Author's Note: This is, of course, not my 'verse. I hope you enjoy, and please leave a review if you would be so kind. Also, thanks to Gibbersnap for editing assistance.
I miss him. I miss talking with him, laughing at his stupid jokes, listening to him come up with absurd prank ideas, improving them infinitely, everything. I miss standing wrapped in his warm, comforting embrace, and I miss that fleeting feeling that the world doesn't matter, and time can just keep on ticking, so long as we're holding onto each other for dear life.
I hate that I miss him. I hate that whenever I think about him, I feel this horrible flurry of conflict welling up inside me, with the positive and the negative balling together somewhere in my throat, threatening to choke me. I hate that I have all these positive memories that keep popping up, in my dreams and when I'm awake. They're reminding me of all the good he's done, for me and for so many other people. But intermingled with those images are ones that I've never seen, ones that come from the deepest pits of my imagination, the pits that are active before and after every full moon. Images of James and Lily, lying dead on the floor. Of Peter's finger. Of Harry alone somewhere, crying.
I want to hate myself for missing this murderer, this betrayer. I want to banish all these happy memories, box up the photographs of treasured times shared and never look at them again. But I can't do it. Once, I took the picture of him blowing a kiss at me off the table beside my bed. I put it in a drawer, and hid it under some socks that have been patched so many times I'm not sure they can be called socks any longer. But it didn't last in there longer than a day before I took it back out and put it back on the table. I stared at it for a good twenty minutes, longing to be back in that happy time when he could blow kisses at me and I would smile and nothing would matter. So maybe it's not just him that I miss, but myself, or rather the old version of myself. The version of myself that could laugh and smile and, just for a moment, have nothing matter.
But maybe nothing matters now. Because everything is negative and positive and maybe it just averages out to zero, to neutral, to nothing.