Some day, this will be a "Last.fm/NetFlix/Amazon for web fiction" (both original and fanfiction) where you can search across many different hosting sites or rate what you've read and get recommendations. However, life keeps throwing more urgent projects my way, so I don't know when it'll be ready.
http://www.fanfiction.net/s/5786099/16/She let her eyes glide over the rest of the room. "It hurts me that he had to do this alone."
"He was never alone. I had charmed the whole room to be near indestructible, and sat here with him, listening to him crying and raging, watching over him. Every few memories, we stopped and talked, sometimes for an hour," Remus replied, again putting his hand on her shoulder.
She was grateful for that little gesture. "I should have been there," she said, once more.
"That wouldn't have worked. You see, you are as much a help as you are a problem to him," Remus said, much to Hermione's shock.
Her eyes narrowed as she hissed at him. "What do you mean!" she demanded.
Remus brushed through his hair with his left hand, trying to find the right words. "We talked a lot, you see. When you are nearby, Harry does his best to be the kind of man he thinks you want him to be. This means that he deals with his anger the only way he had learnt to - he swallows it."
Remus looked around, waving into the general direction of the flasks. "But as you see, he has already swallowed so much, he's almost bursting. He finally has to learn to deal with his emotions in a normal way, allowing himself to actually feel them. His time with these... fools...," Remus corrected himself, "has left him unable to process emotions as a normal human can."
Hermione had a hard time to follow. "That's not right, he laughs, he cries, he gets angry, and he loves. How can you say he can't process emotions?"
"That's difficult to explain," Remus replied, worrying his hair. "Let's try it this way. If a child laughs, and you hit him for it, what will happen? I tell you what – he will suppress happiness. He will learn that it's bad. The Dursleys did so with every emotion he showed. Before he came to Hogwarts, he had no social skills, at all. He is practically a functional sociopath, for all it's worth. He fakes human behaviour to a degree, but he, how can I put it, doesn't really feel it."
"It's kind of hard to explain, I'm no professional," he threw in when Hermione's face wrinkled up in disbelief.
"He can feel amused, afraid or sad, but he has no experience with expressing emotions. That's why he's always the last to laugh, always says he's fine. Friendship, love, that confuses him. He never really know what friendship is, but he liked being with people. So he tried to behave like he saw people do, but from what I learned, Ron wasn't really a role model in that respect."
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