Love Letters to You

Surviving a war means to sacrifice. 

Sometimes, one must sacrifice comrades. Morals. Loved ones. Your heart. 

Harry James Potter has sacrificed them all. 

Perhaps it was the right thing to do. 

The Wizarding World, at the very least, seems grateful for it. As grateful as one can be, as a society who hid beneath children to fight a war of their own doing. And somewhere along the lines, Harry has lost a piece of himself.

Harry used to mourn it. 

After all, it takes a wretched thing to survive a war. Even more so as its leader. 

It takes something from you. Something soft, something that made you a human, and now, it has rotten and festered. 

Maybe that is why when Harry sees Nott, sees the pureblood who abandoned a country to its demise when he has the wealth, the power to stand and do something that is right, he cannot help the snarl that twists his lips into a hateful grimace. The child in front of him turns colder at the sight. 

As if used to anger and has learned never to flinch away from it. 

Grey eyes turn to steel. 

Harry has seen it, once. Before. 

He's always disliked it, before. Sought to replace the steel with sparkling silver 

"Nott," he greets. Passerbys glance at them, inquiring, always in search of their next gossip, but a single, stern glance from Harry makes them stumble away. 

No. 

Not from Harry. 

From General Potter. 

"Potter," Notts greets. He sounds as polished as ever, aristocratic to the bone. "Or is it Lord Potter, now?" 

Harry scoffs. "You've never been one to care for respect, don't start on my account." 

Nott nods. He extends a hand towards the child. "Caelum," he calls softly. Harry has never seen Nott so soft, so open with his emotions. Before, one could have mistaken him for a corpse, but now, instead, he almost seems like a doting father. "Come."

The child takes Nott's hand without hesitation. 

As if it is the most natural thing to do. 

Something curls and rages inside of Harry's chest. 

Something almost bitter stains his mouth. It almost tastes like envy, as if the heart knows that it should be him, instead. 

"Is Mother here?" the child asks.

Notts's smile stiffens. It is almost unnoticeable, for it is only the curve of his mouth that tightens ever so lightly, yet, Harry notices. 

He has to. 

"She's close enough," Nott answers. "And you, little prince, need to get fitted."

Caelum -because that is his name, Caelum - gives a small pout. 

Harry has learned early on during the war to let dead birds stay dead. To bury all that mattered not in his war, in the fight for what is right. 

Yet, at the mere sight of the child's pout, with soft cheeks, and glittering grey eyes, it is like the damn has opened, and Harry is drowning. 

Elara. 

He's seen it before, after all. 

After all, he had once erased the pout with soft and worshipping lips. 

But that was years ago. 

Before everything. 

Harry's eyes linger on the child even as Nott shuffles him further, shifting ever so slightly so that Caelum Black is hidden from him. 

As if afraid that if Harry were to glimpse at him, were to notice Elara in Caelum Black’s shadow, then he would raise the heavens to get back to his former lover.

For a Pureblood, Harry finds the other man almost too easy to read. He's a far cry from the cold Slytherin with clever eyes and marbled like features from before the war. Do not get him wrong, Theodore Nott is still a pain in the ass to understand, much less read, but there are things that betray him.

A scuff in his left shoe speaks of more rural grounds than London. 

The steel in his spine - barbed with a lethality that hadn't been there before. 

A tenderness in the way that his steps slow almost naturally so that Caelum Black does not have to hurry to catch up. 

And most importantly, Harry sees fear in Nott's eyes.

Fear for what it means to have the Savior see Elara Vespera Black's son on British soil. 

If the Gryffindor had been kinder - soft in the way the days before the war afforded him - he could have told the Slytherin not to worry. 

That he does not begrudge Elara Black for leaving Britain. 

But Harry knows better now than to find kindness in a lie, to prefer the solace of never knowing the sting and the bite of truth. 

He does begrudge her for leaving. 

The Chosen One knew Elara was many things. A Pureblood, a leader, a ruthless, beautiful girl. 

He had simply never taken her for a coward, too.

Hermione would scold him for that very thought. 

His best friend had taken Black's departure almost too lightly, a casual shrug of the shoulder when Slytherins suddenly went missing. 

The smallest furrow of her brow when news of the Slytherin Court disappearing. 

But that's it. 

