prelude
The night the War ended, the world began again.
There were three years of lost time and lost lives and crackling wands riddling bullet holes in hearts, walls, minds, anything you could name, really, and the fabric had remained damaged until now. It was a dark curtain that had descended on the Wizarding World, and it took one final duel on cobblestone and debris to lift it all. An unspoken calm took hold, swallowing the world whole, and the quiet was all everyone knew for some time. There was a divide between what had been and what were to be, and at the minute, all was lost in its borderlands, questioning whether to make the irrevocable jump to moving on or lingering in the aftermath for just a little longer.
But more and more people seized the glimmering prospect of leaving the War a memory, and sound flooded back and so did the color and it felt like, just once, the fates had aligned, clicking into place so intricately as if to say this is the second chance you wished for. Use it wisely.
Yet, even amidst Hermione and Ron and Ginny and everyone he knew making that leap, Harry just couldn’t. He wasn’t sure what held him back from making the hesitant step across that hazy line and finally leaving eternal misery and bursting from slumber – palms sweaty and sweat rolling down his forehead – in its grave with Voldemort. He had left the War a question, not sure who he was and who he would become, and now, as if the eternal identity crisis wasn’t bad enough, he wasn’t sure what he wanted either. It was painful to live as a shadow of himself that had won a war but lost those he used to hold dearly and was now, so utterly confused on what to make of a hollow life. And one thing was for sure – it was the uncertainty that made him so afraid and so uncharacteristic of the golden Boy Who Lived.
When the letter came he jumped at the opportunity and before he knew it he was pacing the familiar carpeted floors of the Hogwarts Express and running his hand across foggy glass panes. He had found himself once there. Now he would find himself again.
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Dear Draco,
I hope you’re doing alright. I know you don’t like to bring what happened during the past few years up, so I won’t. I’d just like to ask if you’d like to come over sometime, with Theo and Blaise, you know, just like old times. I find it rather imperative that you get your mind off things, and Merlin, get out of your room for once. Don’t ask me how I know you’ve been rotting in there, and don’t argue with your Mother if I tell you she’s been exchanging a letter or two with me.
A week from now will be fine. My doors are always open if you need to talk.
Love, Pansy