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I Regret.
I regret not telling someone.
I regret that no one asked.
I resent the sheep.
I resent their vitriol.
I remember the hate.
I don't remember any love.
Therefore, how could love
be the power he knows not?
My hand ran over the words that had been carved into the wall. Carved by someone that only after his death I started to understand. I traced the letters that many had tried to remove.
When I found the four couplets 6 years ago, I had stood looking at them for minutes that felt like an eternity. I had no idea that they meant, what they referred to. Since then, almost the entire world thinks they understand the words.
I came up to the tower to escape the stares and weeping in the Great Hall. I needed space to think to absorb what had occurred, that I had survived.
I had sat down before I noticed the carving. It was directly opposite my chosen seat. I had hung my head between my knees, I don't know how long it was that I sat there with my arms fallen limp on my knees but I eventually scrubbed my face with my rough palms as I brought my head up. There directly opposite me were the words.
I regret not telling someone.
I regret that no one asked.
I resent the sheep.
I resent their vitriol.
I remember the hate.
I don't remember love.
Therefore, how could love
be the power he knows not?
They had never been there before; I use to torture myself by sitting in the tower where it had all gone wrong. All the year that the Carrows had stolen away my last home and Voldemort had tortured my family, I had found myself reliving the night Dumbledore had died and the what ifs. What if I had taken what he offered? Would I have escaped the last year of torture?
But that night, when the final battle was won and the monster was finally gone I retreated to my safe spot on the floor of the Astronomy Tower. When I spotted the words carved into the stone, I wrenched myself to my feet and wandered in a stupor to the wall. Tracing the letters individually much as I do 6 years later.
The 8 lines struck a chord with me. Like I said I had no idea of their meaning at the time, I simply thought it was a fitting description for the war and should be kept for future generations of Hogwarts students to remind them of the hate and violence that we had endured, in the hope they never would.
I cast a preservation spell on the words. Sometimes I regret that but I can never know if it was that spell, or the mysteries that are Hogwarts that prevent those words from removal. I believe it was a mixture of the two. After all, magic is about intent, as I've been told.
After casting the spell, I left. Leaving Mother and Father in the Hall I left the castle, the grounds. It wasn't until later that night when I was drowning myself in liquor while the rest of the pub celebrated that I knew who had carved those few sentences that would not leave my head.
Someone stumbled out of the floo in a spurt of green flames. It wasn't until a hush fell over the crowd that I tuned into what the man had said. It wasn't long before a wail went up and there was sobbing, from the gathered merry men. Dedalus Diggle had just announced Harry Potter had been found at the same place Dumbledore had been, having plummeted to the ground.
I just closed my eyes, I knew it. Diggle did not appear to have any knowledge of the words I had seen not hours before. He and the rest of the pub were calling murder most foul. I agreed with Potter, they really were sheep.
Over the series of years following this Harry Potter was celebrated as a hero. A glass roof has been added to the tower to prevent people following their hero, after they realised it was his own choices that sent him over the edge of the turret. For those first few years flowers and gifts to the dead man littered the tower but now it is only the words that remain, haunting the tower that has haunted me.
The wizards and witches of this world don't fully understand the strife of Harry Potter. They reprimand those that knew him in that they did not help him, but just as I am tortured by his death, so are the rest of the Golden Trio. I've often seen them mourning him in the same fashion I do. Daintily touching the words that refuse to shift the weight of someone who was never given a choice.
I observed them from under the same cloak I envied as a child. Potter had it sorter out. He left everything to Granger and Weasley, except his invisibility cloak. That found its way to my hands, with a note.
You're a good man, Draco. You are not who they think you are, just as I am not.
I learnt about him. I found his relatives and I prevented them from ever doing what they did to him, to another. I understand that I am lucky. I understand what love is. What I don't understand is why. Why he fought?