Who: Neville and Harry What: Neville has trouble coping When: Friday evening, after dinner Where: Gryffindor boy's dorm Rating: TBD? Incomplete/Open
Once I saw him in the moonlight, when the bats were a flying I saw the werewolf, and the werewolf was crying
Neville had made it through his first week out of hospital, barely. He'd been having trouble, though he didn't let any of his friends know. He'd been accepting help when they offered of course, but he knew they were avoiding the subject and he'd just been letting them. Really though, he was having a lot of trouble coping. He saw the way people looked at him, the way they whispered as he passed, the way some avoided him and others just openly jeered. He could tell most of them, his friends especially, were doing their best to be careful around him, but he just wanted them to treat him like they always had, not something fragile and broken. It was all starting to get to him.
He left dinner early. It was easier to avoid people when the halls were empty, though now he was avoiding them for totally different reasons than he had been. He went straight to his dorm and dropped his things on his bed and carefully took his shirt and undershirt off. He sat on the bed and tried to toe his shoes off but he'd let Hermione tie one them for him earlier and she must have double knotted the laces. He tried to carefully bend over and undo it but a jolt od pain shot through his stomach. He let out a frustrated noise and lay back on the bed. He'd felt so incompetent. After a few moments tears started rolling down his cheeks. He wasn't really crying about the shoe, that had just been the breaking point for all of the stress and emotion he'd been feeling throughout the week.
He wasn't sure how long he lay there crying before the door opened. He tried to close the curtains around his bed but his left arm wasn't strong enough so he just turned away from the door, feeling tired and frustrated and alone.