i. il est mort.
The tea-stains are getting bigger, deeper, darker.
He burns his tongue on too-hot cups—earl grey, always, no more and no less— to cool it down with a mouthful of rainwater from the cup he keeps on the veranda. The summer days he spends with his windows thrown wide open to hear the unwanted summer rain, watching the trees watch him, not a human in sight. His father's estate is too far from society, from people, to feel like a real place. A floating world away from everything, where nothing could have ever touched him. It's no wonder he came out the way he did, a name was no suitable armor at all—
He sometimes hears the voices echo over the grass, through the branches and leaves, through the undergrowth, calling him over to their side; leave whom you stand with. Come back to us. The haunting laugh, the He is dead.
Such a shiver had passed through him then, in that courtyard at Hogwarts; he had thought for a moment, back then, that he was back at home with a fever. That the boy dead in the giant's arms was nothing but a nightmare.
What have I done, he'd thought then, what have I done. Because in his heart, he knows that this could have been avoided. He knows he's always been a coward, afraid of his father, afraid of the pale man who commands the world's will.
He's not sure whose side he ever was on, because he was always only in a position of fear, following the rule of the powerful. Ever since he met him, the boy-who-lived, the golden boy, the one who would grow up to be called dead in front of a sobbing crowd.
Yes, he thinks, He was really the chosen one.
It's not fondness the way he remembers Harry Potter, but it's not hate, either.