"She LEFT, Hermione! She left, and she left us with a madman!" Harry roars, almost throwing himself up his seat to shake sense in his best friend to no avail as others grasp at Harry's arms to keep him in place.

"Can you blame her?" Hermione is quick to respond, too quick for Harry's liking. "Would you prefer her standing with You-Know-who?!" She strides forward, crouching down to where Harry had fallen to his knees, eyes meeting - one enraged, the other resigned. "Do you want Elara Vespera Black and her court as Death Eaters?"

"Of course not!" Harry snarls. He then quietens. His rage is often like that - quick to be drawn, quicker to be snuffed out if handled right. And Hermione Granger knows her best friend better than most. "But I thought- I thought she'd choose me." 

His confession is small, a whisper that tastes like ashes. Hermione softens, hands clutching at his shoulders. 

"It's not your fault, Harry." She has always read him well. Too well, sometimes. 

Harry gives a sardonic smile. "That Elara left? That I couldn't convince her to fight for the Order?" 

"That you couldn't stop her from running." 

It sounds kind, that lie - that it wasn't his fault. 

Maybe it isn't, in the strictest of senses of the word. 

Once Elara has decided something, it is almost impossible for her to change - whether they are her views, her decisions. They are both  similar in that regard, jaw clenched and ready to face the world. 

But she would never leave those she loves. 

Because Elara Vespera Black has always put her family first. 

Those she had loved most. 

And Harry-

Harry is simply not loved enough for her to stay. 

It used to hurt, that simple fact. 

But a leader cannot hurt. A leader is the revolution's god, and a God must never falter to be believed in. Even if he bleeds, he must not bleed crimson. 

It had been a heavy burden to bear at seventeen, but Harry had worn it anyway. There hadn't been another choice, another alternative, an adult to take off the armor from the child and tell him, not like this, not you, not now. 

But no. 

The world isn't so kind, and the wizarding world instead closed its eyes and stopped breathing, desperate to ignore the copper of the slaughtered muggle-borns that started to linger everywhere. 

They closed their eyes till they couldn't. 

And Harry drowned in crimson till it never left him completely - like a stained skin he could never shed off.

War is a slippery slope:

What would you do? 

becomes 

What will you do?

becomes

Merlin, what have you done?

The thing about losing people without so much of a goodbye is that you mourn them by half. 

You let yourself linger in the empty spaces of what if? 

what happened?

You perform autopsies on conversations that were whispered in the middle of the night. 

You haunt the monument of what you once held with that person. 

Harry can't quite put a name to what he had with Black. 

It had been something too intimate to call friendship, yet they had never put a definition to it. Too confident that, together, the world will never harm them. Too confident that the world will never seek to tear them apart.

Till it did, and instead of fighting, Elara Vespera Black complied with fate and vanished without the smallest notice, vanished, and did not once look back.

How do you mourn someone who isn’t dead?

Better yet, how can you stop being haunted? It is not as if he can exorcise the shadow of a girl who left with his heart for that is the plight of having someone still alive haunting you.

Harry has never worn grief well. Has never learned to make peace with it, to let it rest. Instead, he wears it like a chain of thorns that prick him at every breath. Like an unstitched wound that has festered. 

In a way, you can assume what happened when he met Elara Black for the first time after the war. 

It is vastly different from the first time they met.

The first time Potter and Black saw each other, and fell.

Before, when Emerald had met Silver for the first time, it had happened with the small wonder of childhood: shy and quiet awe in front of something mesmerizing.

It was like discovering colors for the first time. 

Now, it is different. 

Emerald still meets silver. 

But there is no quiet awe. No childish wonder, no innocence. 

Only thousands of unsaid words, some more curses than not.

"Harry," his name escapes Elara's soft lips like a prayer, as if it has slipped from her. It curls softly on her tongue, like a sweet song that he knows by heart. 

It makes his lips twist into a sickening parody of a smile. 

"Black," he greets. 

Something inside of Elara's eyes shudders, flickers, and then dies silently, with a kind of hurt that makes something deep within him - deep behind walls of occlumancy - ache.

He straightens his shoulders. 

Do not look at me like that, he thinks with something that tastes eerily like heartbreak in the back of his throat. Harry has never dealt well with hurting Elara, and even with years and a war between them, it does not change that fact. You are the one who left.

