The Road Not Taken

Harry Potter was my hero.

This is my punishment. I can imagine myself writing it ten times over across a blackboard, some damn hypothetical blackboard in a classroom memory. Even now it sickens me, makes my stomach clench a little when I hear his name.

Sure, of course. Tell me he was everyone's hero, I've heard it enough and it no longer sounds sympathetic for all that it's fucking worth. No, he was my personal Scar-Boy who could leap over evil in a single bound, and I damn the day he was born because of it.

Because he couldn't have altered that day and time and place a little, and simply strolled away from it. You can ask me why, but there's nothing I could beat into all your damn skulls that could pick up a trace of what I suffer. Fuck you. I suffer, do you hear me you damn Potter?-, I suffer because of what you couldn't throw your morals away and just do. The moment you wouldn't take my hand, seal my vulnerability closed and shake me as an ally, you screwed me a dozen times over after. But no- you left me open, like some sort of gaping wound and I was left alone to heal raggedly, fight off grime and infestation to become a jagged scar. My only flaw, my only fucking weakness. Did you know that, Potter? Hate makes you weak like that, because it bleeds and then sits and rots away, and it was my hate for you that made me the weakest of all.

I knew, I simply assumed to myself from then on that now my enemy would never be filthy Muggles, nor the rest of the wizarding world, bloody optimists that they are. Only you, Potter; I saved up all my hate for you, day by day, watching it drip in with carnal gratification, and now you toss it away as if it were shitless. My ambition was in there, damn it, my god damn inherited Slytherin ambition that would have been my pride as a Death eater- you had to throw it all away, ignore me and move on. Fuck you, fuck you to hell and heaven and any god damn misery you can find in between, because I hate you and waste away because of it.

I will never reach those glorious high games of power and evil, where I could have placed my bet and became a great one, wielding my warrant for misery as often as a dragon shits. And I would have been content. I would have been rewarded by my only lord, my only master. I missed my chance, Potter, for bloody old you, do you fucking hear me now? I don't care that you're dead, I don't care for shit but I want you alive so I can loathe you, loathe you in peace. Because this is hatred, Potter, this is a bloody rivalry. You haven't felt it before, have you, you little innocent crap? Feel mine, goddamn it. I've hated you forever. You can't see the roots, now, of where all my hate came from before, but its there and it lingers and eats at me through every-waking-breath as if your chivalry is strangling me.

You lowered me to human, Potter. Harry Potter, you damned soul, you dethroned me from those high games that I was simply born to play in, and if you could have died, just once back then, I could have still. You just had to die now, now, of all times. Live just long enough to give me this schoolboy hate, drag me into an adolescent playtime of cops and robbers. I am the mere badass bully now, Potter. I will never be great, and I will blame you for it till I am too bitter to live in hell, because that is all you fucking deserve of it. You will never know what I lost, because I will not let you see my suffocation.

I will hate you in that breathless silence that tears away all possibility, lay down the loathing in precious handfuls at your door and watch all those high games dangle so tantalizingly and disappear. You may ignore you, but I can only go on despising you, spitting on your name and cursing your bitch mother whether I love you or not. The hatred will always remain in me, and you will never satisfy me with an equal hate, will you? Can't bring yourself to hit me with all your anger and detest me like the little boy you were and always have been? Do you hate me now, Potter? Tell me, hate me, so my damn efforts were not all in vain.

But, hell. It's out of the question, right? You're in heaven, the one place I can't buy my way into, and you could hate me past the tips of your wings, and I would never hear it.

I will never fucking know.

So I will assume that you bloody well do. Because my hate can only be returned, and I will not consent to a one-sided affair in all this competition. I'll ignore your heroism, turn a cold chipped shoulder to the brightening clouds beyond my father's grave. They only call it a mausoleum because the ground didn't want his sins, and will not want mine when I come to this.

There is no damn possibility, none in all of fucking hell and all my damn history, that if you had not come along, I would be a Death eater now. I will not allow it.

There is no way that, in this war, I would be dead now, both you and me, dead from all this collective hatred. We'd both be ashes now, but I refuse to let it bother me. If you were to die, I would gladly follow, or better, be the cause of it.

You were never my hero, though you saved me from this bloody war.

Hate is all I can feel for you, Harry. Forget you were ever my hero, and leave me to loathing you in peace.

Ignorance is bliss.