AN - Well, this story's had a bit of trouble getting out hasn't it? I think this is the fourth time I've put it up. Lol. It will prevail! No lyrics in this one, but the story is based upon I AM A ROCK by SIMON AND GARFUNKEL. Sorry about the caps lock but I had to make sure it's read. Just search it in Google, and you'll get the lyrics. Listen to the song if you can, it puts you in the right mood!

Righty ho then, on with the story!

Disclaimer – Nothing is my own.


Goyle's Story - I Am A Rock

The cold stone is refreshing against my back. As I precariously rest on the windowsill of the fourth year boy's dormitory in the Slytherin Common Rooms, I gaze through the misted glass and wonder.

The grounds are covered in a thick layer of snow, which glistens every now again when the sun flashes out from gaps in its cloudy cave. The lake seems pitch black and the Durmstrang ship looks like something out of a muggle fantasy book as it rocks gently back and forth with the gentle ripples across the water. Footprints in all shapes and sizes lead around in great circles, the only remains of the laughter and yells of my fellow students' snowball fights. I had not joined in, preferring to stay and read, a hobby I seem to be doing more and more of recently.

Ironically, even with my great love of reading, I never visit the library except for desperate means. Instead, I exhaust the supply of books I have brought from home and stay huddled in my dormitory, only moving when I am needed. I do not know why I hide me interest, probably to keep up the charade of being Draco Malfoy's dumb but tough bodyguard. But perhaps I should first tell you who I am before I go into such details.

My name is Gregory Goyle. I am thought of as thick, dumb, stupid and a variety of other degrading terms. Though I am not, my intelligence is far from lacking, though my Common sense is low, which explains the sleeping draught in the buns from second year, something Crabbe and I have not been allowed to live down.

Vincent Crabbe: he is probably my only friend. The only one who knows why I am who I am, though he does not understand it. Only he knows and my father of course, my father was and in a way, still is, the friend and bodyguard of Lucious Malfoy, Draco's father.

Crabbe's father and mine acted in the same way for him that we act for Draco. I had seen the way my father was forced to act in front of his fellow DeathEaters, slow and stupid. At first I despised it, and could never see why my father never showed the side of him that I knew existed.

I was all for going against the traditions of my grandfathers, and going out on my own. Showing the world what I could do. Then two years before I left for Hogwarts. Something happened that changed the lives of my father and me forever.

My mother, the half-blood witch, that everyone had thought my father crazy for marrying, left us.

She was always wild, never one for being enclosed in a marriage, and the pureblooded dinner parties and balls, did exactly that. My father was shamed for having married her, though it never seemed to bother him. Her being half-blood, with one muggle parent was seen as an abomination, and the fact that her one magical parent came from a poor family was even worse.

She was seen to of got more than she deserved and in a pureblooded society that is never liked. She was accepted into the pureblood world, but people still scorned her, talking behind her back, saying she had bewitched my father. Yet still she kept up the marriage with my father, and he went on as normal, ignoring all. They loved each other, I know that much, for she brought out the best in him, and he thought her to be an angel on earth. It was in these happy days, a year into the marriage, that I was born. As I grew, the mocking still continued, more subtly said, but it was evident, people still didn't think she belonged into our culture.

Years of hatred and mocking from her peers finally got to her though, and she did the worst thing possible, she began to blame my father, the man who loved her the most.

When I was around 7, the fights started, and she rebelled more and more against the marriage, trying to force my father from the society the Goyle family had been in for many years. She embarrassed him in front of important people, and made the rumours even worse, yet now they were starting to blemish my father's good name.

I believe my father still loved her in those days though, even though she out rightly laughed at him and his ways. For he never fought back, and never said a bad word against her. This however, seemed to anger her more and she exhibited in even more outrageous acts, until as I said before, she left us for good. Running off with the muggle boy she had grown up with as a child.

Those two years, from when she left and to when I went to Hogwarts, were the worst in my life. My father, once a calm and gentle man, grew to hate her very name, and his hatred of muggles grew even more so, because of the very man she had chosen over us. My mother had left us for a muggle, the very scum of the earth.

Somehow, this had the opposite effect of what you would think, when it came to my father friends. They got it into their heads that my father had gotten rid of the 'dreadful woman', as she was called among some circles; his name and position in society was saved at the least.

He was never the same though. The books and literature he had once loved were littered with memories of her, and he no longer touched them, gladly he still let me read them, though he disapproved if I did it openly.

And what happened to my thoughts of showing the world what I was made of? They were pushed to the side, and finally lost altogether when the day before I left for Hogwarts, my father took me aside, and told me the importance of not showing all your talents to everyone.

In other words, he pleaded with me to hang around with Crabbe and be Draco Malfoy's bodyguard. Which, out of pity for him, and the want to show my mother that she had not affected me, even though she never once came to see me after she left, I agreed to do.

And here I am today, four years on from that decision and not changed. I do not regret it; only continue to stand in the sidelines, hiding from my friends and foes alike. Watching the world move by in front of my eyes and the people love and hate, and all things in between. Knowing that I would be one of them was it not for the promise I made to my father and even myself.

For the day I saw my mother leave us, I saw the hole of pain she placed in my father's heart and I vowed to myself, I would not be submitted to that pain, I would not be controlled like that, and I would never love again.


Thank you for reading! Please review.

Nestle