Disclaimer: J. K. Rowling owns Harry and company. I'm borrowing Hogwarts and all those people…but Nick and Tayte are mine. No money is being made off of this.

Dark Passage

By Pyramidal_Apollo

He was – beautiful. Just perfect. Wonderful.

I held him slightly away from me in both hands, parallel to the ground, the corner of a crème fleece blanket trailing through my fingertips, drooping downwards – just stared at him. I ran my eyes over him, my thumb against his soft, chubby cheek, smoothed the downy, gold-blond hair on his forehead.

I simply held him and looked at him as though he was a completely new concept to me – as if a stranger had placed the small, solid bundle in my arms and said, "Congratulations, you have a son."

And as a matter of fact, that's exactly what had happened.

So now I looked at him, watched the soft blue eyes as they darted randomly about, and thought, How could I have not wanted this?

It had taken me six-and-a-half out of the seven months I had known I was pregnant to stop fearing the baby. Even as the fetus gestated inside of me, I tried to avoid looking at or touching my belly. This was rather difficult, as it was a result of my entire predicament, and growing larger every day.

In the end, I accepted the facts. I'd had no choice, and actually the state of my gravid body led me to anticipate the end of the ordeal. But the entire time, I did not think about the actual baby. I couldn't see it as a girl or boy, as a being capable of thoughts or emotions. It took me so very long to get used to the idea that I would have a child, and yet for years I had imagined this exact situation. But perhaps, not exactly.

Well, I got through it. And when they put him, my son, in my arms, I fell in love. I gazed, enraptured, into those bright blue eyes, and knew I'd made the right choice.

I won't say everyone agreed with my decision. In fact, very few people did. Countless Howlers had arrived in a flood when my condition became apparent. They screamed about me, about the entity inside of me, about my quavering determination to let the child of a convicted Death Eater and rapist live.

Oh, please don't look shocked. You can't know how much it hurts me to see the pity in your eyes, and the horror.

You can't know hot much it pains me to be pushed away from the rest of society, shoved aside from the ruined walls of my former life.

My son is mine. The man who forced him into existence is dead. Please, just one look at my baby, please. How can you blame my son for his father's sins?