Order Only: Private message to Colin Creevey

[alt_luna]

Thank you for asking Auror Brodie about my daddy. I couldn't quite bring myself to ask the question. I wondered whether it was better...

oh, of course it's better to know. It was always only the faintest of hopes anyway.

Colin, I know about Dennis, of course, but do you know if you have any other family, somewhere out there? Has the Order been able to find out anything?

If you know that none are left, is that easier, to really know that you're alone, so that you quit hoping?

Forgive me. I suppose that wasn't a very fair question to ask.

I really wish I could stop this welling up with tears at the most inappropriate moments.

Comments

[alt_frank]

(My mum died about two years after having Dennis. She was sick, you see, so wanted to keep him as long as she could, and he ended up getting taken away after she died.

My dad, he works in a dairy in Eastbourne. When Mr Weasley was around, we'd exchange letters every Christmas (or close enough to). He's got one of those buttons now, though. It's strictly for business, of course, camp reports and things, but Tim makes sure to let me know every time he's checked in, and gave him word that I was doing all right. Which is something, hey?

I was so little when the Longbottoms got me out of the camps, and a picture and a handful of letters is all I have, really. I know he's family, and I want to meet him someday, but until I do, it's more that he's a person who happens to be my father.

But I do hope that I'll get to see him one day, and that when I do, we can be a family of sorts. Never quite what we would've had if he'd raised me, but something worth holding out for.

Hope is never a bad thing, Luna.

We read a poem by Emily Dickinson once, she sort of reminds me of you, actually, and she said

Well, hang on, let me copy it down.

“Hope” is the thing with feathers -
That perches in the soul -
And sings the tune without the words -
And never stops - at all -

And sweetest - in the Gale - is heard -
And sore must be the storm -
That could abash the little Bird
That kept so many warm -

I’ve heard it in the chillest land -
And on the strangest Sea -
Yet - never - in Extremity,
It asked a crumb - of me.

I always liked that bit about it existing everywhere, even when things are at their worst.)