Title:
OdiumAuthor:
Jade HunterDisclaimer:
None of the characters or properties of Harry Potter belong to me.##################################################################
He has never hated anyone before.
He has loved, of course; he loves everyone who cared for him, even when he was just a chubby failure, his only hope lying in Herbology.
He has been afraid, oh, yes; he knows fear very well. He knows how fear pounds inside the heart, how it clenches the stomach, how fear hisses out in short, labored breaths and leaks out from palms to clumsy the hands.
He knows fear very well, because he lives fear.
He is always afraid.
He has felt shame before, hot and accusing, because who is he to be ashamed of anything? It is everyone else who should be ashamed of him.
But he can't help it, just like he can't help being afraid.
He has been frustrated before, so frustrated that sometimes he just wishes that they were gone and dead instead of alive in such a state, because that would make it so much easier. He knows he should not think that, they are his parents, they were brave, unlike him, and he is ashamed for thinking so selfishly, but they don't understand at all.
No one does.
He feels all this and more, everything any other wizard his age might feel, but he has never, ever hated.
Until now.
He looks down at the article, seeing but not really reading anymore.
It's very bitter, this hatred, and he can taste it in the back of his tongue, forcing him to swallow every few moments or so.
He thinks he will die choking on it, it's so large.
It's a discarded copy of the Daily Prophet, because he and Grand canceled their subscription after they started printing lies.
He wishes this was a lie, because it would be better than the truth.
But he knows it's the truth, or else why would he be feeling so much hatred?
Bellatrix Lestrange,
he reads, convicted of the torture and permanent incapacitation of Frank and Alice Longbottom.It makes it sound so impersonal: permanent incapacitation. It makes him feel like all this hatred is for nothing, because permanent incapacitation doesn't sound as bad as tortured to the point of insanity.
She had been pretty, this Bellatrix Lestrange, even beautiful, maybe, before the hells of Azkaban took away all that.
He can't feel sorry for her, however, because he feels that she deserves it. She made countless of people suffer, why shouldn't she suffer as well?
It doesn't make him feel better that she's been in Azkaban for the past fifteen years, because his parents were alive, but they didn't know him. What memory could be worse than that?
He doesn't remember this, but he saw pictures, and knows that his mother had been pretty – not beautiful, but not plain, either – but now she was stuck inside St. Mungos for the rest of her miserable life. Unable to recognize her husband, knowing her son only as the frequent visitor, only able to give him little wrappers that he saves like scraps of gold, because it was from her, and maybe it means that she knows him.
That she loves him.
He stares at the picture of the woman, because he wants to see something in there that'll make the hate go away. Maybe regret?
But there is nothing like that there, just disdain, and he understands that she probably feels satisfaction for what she's done to his parents, to him.
It makes him angry. The anger swells up inside him, mixing with the hate, and he wants to scream, to go out and hunt her down, or something, but he does nothing. He just sits there on his bed, in his dorm, all alone.
Because he can't do anything.
He feels helpless, angry, ashamed, afraid, all these things and more.
And he feels hatred.
Because that's all he can do.
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FIN