Insomnia

He hadn't had a good night's sleep since Jacob had disappeared.

If anyone looked at him, they'd simply see the infamous 'cursed student'. They'd see the boy who completed all his classes without trouble. The boy who made friends with anyone and everyone. The boy who won the House Cup almost entirely through his own efforts every year.

They wouldn't see the boy who wanted nothing more than his brother back. The boy who surrounded himself with friends and people to keep himself occupied. The boy who struggled to sleep at night, almost certain that any second, he'd hear a knock on the door, and his parents would tell him that Jacob had been found.

There had been a time, years ago, in the lazy days of a summer long since passed, where he had slept peacefully. He had woken up every morning to find his brother's smiling face. He'd laugh and tell him that he needed to get up, before his parents came and did it for him. One thing that had always stuck out to him was the fire in Jacob's eyes. No matter what challenge came his way, he would face it head on, be it waking up a grouchy brother or fighting a heavily armed death eater.

Funny, that - He would find himself thinking in the oppressive silence of the night. That the fire in his eyes, the burning passion of a man who didn't know the meaning of the word 'quit', would be his undoing. Not that it had been a particularly rapid change. No, no, it had taken a long time for Jacob's life to fall apart. A slow, agonising shift, until one day he had awoken to his parents, instead of his brother.

Sometimes, he'd get out of his bed - more comfortable than the bed he slept in over the summers - and find a corner of the room to sit in. He would stare at the flickering flames in the fireplace, and he would feel a measure of peace. In those times, he truly was able to forget everything, to pretend that he could close his eyes and wake up to that smiling face.

The summers. Those times were supposed to be full of joy and laughter, of balmy nights that seemed to stretch on endlessly, and days of sweltering heat, the kind that made him just want to lay flat out and forget the world. When he really thought about it, nothing had changed in that regard. The house he grew up in still stood, his parents would come home from a hard day's work to talk to him, and conversation would flow in the living room. Well, conversation would occur. He couldn't call it flowing. If anything, it reminded him of a picture he'd seen in a drawing book once. A piece suffering from what he knew as 'symbol drawing', drawing what your mind expected to be there, instead of what was actually there.

The building housed three people, but his mind wanted to say it housed four.

There had been a shift, that day. A subtle change in atmosphere and warmth. The house had stopped being his home, and had instead simply become the place he stayed over the summers. He had drifted further apart from his parents, until their presence almost became alien to him. He would find himself staring up at the ceiling, of the room he slept in, feeling something uncomfortable. A foreign feeling, and one he shouldn't have been feeling in what had once been his home.

The feeling stuck with him, although he had never been able to fully explain it, even to himself. Soon enough, he'd began to wish for time away from the house, from the deafening silence and stilted conversation. Starting at Hogwarts had been an immense relief to him. A new place to call home, he had thought, enamoured with the idea of starting over.

On that first night, he kept his eyes tightly shut and willed himself to sleep. He failed, of course. Some things were not so easily forgotten, and starting over just wasn't doable for a boy at the age of eleven. He distinctly remembered wondering that night if something inside him was broken.

Strange, he thought. That he would still remember that, even years later. The nights blurred together eventually, ending up as incomprehensible images in his head, like a symphony composed of discordant noise, but he never forgot that first night. He would think to himself that maybe he should do what the bright eyed Hufflepuff girl did, and start dosing himself with forgetfulness potion, to try and forget all the demons keeping him awake.

Whenever he tried to work up the resolve, that smiling face would swim in front of his mind yet again, and he would find himself unable to even stomach the concept of forgetting. The idea of losing his memories of that smile made him sick to his stomach, despite what people said his brother had become.

The changes had been slow, of course, and perhaps if anyone had caught the signs earlier, the ugly events that kept him awake at night wouldn't have occurred.

It hadn't been a noticeable thing. He had stopped coming down for dinner, opting to stay in the perpetual heat of his room. His parents hadn't thought much on this, since his OWLs had been fast approaching. Soon after, though, he had stopped leaving his room almost entirely. While he hadn't thought much on it at the time, sometimes the shadows at night would twist around him and whisper insidiously into his ear that if he'd said something, maybe he wouldn't have gone missing.

Jacob had kept coming into his room to wake him up, and that had kept him from speaking up. He couldn't remember a time in that last summer outside of waking him up that Jacob had smiled. His parents had been concerned, of course, but Jacob had waved them off, saying he was just tired. It was a flimsy excuse, even at the time, but his parents had been going through a rough patch and hadn't been thinking straight.

Finally, one day came where he slept on longer. He remembered his groggy climb to consciousness, and the cold that had gripped his heart when Jacob hadn't been there to wake up. Most of that day passed in a blur, and only remnants of it remained available to him. He didn't forget the detached feeling he had had for the rest of the week, after his parents had told him of Jacob's fate, and the role the Cursed Vaults had played in it. That detached feeling had lasted for a week, and since then, sleep had evaded him.

Was it his fault? He would sit in the common room, long after everyone had gone to bed, and watch the embers in the fireplace die out. Did the blame for Jacob's disappearance rest on him? At night, when everything was silent, the questions would appear, as if the shadows of the common room were wrapping around him, binding and constricting him. He wondered if he could have stopped it, had he spoken up.

Would he forget his brother's face, eventually? Memories weren't the most precise things, and each time he recalled them, the details changed. The time of day, or the clothes his brother wore. The idea that one day, he might no longer recall what his brother looked like terrified him.

Not that he had nothing to remember him by, of course. He fumbled beneath his robes to pull out a small locket. Once, that girl had seen it, and belittled him for it, but he didn't care. He flipped it open, revealing a Muggle photo of a man who bore a striking resemblance to him. He squinted to make out the writing in the corner, a small, faded print spelling out the date and time the picture had been taken. He held it close to his heart, whispering pleas to the last embers of the fireplace for his brother to return, to smile and laugh at him like he always did.

Sometimes, he would watch his dorm mates sleep. He would see the rhythmic rise and fall of their chests, and feel some envy at how easily they drifted off. Did they have their own inner demons? Did they have things that kept them awake at night? Perhaps, he thought, they were just pretending, and everyone was laying in bed, pretending that they were normal kids, sleeping away happily, trying not to let themselves be consumed by the self-doubt.

Maybe he would end up the same way as his brother. He had come to Hogwarts full of hope, that he could forget what had happened, that he could clear his brother's name, but here he was, searching for the same vaults that had driven Jacob insane. They consumed his thoughts sometimes, and he always forced them back as terror gripped his heart, and he thought he was about to experience what Jacob did first hand.

Perhaps, deep down, what he craved wasn't clues, but solace. During the quiet of the night, his doubts manifested, and his fears came to life. Maybe, all he needed was something to keep his mind occupied, to stop him from dwelling on the past. If he could, he wouldn't be sitting in the common room, staring at the remains of a long since burnt out fire. He'd be in the library, searching through book after book. Anything to keep himself busy. He could sneak in, he supposed, but the feeling of being a thief would eventually get the better of him.

That's what it was. That feeling he felt in the room at the house he stayed in during the summer. It was the feeling of being somewhere he wasn't meant to be. Somewhere where he didn't belong. His destiny had changed, and now the only time he felt at home was when he was searching for information about the vaults.

His brother had always told him that he shouldn't sleep in. He had always said that it was wasting a perfectly good day.

He didn't sleep all that much, anymore.