❝Do you think I’m evil?❞
“What?”
She turns over her shoulder to glance at him, gentle hands working to button up the wrinkled shirt she finally found by the corner. Andy can’t see his face, and still she keeps her gaze settled on him for a few seconds; waiting for something, an explanation, or a dry laugh followed by a smirk.
Wasn’t it the same to him - if she did or didn’t?
She had heard it enough. Whispers in the halls, and screams across the corridor. Anyone not in Slytherin feared the boy as much as they feared his brother. Two of the same soil and same blood, destined only to do wrong in the world.
Ruthless. Wicked. Souless.
“Let me help you with that.”
The witch says as a few long seconds after, as she approaches the boy to take the ends to the emerald tie in between her hands. Glancing up at him as if to confirm there was no sign in the counters of his face.
Did he really want to know?.
“I think you can be cruel…” She says, voice low while she focuses on fixing the knot. “And I think you can be an asshole, sometimes.” There’s a smirk that perhaps he doesn’t see, but the girl continues in in a calm, half dazed manner.
“But I think…actions are evil, not necessarily people, not until it’s too late. It’s hard not being mean, or not being evil. It’s easier to think that its justified. That the hatred makes it all justified, so you just shut off. Then it comes the point where you don’t care if it’s justified - where you just act in the sake of acting, without caring who you might hurt in the process. Your friends, your family, or even yourself.”
They were brought up to believe otherwise. Their families bred children with no empathy, and no compassion. That was true for both the Blacks and the Lestrange. But he had a situation unlike any of them, and there was a tuck in her mind that perhaps that had to do a lot with his question.
“I think eventually it’s a choice - a choice only you can make. And it can become very hard, especially with previous choices.”
The path their siblings had taken, for example. That had a price, one that can only lead them deeper into a dark abyss. But he had not taken that decision - not yet, at least. She’d seen him close enough to know.
She taps the result of her work - a polished knot in his tie that she arranges around his neck, eyes seeking to meet his gaze darkened underneath the shadows of the empty, abandoned room, if only for a second.
“But no, I don’t think that.”