BEGGED AND BOUND
Disclaimer: This is a non-profit tribute to the works of JK Rowling who created and, together with her publishers and licensees, owns the characters and settings elaborated herein.
A/N: Spoilers, seventh year fic, begun after OotP and not compatible with HBP or DH. Thanks to all my reviewers and especially to my previewers, Bellegeste, Cecelle and Lady Memory.
He finished the letter, nodded, and signed. This one felt right.
Drop the potato? Hermione, I am the potato, for I hardly know where it ends and I begin. Since we first met, aged eleven, my life has been deformed around James Potter, as ivy twines around a stake. Remove him and I don't know what's left that's me.
I will not burden the son's friend with the father's deeds, still less with the impossible task of defending he and I to each other. Suffice to say that, if I am broken, as you once informed me, it was James Potter that, with relentless malice, broke me, and that I subsequently, inadvertently, caused his death.
Who did whom the greater injury is not for me to say. I can say only that, for all I hated him and still despise his memory, I did not then wish him dead. How could I, when his death meant hers?
I was a Death Eater. You know that, and you can imagine what it entailed, perhaps better than I did when I joined. When I realised the import of my actions, I begged her life from one master and bound myself to the other in desperate attempt to save her. You know that I could not. It is a bitter, bitter regret.
Do not repent of your request. The stab of remembering has been a cleansing pain. Having no confidant at once willing to hear and trusted to know, I have not, until now, tried to put my past miseries into words. After seventeen separate attempts to decide what to tell you, I believe I see with clearer vision now. Of one thing at least, I have blamed both him and myself unjustly. Although I had known and loved her since we were nine, our friendship would never have lasted, was already dying before the terrible day that I insulted her and so lost her forever. Had he harassed me less, her affections would have turned to him all the sooner, I believe. She was ever too fine for me.
Your concern is more precious to me than I have words to tell.
S
... ... ...
I am the potato, Hermione read and her lips twitched. She had had a Mr Potato Head doll once, with interchangeable eyes and mouths, ears, noses and moustache. Just so had they dressed their stern professor in their youthful imaginings, pinning incongruous features on his unresponsive face. She swallowed hard. He had been a toy for others for too long.
If I am broken … I begged her life…
I was a Death Eater … bitter, bitter regret …
Having no confidant… She was ever too fine…
Again and again she read the letter, sometimes with tears running down her cheeks, sometimes with fire burning in her breastbone. Finally, she set it down, only to snatch it up again to see if her eyes had not deceived her. They had not.
"Hermione," she said wonderingly. "He called me Hermione."