Words
The words are out of your mouth, hollow and empty and more loaded than anything you've ever said in your life. Your voice isn't your own, or at least you fail to identify with it, not when it speaks so coldly and with a finality that is tied to you both.
Words. Just words. It was what you had told yourself as a child, burying deeper into shadows, trying to merge with the tattered wallpaper as your parents screamed and screamed and screamed. Words couldn't hurt, because words never meant anything, you'd said over and over again. Not those that fell from the lips of your mother and father, not ones that flew swiftly and without remorse from cocky teens.
Just words. Yet they're damning you now far more than any of the stupid mistakes you've made in the past, shallow alliances that promised you all but delivered with the same mocking nothingness that everything in life always did, empty relationships that pretended at least to dip their toes occasionally in respect.
The voice isn't yours, so the words as well must belong to someone else. It certainly feels as though your feet do as they take flight down marble steps and through dew drenched grass. You're running away for the first time in your life. It should feel like freedom or something equally ridiculous, but instead there's something so claustrophobic about it all that threatens to send you sprawling into an eternal freefall.
You damn them all as your feet carry you away and your voice cries out curses and spells that will maim but not kill. Malfoy: One, Two, and Three, for seducing you and making you a part of their lives, even if that part is only as sacrificial lamb. Dumbledore, for bonding you to him with a smile and belief instead of magic, forcing you to abandon everything – everything! – just so that miserable child Potter will have a better chance of succeeding.
It's a short list, so you damn them all over again as you weave through bodies and Death Eaters and students who should be in bed because they've got class in the morning, although you note with something that resembles far too closely hysteria that class will quite possibly be cancelled.
They are only words that Potter uses against you when he catches up to you, but they are words that are supposed to be your own. They come at you without recognition, beating and striking with heat and passion and power, pulling you apart even as you block them all efficiently. You've always hated Potter, but you hate him more now than you ever have done in the past, for he's stripping away the last thing that is yours and claiming it as his own, and you would kill him now if he wasn't the only person in the world who still mattered.
Regardless, you still come close when he calls you a coward. The words are there on the tip of your tongue, begging for release, craving the tantalizing power that they provide. It would be so easy, so very easy …
But you've never done things the easy way, and that's not going to change because of a bloody Potter, so you fight and you curse and you speak in a voice that isn't yours although right now the sentiment certainly is, before disappearing to a fate that fits perfectly in with the utter train wreck that your life has been so far.
There are celebrations, naturally, upon your return. Pats on the back and instant friends and admirers, and you can vaguely remember craving all this once, but it seems like a lifetime ago. Someone asks you if you're all right, a passing question as they take in hollow cheeks that to the unfamiliar might seem a sign of distress or worry.
You nod curtly and say yes. Of course you're fine; of course everything is all right.
Just words.
You wonder if you'll ever be able to speak again.
