He had unresolved feelings about the boy, thinking of him with a mix of understandable loathing and odd longing. Tomorrow evening the boy would arrive to the Great Hall among the rest of the snot-covered imbeciles, and while he couldn't stand the idea of actually seeing him in the flesh, at the same time he needed to. It was actually rather ludicrous that so many years had already passed and he hadn't yet seen the boy, the only thing that was now left of her.
Or perhaps it wasn't really that ludicrous: when he had heard that Lily Evans was marrying that tumour of a man, he had simply refused to even think about it. He had spent a miserable week burying his thought about the matter under bottles and bottles of Firewhiskey, mead and Brandy; when those had run out he had moved on to Jack Daniels, Absolut and Wild Turkey he bought from the corner shop, and it wasn't until the morning when he had seen his thin, baggy-eyed face in the mirror and realised he looked very much like his father, that he had sobered up.
But somehow, not even the marriage between the person he considered his soul mate and the person he considered his worst enemy had truly registered in his mind. In his head and his memories, she continued to be Lily Evans, never Potter: radiant, a little impulsive, naive even. Brushing aside the marriage as some sort of a foolish, temporary thing, which she would certainly regret once the euphoria of the moment disappeared, had been his lifeline and he had managed to nearly convince himself of the notion's truthfulness. She was still young, after all. Young, naive, and vulnerable to Potter's manipulation and flattery.
It hadn't been until the child was born that his excuses started to run thin. Harry Potter. That tangible, living and breathing proof of shared intimacy and commitment between Lily Evans and James Potter. A creature, whose birth meant that the two now shared an eternal, unbreakable connection which could not be dissolved by divorce nor death. A repulsive mutation which had been born out of her, but which somehow was still Potter; the whole idea made him nauseous. He felt rather like Potter had defiled her entire body and his memories of her by forcing her to carry his filthy spawn, by forcing her to become a mother to his leeching offspring. If it weren't for the shock of the Prophecy and everything it signified, he would have been hard pressed to fall back on to the drinking wagon, as the tormenting thought of her, first lusciously spread open at the moment of the boy's conception and then radiating with newly-found motherhood while coddling Potter's verminous spawn, penetrated his head with a throbbing pain. Even though he had given his word to Dumbledore, he would have been lying if he'd said he didn't wish for the disgusting parasite to perish together with his useless, arrogant father. They could go for all he cared, as long as Lily Evans remained in this world, living and breathing and free.
But yet, when all had disappeared in a flash of green light and Voldemort's cruel hand had taken away the only good thing this world had ever bestowed upon his life, a stay thought had, uninvited, crossed his mind one miserable evening. The boy – did he look like her? If he were to gaze upon the boy, would Lily be somewhere there, would he find the connection with her soul he so craved? And for a moment there, he had almost wanted to go see the boy, just to experience her presence from beyond the grave.
And then, the boy arrived. He spotted the boy even before he was sorted, would have recognised that familiar, hateful figure of his anywhere, and his fingers squeezed the bottom of his goblet so hard it would have broken had it not been made out of gold. Potter's boy was indeed Potter's boy, a miniature of his insufferable father in every possible way! All yearning vanished from him at the sight of that head of messy black hair, which the boy would certainly soon be mussing up even further when his head would become filled with the buzz of hormones and red-haired girls. He would not, could not, see a thing of Lily Evans in the boy: he was his father all over again, from his poor eyesight to the vacant expression which revealed not even the gifts of Lily's intelligence had been bestowed upon this rotten scab of a child.
What had he truly even expected? Now he felt ridiculous for even having wished to see the boy. There would be no presence of hers to be felt through the boy, he was nothing but a putrid reborn version of his father, his mother did not dwell in him in neither body nor spirit. It was just as he had always thought: Potter had used her body to conceive this abomination of a creature upon this earth, and it had been his very last laugh to somehow manage to thrust the responsibility and care of his nauseating seed onto the shoulders of his old enemy.
The following day he was startled to unexpectedly find himself staring into Lily's eyes over the boy's cauldron, in the face of Potter. Her eyes looked at him accusingly, they were surprised and hurt. Just like her eyes would be if she were still alive and standing before him, asking him the question which would bring him to his knees and beg for her forgiveness. He had to avert his own eyes. Out of all the possible physical characteristics – why did it have to be her eyes? Why not her hair, or her fingers, or her freckles? Why did the boy have to have the one single physical trait of his mother's which had had so much power over him? Her eyes, and the look in them which would surely haunt him into his grave? And shaking, he turned his back towards the classroom.
But he was able to forget about the startling look in the boy's eyes soon enough. For he had opened his mouth and spoken in his father's dim-witted, lazy, tormenting voice, and that more than anything sealed it all. He would not, could not, care about the boy. He would do his duty out of his love for Lily, nothing else. Otherwise he wanted the boy to remain out of his sight. For the rest of the class he refused to look at Potter in his eyes. Instead he stared over him as the boy slovenly scribbled notes into his scrolls, focusing his gaze an inch or so over his messy black head of hair.
One amber-coloured summer evening, back when they had been just children, they had climbed on a half-crumbled pier and watched the ships pass them by. Lily had told him that her child would have black hair. Her eyes had been like spotless sea-glass then, in the lingering gold of the summer sun.
He hadn't asked her how she knew.