They all come and stare at you.
You try to tell them that it's useless, that you're beyond help. But they still come in, one by one, with saddened eyes and kind smiles.
-
Everything's a haze now.
You can't see more than the parchment in front of you but you can still remember when you could see and read labels on jars from across the room.
-
Potter promised.
He promised that he'd stay (forever, he said) and that he'd heal you and that everything would be as it was supposed to be. Happily ever after, he said. He lied.
-
Happily ever after lasted two years, three months and five days.
You could smell it on him, yet he still denied it. Denied it for over six months until he walked one evening, arm on another man and said that he was leaving.
Even then, he was just a blur in the distance and you couldn't do anything but nod numbly as the love of your life walked away.
-
It wasn't as though you didn't know that was coming. It wasn't as though it wasn't obvious.
What would Potter want with somebody as old and used up as you? Somebody who didn't even posses full control of all of his senses. Somebody who was slowly going blind.
Yet, for a short time, you believed.
More fool you.
-
You stare at the potions book he bought you and you still don't have the heart to throw it away.
You tell yourself that it's because it's a valuable text and you need it for your work. But you know that's a lie. You can barely see the cauldron now.
-
It's been over a year since he left and you still haven't changed anything. It's easier, you tell yourself. It'll easier when your sight disappears altogether.
-
Sometimes, you feel as though Potter (Harry) owes you. After all, you saved him. You were the one who threw yourself in front of the blinding spell. You were the one hit, not him and now he has this perfect life with somebody else.
You then wonder whether he was only with you out of gratitude.
-
A healer comes in and administers yet another potion while you sit there staring at your notes.
Potions were always so simple.
Add the right ingredients. Stir the correct number of times and the result is always the same.
-
No matter how many times you go over your notes, you cannot make your relationship with Potter add up. His actions and his words, you could never make them match. It doesn't make sense and it frustrates you.
Perhaps if you had added in more caring at the beginning -
- but no.
Potter's gone now.
-
Sometimes you wish that you could buy a time turner, that if you went back, and begged, pleaded with Potter to stay, then maybe he would have? He said he loved you. How could he have just left?
Then again, you and Potter always were very different people.
"You never trusted me," he told you just before he left.
But how could you have given him trust when all trust was earned, extorted, and otherwise manipulated out of you.
-
You know that you're beyond help. You knew this ever since you first knelt before the Dark Lord and received His Mark.
Potter merely slowed down the inevitable.