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If there was one thing I admired about Harry, it was how he always managed to make me feel important.

This is one of the nicest thoughts I’ve had all night, but they all repeat, falling and folding over themselves.

Everyone is asleep here.

Except Harry.

Harry’s still tonight, just like me. I can’t sleep. Sometimes he thrashes and makes noises, but no one bothers him. And sometimes, he doesn’t do anything, like tonight, when I know he’s awake.

I wonder if he’s thinking the same things as I am, about Moody’s lesson. He’s a decent bloke, I suppose. He gave me a book on Herbology, after all. A surge of pride blocks out all thought – Herbology is something I can do better than anyone.

But Moody’s lesson was disturbing.

He had three spiders, and used an unforgivable curse on each. The Imperius Curse frightened Ron. I feel a rise of annoyance – he hated that part because he hates spiders. Drop dead petrified of them. Not of the curse, which can make you do anything. But of the subject.

The Cruciatus Curse was terrifying.

And it was all so effortless for Moody.

A flick of his wand.

A word.

And a thought – a powerful want, a need, an enjoyment for the spider’s pain.

Someone wanted their pain so badly they cursed them, cursed them so they screamed and twitched and couldn’t stand it and their minds fell apart.

That someone is Bellatrix Lestrange.

Anger flows through my veins, and for the millionth time I grit my teeth. I want to do something to her. Cause her pain, give her an ounce of the suffering she’s inflicted on me.

But it’s no use. Of course not.

She’s arrested, locked up in Azkaban, and always will be.

She’s insane. Nothing could hurt her.

Nothing I could do, anyway.

I can’t even perform a Switching Spell, I couldn’t perform an Unforgivable Curse.

I’m sure I would be all right with it, though. For her.

Somehow, I doubt that Harry feels the way I do about the lesson.

I saw his face, though, when the last spider had its turn.

Moody moved his wand and said a spell.

And it simply ceased to exist.

This was exactly what happened to Harry’s parents, I know. Voldemort said a spell, and both of his parents fell, they fell to the ground and left him.

Just like mine left me.

Of course, my parents aren’t dead. For all the parenting they do, they might as well be. But they’re not. They’re alive, in St. Mungo’s Hospital for Magical Maladies and Injuries, in a ward made for people whose minds are so far from sanity they stay there, by law, for their own health.

I’m ashamed to say that Gilderoy Lockhart lives in their ward now.

I wish it wasn’t like this. I wish my parents would talk to me, do more than caress my face and give me a bubblegum wrapper.

Those things are meaningful, to them. To them, I’m sure it’s the extent of their abilities to express the love they have for their son.

Their son, that sometimes, on bad days, they don’t recognize.

I think it would be easier, sometimes, to be like Harry. To have parents who were killed for a noble cause, dead and buried years ago. Not to have living, breathing parents that are just so far away.

It’s heartbreaking.

Is that really how it happened? Did Bellatrix want, so badly want to see my parent’s pain, to revel in it, that she destroyed them for eternity? That she took their son away from them, that she made them little more than stuffed toys?

Did she wave her wand and say it as calmly as Moody, or did she jab it, scream the curse? Did she sit back and flick it lazily, say it slowly, drawing out my parent’s torture?

Sometimes I wonder why Harry and I are so similar. In theory, we don’t have parents. Our birthdays are hours away from each other. But there are other things, too. How he’s a leader, and does everything he can to bring people up, protect the others. How he’s so brave, so worthy of the Sword the Sorting Hat gave to him, so daring to take Voldemort head-on, twice.

How he’s the Boy Who Lived, the boy who saved everyone, fixed everything, destroyed the Dark Lord.

The Dark Lord. The word the Death Eaters use when they call him.

I can never be like that.

I can never be so self-assured, strong, skilled, brave. I can never be worthy of Gryffindor. It was a stroke of luck that the Sorting Hat must have seen something of worth inside me, something I’ll never find.

Ever.

Sometimes, I wonder why I was even born, in such dangerous times, when everything, at any time, could be ripped away.

Harry turns over in his bed, rustling the sheets. He must be going to sleep now. The things we saw in class must not have disturbed him too much, because I’m not sure I’ll ever be able to go asleep, haunted by the flash of light, cackle of laughter I’m sure she laughed, and the way my parents yelled and screamed and writhed at her feet.