Dennis got to his feet in one swift movement, his chair screeching against the floor as he pushed it back. More people were looking. His palms were pressed flat against the tabletop as he leant forward, towering over her despite his very average height. “And who made those cells?” he asked, his voice rough with anger. At this point Dennis had veered madly off course. He was angry that she’d painted the battle in some kind of heroic light; furious about how she’d spoken about Colin, even though Dennis had asked, and most of all angry about the way things had happened. Colin’s funeral had been the third one he’d gone to that summer; after a year of isolation from the magical world he got a last chance to kiss it all goodbye clad all in black with a string of ceremonies and children in coffins.
And now? Now he was just angry. Dumbledore’s Army and Harry Potter and the Battle of Hogwarts and Hermione Granger’s list; to him they were all part of some grander disease - Dennis blamed the magical world for his brother’s death. He blamed it, and the system, and the ministry and everything for the worst parts of his life. The way his teenage years had been all chopped up and pieced together so raggedly. The way he’d tried to cling to it all - his magic, his parents, the precarious, ever-shifting landscape of peers and classmates - but ultimately had lost everything. His old life. His new one.
Azkaban had been standing long before muggleborns were forced out of Hogwarts, and it had remained standing because of the ministry of magic. The point he was trying - and failing - to make was that the entire magical world was all fucked up. The ministry had a whole department that was taught to change the contents of people’s minds and in some sick twist of logic, witches and wizards condoned this. “Maybe I should be quieter,” he said in a tense, low voice, his eyes trained upon her face with an unnervingly focused sort of ferocity “wouldn’t want to break the international statute of secrecy.” The last words were spoken with bitter vitriol, even though she wouldn’t understand what he was talking about.
His anger had him clawing at many things, all at her. Things that were her fault, things that weren’t. Mostly things that weren’t. He dismissed everything she said by ignoring most of it. No, actually, he didn’t know what Colin wanted. The Colin he knew was an older brother, an idol, someone to model himself from. Now that he was older, Colin seemed so naive in comparison. So sweet and soft, even though at thirteen, his older brother had seemed like some kind of superhero. Dennis found it hard to reconcile the two pictures of his brother in his head. Brave and believing, he thought distantly, his thoughts carrying a messy, bitter edge.
He'd regret his behaviour later.
”I just want to believe that what he wanted counts for something. But I guess you're right, because he's gone. All of them are gone. And we're here.”
All of them are gone.
Gone.
Dennis wasn't convinced that they both really were here. The before and after kids certainly weren't the same people.
He felt his eyes sting and had the sudden urge to smash something - his glass, his fist into the wall, anything - but of course he didn’t act on it. He thought he had an explosive anger, but really he was much more implosive. He turned his thoughts in on himself in the most destructive way. She was apologising for being here and Dennis didn’t know if he wanted to laugh or cry or shake her and tell her to shut the hell up, but more overwhelming than any of that was the urge to just get out. So he grabbed his backpack up off of the ground. “Me too,” Dennis said, not sure if he meant that he was also sorry or that he was also sorry that it was her, rather than his brother, who was here. Who was alive.
He walked.