You were the one who didn't want to stay.

Elara quirks a brow. "Should I adress you as Lord Potter, now?" It does not escape Harry's notice that her question echoes Nott's. 

It only speaks of familiarity, of knowing each other so well that their gestures hold a touch of the other. 

It used to be Harry and Elara who were so intricately woven into each other you couldn't tell where they started and ended. 

"Like I told Nott, you never cared about formalities with me. Why start now?"

"Because you are upset."

Harry snorts. Coldness lingers in his eyes as he steps closer to Elara. "Congratulations for stating the obvious, Black. But since when have you cared about anyone's feelings?"

Elara falters at that. 

Harry sees it. 

Harry doesn't believe it. 

He had once believed it, believed the love she claimed that was so powerful, only it hadn’t, right? It hadn’t been enough to make her stay.

"I - I've always cared for your feelings, Potter," she whispers. Perhaps it hadn't been meant for his ears, but Harry hears it all the same, and it burns.  

"Please," the derision escapes him as if it is oxygen. As if it has always been there, at the tip of his tongue. "You don't care much for anyone, Black."

Elara crosses her arms, defensive and her hackles raised. Suddenly as if realizing that there is something different. Good. "It is not a crime from what I know unless something has changed since I was gone?"

"Much has changed."

Silence lingers. 

She tilts her head. It is so Elara of her that Harry can almost see her ghost, younger and innocent, smiling up at him. "That much is obvious," she then hesitates. "And have you?"

"Have I what?"

"Don't play dumb with me, Potter."

"I do not know what you mean." 

"Harry-"

"Don't." Harry interrupts. "Don't call me that."

She pauses, nibbles on her bottom lip in worry. Harry used to kiss her to stop her from drawing blood. Once. "Potter, then.” She nods to herself. As if trying to remember. “You’ve survived,” her words turn gentle, almost thankful. “I’m glad.”

“Yeah, no thanks to you.”

“Harry- Potter, I-“

“No,” Harry snaps, turning his back to her, resolutely ready to walk away from her, to carry on with his life as he has for the last years. Or maybe he turns away not to see the heartbreak in Elara’s eyes, though he would never admit to it. “I don’t want to hear it. Whatever excuse you want to give me. Keep it for someone who cares.”

Honestly, Harry should have left her at that. Let her call his name in vain as he once did. He has always been soft for Elara Black, after all. Soft for her laughs – as rare as jewels, as precious as gold, soft for her smiles. He should have known not to linger.

“I HAD NO CHOICE!”

Harry turns to her.

To the Lady of the Most Ancient and Noble House of Black, Slytherin’s darling and pureblood royalty. The ghost of the girl she had been back in Hogwarts clings cruelly to her features. Time has barely affected her. She has the same lips, the same wide tearful eyes.

Her lips, slightly opened, her cheeks flushed, begging to be believed.

she still looks like the girl he had fallen in love with. 

But Harry is tired, a mourner who has been to too many funerals. Someone who has been haunted and haunted, and before the stranger who wears his lover’s face, he has no words, no gentleness.  

“You did,” his words are soft. But for all its softness, it does not lessen the sting, the blow that lands on the pureblood as he stares right back at her with condemnation in his eyes and something less like love and more like bitterness in his chest.  “We always have a choice.”

Whispers of Elara Black's return among British Wizarding society haunt Harry's ever step. 

Those from their Hogwarts times send him well-intentioned owls, asking after him and skirting so carefully around the specter they all know and remember. 

Harry is fine. 

He has made his peace, has left the ghost of the girl he had loved behind. It is almost easy to do so when he remembers all those who have died, all those who had bled for a war that could have been shorter if the Slytherin court had not fled. 

Newspapers gush over the return of the leader of the Pureblood faction, gushes over the Lady of the Most Noble and Ancient House of Black and her heir, a small, handsome, and dutiful boy who shadows his lady mother's steps as she secures his throne. 

And then, a crow comes to Harry's window, a letter attached to its leg, waxed in silver and Harry's name delicately written on it. 

The Head of the House Potter recognizes the handwriting. With a quick wave of his wand, he makes sure there is nothing harmful added to it - one might never know, especially with Elara's quick and cruel justice - yet the spell comes back clean. 

