesterday. He clearly wasn't comfortable matching with Buzz, so now he's proving himself." Dougie explained, stabbing a fork into his boiled egg, the metal tines clanking against the plate.
"That wife of his fucked up his mind far too much." Danny grumbled, "No-one should feel guilty for something as simple as an outfit." He too stabbed his fork through his food, roughly cutting his bacon in half and chewing it angrily.
"The way he was yesterday, he was just trying to read a story and he could barely get his words out he was so stressed. I thought he was going to throw up he looked so ill with it. All over a bloody outfit, not even a mistake, or something supposedly going wrong." Danny continued to grumble, hands tightening so much around his cutlery it had to hurt, "And we are powerless to help. We can only encourage and support him, not get to the bottom of this and sort him out ourselves. Or hunt down that... that woman and force her to see what she has done to him."
"There's only so much we can do Danny, we aren't trained in this, we don't know how to help, not properly." I sighed, wishing we could help. I wanted to help, more than anything. I wanted to pick Tom up and take away all the bad thoughts, the bad habits, give him his confidence back, but I couldn't. I didn't know how, none of us did. It was awful to stand back and watch, but what else could we do? We didn't know what to do in this situation!
"But we know Tom! We know what he's like, who he really is! Why can't we do something to help him? Why can't we do something to help him get back to that? Why do we have to constantly stand back and watch him suffer?!" Danny barely managed to not shout.
"Because it's his problems, and we can't force him into things he doesn't want to do. We'd just be another version of his wife. We had to let him recover himself, not do it for him." Dougie sighed, "My therapist always said that it was my journey, so I had to want it myself. That I could seek support from others, but ultimately do it myself. The same goes for Tom, he's not going to recover if we force him into things, even if he enjoys them. He needs to recover on his terms, not ours, no matter how hard it is to do." he sighed again, "It sucks balls, and is painful as hell to watch, but it's the only things we can do right now."
It was a shit situation, one none of us could tolerate properly, but what else could we do? There wasn't anything we could do, as Dougie said. All we could do was let Tom take the steps he needed to, in his time.
But it was this bit, the bit where he freaked out, that was the hard bit. Seeing him take good steps was great, even when he was stressed. But watching him freak out afterwards, to doubt himself and fall back on what his wife had instilled in him over the years, was the hard bit. We were helpless to do anything, no amount of reassuring was going to do anything here. We had to let Tom work it out himself, no matter how hard it was.