For My Sins

Look at him. Look at him, lying there lifeless, looking for all the fucking world like Snow White with all that jet-black hair and pale skin and soft lips. Look at him, you fucking bastards! Look what you've done to him!

I stand here anonymously in the huge crowd of people who have come to see the Boy Who Lived for one last time. It sickens me. It sickens me that I'm here, when I could have stayed away and kept him in my memory for all time as a laughing, normal boy. I could have only pictured him in my mind as a gold-red blur on a broom, a thatch of black hair in the snow as he ducked to escape a clod of it, a too-skinny child looking as scared as everyone else as the Sorting began or a young man absently scratching his chin with the end of his quill in class, the hero learning that his whole life has no choice but to come down to a final fight that might end it forever.

But I, like so many, have come. I, with all the rest, stand here and stare down at the Boy Who Could Have Been So Much More.

It kills me to know that he is- and forever will be- only eighteen years old. Yes, so many have died in this war, some younger than he. But we placed all our hope in him. We thrust this burden upon him and then we had the gall to believe he had to do it alone. We abandoned him not once, but many times! We abandoned him at the beginning of his life, we abandoned him at the Ministry of Magic's demands, and then we abandoned him yet again to face one of the greatest evils that the wizarding world has ever faced! And now we mourn him, we dare to mourn him for dying for us when we did nothing; we stood aside and let him save the world!

To many of the people here, that's all he is: the hero. The Boy Who Lived. The defeater of Voldemort. That's all they're mourning. Yet some of us knew him. Some of those here look at the body and remember a boy, a teacher, an athlete. It is for us this ceremony is happening. Not for them. We had him first! He was ours before he was theirs!

I take out my handkerchief and hold it, but do not wipe my face. It seems wrong when there are so many crying openly, some of them his friends. I can cry for him, perhaps. He deserves it. If there is a heaven, if he is somewhere in which he can see us, I hope that he is looking down at us and shaking his head incredulously that there are all these people here saying goodbye to him. I hope that he is finally with the family he never got to know.

I hope he forgives us all for the great sin that we committed when we let him go to his death.