It's an invitation for a cup of tea in Black's manor. At his earlies convenience, it is written sardonically, daring Harry to make her wait. 

"I did not expect you to come so quickly," Elara Black says as she glides into the green room, cheeks flushed and, for once, her curls free from any confines. 

Harry snort from the rim of his teacup, generously gifted by one of the attending elves. He wonders if it is the fact that he had been Sirius's godson that pushed the House elf to bow and name him Master. 

It would be the kind of decorum Elara would expect from her household, Harry would be surprised if it were otherwise. 

"Well, you did practically order me here," Harry remarks. 

Elara quirks an elegant brow. "And you listened? You have made your dislike clear."

"Even so, it is not every day one might dare and order me around."

"Me? I dare not," Elara's lips twist into a masquerade of a smile, depreciating. "After all, who am I to order the savior of the wizarding world?"

It almost seems like there is an answer to her question rather than being rhetorical, but Harry cannot put his finger on it. The dark-haired girl seems almost melancholic, taking Harry's anger and poisoning herself with it, and it makes the Gryffindor's stomach churn. 

After all, he did love her. 

Once. 

but you do not forget your first love, do you? 

you carry it in your heart. 

And Potters have always loved ardently. 

"Get to the point, Black." 

Elara nods as she sits down on her own chair, plush and royal with its golden embroidery set in deep green. It is not emerald, Harry notes with a quiet detachment. Not her favorite color. Or has that changed too? Taken yet another part of the Elara he had loved as a child and as a teenager. "Theo told me you met my heir."

"I have met your son, yes," Harry responds, pointedly using the term son instead of an heir. He does not know why the urge comes to him, to call the small boy her son. His chest aches. He thinks it is because of how cold and pureblooded Elara uses the word heir when she speaks of her own blood and flesh. 

he looks like you

he looks like someone I know. 

Elara's eyes tighten. 

It's funny. Harry has never thought to one day be able to read Elara, to take whatever wall she has holed herself in and by a single glance, can see its shaking foundation. 

"I plan to introduce him to society at Yule," Elara says. 

Harry quirks a brow. "As it is your right as his mother." He then tilts his head, thin-framed glasses sliding to the bridge of his nose. "But that doesn't concern me." 

The Gryffindor wishes he could swallow those words back at Elara's reaction. He instinctively flinches like Elara does, both feeling the sting of his words, though only one of them understands it. 

"I fear that—" Elara Vespera Black hesitates. If Harry were anyone else, he would have taken a picture to immortalize such a scene. "It does concern you." 

"What."

Elara continues, her nails picking at her fingers until they grow bloodied, gnawing at her bottom lip. Her grey eyes avert Harry's gaze, almost as if guilty. 

"As his Lord Father, you technically could find Caelum too young to enter society and vetoed his presentation, and-"

The world stops. 

Harry cannot breathe. 

"Elara," her name slips from him like a plea, desperate. "Tell me you're joking."

She does not answer. Stubbornly thins her lips instead, eyes hardening as her spine straightens. Gone is his Elara, now more the last Black than anything else. 

But her Harry is gone too.

His own eyes harden, his voice, a cruel whip in search of a wound to create to make up for the agony in his chest as he remembers a child, a child with his nose and his jaw. 

"Elara, tell me you did not take my son from me. That you were not so selfish and took him away." He spits the word selfish as if it is everything wrong in the world and maybe it is. Maybe it is the crumbling of a peace that Harry had thought his. 

"Selfish?!" Elara spits. "Selfish?! You dare call me selfish after everything I have done?!"

"And what did you do, Lara?! Huh?!" Harry does not realize how easily he falls back on her nickname that was his to hold years ago. "What did you do except run away?" 

"I left for our son. To protect him." 

"So what, you abandoned an entire nation to rot under a madman for a child?!"

"For our child, yes!" 

"And what about the others? Those who suffered and died because you left?"

Elara's ghost weeps at Harry's side as the stranger who wears her corpse sneers. "Their blood isn't on my hands." 

Dennis Crevy's bloodied and mawled face flashes before Harry's eyes. 

The agonized cries of George as they bury Fred. 

The demented laugh of Bellatrix Lestrange as she kills the only father that Harry ever knew. 

