Utterly spent, Harry sat listlessly on an old log completely ignoring the energy bar he really should've been eating as evening set in. He was... tired. So very tired. The kind of bone deep weariness that was felt more in the soul than the body (not that he wasn’t physically tired. He’d ended up having to use Stop-Gap too many times that day).
“When I was really young, my gran once told me that they” Ron said softly as he quietly sat down next to Harry, pointing vaguely at the soft blinking glow coming off of the fireflies that lazily flitted about, “were the souls of people who’d died and weren’t sinful enough to merit being sent to hell, but hadn’t been properly baptized and as a result couldn’t get into heaven. Mum kind of just awkwardly herded us kids somewhere else while my Aunt Cathy kinda just... broke down. It wasn’t until I was older that I learned that fireflies - or will o’ the wisps as my gran called them - were just a type of beetle. And that my gran was just being nasty to my Aunt Cathy who’d just had a miscarriage. Nasty piece of work my gran was.”
Harry glanced at Ron before looking back out at the glade they were sat in. It wasn’t that he was ungrateful for the company; at least Ron knew enough not to espouse empty platitudes about how he’d done his best and how he couldn’t save everyone (not even Japan’s legendary number one hero All Might could, and he had one of if not the highest record for number of people saved of any hero in the world - past and present) that pretty much everyone else he’d encountered after everything had given him. He knew that. Sometimes no one found the body until too much time had passed, or the damage was too bad to ever be healed. Or Stop-Gap just didn’t work no matter how much he tried to get it to. It... it wasn’t fair and it didn’t feel right. And it flew in the face of everything he’d sworn to do; to be. He had such a wondrous gift of a quirk that it would’ve been utterly selfish and a waste for him not to use it to help people. But...
Failure was supposed to hurt. If it didn’t, nobody would try to do better the next time. He could’ve done better. He should’ve done better. (It was his fault that his parents had died; he hadn’t even tried to save them).
(Guilt was a familiar, almost comfortable, companion for him; a dark voice whispering in his ear. All the what ifs and should have beens, and pointing out just how selfish he was because it was so obvious just how much more he could do if only he’d put in the effort. It was never enough. It could never be enough. Even if he spent every waking moment spamming Stop-Gap until there was nothing left of him beyond a withered empty husk, it still wouldn’t be enough.)
Harry blinked as Ron took the uneaten energy bar out of his hand and shoved a warm styrofoam cup into it, making sure to keep his hands wrapped around Harry’s so he wouldn’t drop it. “I should’ve seen it coming. I mean, it wouldn’t be the first time that a gang decided to get rid of the merchandise before it could be found and confiscated in a raid.”
“Ron, you couldn’t know. You thought they were trafficking drugs; not people.” Harry pointed out coming out of the funk that losing patients always put him in, “They told you it was just drugs.”
“Doesn’t make me feel any better though. I’m supposed to be the expert. I’m supposed to plan for everything no matter how low a probability it is. That’s how my quirk’s supposed to work right?” Ron countered, making sure that Harry took a drink from the mug (because Harry would never eat after helping with a disaster or villain attack where lives had been lost).
Harry blinked as he absentmindedly drank the hot-sweet-salty drink (some sort of enriched or fortified hot chocolate from the taste of it he idly noted in the back of his mind. Harry was fully aware of how bad at self care he was - especially at times like these. He knew how repeated uses of Stop-Gap ate at energy reserves he all too often didn’t have.To solve this, a number of carefully formulated nutritionally dense high calorie drinks had been devised) “But that’s not how your quirk works. Your projections only work with what information you have. Sure they can be updated if and when you get any new information, but you have to work with what you’re given. If you’re not given the right information, then...”
Harry was well aware of what Ron was trying to do by taking more than his fair share of blame for the cluster fuck the raid had been. Harry would never let Ron blame himself for something that he had no control over - such as not having enough or the wrong information. Therefore, he shouldn’t let himself feel too guilty for not pulling certified miracles out of his ass. He wasn’t god and sometimes people just died no matter what you did; their time was just up and that was that. No one lived forever after all. Harry knew all this; had had this lesson beaten into his head time after time.
But just because you knew something with your head didn’t mean that you knew it with your heart. You felt what you felt regardless of the facts or what reality was. And thanks to what he’d been through growing up, he was pretty fucked up emotionally speaking. Childhood was such a fundamental time in a person’s life and you couldn’t really say what the end effect would be until it was way too late and then suddenly you had a full grown adult trying to work around the lingering trauma and possibly having to fight PTSD to boot. For seventeen long years (more than half his life) he’d been put down by his aunt and uncle; constantly told how worthless he was. No matter how hard he’d tried to please them, to show that he wasn’t the complete fuck up they kept telling him he was, it was never enough. It never could be enough, but that wasn’t because of any inherent fault in him (as his aunt and uncle kept claiming); it was because that there was something wrong with them. It had been their choice to treat him like he was less than dirt. To deny him the basics of regular food and decent clothes that actually fit, push impossible standards and then punishing him when he fell short of their expectations. To poison their friends and neighbors to the point that not even the people who should’ve stepped in and called the proper authorities - such as his teachers - cared to step in and give him the care and protection he had been legally entitled to. The fact that he hadn’t not only turned his back on the society that had failed him (and had never developed the deep distrust of authority that would’ve been so easy to understand given the circumstances), but had sought out a way to help said a lot about how strong his moral fiber was (or it could just be the way his abysmal sense of self worth manifested as a martyr complex; less selflessness and more the abiding idea that everyone else was worth more than he was and therefore came before him).
He was getting better about it. Slowly. Mandatory counseling helped (no doubt he would have to attend at least one therapy session before he was cleared for more than lite duty after this). So did his friends and roommates, who had their own ways of helping (even Draco. Which was an odd thing to think about since one would be forgiven for thinking that Draco would’ve been entirely antagonistic; playing the part of the epic Rival stuck on the opposite side from Harry). Ron was the best at it though. Ron got it. Ron knew what it was like to fail when there were lives at stake. True he’d made a comment earlier about it being his fault that there’d been an accuracy when it came to what exactly the gang had been trafficking in, and someone who didn’t really know Ron might think that he was the one suffering from misplaced guilt (if only because Harry’s guilt complex had kept itself to a totally mental tirade instead of Harry blaming himself out loud). But Harry knew that that was just Ron’s way of saying that it was... not ok because there really wasn’t anything ok about a raid on a human trafficking location... but acceptable? perhaps even expected? to not have been able to save everyone involved. He couldn’t save everyone, no matter how much he wanted to. And that hurt. But that was ok.
He’d done his best. Saved who he could. And managed not to over do it (at least, not too badly) so that he’d be able to save more people once he was all rested up and restored back to what was his normal. After all, you can’t save anyone once you yourself are dead (maybe he could. Sometimes the side effects of his quirk were downright weird. He was in no hurry to test that theory out though).
Harry’s mood slowly shifted from morose at the (senseless) loss of life he’d been dealing with in the aftermath of the raid to contemplative as he sipped at his hot chocolate with extras. Ron sat right by him, handing the previously forgotten energy bar back to Harry at the point where Ron knew from experience Harry would have enough presence of mind to eat it; even if he wasn’t quite with it enough to actually register eating it.
“Souls or beetles, they’re fairly pretty aren’t they.” Harry mused as he absentmindedly munched on the energy bar.