This Boy

this boy

a tragic tale by carandra

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There are some people in this world whom life just never seems to work out for; you know the ones I'm talking about? The ones that never fit in. The ones that must prove themselves powerfully and continually if they are ever to accomplish anything in this life. They are the ones with sad childhoods, sad adult lives, and sad deaths. They have awful bad luck, if you believe in that sort of thing.

I knew a boy like that once.

He was my son, before he became a caricature of himself, a soulless man unrecognizable to me.

From the beginning, my pregnancy, I knew he was different. Call it a mother's intuition. He was the physically weakest of my children. And though I never told him this, to protect him from the soul shattering guilt he would have been sure to feel, his birth almost killed me. He scrabbled through my womb three weeks too early, clawing and biting and screaming. My husband had no time to rush me to the hospital, so a midwife came to us.

She was an odd woman, the midwife. I knew her, of course. I had contacted her while I was pregnant with my first child, to be sure there was someone to call if I could not reach the hospital. I'd never had to use her before, and thank god I never had to again.

She sprinkled herbs onto my belly as I lay in the master bedroom, feeling my child convulsing and wriggling within me. "This is a cursed birth," she whispered frantically.

"It is not either," I said through teeth clenched against the pain.

"Three weeks early is a trinity in a wicked way, Molly Weasley." Yet the hag shrugged and bent my knees and pulled them up. She instructed me to grip the braces on the back of the bed behind me, and I pushed as hard as I ever had. Ten hours later, I had my son, salmon-pink and bony in my arms.

The midwife, looking more exhausted than me, glanced edgily at my son and refused to accept payment. "I want no link with this child, ma'am." She scowled, and spat the customary, and now ironic, phrase. "Blessings."

"Blessings," I whispered, and forgot about the midwife when my husband entered the room, crooning over my son. He didn't seem to notice anything different about this one, but I did. His eyes were yellow, for one thing. Sickly yellow. And it was hours before I could get him to take to my breast.

This baby boy grew up to be my little, insecure, big boy. His name meant "pierced", because he pierced my heart with his heartbreaking wails when he was an infant. He became a serious student and a serious boy who never laughed. His younger brothers talked before he did, but they weren't spending their toddler and Preparatory School for Young Wizards and Witches years writing out intricate symbols for the notes played in the old songs on our aged radio, either. I think his system was better, though, too. Of course, I've always been proud of my son. Proud of my little prodigy. And somewhere along the line, I confused pride with love and it stayed mixed up like that.

He was a leggy boy, and his sallow eyes had darkened to hazel by the time he was five years. I never made him go outside and play with his brothers, like all little boys should, so he stayed inside with me and his baby sister, helping me bake biscuits and croissants. I watched silently as he waited impatiently for his slice of thick bread to cool, and then still burnt his skinny fingers picking it. The burn was bad, much worse than it should have been, and as I wrapped his entire hand in heavy gauze, I thought back to the midwife's words. "This is a cursed birth."

I vowed to keep my insecure child safe as best I could, and therefore I made no effort, selfishly so, to encourage him to interact with his peers at school. He clung to me, and I doted on him. He saw his brothers leave for the big school, and I dreaded preparing him for the years he would spend there. I would see him on breaks only, and he would be mistreated, for only I knew how to take care of him.

So when he went off to Hogwarts, I let him buy a pet because his brothers teased him so, and I gave him a gold watch because I truly wanted him to be happy.

"I'll miss you, dearest." And I would. Well, at least I would miss the little boy who brought home excellent grades and ate lunch with the teacher witches at his basics school. I would miss the child who played chess with me when his siblings wouldn't, and I missed the son for whom I bought a little plaque and hung in his room inscribed with, "All work and no play makes Johnny a dull boy," in German, his favorite language, and English.

He nodded, stiffly; he never relaxed fully, even for me, and stepped aboard the train.

Within days I received tearstained and triumphant letters alike back to my home.

"I have been Sorted into Gryffindor, Mother. Are you proud?"

"I do think Professor McGonagall likes me. I practiced before my first class with her, because you said she was a teacher whose good side I should get on, Mother."

"I don't understand what I've ever done to my Potions teacher to make him dislike me so much, but today he took off five points from the House because I didn't turn to a page in my textbook quickly enough. Are you upset with me?"

And, finally:

"My rat died, Mother. I think I neglected him in favor of my studies. I'm sorry. I feel terrible."

I sobbed as I read my letters. My unblessed little boy was making something of himself. I went to Diagon Alley and bought him another rat, a sleek grey one, from the pet shop. I sent it to him with condolences.

He stopped writing to me after that.

He reluctantly came home for the Christmas holidays, and even then all he talked about was that he was already beginning to prepare for his Potions final, which he would end up failing, anyway, because he dropped his ladle into the cauldron at a crucial moment and it neutralized the poison he was trying to create. He was dissolving into his studies because that was the only thing that wanted him.

Books can't get irritated with your compulsiveness, annoyed with your prissiness and huff off, now, can they?

The Yuletide season came and went, and he returned to school. He didn't ask to return for Easter. When I finally saw him again, the following summer, I gasped when I saw him and spoke to him. He was all of twelve years old, but I could tell he was already exhausted of existence, like an old widowed woman who just wants to die.

His first words to me were not can I go see Soandso over the holidays, or you won't believe what happened during Easter, but:

"I received no less than a 94% on any of my exams this year, Mother."

I waited.

"Are you proud?"

I smiled tremulously at him but was interrupted from saying anything more when Baby Sister Ginny came wailing to me, crying over a skinned knee she got playing near the barrier between the Muggle world and ours.

"Come on, kids. Let's go home."

Second, Third, FourthFifthSixSeventh Year passed, and the only letters the school owl brought me from him were exams, essays, assignments he had done particularly well on. Sometimes, they even had little footnotes directed at me on them:

This was an awful careless mistake of mine, entirely my fault.

Sorry, I forgot the fourth ingredient.

I am prepared to admit I should have studied much harder for my ________ test.

Always, he constantly, continuously, wordlessly asked for reassurance, begging me to tell him he was not a failure, he had done a good job on something.

I was proud to bursting, but I could never seem to form a letter that could tell him so. I smiled at him during the summer times, though, and I couldn't seem to help mentioning to every single person he was Prefect, then Head Boy.

Then he graduated Hogwarts with highest honors, and followed his father to the Ministry.

Then he turned his back on our family, the entity he hadn't ever been a part of since he was barely twelve.

Then he found someone who really needed him. He found a place in Lord Voldemort's inner circle, a trusted confidante of the Dark Lord himself. His antisocial and obsessive-compulsive tendencies were fully appreciated within the Death Eaters.

Then he died, killed by one of the brothers in the family he had never loved. They didn't mourn for this traitor.

But I did. I was the mother who could never give him what he needed. My fault, my error, my mistake. Maybe the midwife hadn't been merely a superstitious old hag. Maybe his birth had been cursed.

So now I am the outcast, the one the rest of my children cannot look in the eye.

Because I found his body, and I buried it, with dignity and grace. And I bought a tombstone, and placed it in the ground in the backyard, because a Weasley can never not be a Weasley.

I wrote on his tombstone:

May rest in peace

Percy Ignatius Weasley

Who always tried his hardest

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