"Potter?" Elara's voice reaches him through the thick fog that fills his head and lungs. It cuts through it sharply yet his vision does not clear. The ringing beats into his ears. Bellatrix's laugh, too. 

"Harry-" A hand approaches him. A hand he does not know.

It is not Ron's callous and freckled hand or Hermione's with ink staining her fingertips like a well-loved paint. 

He slaps it away. 

He stumbles through the room, avoiding every corpse that litters its wooden floor, flinching away from faces he has known ever since he was young, looking up at the ceiling with unseeing eyes. "I- I need to go." 

And he leaves the graveyard, leaving the corpse of the girl he never could fully mourn behind. 

Caelum Hadrian Black knows he is in a precarious position. 

His Lady Mother has never been one to shield him from the darker side of wizarding society, and though he is the Heir to the Most Ancient and Noble House of Black, Caelum knows there are faults that some could find with him. 

His lack of a Father, for one. 

Some in France used to whisper about the disgrace that had befallen the last Black. 

If it wasn't clear, such disgrace is Caelum's existence and he takes much offense in it. He is a treasure, thank you very much.

But he knows that the more traditional French nobles dislike the idea of Angeline Selwyn's sole daughter and heiress bearing a bastard, unwedded and dishonored by someone of lesser blood. 

Mother would scowl if she knew of Caelum's thoughts, if she knew that her son had listened to the vile whispers that liked to trail behind him, desperate for a reaction, for a sign that the House of Black and the House of Selwyn has fallen.

"You are a Black," Mother would tells him, gentle as she cups his cheek with a loving hand. Her smile is a small, kind thing that Caelum knows is for his eyes only. "A Selwyn. That is all that matters." 

Of course, Caelum knows of his Lord Father, too, though he supposes Mother would have preferred him ignorant. Perhaps she is afraid that he will take his Lord Father's absence to heart, as if it is a failing of his and not of the father who has chosen the world instead of their family. Not that it was so explicitly said, but Caelum prides himself on being a clever boy, as his lady grandmother likes to coo.

It is alright. 

Caelum does not mind it. Much. 

He knows with the surety of the rising of the sun that his Lady Mother would sooner raze the world to ashes than allow any harm to come to her precious son. 

It is alright if his lord father has chosen everyone else except Caelum. 

Caelum has Mother and his lord uncles. 

He does not need a father, expecially not a hero. 

"Darling," Mother says as she crouches down till silver meets silver. Caelum likes it when she does so, when she crouches so that they are eye to eye, only son and mother instead of Head of the House and heir. "Tell me, dearest one, which House would you rather be heir to? The Noble and Ancient House of Nott or Noble House of Zabini?" 

Ah. 

"Did Father refuse me?" Caelum asks. His voice, he is proud of it, is steady. 

Mother smiles, but the slight tightening of her eyes is enough for Caelum to understand. He tries not to get it to him. 

He is Caelum Hadrian Black. 

Heir by birthright and blood to two Noble and Ancient Houses. 

yet the sting of rejection lingers, almost as if his heart is bruised

"I don't know, my love," Mother whispers. "But it matters not. You will have a Lord Father for your own before Yule." 

There is certainty in her voice, the regality she wears almost imperial-like. Unbroken, unbent in face whatever harship his lord father has dared to impose. Caelum's fiercest protector. 

The small, dark-haired boy rushes to his lady mother, tucking himself in her slender arms and nuzzling her thick, ebony hair. The warmth of home welcomes him. "The House of Nott," he says. "They are both Ancient and Noble and have an inherited seat."

"My clever boy," Mother sounds proud, and Caelum cannot help the flush of his ivory cheeks at her words and her pride. "I am sure your uncle Theo will be thrilled to hear that." 

"Uncle Blaize will sulk, won't he?"  Caelum dreads it. Whenever his lord uncle is miserable, he likes to share it like one would share his oxygen.

After all, misery, according to Lord Zabini, is to be shared with the company, though Uncle Draco would say otherwise. 

Mother smiles. She does not laugh, though the sound might escape her on a few occasions. It is said that his lady mother has lost her laugh as she lost Caelum's lord father, a harrowing thought if he must be honest. 

