"My friend, the great goddess cursed me and I must die in shame. I shall not die like a man fallen in battle: I feared to fall, but happy is the man who falls in battle, for I must die in shame."
Enkidu, Epic of Gilgamesh, the sacrifice to save the hero
"You've chosen your way and I've chosen mine." It was what I hated most about Gryffindors, and the only thing I could ever bring myself to truly hate about her. Always the choice with them – as if anyone really made a free choice in a vacuum, as if those who grew up with Voldemort's doctrine really made a choice any more than those who grew up with Muggle-loving sentimentality ingrained into them.
"If you loved Lily Evans, if you truly loved her, then your way forward is clear." I offered you anything, and you took it but didn't deliver your side of the bargain. Now you need a new stratagem to lead me by the hand. You say it's a choice I've already made. It is, but it isn't a choice that I would have made. Choice indeed. Do you, like her, think it so free? Even now, when you have tricked me into my "choice"?
"I am not such a coward." I heard my voice, and for the first time it a choice. I heard myself making it in surprise. "You are a braver man by far than Igor Karkaroff. You know, I sometimes think we Sort too soon…" Is that what I've become? A foolhardy, principled Gryffindor after all? How annoying.
But at least I didn't die heroically in Battle like her precious husband. Perhaps that is the other half of Lily's curse – to make me half a Gryffindor and deny me the glorious death that is the right of that house.
"It cannot be any other way. I must master the wand, Severus. Master the wand, and I master Potter at last." A death that wasn't even about me, but about her brat, as if the rest of my life hadn't been enough. Even my death had to be all about her brat. Not even a brave last stand I had half come to desire. At least I wasn't such a Gryffindor in the end. Curse her for making this lot mine, and for making me want another. But that is the way of vindicitive goddesses, if the Greeks got anything right.