amnesia | d.m.

chapter 41

Damaged.

Defeated.

Bruised.

Broken.

All four words shared similar meanings. All of them resulted in pain. All of them were just the small snippets of the emotions I was feeling right now.

But worst of all, empty.

I couldn't cry anymore. There was no good that came out of it. It was a waste of time, a waste of tears. And besides, there weren't any tears left to cry. I was practically numb, and I wondered how much more I could bear before being driven completely insane.

And Cedric, I couldn't say goodbye to Cedric. The one person who was there for me before I made the mistake of pushing him away.

Worst of all, I realized how much I loved a boy who just happened to stumble into my life one day, unannounced. It was more than before. A thousand times more than before. I kept wondering, had my memories not have been erased, had I not gone to the Dark Side, would I still have fallen for Draco? I didn't know. I didn't care. All I could think about were his shouts of genuine fear and pain, calling my name. All I could think about was the mark on his arm and the ones before. The blood trickling down his wrist, three rows of the same word engraved so deep. He was hurt, imprisoned on the wrong side.

"Don't you understand? I have to do this. I have to kill you...or he's gonna kill me."

A shiver ran up my spine.

"Do you think he would've done it?" Hermione asked Harry. I sat atop the Astronomy Tower, hands over my knees as I stared into the clearing emotionlessly. "Draco?"

"No," said Harry. I noticed Ron turn his head in my direction but I remained still. "He was lowering his wand. In the end it was Snape. It was always Snape. And I did nothing." My head snapped up towards Harry yet he didn't breathe in my direction. I swallowed hard, gazing out at the sunrise.

"Neither did I..." I whispered. Harry and Hermione turned to face me. Hermione was toying with the fake Horcrux necklace that Harry and Dumbledore had found. Yes, Harry had explained everything to us. Voldemort had split his soul into Horcruxes in order to become immortal and it was now Harry's mission to find them and destroy them. I, for one, was all for it.

"It's not your fault," Harry mumbled. "You were scared just as I was. Especially when Snape arrived."

I stood up from the floorboards of the Astronomy Tower. "Do you want to know what Dumbledore sent me to see before you went searching for the Horcrux?"

"It was a memory of your mother, wasn't it? Dumbledore told me he remembered...she was here at Hogwarts months ago."

Hermione and Ron shared looks of surprise. I chuckled with defeat.

"Did he tell you that I betrayed you all? Did he tell you that I went to the Dark Side?"

Silence. Pin drop, silence.

"That's right," I murmured. "I remember it all. I remember what I did. I was a traitor, well on my way to becoming one of them. A Death Eater." None of them uttered a word. "I was there at the Department of Mysteries. I was there when I witnessed the death of Sirius."

"It was the dark magic," Hermione uttered, finally coming to her senses. She faced Harry again and reiterated her sentence. "It was Voldemort's dark magic inside of Terra. It escaped, it consumed her." Still, Harry didn't move a muscle.

"Sure." I nodded. "I could have fought it. He killed my grandparents, and he almost killed my mother. So we ran and we hid, until he found me, and he took me from our hidden home and released the darkness within me. I would say to check my wand but it wasn't the same one I had woken up with on the train. The night Voldemort took me, I had left my wand in my bedroom so he provided me with a spare wand that proved itself quite useful. It wasn't until the day my mother erased my memories that she placed my own, original wand in my boot and she left me on the train."