Caelum has never met his Lord Father and has never seen a glimpse of his shadow except on Mother's most horrible nights. Of course, Mother does mention him, but the love-struck tapestry she tries to weave to him - a story of a love that healed a heartbreak she had not even noticed - to cover her hurts and her scars, makes him want to hex his father. 

He isn't sure if he wants to meet him. 

What do you say to the man who broke your mother's heart? 

i wish mother never met you?

(i wish you chose us instead of the world.)

Elara smiles lovingly, pressing a soft kid to Caelum's forehead as she tucks him into bed. Her precious boy is already lost to sleep, and a gentle smile curves his lips. 

Something in her chest eases at the sight, at the comfort her child burrows into.

Sleep, my love, she thinks as she clicks her fingers and three house-elves appear, heads bowed as they start to prepare Caelum's morning clothes, ironing and dusting the expensive wear with the dutifulness of a Black house-elf. While I take care of the rest. 

If Elara's Lady Grandmother had seen fit to raise her heiress as one would raise a soldier, crude and harsh, the kind of throwing your child into the tempestuous sea and see if they can swim, Elara does nothing of the sort with her own heir. 

No, Caelum Hadrian Black is raised with the best comforts money can provide, raised lavished and never knowing of the stain that had been his lord grandfather. 

He is her child. 

Her blood and flesh. 

the embodiment of the love she and Harry carry.

He deserves the world, and damn anyone who would try and stop Elara Vespera Black. 

"Theo," Elara calls out as she enters the family drawing room. Her court and beloved brother all turn towards the door as she saunters in. "Caelum has chosen you as Lord Father."

It is a rare thing to see Theodore Nott with something other than his cold, aristocratic facade, yet there is a small, fond smile gracing his lips. If anything, he looks pleased, the perfect mirror of Tracey, who melts into the velvet couch with the grace of a half-blood. 

"What did you bribe him with, Theo?" the heir to the Davis family questions, grumbling as Draco pockets two galleons from her and Astoria. 

"I didn't need to do anything," Theo answers, summoning his own share of the betting pole in an impressive feat of wandless magic. Another factor for which Theodore is the perfect candidate to stand for her son's lord father. "Caelum is clever and he has seen the worth of having House Nott behind him. And me, of course."

"Careful not to let it get to your head, Theo," Draco playfully warns. 

Theo rolls his eyes. "So long I do not reach the heights of your ego, dearest brother, I believe I will be just fine." 

Elara sighs as the soul bond stirs admits Draco's indignant splutter. "Brother?!"  

Theodore tilts his head. "Why, we share an heir, don't we?"

Before Draco can attempt to slaughter the Lord of a Noble and Ancient House, Blaise sensibly joins in with a remark that shifts all bloodlust toward one unsuspecting Chosen One. "Has Potter fucking rejected Caelum?" the dark-skinned Lord asks, his voice dangerously low, almost as if a purr and a threat in the same. 

Elara grimaces at his word choice, never one to like or even tolerate any slander toward her beloved son. 

Daphnee snarls at that. Being Godmother to Elara's son, the Lady of the House of Greengrass's courtesies have taken the sideline whenever it comes to Caelum. "He dares?"

Blaise carries on, as if he has never been interrupted by Daphnee's fury. "Let me finish Voldie's job, Elara," he practically implores, wand already drawn and hungry for the blood of a certain wizard. 

"Stay your wand, Zabini," Elara scolds, dousing her brother and Theodore with water with a wave of her hand, hoping to diffuse their temper. "He is still Caelum's by blood, and mine by heart."

"Let's face it, Elara," Tracey remarks. She has grown braver in their exile in France, her respect important enough for her never to challenge the last Black, but her love for her leader not so carved as others which makes her priority less about Elara and more about the Court. "You might claim him, but that does not mean he will claim you the same."

"Watch your tongue, Davis," Draco snaps. "Potter will claim them if he knows what is good for him." 

Elara cannot answer her brother. The words shrivel on her tongue like wilted petals. Hesitant. She thinks of Harry's cold eyes. His refusal to be called anything that would suggest them not to be the perfect strangers he clearly wishes for them to embody. 

He's no longer the boy she fell in love with. 

How could he? When she has left Britain, Elara knew her choice would shatter something between them. 

