Harry finds the notebook on Tuesday. It’s an empty kind of day: the kind where everything inside Harry’s chest is made of air-dried bone china, unfired and brittle. The kind where all the sounds are dampened by the cotton-wool of grief inside his skull.
*
Harry sees the notebook again on Thursday. It’s still in the same place, half-hidden behind the heavy velvet of some forgotten drapery, in an empty alcove somewhere deep in the belly of Hogwarts where no one ever goes. He thinks about picking it up, but it’s a pins-and-needles kind of day. The kind where every word is a knife and every breath is a wound. The kind where Harry tries to exist as little as possible.
*
Harry finally opens the notebook on Saturday. It’s a grey kind of day, the kind where the colours have bled out of everything and everything tastes like sadness and Harry’s heart is alight with the desperate desire to stop thinking about the way everything keeps changing all the time.
Cramped words in black ink crawl all over the white paper like ants.
Quiet: round and smooth. Quiet fills my mouth like a stone. I don't have words now, they've all slipped through my fingers, I've forgotten them on a rock in the middle of the sea. I've thrown them to the northern winds and strewn through all over the charred-black soil of hell. All I have left is quiet now (it sits heavy on my tongue).
Deep inside Harry’s chest, his brittle-clay heart beats a little faster. He turns the page.
Superfluous. In this word, I paint my self-portrait: A river of a boy, overflowing (movement, movement, movement.) My heart never in the same place twice. Superfluous though I am, I, like running water, cannot be captured or held. This small luxury, I hold close to my chest.
Every inch of Harry’s skin catches fire with the painful memory of being unloved and unwanted. He clasps the notebook to his chest, running a thumb over the butter-soft leather of the spine.
“Me too,” he whispers to the stone walls, in the cold air.
“What were you doing behind those curtains, Draco?” Pansy’s voice is sweet like a kiss and sharp like a knife all at once.
Draco tosses his notebook aside.
“I was wanking, Pans,” he tells her in his best blase voice.
“Don’t be crass, Draco,” she answers, but she doesn’t press.
They’ve been raised to be beautiful shells, the both of them. Hard and polished like mother-of-pearl and always perfect, perfect, perfect. Draco briefly wonders if she’s silently breaking apart too. He knows better than to ask: neither of them has the words to speak about it. Neither of them could live with the shame of having admitted it either.
*
He doesn’t go back for his notebook on Wednesday. Not on Thursday either. Pansy watches him with wet eyes, on these days, so he cracks jokes about the brief stint he did in Azkaban over summer.
“Of course, dementors must seem trivial in the face of arithmancy homework,” Pansy quips, casting a quick refresher on her impeccable makeup charm.
He still has nightmares about Azkaban. About the neverending screams that echoed through the wall, about the pervasive solitude that wrapped itself around his neck like a noose. He’d tell Pansy if he could. Sometimes he thinks she knows all the same.
*
He doesn’t go back on Thursday or Friday, but Saturday is a screaming kind of day. The kind of day when words swell and swell inside his chest until they fill his throat and choke him. By nine in the morning, he can’t take it anymore. By noon, his feet find their way down the winding staircase and to the forgotten alcove.
There are two boys in a castle that’s scarred with war and stained with blood. There are two boys with cotton-wool heads and words they can never say coiling around their lungs like snakes.
There are two boys and they meet on a Saturday, in the quiet of a forgotten alcove. There are harsh, hissed words when it happens. There are ugly sobs too, and whispered words, and soft touches that say I understand you.
There are two boys. They are broken and sad, with cracks upon their hearts and the sticky tar of death painted upon their soul, but when they kiss, after spilling all the viscous words that have lived for so long in the darkness at the bottom of their chest, it feels like the first flowers of spring, blooming between patches of snow.