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Late January 1978
Potter Manor
The time alone, without the guidance of others, caused the bad habits to form again.
She forgot to eat due to various reasons, but the healer would sometimes bring her a snack or a meal, which would prompt her.
She lacked motivation to do anything purposeful.
She started to work and work and work whenever she had free time, but had no goal. She isolated herself from the healer.
She had been expecting more letters.
But then she remembered that James was the more remarkable of the two of them, he captured the joy in life, the feeling of New Year's Eve, while she preferred the quiet moments.
But people don't like that. They find it odd. People like people like James.
So she read to her parents.
She didn't know if they could hear her, sparks came out of their ears when they sneezed.
She would always sit in the arm chair from her mother's dressing table that she'd pushed so it was placed between the two beds.
It was big enough so that Thea could curl her legs onto it.
The covers were cream with little pinkish-red rosettes growing everywhere.
She would read them anything and everything.
Muggle books, text books, ancient books, books in other languages, gardening books, cook books, the whole lot.
Sometimes they would respond with a ghost of a smile or some slurred words, but mostly they just laid there.
Thea felt so absent from her own body.
It felt as if this possibly couldn't be her, in every respect.
Her golden childhood being shattered.
The realization that people would, in fact, always choose James.
How calm she was about the whole thing when all she wanted to do was scream.
She wanted to dye her hair and smash a vase against the wall.
Something, anything to get their attention.
But she couldn't, it wasn't her way.
So she remained like a desperate message in a bottle, floating in the ocean, cursed to never run ashore.
