Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player

That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,

And then is heard no more. It is a tale

Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,

Signifying nothing.

- Macbeth


Loathing

Argus Filch

by Picassini

Argus Filch had known no other home than Hogwarts.

They did not know Hogwarts, those vile crotch-droppings who traipsed like royalty through it, absorbed in their petty, meaningless, worthless little lives and the trivialities that attended thereof. Students, they called themselves! Phew... and he'd console himself by oiling the manacles that had once been used to keep transgressors in line. In the good old days of course.

What did they know of magic, those spoilt children who thought themselves so high-and-mighty because they could light a candle with a swipe of their fine sticks? How could they connect with the structure and the spirit of Hogwarts, the cadence of the slowly thumping heartbeat of the castle and the imperceptible melody of whispering stone and creaking wood? Hogwarts was magic, the only magic that had never reared it's ugly head against him.

The flagstones were not cold and unforgiving as ungrateful, stumbling, bumbling firsties declared. They were warm and soft when he knelt to mop them and he would swear on Nature's Nobility that they purred - catlike - when they were squeaky-clean. The twisting, twining staircases were not a challenge to be overcome, they were like gambolling kittens that had to be pleasured.

But what would they, who spent seven years learning naught but to sneer at their elders and make love to mincing girls who'd be heavy with another generation of pestilence before long, know of magic? They whose hearts were bound to other, breathing hearts? The invisible heart, hidden under layers of stone and wood, that was so much to him, was nothing to them.

He loathes summer, when he's exiled - yes exiled - to the cottage at Mold-on-the-Wold. Doxies lurk in the folds of the grimy tapestries and cobwebs lace over the cracked windowpanes, while the weeds tangle over the rusted fence. Mildew greens the rainwashed-grey walls. He fills a cracked butter-dish with wildflowers and tries not to look at anything else. But there are the neighbours with their false smiles of sympathy and their barbed, honeyed courtesies - "Why how good to see you again, Argus. How's the job going? Caretaker's job is no easy business but someone's got to do it."

Yes, and who better than the ignoble Squib, that black mark on an impeccable bloodline?

And summer is the time he remembers the little eleven-year-old boy who'd go picking wildflowers at dawn for his mother. The little boy with the wind-tousled curls who'd hope against hope that today the letter would come, that it was just possible that even though magic hadn't ever sparked through him, there was the chance...

But the summer came and the summer went and with it, his boyhood.