September 1993
The first letter from Hogwarts arrived on the Wednesday of the second week, delivered by a snowy white owl that looked considerably more travel-worn than my usual post and landed on the counter with the particular exhausted thump of a bird that had flown farther than it wanted to admit.
I’d been expecting it, in the abstract way you expect something you can’t actually plan around.
What I hadn’t expected was how much my chest tightened at the sight of Harry’s cramped, careful handwriting on the front, like some part of me had been holding its breath since the first of September without quite noticing.
I fed Hedwig, locked the front door ten minutes early for once, and read it standing at the counter instead of waiting until I’d sat down properly, because apparently I had less patience for this than I’d realized.
Marcus,
Sorry it’s taken this long to write.
First week’s been mad, in a way I wasn’t really ready for.
The train was bad.
There were dementors on it — one came right into our compartment looking for Sirius Black, I suppose, though it didn’t say so, they don’t really do anything so useful as explain themselves.
I don’t remember much of what happened except that it got very cold and then I wasn’t really there anymore, if that makes sense.
Professor Lupin was on the train too, thank god, and he did something with chocolate afterward that actually helped, though I still don’t love thinking about it.
I heard someone screaming right before I went under.
Took me a while to work out it was my mum.
I haven’t told Ron and Hermione that part.
Didn’t feel like something I wanted to say out loud yet.
Sorry — didn’t mean to lead with that.
Everything else has actually been good, promise.
I took Ancient Runes, like you said I could.
Professor Babbling seems fair, if a bit intense about a subject most people apparently only take because it sounds impressive.
I like it more than I expected to, actually.
It’s a bit like the anchoring theory you explained that time with the steady-hand device — everything meaning something specific, nothing just decorative.
Defense is brilliant this year.
Professor Lupin’s nothing like Lockhart, thank god, or the one before that who I still don’t like talking about.
He actually teaches things that work.
Third lesson he had a Boggart out for us to practice on, and Neville — you’d have been proud of him, honestly.
His Boggart turned into Snape, which everyone already half-expected, but then Lupin got him to imagine Snape in his gran’s clothes instead, vulture hat and all, and the whole class lost it laughing.
Neville looked like he’d won something.
Anyway.
I keep thinking about the dementors, if I’m honest.
They’re patrolling the grounds now too, apparently, same as the Alley from what the paper said.
Everyone’s a bit on edge about it even if nobody says so directly.
I don’t really know what I’m asking, writing this.
Just — you’d know more about this sort of thing than anyone else I could ask, and I didn’t want to sit on it.
Write back when you can.
Tell me how the shop’s doing.
— Harry
I read it twice, the second time slower than the first, and stood there a while longer than the letter strictly required, turning over the particular sentence about his mother with a care I suspected he hadn’t meant to invite but that I wasn’t going to pretend I hadn’t noticed.
I thought about Molly’s cookies, and Augusta’s healers, and a pair of ravens still turning somewhere behind my own eyes some nights when I closed them.
I thought, mostly, about how badly I wanted to be standing in that compartment instead of reading about it three weeks and an owl-flight away, and how little good wanting that actually did either of us.
So I did the only useful thing available to me, which was to write back properly instead of sitting with the feeling.
I found paper, sharpened a quill I’d been meaning to replace for a week, and started.
Harry,
Don’t apologize for leading with the hard part.
I’d rather have the true week than the tidy version of it, and for what it’s worth, I don’t think less of you for going under on that train.
Dementors don’t care how brave anyone is.
That’s rather the point of them.
Your mother’s voice isn’t something you need to carry alone, if you ever want to talk about it properly rather than in a postscript.
I’m not going anywhere.
The shop’s good, quieter than August, which I don’t mind as much as I expected to.
I’ve been keeping busy regardless.
Finished Amelia Bones’s monocle at last — she has it now, whatever she decides to do with it.
And I finally managed a proper Patronus myself, four tries in, which I’m rather absurdly proud of.
Two ravens, if you can believe it.
I won’t pretend I know why, only that it felt exactly right the moment they appeared.
Practice the Patronus Charm.
Properly, with real effort, not as a last resort you’re saving for an emergency.
The memory has to be whole and yours and strong enough to hold under real pressure — not just pleasant, properly happy, the kind you’d choose if someone asked you to relive one moment forever.
Test a few before you settle on one.
Some that sound good on paper turn out thinner than you’d expect once a dementor’s actually testing them.
I am building something else alongside that — a piece of jewelry that should, if I get it right, take some of the worst of a dementor’s effect off whoever’s wearing it, without needing them to hold a spell at all.
I want to be honest with you about where that stands: it isn’t ready, and even once it is, I don’t want you leaning on it instead of learning the real charm properly.
Think of it as the spare wand in your trunk, not the one you actually reach for.
The charm is the thing that will actually keep you safe when it matters.
The pendant, when it exists, is just insurance underneath that.
I’m sending something else along with this letter — a notebook on Occlumency, foundational theory only, nothing to attempt without more guidance later.
I meant to give it to you over the summer and never quite found the moment before the term caught up with us both.
I gave Neville a copy of the same one, for entirely separate reasons of his own, and it occurs to me that the two of you working through it together might suit you both better than either of you working through it alone.
Give it a try, if you’re willing.
No pressure if it’s not for you — some people find the discipline useful and others find it maddening, and there’s no shame in either.
Glad Runes is going well.
I’d have been surprised if it didn’t, honestly — you’ve got the kind of mind that likes things to mean something specific.
And tell Neville, from me, that I am enormously proud of him, Boggart and all.
He’s earned every bit of that straighter posture.
Also tell him I would love to get a copy of that memory the next time he comes by
Write when you can.
I’ll keep an eye out for your owl.
— Marcus
I read it back once, decided it said what it needed to without saying more than it should, and went to fetch a copy of the books I gave neville from a shelf of my library.
I wrapped it plainly, tied the parcel to the Hedwig’s leg alongside the letter, and watched her lift off into a sky already going grey with early autumn, feeling the particular, useless ache of having done everything I actually could from this distance, and knowing it still wasn’t quite the same as being there.
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