"Freedom has a thousand charms to show,
That slaves, howe'er contented, never know.
     -William Cowper

He knows what they whisper behind his back, grumbling students, hostile, afraid. He knows what it looks like, his long black robes, flapping around the dungeon. "A bat," they call him, "a great big ugly bat." He knows.

He knows, too, what his colleagues say. Even Albus, who goes out of his way to assure him that he's free, that he need only act because he wants to, that he isn't bound the way he was to the Dark Lord. As if the Dark Lord could truly bind him--as if anyone could.

When classes are over for the day, the young ones asleep, he makes his way from the dungeons, releases his wings, and soars, and no one, not Voldemort, not Albus Dumbledore, not Harry Potter, has any claim on him.

They are beautiful, his wings. They have all the beauty lacking in his face, all the beauty of his heart, of his--everything. He is ugly and harsh and bitter, and his wings stretch the armspan of two fullgrown men, and encompass the colors of the rainbow. No batwings for him--his are feathers upon feathers, soft, precious, delicate feathers. He molts in the spring, and the quills they make write truer, the potions they go into brew easily, the skin they brush against shivers. He needs no other touch.

Every year, he tells the children he can stopper death, brew glory, bottle fame. He doesn't teach them that, of course, not the young ones, the 10 and 11-year-olds. There's a reason he requires an O for his N.E.W.T. level classes. And even those ones, the few who continue in 6th and 7th, even they don't learn his deeper secrets, what potions can really give them. He watches them in class like a hawk, always wearing loose black robes, hiding his body--hiding the feathers that beat against his flesh.

They'll have to create freedom on their own; no one can do that for them.