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Carefully, as to not injure his hands further after hours spent writing his potions essay and a morning spent catching grumpy snitches, Harry writes, Tomorrow is Valentine’s Day.
He’s not sure what he’s doing, tucked into a corner of the Gryffindor common room, a journal he’d appropriated from the floor of one of Hogwarts many abandoned classrooms clutched furtively in hand, but he’s doing it.
There’s no one I fancy, so I don’t really care about romance. I just wonder if my parents would do anything, if they had the sort of love that led to big displays and fireworks, or if they’d just have a quiet night in.
Across the way, the flames in the fireplace flicker. For a moment, it’s as if he’s sat right next to a drafty window.
I think about my parents a lot, Harry admits, pressing down hard on the journal page, I never knew them, not really, but I see them everywhere I go.
A blotch of ink appears under his words, startling Harry. The ink slowly forms into shapes, slowly into discernable letters.
Grief, unfamiliar cursive writes, Does not care for logic.
Few things do.
The term passes by in a flash. He doesn’t write in his journal anymore, hasn’t spoken to his pen pal for weeks, not since the diary, not since Ginny, pale and lifeless with Voldemort crowing over her, being mocked by someone who spoke too familiarly for Harry to nudge it all away, to return and open that journal, open his mind.
He’s locked up in his bedroom at the Dursley’s when he finally gives in.
Are you real? Harry writes, If I asked you to tell me about what was in the Daily Prophet today and not the other way around, could you?
There’s no response.
In some ways, his pen pal always lingers in the back of his mind. As Sirius tells him about the love his parents shared, their spark so bright; as he survives another one of Voldemort’s schemes; as he begins to make his own.
It’s a few days after Voldemort’s defeat, after Harry had died but not permanently, not long enough for Voldemort to secure victory, when he’s collecting his belongings from the castle, that he finds it.
He hadn’t been able to take everything when on the run, hadn’t wanted to. There was no purpose in baggage, no reason for sentiment or anything beyond the bare necessities— and even those felt like too much.
He’s sitting in the empty Gryffindor common room, considering the heft in his hands, the fireplace dark and the ambience cold and unfeeling, a mourning veil cast over the whole castle, when he feels a wetness on his fingers, when he sees ink leaking from the pages.
Harry flips it open, his hesitance not strong enough to overcome his curiosity, to overcome the needy part of him that had been gaping wide since he’d locked wands with Voldemort— since he fell, lifeless.
Hello, that familiar cursive reads, It’s been a while.
Harry doesn’t have a quill, doesn’t even have a muggle pen to respond with.
“It has,” he murmurs, voice low, “It has.”
How are you?
A pause, an ink blotch, words never written, words disregarded. Harry sees it fade away. After a while:
How is life?
Something almost like laughter, more of a resigned exhale, parts Harry’s lips.
“Where do I start?”
The fireplace flickers, and this time the flames whoosh alive.
From the beginning, of course.