That a wall of glass would seperate the two lovers, a glass of lies and misunderstandings. Yet she had not expected it to be so thick, so seemingly unbreakable. 

Elara wants Harry James Potter. 

She wants him, his smile, his everything. She wants him to smile at their son, wants to wake to him holding Caelum who would not stew in bitterness at a man who knew nothing of him. In that regard, perhaps, Elara is a coward. 

She tries not to talk of Caelum's father in front of her boy and if she does, they are only elogies, only tales painted in a delicate and love-struck brush because she wants her son to love his father the way she herself loves him. 

"In the meantime," Elara remarks, settling on her seat with the grace of a pureblooded lady. "We can assume he won't. Yet. Still, I'm not taking chances." Her silver eyes flash. "Britain is Caelum's birthright. I will not have my only and precious son disdained for a fault of mine. So help me Merlin, my son will not be seen as bastard. He is royalty and he will rule as it is his right." 

In the face of their Queen's declaration, the Slytherin Inner Court cannot help but abides by her words. Though some might disagree, wish for Caelum never to know the Gryffindor, wish for Elara never to have left, in the end, they follow the Last Black's will and if her will is to flee, to try and hold her heart and not let it shatter, try to make a choice that will only bring heartache, well, there is nothing they could do. 

But, if they were to be honest, they never did expect Harry James Potter to have carved out Elara Black from his heart five years ago. 

Harry has called for another meeting with Elara much to Hermione's worry. Ron, on the other hand, is more so worried for the collateral damage that may occur with the two former lovers meeting about the son that Harry never knew of.

Caelum.

It is a pretty name.

Harry thinks it sounds perfect. Suitable for the precious boy he has only seen once even now, and he has rewatched his memeory so much times that he could see in when he closes his eyes.

And now, he stands face to face with the girl who birthed his child. 

To the girl that once was his everything. 

"We can't go back to how we used to be." Harry does not waver, does not falter as he says so, even when Elara blinks, and he can see her heart shatter before his eyes. "I won't do it."

After all, it had been a losing game, loving her. 

Can you blame him for burying his heart?

It was war. 

She left. 

"Why not?" 

Harry blinks, scoffs at her almost innocent question, as if she truly does not understand why Harry does not welcome her with the love he had once bore her. "Because it's been years. Because you were gone, and I've accepted that."

Elara tilts her head. "Who is she?" she asks. Her words are quiet, meek if one were to be fooled enough by her downcasted gaze and trembling fingers. But Harry knows Elara like one knows his own heart, and he knows there is nothing meek in her question. 

"There isn't anyone," he starts. "If-"

"Someone replaced me in your heart," Elara interrupts, glaring daggers at him, as if daring him to continue. "You cannot stop loving someone out of nowhere, Potter."

Harry scoffs. "How would you know, Black? You've never loved anyone." 

She falters at that, the first slip in her careful mask, the first pebble of her castle crumbling away. "I've loved you," she protests softly. Shyly. "I love you."

Harry wonders how can her lies sound so perfect, dressing themselves in truth to hide their true meaning. He wonders if he will one day be able to believe her once more. 

"You do not abandon those you love." 

"Is it such a crime to love our child more, then?"

Harry bites his bottom lip. Copper stings his tongue, makes the words easier to let go. "He's your child." 

Elara shakes her head. 

Of course, she had always been the best out of the two of them to understand unsaid things. To see beneath the surface, to twist the world to her own wish. 

There's denial etched on her face. 

A sole tear - a small crystal - rolls down on her sharp cheek and Harry follows its trail with his eyes like a man starved. 

"Don't reject your son," she pleads. 

"Is he even mine?"

The question slaps her. 

"HOW DARE YOU ACCUSE ME OF SUCH THING," she roars, the lights flickering in her disbelief and anger. 

"HOW CAN HE BE MY SON WHEN I DO NOT KNOW HIM?!" Harry screams right back and somewhere, something shatters but the couple does not hear, does not see, can only taste each other's fury. "HE'S NOT MY SON, AND YOU MADE DAMN SURE OF THAT WHEN YOU LEFT WITHOUT TELLING ME."

 And God, Harry wants him.

Wants the boy with his mother's eyes and his father's nose and hair. 

The want curls into his chest, tearing itself out to be known but how can Harry see the boy, how can he face his own damn son knowing nothing of him? 

