Red Ink Remains
Fred Weasley's card tricks are like real magic. He finds the Queen of Hearts for her over and over, smiling broadly across the counter as she examines the cards again in disbelief.
The last time he comes, one cold day over Christmas holidays, one day without his twin, he smiles at her and leaves the Queen of Hearts on her counter, says to keep it safe, he'll be back for it.
She laughs, turning the playing card over in her hand as the bell over the door signaled his exit. She might just be a girl in a card shop, but she knows the likelihood of that. She knows boys.
She keeps it anyway, tapes it away in a photograph album somewhere. He never comes back, of course. And she never knows why, and never wonders, either.
She moves away from Ottery St. Catchpole, marries, has children, grows old. But she remembers sometimes, long long years after he walked out into the feathery falling snow, flipping through the album, remembers precisely the shade of his red hair and the crinkle of his eyes and his perfect, mystifying card tricks and the way he made her smile.
To her, he was never anyone more than a nice young man who made her laugh one day while the snow fell down. In a world she'll never know, he is a hero. His name is etched on monuments that will stand so long people will scarcely remember what they were built to celebrate, to mourn. He just made her laugh; maybe that's just as worthy of memory.
The card grows yellow with age, taped amongst unmoving photographs, but the red ink remains.
Actually a part of TheOriginalHufflepuff's Christmas challenge (Prompt: Heart), but I'm so in love with this I had to post it in its own right.