No comment, except that it turned out slightly stranger than I intended it to.
Disclaimer: Harry Potter, et al, are property of J.K. Rowling.
***
The Hanged Man
Sometimes I look at you and I want to put my hands around your neck and close them tightly, so that soon the separate palms will meet in a flattened mesh of artery, flesh and bone.
Who asked you to be the sacrifice, offered up onto the human altar of your parents? Nobody asked you to bear this load, and nobody has told you to bear it since you started.
It drives me mad. Nobody can possibly be that self-sacrificing. Nobody can be that perfect.
It's probably become a habit to you, defeating the Dark Lord. You don't understand -- you think you're fighting for the greater good. You are fighting, Potter, for people whose faces you might never see.
Every summer I go home and see my father, storming around the house, pulling random paintings off the wall, various vases off their stands, finally stamping into his oak-and-velvet office to plan another scheme to get rid of you, to make up for losses in recruitments, to find another way to manoeuvre around yet another obstacle you have placed in front of him.
Then he comes out and eats dinner with us, with barely controlled anger, silver fork and knife becoming a hazard to all dead meat, shaking as if there is an earthquake in his hands. He goes up to the bedroom with my mother trailing behind, nervously wringing hands and casting skittery glances back to the safe haven of the dining room and me.
Sometimes I can hear the noises, Harry, and they give me nightmares. Nightmares of screaming and senseless blood and violence and tears and the boy in scarlet-red and pus-yellow standing at the side, laughing so evilly I expect a pitchfork and crimson flames.
It ceases to become a crusade against the evils of Mugglekind and their sympathizers. It stops and drops its resemblance to aspire for a better, purer world. It has become, for lack of a better word, personal.
The Hanged Man, Potter -- I take Divination too, you know. The Hanged Man, upside-down, eats his own faeces to survive.
Likewise, my father -- he eats his own insides and his kin to survive the things you wrought on him. Every triumph you celebrate in the train-carriages as you return to your home, equates to one more agonizing spell cast on him for his failure. Equates to one more screaming, tear-filled shudder of my mother's body. Equates to one more nightmare-plagued hour of sleep. Equates to only one more insult I give to you in the halls of Hogwarts next term.
Tell me again, why do you hate me so much?