At least Aunt Petunia had been there, the shadow of her long neck following Harry's childhood. 

Harry had promised himself to gift his children all that he could not have. 

Already, he has failed. 

Because that boy - Caelum Black - has never met Harry. 

Has never known a father's love, that is if Nott and Zabini have not taken Harry's place, have not taken all that should be his. 

The very thought makes him want to break something, to take something and shatter it beyond measure, hoping it will quell the brokeness in his own chest. 

"I want to meet him." 

Elara opens her mouth, but Harry does not allow her to place a word in. "Unless you have already disregarded me as a stranger. Because I will take you to court and take him away. No jury will ever oppose the Man-who-conquered." 

The Slytherin huffs a mocking, daring laugh. "No jury will take away the Heir to three Noble Houses from his own Lady Mother and his household." 

"Three?"

Harry might not be as politically savy as Elara or even Hermione, but he knows for a fact that the woman before him only possesses the direct lineage of two Houses, the Black and Selwyn. 

No. 

"Who." His voice trails dangerously, and he is no longer in his office, no longer in a time where Voldemort has died. Instead, he is in the middle of a battlefield, with his heart and soul as collateral. "Who dared to take my place."

Elara has already been good at noticing the cracks, the start of a wound. "No one. Yet."

"Are you provoking me, Black?" 

Her smile is cruel. beautiful. 

"I am offering you your rightful place." 

She says it as if it is a boon, too. As if she is benevolent to allow him to become Caelum Black's father, as if it has not been his position in the first place. Elara Black says it as if he should be indebted to her. "It's not yours to offer, Black!" Harry snarls. He might not be as politically savy as the woman before him, but he has won the war, he is the Man-who-Conquered and he is not afraid to wield those titles like one might wield a sword to have his son by his side. 

Elara ignores him. "Will you claim him or not?" 

It's funny. 

As they say, distance makes the heart fonder because Harry has forgotten the stubborn clench of Elara's jaw, has forgotten how it is always her and hers and the rest can settle, selfish when it comes to those she loves. 

Before, Harry had found it endearing. 

How a girl who has been drowning in the darkness could be capable of kindness to those she loves. How she craddles them into her palm, desperate to shield them from everything she herself has seen. 

Now - after the war, after learning that there is a boy who Harry could have loved, a boy who Harry was father to but who was kept away - well, it is harder to see any of her actions with such lenses. 

"I will. He's a Potter, isn't he?" Elara seems to settle at that, to relax, but Harry is not done. He knows Elara like he knows himself, at least, he likes to think so and he knows if he were to lower his guard, she will try to slip a dagger in the softness of his neck when he is unprepared. Perhaps not to kill him, by any means, but for those she loves? She will not hesitate. "But I want nothing to do with you any more than that."

"I am your heir's mother-!"

"You are his mother and nothing more," Harry interrupts. "Not once did I try to curry favor with the people you are an ally with. Even when you left, I didn't claim anything that was yours because I was your lover." Their eyes meet. His voice does not falter despite the throbbing in his chest. "I won't allow you to just waltz back and use my fame for your ambitions." 

Elara scoffs. "My ambitions?" she asks, something mean on her tongue, like poison an a whip. "My ambitions?! Please, Potter, you say that as if I need you for anything." 

"Why are you back, then?" Why did she leave, abandon him and come back years later, a son she claims theirs in toe and only contacts him when it comes to Caelum's introduction? 

Why is she stirring his heart, making old feelings swell into his throat till he is suffocating on them?

"Because it's finally safe." 

"It was safe four years ago."

She scoffs. "Don't be naive, Potter. You guys hadn't stabilized the country yet. And any son of yours, any of your blood, would have been hunted." 

"That does not give you the right to take him away."

"What do you want from me, Harry?!" They are closer now, and Harry does not even think to scold her for using his name as if they are back in Hogwarts, back in love. "You think I liked leaving you? You think I liked having your child while you were fighting for your life?!"

"Well, that's the impression you're giving!"

Her finger pokes at his chest, against his beating heart. Harry does not know if it is a dagger instead. "Our son would have never been safe here."

Harry steps forward, presses against the digit of her hand, his shadow looming over her. "This wasn't your decision alone to make."