Notes on a Dream Deferred

What happens to a dream deferred?

Does it dry up

Like a raisin in the sun?

Or fester like a sore

And then run?

Does it rot

Like a side of meat,

Or boil over

Like a sugary sweet,

Perhaps it just sags

Like a heavy load--

OR DOES IT EXPLODE?

~Langston Hughes, A Dream Deferred

I used to be a lot different, you know.

I used to believe in miracles. I used to believe the sun would always rise and set the same times, in the same places as always. I used to believe that people were basically good, deep down inside, and that if I just took the time to know them that goodness would come out. I used to believe that, someday, I would find peace. I used to believe in a lot of things.

I don't believe anymore.

My faith has been shattered. I've watched people I love die and been helpless to stop it. I've seen things that would give most people nightmares. They used to give me nightmares too, but I guess I've become jaded. They don't even faze me anymore. I've seen people tortured. I've seen men torn limb from limb. I've seen infants raped, which is about the bloody sickest thing I've ever seen in my life. I've stopped believing in the deep hidden goodness in people. I've seen too much horror in the world to believe that I will ever find peace.

I used to have friends, family, a huge network I could care about. My parents. My best friend, his family. My own siblings. My friends, their families. We were all so close. I loved them all. I used to be inseparable from them all. I used to have a mother, a father, a stepfather, two sisters, two stepbrothers, one half-brother, two half-sisters.

I am alone now.

My family is gone. My father went first. He died when I was barely ten. Officially, he died of a lasting illness, but the truth is my mother's cousin killed him. She enchanted him twice, once to try and make him marry her--he woke from that just in time--and once to give him a slow, wasting illness. I loved my father and I was never unhappier than the day he died.

Then it was my mother. She died when I was seventeen. She was poisoned. Officially, of course, she died of an illness like my father, but we all knew the truth. I loved her too, and especially after Father died, when I had to be the man of the house, we were incredibly close. Don't get me wrong--I loved my stepfather too--but my mother was my blood.

My stepfather didn't last much longer after she died, actually. I was hardly eighteen when he left us, but really he had been wasting away since Mother died six months before. The last couple of months he hardly ever got out of bed. Salazar and I both understood; he had loved Mother for a long time, and would have married her if Father hadn't got there first. Still...to leave us all without a father, Tomas and the little ones for the first time...

Tomas died young, as did Robert, my half-brother. They really were sick--consumption, I believe the disease was called. Robert died despite all our efforts to treat him. When Tomas fell ill, Judith--my sister--overrode Salazar's and my protests and called in a doctor--a Muggle doctor. He used leeches on Tomas, but in spite of--or perhaps because of--that, he died anyway.

Judith married well, when she was fifteen. Young women of our social class--we're minor nobility--always marry well, unless they're stone stupid or die young. Like Aunt Ann, she married an older, wealthy baron. Unlike Aunt Ann, whom Uncle William rescued from the baron's abuses, he loved her, but she died in childbirth. I had a beautiful niece who died shortly afterwards.

My two half-sisters, Caeli and Aelfgifu, drowned. There was a lake out back of the Starr Estates, which my great-uncle left for my mother and then for us. Mother taught us all how to swim when we were very young, when we spent time there, which wasn't often. After Cae and Elfie were born, we spent even less time there. But after my stepfather's death, Salazar and I thought taking the little ones to Starr Estates would take their minds off Father Solomon. A mistake, as it turned out. We went out on a boat, and it tipped. I tried to save all of them, but I got to Salazar first. By the time I had draped him over the upturned boat and gone after my half-sisters, they were already under. I got them back into the boat and towed them all to shore--with my siblings' help--but the girls were already dead.

And then...there was Elizabeth.

And Salazar.

Elizabeth had always loved Salazar, and he had always loved her. When he asked me for her hand in marriage, I consented--of course. I loved them both and I was so happy for them. Salazar and a couple of our friends and I--Helga Hufflepuff and Rowena Ravenclaw--decided to start a school. I picked eleven as the right age for them to start; that was when I got my first wand, and the others agreed. Helga and Rowena and I had never married, but we built a hut off of the grounds for Salazar and Elizabeth into our plans. We were all happy.

