The watery grey light of the sun filtered down onto the small and hastily erected platform. People began silently filing in to the scattering of chairs, casting anxious glances at the heavily laden sky. There was a reluctance in the crowd, a mutinous muttering in which some of them debated the merits of simply slipping away before it all began.

But they had waited too long; two boys were coming down the hill from the castle, the long wooden box borne between them. They parted the crowd like Moses at the Red Sea, and carefully lay the casket in a place of honor just in front of the podium. The taller of the two boys walked back into the crowd where he found a seat in a sea of red-heads. The other boy stood for a moment, gazing down on the black draped box before stepping up to the podium.

He ran a hand nervously through his hair, ruffling it up from the oddly shaped scar on his forehead. When he began to speak, however, his voice was clear and steady.

“You all know why we are gathered here today. I am not going to make any excuses. I am not going to pretend that the past never happened, that it never existed.” He could sense their puzzlement, they wished to know why he would wish to pay their last respects. But they were here because he asked them, and their curiosity made them stay.

He continued. “Instead I am going to tell you a story, the story of a boy. Like all other boys, he was born and for a little while he lived. He had his faults and his failures. Everyone knew he was cruel, selfish, and cold. The words that lashed from his tongue were venomous. How many times did he make someone cry with a flash of his eyes and a well placed insult? He never hesitated to use a jinx or a hex, picking on the small and the weak.”

They gasped at his words, he could hear them, muttering and wondering how he dared to speak ill of the dead. A petite red-headed witch caught his eye and gave an encouraging nod.

“He was a bully, and had been trained to it well. His father shaped him and molded him; brought him up to despise weakness in any form, to strive for purity, for perfection. In others, would we see this goal as perverse? Are we not all taught to better ourselves? But no, you say. He warped those ideas with selfishness; they were wrong and evil because they did not agree with ours. Yet no one took the time to understand, to reason, to explain. What was the use? He was born bad.”

His audience was beginning to shift uncomfortably in their seats. This was not the entertainment they had predicted. They had never suspected that the truth could be an painful thing to hear, how ugly their thoughts could sound out loud.

“We called him Ferret behind his back, and sometimes to his face. The day Moody transfigured him- we never let him forget his shame. After all, he was an animal, a ferret, a twisted, evil creature who should be shunned or he would bite. We knew that, and yet we didn’t forgive him when the bite came. We forgot that any animal backed into a corner will fight.

“No one was close to him, no one needed to be. For he had been taught to stand alone. Who could he speak to? The only ones who did not despise him were taught to need no one, the same as he. All he had was pride. And so instead of friends he took followers. Too late did he discover what being a leader means. A leader can never show fear or indecision, can never confide or ask questions, can never weaken himself in their eyes. He was surrounded, yet more isolated than before.”

There were more murmurs now. A witch at the back sniffled slightly, muttering “the poor boy,” into her handkerchief. Others looked mutinous. How dare he say anything in favor of that wretched, wretched traitor?

“He bore the isolation and the taunts, lashing out because it was all he knew. And yet he would be asked to bear even more. He lost his father to prison, his idol was desecrated before his eyes. No one bore him sympathy. Who would waste compassion on scum like that? Yet he had to be strong, for his mother and for himself. All the while we despised him, and told him he was worthless. No one had faith in him. So he became what we made him- a servant of fear and hate, of Voldemort.”

A lean wizard in the back snorted at these words. “He had free will,” he called out over the crowd. The boy regarded him somberly for a moment, and the wizard quailed under the force of those deep green eyes.

“Again his load grew heavy. He was given the impossible task of killing Dumbledore. He knew his life had no value- even his master did not care if he lived or died. His efforts became clumsy, a cursed necklace, a poisoned drink. Innocent people were hurt. People who had taunted him, mocked him. People he shouldn’t give a damn about. And he cried.

“He cried for himself because the strain was too great. He cried for his mother who was living alone with only a bottle of firewhiskey to combat her fears. He cried for his father shut away in jail; cried because he still could not earn his approval. And he cried for those innocents, because, despite it all, he never wanted to see them killed. And even his grief held no sanctity, provoking a certain scar faced boy who could not drop his grudge.”

Here the speaker looked rueful for a moment, and they all knew which scar faced boy now suffered keenly from regret.

“Out of fear and determination he worked harder, and found his way. His use of the vanishing wardrobe was clever, a trait we often overlooked. But it was easy to forget his intelligence, he was eclipsed by a muggleborn at every turn, a girl he had been taught was beneath even the dust on his feet. It must have always chafed him to be second best, but he was only an arrogant ferret, so why should it matter?”

His voice held no irony; and a few in the crowd heard his last words and flushed, remembering the similar utterances which had dropped from their lips. The words were abrasive against the compassion of his speech.

“He never did kill Dumbledore; he never could, never would. He chose then, chose not to be what we had tried to make him with our words and in our minds, chose not to kill. There was never murder in his soul. He died for this. Died by Voldemort’s own hand. Died for trying to make his life his own. And he succeeded.”

There was a quiet triumph in the boy’s voice now, a pride in a decision well made. The hush of anticipation for his words swelled even greater, and he smiled serenely as they waited for his final words.

“I do not give you the guilt of his death, but the responsibility of our actions. I do not ask that you honor him, for some of you that would be asking too much. I only ask that you try to understand, that you do not judge him too hastily, for at the end, all Draco Malfoy wanted was to be seen as himself.”