On the floor of their new flat, Rose opened a couple of boxes marked "School Things" filled with piles of loose papers. She flipped through the pages of yellowed parchment, each one a little thinner and more fragile than the last, and each one similarly addressed with a scratchy date next to her name.
"Scorpius," she looked up from the piles. He hadn't heard her and continued reading a book perched on his pillow. "Scorpius," she repeated, louder this time to get his attention. He blinked a couple times as he shook his head from the book and turned to her. She held up the top stack for him to see. "What are all of these?"
"They're letters, of course," he replied without a thought and began to read again.
"What do you mean of course? And what do you mean by letters? One usually sends letters to the person they're written for. That's the definition of a letter!" Rose wasn't sure why she was so upset with him, but she could feel the tension of anger rising in her spine.
"Rose," he sat up so as to look her in the eye. "Those letters contain my deepest, most personal thoughts and desires. I couldn't send them to you." His voice sounded strange, as though he'd had this conversation before and was trying to remember the words he'd used. Her confusion must have been evident in her eyes, for he sighed a little and continued. "I mean, I've told you all that stuff now. But how would you have reacted in second year if I'd told you all about my parents' dinner parties or how much I hated all the kids my mom set play dates with when I was little or that my dorm mates snored and whatnot." Again, confusion filled Rose's eyes.
"Wait, what do you mean second year?" She looked down at the yellowed parchment and read the dates on a few of the pages. They went as far back as their first year, even.
"I've told you a hundred times that I loved you the first moment I saw you, right?" She gave a little nod and he went on. "Well, I meant it. It was that very first moment on the platform before first year. Of course, back then I didn't realize what I felt for you was love, necessarily. It was more a desire to just meet you and maybe be your friend. You were so completely different from anyone I had ever seen. And it's not just the red hair. You were smiling, genuinely smiling, with all your family there. I wanted to be part of that." She watched him as he spoke and it was clear that he'd been planning this conversation, or rather, confession, for some time. "From that day on I was determined to talk to you, but I could never work up the courage." She nearly scoffed at this, remembering Scorpius's arrogant attitude when they were younger. He would never have admitted being nervous about anything back then. He continued, unaware of her small smile. "I imagined how I would introduce myself, what I might say about a Transfiguration lecture, different ways to ask you to go to Hogsmeade or to a ball with me. Eventually it was too much to keep in my head. I began to write down these thoughts. It might seem creepy now, but this proved a very productive strategy. It was much easier to focus in class after I began to write things down." He smiled to himself before going on and Rose continued to sit in awe. "They weren't originally letters. They were simply scraps of parchment I kept all together in my sock drawer, a kind of haphazard journal. But I felt silly writing to no one, so I addressed them to you," he paused and a smile spread wide on his face, "with absolutely no intention of sending them out."
Rose wasn't sure whether she should feel flattered or creeped out and, fingering the yellow parchment a bit more delicately and fondly than before, decided on somewhere in between. He was watching her as she looked down at the stacks and when she turned to meet his eye he was smiling nervously, awaiting her response. She realized that he'd been waiting for this response for years and wondered if maybe, somewhere in the pages of confessions and concerns that filled these boxes, there was a letter explaining what he just had in the scratchy writing of a teenage boy.
"Well, may I read them?" she asked with a smile and a laugh and he looked relieved as he nodded his permission and turned back to the book on his pillow.
"Oh. But please skip February 19th, fifth year, " he added with a smirk. "I really should've burned that one."