A Short History Of The Teenage Years
When he was 11, Harry rather fancied Firenze.
Something like fancying, anyways. He spent a few hours in mind-numbingly dull History of Magic lectures daydreaming about Firenze bursting in, lifting him from his seat, and carefully setting him on his back before riding off together for some amazing adventure in the Forbidden Forest where they fought monsters and dark wizards and were best friends forever.
He remembered this over a decade later, when he was finally clearing out the last bits of his old school trunk. A scrap of parchment fell out of one of his books, covered in doodles of boy wizards and centaurs and their adventures.
Ron laughed and threatened to frame it, pointing out an ideal location in the entryway, titling it "Harry Potter's First Crush".
When he was 13, Harry discovered that there were other men who felt the way he did.
He had suspected, for a couple of months, that maybe he wasn't as interested in girls as Seamus or Dean or even Ron was -- the regular long talks at night about breasts and smiles and legs and which girls they'd "do".
And as Professor Lupin packed his bags, Harry remembered him embracing Sirius, the look on his face when he held him, the smile when they looked at each other.
When he left, Harry went back to his dormitory, sat on his bed, and spent the rest of the afternoon thinking about boys, about girls, and how, for the first time in his life, he had actually seen two people in love.
When he was 15, Harry walked in on Hermione and Ginny.
He didn't realise it at the time, though. Wandering the empty halls of Grimmauld Place with Ron, trying to find something interesting, going to another empty room, with another creaky door, and there was a muffled shriek and a thump and Hermione and Ginny's heads peeking up over the top of an overstuffed armchair pointed towards the corner.
Hermione had mussed hair and Ginny kept on licking her lips. But Ron and Harry both believed their story of helping with the housecleaning.
Much to Hermione and Ginny's regular amusement at family gatherings several years later.
When he was 17, Harry discovered that there were people out there who loved everyone equally.
It was the night before Bill and Fleur's wedding, when the Burrow was filled with guests and food and festivity. Harry climbed out of Ron's bedroom window and climbed up to the top of the roof, looking up at the night sky.
Remus found him up there, chuckling as he slowly made his way up. They sat there, watching the stars, talking about trivial things, when, suddenly, Harry turned to him and asked him about Sirius. And Tonks. And how he had seen that look on Remus's face four years ago and how being with Tonks was not honest, or right, or how it should be.
Remus paused, looked at him, and then told him a great many things -- about love, about Sirius, about Tonks, and even about Harry's mother, who Remus loved a great many years ago.
Harry listened, and looked out over the fields surrounding the Burrow, and saw Ron walking out into the fields, occasionally shouting Harry's name.
When he was 19, Harry got extremely drunk at his best friends' wedding, and made a declaration of love.
Nobody was particularly surprised that it happened, expecting it for years, but some aspects of the drama were unexpected.
For one thing, although they knew that Hermione would marry a Weasley, very few people expected it to be Ginny.
Which meant that, when Harry, after spending most of the day sitting on the back step of the Burrow drinking homemade strawberry wine, stood up and shouted "I love you! I've loved you for years!" to the person trying to back into the house, it wasn't Ginny he was speaking to.
And when Ron blushed, and stammered, and seemed to be mumbling something like "Me too," everyone held up their glasses and cheered.
When he was 21, Harry was married.
And, as they were moving into their new flat, Harry and Ron decided to clean out their old school trunks.
At the bottom of Harry's trunk, falling out of a book, was a scrap of parchment detailing the adventures of a boy wizard and a centaur.
At the bottom of Ron's trunk, falling out of another book, was a scrap of parchment detailing the adventures of two boy wizards.