Warm day to start a new year, and you broke rules the first night back. Everyone already in bed, and you spiralled up to the sky under a sliver of moon, not enough to hide you from constantly watching eyes. And we saw that you wanted never to come down ever again.

Dumbledore forbade us to mention this to others. To you. But he did not forbid caution, and so I watched you, night after night.

Flying is your gift, and a gift to you; when you fly - oh, better than your celebrated father ever could - you look as if there are no burdens the weight of a world on your shoulders. I feel a twinge of guilt, but I am glad for that weight, for I think it may be the only thing that grounds you in your mind, draws you back to earth in the dark. Because some nights I watch you spiralling, and I can see you are ready, primed, to fly away from here on that broomstick, and never look back once. There is nothing to hold you here, but that burden of responsibility.

And so we watch you, monitoring your physical health, your mental state. We let you fly at night as long as you don't leave us, because the day is coming where we will need you. I wouldn't call this bending of rules for you altruism, save that it does you good. Late nights, and you chew your morning toast in a daze, come to class with black half moons under your eyes; but now there is a flush of colour in your cheeks again. An awareness of life going on still in your eyes, though an equal awareness of the threats against it. It is all we can ask of you now.

But you know what they will ask of you later.

Flying is the only time you can be free, be your own. This is why Dumbledore will allow you to have that in peace. Such a laugh, that we have the power to control your freedom such that it isn't. Knowing how we manipulate your life is part of my burden, even though I do nothing but watch over you and know that I am part of your prison. You have reasons to hate me beyond petty classroom grievances, boy.

Months to the end of your schooling, to the beginning we have been engineering for so long. Watching you count beetle eyes for a potion, cupped in your palm slipping through fingers with a softly mouthed count. Exactly fourteen small black beads roll past, and you catch yourself from letting the fifteenth fall onto the table. The excess discarded aside, and you move on surely. I sigh in relief under my breath, for I have taught you well. You are as sharp now as you will need to be; and my burden, my debt to you, grows less by the hour.

We have been moulding you from the day your parents died, even from afar. We couldn't leave you be any more than we could survive without the hope you represent. My part in this is but one of many, called in by those who knew I had not paid back what I owed. I expected as much, and to begrudge the duty.

But the whispers now late at night in a chill dungeon room - hours after you have stopped spiralling upwards and almost away from where I watch you - say It's time to let go. I didn't expect this to be so hard.

I wonder if my burden will ever truly ease. I will worry more about you when you are gone, more than I have ever in this lifetime.

END