And then...Salazar and I quarrelled.

Helga--sweet, innocent-looking Helga--is the one who told all and sundry that Salazar and I fought over allowing Muggle-born students into the school. It's true that Salazar only wanted those he deemed "worthy" to study magic to come to Hogwarts, but that meant students who didn't show as strong a magical talent or ambition as the others, not those with less than pure blood. I can't believe Helga would say such a thing, but that's the way things go.

Anyway, what we actually fought over was Elizabeth. Both of us agreed that she should never have been pregnant; she was never very strong, and we worried most over losing her, especially after all of our siblings had gone. But when she did become pregnant...then Salazar and I quarrelled. At first we both agreed that she should take a potion Salazar had discovered that would end the life of her unborn child, agreeing to say nothing to Elizabeth. Then Salazar began to see the sheer joy on Elizabeth's face. He told me that in no way could he slip Elizabeth something that would kill that joy and possibly kill her anyway, with nothing to show for it. He said that the potency of the potion depended largely on belladonna.

If I had been thinking clearly, I would have agreed and everything would have been fine. But I was stuck on ending this to protect Elizabeth--I could only think of Judith's mishap in childbirth--and I argued with him. The potion was designed, I said, to only harm the baby, not my Elizabeth. She would be fine. Plenty of women lost children. She wouldn't be the first.

Our arguments escalated, and then Salazar drew his wand. He attacked me first. I, furious, having lost all reason at this point, retaliated. We duelled for a while, but I was the duelling champion of Europe at that time, and finally I hit him with the worst spell in my repertoire, a spell I had been developing for a while, a spell I wish to God I had never thought up: Avada Kedavra.

Salazar, bleeding from the wounds I had inflicted, fell to the ground instantly in a jet of red light. The spell had killed him immediately.

My wand fell from nerveless fingers as I realised what I had done. I heard a voice behind me and turned to find Rowena and Helga, who had seen the whole thing. It was they who concocted the story I eventually told Elizabeth--that Salazar and I had quarrelled over allowing those unworthy to study magic into Hogwarts, and that he had left the school. She was devastated. My Elizabeth died after giving birth to a girl.

At about that same time, a baby was left on my doorstep with a note saying that it was my own daughter. There could be little doubt that she was--she had my peculiar eyes, bright gold in colour. And I knew who her mother was, for she had long, silky jet-black curls. I raised those two girls together. They knew they were not sisters, but they were as close as sisters could be. My daughter I named Talitha--"little girl"--but my niece I named Mara--"bitter".

Helga had a son and Rowena had a daughter of her own. Helga's son was only a year younger than my girls, so they were close friends, but Rowena's daughter was five years younger, so to my girls she was a little sister. The four grew up as a family.

Mara had always known she was an orphan, that we were not related, but she had always believed the story Helga told. One day, when she was seventeen--just before her Hogwarts graduation--I told her the truth, that I had killed her father.

Neither Mara nor Talitha has spoken to me since. I know--from Rowena, who still writes occasionally and who heard through her own child--that I am a grandfather, that I have a granddaughter and a grandson, but I have never met them, nor have I met my son-in-law. I have never met Mara's family either, and I understand she has upwards of six or seven children, green-eyed like their grandfather and red-haired like their grandmother, my Elizabeth.

I left Hogwarts not long afterwards. I just couldn't take it anymore. I was barely sixty, hardly middle-aged for a wizard, and yet, my heart was no longer in it. I retired to this quiet place in this quiet town I helped to found, an enchanting mix of Muggle and wizarding families, many of whom have adopted me as a grandfather or uncle. I am fulfilled here, but what I wouldn't give to have them all back with me.

Perhaps someday someone will find this. Perhaps someday, someone will read this and know that this is the price of pride. This is what happens to a dream deferred.