"YOU WATCHED AS I WAS DRAGGED AWAY FOR SOMETHING I DIDN'T DO! YOU LEFT ME TO ROT! A SIX-YEAR-OLD CHILD!"
He forced himself to calm, but it didn't stop the hate, the hurt, the bitterness, the rich, unadulterated, loathing to seep through into his last words. "I could have lived without love. I never needed that from you. But what hurts, what has always hurt was that you never fought for me. Not once."
He grabbed his bag, summoning the essay to sit in the safe haven of the leather walls, before storming with the graze of a winter wind, out of the library- his robes swarming out behind him.
And he was right. Lily could see all of that; she could cast her mind back to those years and pull up every memory she had of Harry, and not once had she told him she loved him. And not once had she fought for him. She had never told James off for favoring Saeviour. She had never even remembered to ensure that Harry was with them on birthdays or at Christmas. She had ignored Sirius's begs to spend more time with the youngest twin; she had laughed him off, telling him that she spent plenty of time with Harry. She had lied. Not only to Sirius, but to herself.
She choked, disgusted with herself. Her skin crawled as she tried to flee herself; revulsion scuttling through her veins.
So it was clear to her, that everything that had happened- everything that had shaped her son to be the way he was, was her fault. It was James's too- he would always take part of the blame. But she one of two; and both had failed as parents. As human beings. They had failed a child in such a way that they could never be forgiven.
It was with such self-hate, such self-abhorrence that she fled Hogwarts- not once looking back.
She never made it back to Potter Manor.
She had never intended to go there.
No.
It was in her desperation; it was in her realization that she found herself in the Hogs Head.
And it was in the Hogs Head, her last breath was snatched away.
The morticians said it was alcohol poisoning.
The library's witnesses said it was suicide.
Harry said good riddance.
....
Elladora Lestrange had few beautiful things left in her memory.
When the Dementors came they would take-away what precious little she had, and she had seen so few things in her short life beyond the walls of her prison. Her papa had told her that Rabastan used to be handsome, and her mother beautiful beyond words, and that even he had fair looks away from his haggard, starved appearance; the Dementors had taken away all that too. Her papa told her otherwise, but she knew what beauty could have bloomed as a rose across her features had been snatched from her, just like all the beautiful things.
Her earliest memory of beauty was when she had snuck away from the orphanage she had been left at so carelessly, like an unwanted belonging. They had been on a trip in London, so very close to the concert hall in which all proms worth noting happened. She had possessed a memory once, of the soft strokes of a violin, though she had long forgotten their sounds, and wondered if it were possible she should hear them again. No-one paid attention to the pale shadow that slipped inside, and up to one of the balconies- tucked away in the corner. She had heard the whole concert- the slips of bows against strings, the melodic tapping of the piano keys, the gentle thrums against the percussions and the violent blows of the trumpets and the trombones. She had heard it all, and it became her first memory of beauty.
The next was when the orphanage had insisted upon all the girls 2 years and up entering the ballet class held in the dance school in the next town over. The matron had forgotten her, and left her behind in the corridors. So as she made her way through the gleaming walls and marble flooring, the ballerinas danced and danced; she watched with such large green eyes- the memory forever imprinted into her brain as the reason she wanted to learn such graceful steps. And now, the reason she knew not all beauty was lost in the horrors of what was left.
There was only one final memory of beauty, and it had lived with her for so long before leaving. Those emerald eyes, the color of death- a beauty she could not quite conceive, so she feared it. But in his eyes, in Harry's eyes, it was so soft and beckoning that she would've gladly welcome it, if only to see those eyes one last time. Her brother's eyes were jewels in the darkness of Azkaban, and the sight that awoke her in nightmare, or spoke what Harry could not. It was beauty that had sworn to envision itself to her again, and yet still she waited in the seeping cold of the damp and the desperate.
Her papa and uncle lay huddled in the next cell over, and her mother crossed in the corner of the cell opposite, humming promises in song. She was alone, like her mother, in her own cell. She had been alone for so long, she had nearly forgotten what it was like to share it. She had shared with Harry for a time, and her papa only one year. Her mother had been kept forcibly separate- a punishment to both. To never hold each other, for however long they sat and rot, wasting away as skeletons in the closet of the Light.
....
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