"Buried, almost tangible secrets filled the space between them, and so, without a second to think, she closed it."
The scars of war opened more wounds than Harry Potter thought possible. As he returns to Hogwarts for his eighth and final year, he le...
Oops! This image does not follow our content guidelines. To continue publishing, please remove it or upload a different image.
—————
WHEN THE LIGHTS OF THE world dimmed and voices hushed, when windows cracked just slightly open, the wind would tell secrets. The problem was that the wind was a bit of a gossip. And sometimes, it tended to give the most useless information a very lonely teenage boy had ever heard.
With scraggly hair from sleepless nights and his startling eyes small under swollen, puffy eye-bags, he pressed his ear to his brittle glass windowpane. Nothing moved in the countryside sprawled before him; the surrounding night was overpowering, filling the grass hills and frosting the tips of grass below.
His room was rather high into the sky atop an odd-looking building. Deep inside the large and wildly disorganized home, the perpetually tired boy was the only occupant awake.
His bed was a mess, littered with torn newspaper articles and schoolbooks. An empty birdcage stood lonesomely in the far corner, though it hadn't been occupied in over a year, and so many newspapers lay about the floor that they almost entirely replaced the carpeting. Small, anxious little tears covered every corner of the pages where his hand had clutched at them, eyes scouring for any kind of news, waiting for the moment a rock would plummet into his stomach, waiting for some sort of terrible thing that somehow never came.
The bed where he lay had long adopted a permanent imprint of his tall outline; he scarcely moved from it unless the need was absolutely dire. Despite long legs and arms, the imprint was huddled and small, the mark of a person whose arms rarely left their knees, who couldn't sleep until he shrunk himself into a ball so tight his stomach hurt. The imprint, however often he tried to smooth it out, was a clear indicator of a person who clung to himself like he would another human. But it was only him in that bed. And though there was an abundance of people in that house, to the boy, it was only him in the entire world.
The time couldn't have been earlier than three in the morning. His mind, overloaded with thoughts that would definitely concern anyone who heard, strayed everywhere but his bedroom, which he shared with another. This other teen's hair was vibrantly orange even in the dark, and even when his eyesight was notoriously terrible.
Pressing his puffy face closer into the window, he racked the hills before him, his eyes as green as the rapidly growing, far too long grass. He didn't know what it was that drew him so compellingly to the window. Nothing outside of it was new; he looked out of this window every time he slept in this room.
The misshapen house was not his own, belonging to the family of the redheaded teenager sleeping, who had welcomed him with open arms ever since he was only twelve years old. Their home, a polar opposite to the jail-like house of his last living relatives, had become his sanctuary over the past six years. The family adored him ever since he met them on a train, on their way to the only other place he called home. Despite being so young, he wasn't familiar to love. He had suffered eleven long years of unadulterated hatred from his relatives, yet love surrounded him now. And despite an opposite physical appearance and an absence of shared blood, he had never been more certain of whom he called family.
