[Cinema Competition prompt: The Outsiders; "You can't win. You know that, don't you?"]
[Fan-Fiction Terms Category Competition prompt: PM; write about someone lonely]
Albus Severus Potter is not a Gryffindor.
His brother James is a Gryffindor, and his sister Lily is a Gryffindor, and his parents and aunts and uncles were all Gryffindors, and yet Albus isn't, and he hates that about himself.
"I will love you no matter which house you're in," his father had reminded him before he boarded the train for the first time. No matter which house. Albus knows he meant it, too. He's named after two different houses, after all. And his father has told them all for years that anyone from any house can be a hero.
The problem is, Albus isn't in any house.
Not one.
The Sorting Hat is on his head for eight minutes before McGonagall comes to see what's taking so long. She tips the Hat back so she can see his face and very kindly asks what it's saying to him.
"Nothing," Albus says, surprised. "It hasn't said a word."
McGonagall looks shocked. "Nothing?"
"Is it supposed to?"
McGonagall doesn't answered him, just removes the Hat and points at the door he's just walked through. "Go sit out there," she says, and now people are whispering, and James has stood up from the Gryffindor table.
He remembers the next part vividly for the rest of his life: "Someone will deal with you in a moment."
Deal with him. As if he's a problem, an issue, something vile that needs to be taken care of.
After that there's the long chat with McGonagall, and then the walk to the Headmaster's office where his parents are already waiting, and then there's his father's hand on his shoulder while his mother asks, outraged, who has made this mistake, and Albus knows she's talking about the Sorting Hat mix-up, but he can't help feeling like she meant Mistake, with a capital M, meaning him.
And then he's coming home, less than one day after he's left, and at last he has his answers about why he's never accidentally Apparated or made the lights flicker or blown up an aunt, it isn't because he has impressive self-control or unbelievably mature magic, it's because he has no magic, none at all.
And now he knows how his father's infamous Aunt Petunia must have felt all her life, because sitting here at home is one thing, but sitting here at home while your sibling is at Hogwarts is quite another, and he's angry and envious and lonely and nauseated all at the same time, and James doesn't write him, not even once, not even to see how's he's doing, and Albus realizes the thing he feels more than anything else is betrayal.
When James comes home on holiday, Albus won't talk to him. Not even when James asks what he's been up to. Not even when their father knocks on the door and asks what's wrong.
(But they all know what's wrong. Albus is what's wrong.)
Al starts at normal school now, with normal children who learn normal subjects and have normal lives, and they spend their days saying how they feel like outcasts, or misfits, or like they don't belong.
Albus doesn't say anything.
(He wants to stand on a desk and scream at them that they have no idea what it's like to not belong.)
When Lily boards the train two years later, Albus finds he can't make it through the barrier. One by one, his brother and his sister and his parents disappear through the brick as if it's made of fog; Albus is lingering behind them, and when it's finally his turn to slip through he is met with cold, unyielding wall. His parents return half an hour later to find their son on his knees in the middle of King's Cross Station, crying desperately with his forehead pressed against the barrier and his hands clenched into fists.
And when evening falls, and an owl swoops in to drop off a letter from James, he can't help but hear his mother breathe, "Thank goodness," when she gets to the line about Lily making it into Gryffindor. Albus closes his eyes and starts to cry again, and even though his parents try their best, nothing they say offers any amount of comfort.
James brings home a girl one year at Christmas, when he's in seventh year and Lily's in second year and Albus should-be-but-isn't a fourth-year. Her name is Charlotte, and she's not quite beautiful but she's got a wicked smile, and Albus quite likes her.
"I don't think I've seen you around the castle," Charlotte says during dinner. She's sitting across from Albus and next to James, who is busy flinging peas at his sister. Lily retaliates with a spoonful of mashed potatoes, and they're cackling madly while their mother scolds them but looks like she's longing to join. "What house are you in?"
Albus feels his face grow very, very red when he tells her he's not at Hogwarts.
"Durmstrang?" she asks, and Albus looks down at his plate and mumbles that no, he doesn't go to Durmstrang.
Charlotte doesn't understand. "So you don't go to any wizarding school?"
"I'm - you know," Albus whispers, and the table has gone very quiet. "I'm not magic."
"Char," James says quietly. "Char, let's - "
And now Charlotte is the one blushing as she turns to James and positively yells, "You didn't warn me your brother was a Squib!" and Albus flinches badly, because in the four years since his Sorting nobody in this house has said that word, and he's pushing back his chair and running up to his room, and his mother is calling, "Albus!" but his father is saying, "Let him go, Ginny," and Lily is shrieking at Charlotte to get out of her house and James isn't saying a word.
There's a new girl in class one day, Mary, and she's shy but she's smart, and for some reason she chooses to sit next to Albus.
(Nobody ever sits next to Albus.)
And Mary wants to know all about him: where he grew up, how many siblings he has, what he wants to be, who he wants to be, and he tells her the answers to all except the last one, because the honest answer is that he wants to be someone entirely different from the Albus she sees next to her, and if he starts to talk about that he knows he'll cry.
Mary says she'd like to be a bird.
Albus stops himself just in time from asking if that's her animagus form.
And then suddenly Mary is everywhere, she's at his desk and at his house and in his room and in his arms, and he thinks he loves her, but maybe he doesn't, maybe it's just that she's the first person to pay attention to him and he craves attention the way James craves - well, attention.
Mary takes his hand one day and leads him outside into the forest, and she tells him she has a secret she's never supposed to reveal, but she's going to anyway, just for him, just because she loves him. She reaches into her back pocket and pulls out a long, thin stick of wood, and she tells him it's her wand and that she's a witch, she graduated from Beauxbatons and she's here doing her training to become a Muggle studies teacher (she explains what a Muggle is), and she demonstrates a bit on magic on a pine tree.
Albus feels his entire world collapse. "I can't be with you," he whispers, eyes closing behind his glasses, and he can feel his heart pounding.
"You can't?"
He shakes his head. "I'm sorry. We're too different. It would never work."
And then Mary's crying, and Albus is walking away, and he thinks it's a very good thing he doesn't love her, because otherwise that would have hurt.
(It hurts anyway. It's agonizing.)
"You had to do it, mate," James says when he finds out. "She would've pitied you your entire life. You really can't win, can you?"
Albus draws back his fist and hits him.
And now he's alone again, an outsider, and he watches Mary leave the school and move on to some other Muggle academy, and meanwhile his siblings are grown up and have careers in wand-making (that one's James) and dragon-taming (Lily), and he has nothing to keep breathing for, nothing to do but watch his face grow more wrinkled every time he looks in the mirror, because regular people don't live as long as wizards, no, for them 50 is middle-aged, and 70 is old, and 92, which is Albus' age when he dies, is ancient.
It's James who speaks at his funeral: James, who Albus envied all his life; James, who has tears waterfalling down his unwrinkled 95-year-old face. "Albus never felt at home in this world," he says. "And I wish I could've made that easier - I wish I'd bothered to try - " He takes a breath, but it ends in a sob, and he sits down and cries magical tears onto Albus Severus Potter's entirely non-magical grave.