Theo struggled. That much was obvious to his friends. But it seemed to have gotten worse lately. He skipped breakfast in the Great Hall more than he went to them, and his face was often missing in classes.

You all knew this wasn’t one of his normal depressive episodes. The ones that washed over him every few months. No, this was something different, something darker. Theo didn’t even get out of his bed on the weekends if Mattheo didn’t drag him out of it.

It was concerning, to say the least. And none of you had any idea what the cause of Theodore’s depression was, which made it that much worse, because it made you, Mattheo, Lorenzo, Blaise, and Draco that much more useless.

Usually, it was possible to get Theo out of the dungeons with the proposal of going smoking, so that’s what you decided to do. Theo would come to the Black Lake, expecting to smoke with Mattheo, and there you’d all be, not letting him leave till he at least told you what was bothering him.

But Theo didn’t show. You waited an hour in the grass by the lake, scanning the castle for any signs of Theo. Lorenzo suggested Theo had just taken a nap and was on his way. Then two hours pass, and Blaise says Theo had just forgotten about it.

It was after three hours of waiting for Theo that you and Mattheo finally decided to go find Theo; if he wouldn’t come out, you’d simply force him to talk in his dorm.

As the five of you walk back to the Slytherin common room, something heavy hangs in the air. As if there’s something bleak and dark hanging by a thread above your heads. It was an inexplicable feeling, and one that made you uncomfortable.

You walk up to their dorm first, the boys hanging back to let you talk to Theo first without all of them there; that would likely only be overwhelming in such a small space. You prepared yourself to see Theo bleak in his bed, staring into space, maybe with a bottle of firewhisky or some alcohol by his bed.

What you saw when you opened the door to the dorm, however, was all but what you’d prepared yourself for. There, in the middle of the floor, lies Theo, an empty potion vial looking like it had rolled out of his hand.

He’s paler than Harry had been when he’d first seen a Dementor on the Hogwarts Express during your third year, and his eyes are shut, though not in the resting asleep kind of way, in the lifeless and empty sort of way. The sight was scarier than any image a Boggart could conjure.