7. Humanity's Last Hope
Countless eyes, following his every move from Leaky Cauldron to Diagon Alley, don't bother him. Neither do the whispers, full of undisguised awe and full-blown hero worship. ("Look at that kid, isn't he Harry Potter?", "Did you see the scar?", "Mommy, why doesn't he wear glasses, like in my storybook?") Honestly, he is used to it (remembers with perfect clarity, that he could never go out of Survey Corps Headquarters without some kind of crowd – angry more often than not – forming around him almost instantly).
What does bother him is the name-calling.
Savior of the Wizarding World, they call him. The Boy-Who-Lived.
He is not sure whether to laugh or to cry (or to go for the knives – because that is his first, primal response for any kind of stress, and if being thrown headfirst into a whirlpool of crazy isn't stressful, he doesn't know what is).
Maybe in another time, in another world, where he was just some ordinary eleven year old without memories of ancient war invading his dreams, he would have been overjoyed to receive such warm welcome to the world of magic. He would have been enthusiastic, probably even grateful for a chance at a new, happier life, full of sunshine and miracles (and isn't it curious that such a startling contrast could exist between the life with his relatives and the magical world, where everyone wants to see his scar and shake his hand).
He knows intimately, thought, how fickle public opinion really is. How fast it could turn from adoration to scorn to outright hatred and then back to adoration again. How easy it is to loose your sense of self amongst of all the expectations thousand different people put upon you, some of them – mutually exclusive. How easy it is to break your back, trying to satisfy all of them, only to realize in the end that it's impossible, and be discarded, when your usefulness finally runs out.
(He is not bitter. He is not.)
Once upon a time he willingly bore the heavy burden of being humanity's last hope (and look where it led him). He doesn't want to anymore. (There is no Armin, or Mikasa, or Corporal Rivaille to make it worth it).
Absentmindedly patting some stranger's shoulder, smiling benevolently to some stranger's face, he knows with a deep-seeded, unshakable certainty, born from experience, that all it would take is one misstep for all these people to turn their backs on him.
(Sometimes he wonders, why he doesn't remember his – Eren's - death. Years later, when the memory finally comes to him, he wishes to forget it all over again.)