Chapter Text
He didn't try to get away.
He didn't try to fight back.
No one noticed his lack of response.
Why did he? He, the one who hated the boy most, who wished he didn't exist. Why was he the only one who noticed the reaction?
He was a Gryffindor. He'd fought in dangerous situations before, despite his young age.
Why didn't he try to escape the grasp and glare of the man who tried to kill him?
"I'm gonna kill you!" The man screeched, and though Harry looked frightened, he made no move to back away. It seemed, to him at least, that the boy's natural reaction had been to do nothing-to simply remain in harm's way until it was over. Until the beating had ended.
Why did the reaction trouble him so?
What was it about the boy's lack of response that worried him? The boy was a Gryffindor, after all. Stupid, idiotic, reckless-but brave. Determined. A true Gryffindor wouldn't just give up, they'd try to escape and fight back.
She would have.
He sat alone, thinking about the boy. He did, after all, live with his mother's sister. Was that the ideal location for him? He knew that the boy's aunt did not exactly welcome magic. In his head, he saw the boy, cowering in a corner, and suddenly remembered the address he'd seen, on an envelope at the beginning of the previous year- Harry Potter, the cupboard under the stairs.
A cupboard...under the stairs? In his mind he heard the echoes of her cries, as he'd once heard them, when he'd found her crying about her sister, crying about Potter.
What would she think if she knew? Would she suspect it? Would she think he was just being paranoid, as he always had been?
He feared what he knew her reaction would have been. She would have wanted him to protect the boy. She would want to know why he hadn't. Why he'd never tried to check on the boy, her boy, her child. Why had he never cared? He felt an ache in his chest as he thought of what her reaction would have been to his treatment of the boy-especially if what he suspected was correct.
The thing was, he was not only his father's son, and despite his attempts to hide that from himself, he knew the truth. He was much like his mother. They shared many things-though not, of course, their aptitude at potions. If the boy would try...no, he knew...even if the boy tried, could he bring himself to treat the boy fairly? The boy who was the splitting image of his old tormentor? The one he'd hated throughout his Hogwarts years?
Perhaps he could. Sometimes, he thought it was the first one, the father, looking at him with that disdainful expression, that hatred filled gaze. And then he saw her eye's. Her eyes, in the boy he'd sworn to protect, no matter what. He'd sworn to protect the boy-he had to do his duty. His job.
He couldn't break his promise.
He thought back to the problem. How did the boy act when returning to Hogwarts? He never seemed to feel homesick. He didn't seem at all upset about not seeing his family. He stayed at Hogwarts for each and every holiday he was permitted to.
He always seemed skinny, too skinny, half starved at the beginning of the term. On the first of September.
And then there were the bruises.
Oh, how stupid had he been! Thinking back to it, he remembered that occasion in potions. The boy had been stirring a cauldron, and he had sneered at the boy as he stirred, the boy's sleeve rising up, slightly too small for him. He sneered, his mouth an unpleasant line as he mocked the boy.
He felt sickened.
"What did you do, allow Longbottom to practice a spell? Dear me...how incredibly foolish..." He'd sneered at the boy. The boy had flushed red, and pulled down his sleeve. He hadn't stirred the potion again for the remainder of the lesson, allowing his partner and best friend to do the job instead.
He folded his hands together as he sat at the desk, trying to ease his fear. Surely he was imagining this. Surely, surely. It couldn't be what he feared. What, the celebrity hiding a secret? He didn't have the chance. The rest of the world knew more about him than the boy did himself. He was too famous to have secrets.
It would be well hidden, he realised. Or it could be plain to anyone who wanted to see it, but no one bothered to look. No one could imagine that that boy, the one who never died, would have such a deadly secret. No one would think of it. Did his friends notice? Did the observant genius he had as one of his two best friends not add up the clues he left for them?
He had not reacted when his life had been threatened. He had not reacted at all.