Yours, Luna Lovegood

The Note

A|N — This story. Six months ago I began writing on a whim. I couldn't have anticipated the response. Hundreds of thousands of hits, tens of thousands of readers across three platforms. Incredible.

Finally posting on WattPad, and I can't wait to engage with this community.

I live for comments, and I'll nearly always respond. 
Thanks, really. It means a lot that you're reading this.

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Harry Potter woke in a cold sweat, gasping for breath, thin sheets uncomfortably twisted around his bare legs.

"Shit."

His voice was raw from the nightmares — reliving moments of death, torture, grotesque rebirth, aethereal visions of lost souls, every night for eighteen days. He woke screaming, again and again, and it didn't seem to be getting any better at all.

Hating his time with the Dursley's wasn't unusual, but he couldn't remember feeling this alone, this defeated.

And bloody hell, was it hot. While he was away, Vernon hired an air conditioning tech to reroute the air flow from his room to Dudley's. Bastard.

It wasn't the Dursley's venom that haunted him, though. He came to expect this sort of abuse. Nor was it the relentless heat, the throbbing stabs of pain emanating from his scar, or even the pervading sense of helplessness that was driving him to despair. It was the distance of his friends.

Letters were a lifeline for Harry while he was detained at Privet Drive. Every summer for three years he'd written to his best friends, Ron and Hermione, as often as they'd write back. And they did write back, more or less consistently. Sure, Ron's letters were spotty, often short, and seemed less concerned about life than quidditch. But Hermione made up for it with sincere questions, meandering musings, and asides related to her most recent research interests. As silly as it sounded, Harry depended on these notes. They anchored him to a better life that seemed thousands of miles away in the isolation of the summer months.

And he was thrilled to hear from Sirius last summer. It made sense that Sirius wasn't as accessible as he'd like — he'd marveled at Hedwig's magical sense of destination as he considered round trips to Morocco, Tunisia, or Egypt to deliver a quick note to his godfather. He didn't expect frequent communication, but the occasional update from Sirius or even the sporadic check-in from Remus began to foster in Harry a sense of family.

He needed those letters. To survive the summer, to remember his distant community.

And he'd felt that need viscerally for the last eighteen days.

It seemed a cruel joke that everyone, at once, just stopped writing. He'd received two brief, dismissive rebukes from his godfather and a quick "hope you're well" from Hermione that communicated absolutely nothing of substance. That last one was fourteen days ago. Since then, suffocating silence.

Any other summer he'd be swimming in replies, not to mention stashing Mrs. Weasley's baked goods every third note or so. He'd be scheming with Ron about trips to the Burrow, or pretending interest in the Runes textbook that Hermione had recently finished.

But this summer, nothing. When he needed his people most. As he grieved the life of his friend, as he wept for the life he could have had. His family was nowhere to be found.

Reluctantly he sat up, untangled his sheets, and pivoted to the side of the bed. The Dursley's didn't allow him a clock, but from the deep dark of the night sky, he supposed it was 2 or 3 AM. When the nightmares woke him this early, he rarely made it back to sleep.