Harry Potter and the Sympathy of Souls

II) "A Beautiful & Terrible Thing"

PART ONE: NICHOLAS
YEAR TWO

"Goodnight Harry!" exclaimed Ron with a huge smile on his face. Still high on the euphoria of saving Ginny, and seeing Hermione healed and the return of Hagrid from Azkaban. The celebration had lasted all night long, and seeing as it was approaching 5am, it was no surprise to Harry that Ron started snoring the second his head hit the pillow.

Though he yearned for his soft warm bed, Harry knew he couldn't go to sleep yet, and he reluctantly turned around and headed back out of the dorm rooms, taking a parchment and quill with him.

"Hello, Hedwig." He cooed at his owl, petting her gently and offering her a slice of bacon he had stowed in his pocket to apologize for waking her up so early, "I'm really sorry, girl, but I need you to send a letter for me. It's very important, or I wouldn't have woken you up at this hour."

She hooted at him in a tone so understanding, that the thought once again occurred to Harry that maybe she could understand what he was saying.

Hedwig perched comfortably on his shoulder as he sat down at the little desk in the owlery, there for the convenience of the students, and began writing.

Nicolas,

Hello, this is Harry Potter. I'm writing to you because of our conversation last year about the way Voldemort might have become immortal. I think I've found proof of your theory, but you know the subject better than I, so I thought I should ask you what you think.

Harry grimaced at the paragraph, but since Nicolas had stressed to him how important it was to keep information about Horcruxes a secret, Harry felt justified in being very vague with his descriptions. Nicolas would understand what Harry was referring to.

This year, a bit after school started, students started becoming petrified. They were found just frozen in place and unable to move. Also, someone had written on one of the corridors "The Chamber of Secrets has been opened, enemies of the Heir beware".

During this time, I found a diary that someone tried to flush down the toilet, and I took it. Later, ink had spilled on all my schoolbooks, but there wasn't any on the diary which I thought was weird, so I decided to write on it.

At this point, Harry tried to write in as much detail possible. Not knowing which details would be important for Nicolas to know, Harry wrote everything about his encounter with the diary. The color of the diary, the inscription on the front, the conversation with Tom Riddle, and the memory.

Just last night, my best friend Ron's sister disappeared because she was taken into the Chamber, and there was more writing on the wall saying her skeleton would rot in the chamber. That was just when I managed to figure out where the Chamber was(the girls' loo on the second floor!), and because I can speak Parseltongue, I was able to go into the chamber.

Also here, Harry felt important to write every single detail that had happened, and reported everything. He spent special detail writing about how Tom looked, how he was sort of transparent, but looked like he was getting more solid every second. He even spared a paragraph to describe Tom's hair and the color of his eyes, just in case it was important. He wrote about what Tom had said, speculating about what he had meant when he called himself a "memory", and went on to describe the fight with the Basilisk and the destruction of the diary.

Anyways, he concluded, since you're familiar with the kinds of artifacts we discussed back then, I thought I would ask you for your opinion. Do you think this could be that sort of object?

Regards,

Harry

He stared tiredly down at his scribbles, which he was surprised to see had taken up almost two whole rolls of parchment in his tiny handwriting. He rolled them up carefully, wrote down the address Nicolas had given him a whole year ago on the back, and placed them in Hedwig's claws.