I'm a woman / Phenomenally / Phenomenal woman / That's me - Phenomenal Woman, Maya Angelou
Hermione is the one who contacts him, after the war. He never asks her why – he understands that people have their own ways of getting rid of scars, even if he can't understand them.
Besides, her request is something he can do. He spent the battle in hiding. It had been the right decision, everyone tells him. It would have been worse for him had he actually made it to Hogwarts. But it doesn't stop him from feeling useless and cowardly, so the thought of being able to do anything to help at all – he fairly jumps at the chance.
The camera in his hands isn't his. He has one of his own – a birthday gift – but in his heart, in his bones, he knows he can't use that one. Not for what he has been asked to capture. That honour belongs to another boy's camera, someone who understood the subjects of his work better than he will ever be able to.
Dennis Creevey picks up Colin's camera from the shelf that his parents put it on as a last memorial to their fallen son. It's an impossible thought, even for the wizarding world, but he knows that there's something of Colin that's still left inside it. It's only right that he be part of this project too.
The frame shows a young woman with long brunette hair and a shining smile. Once upon a time, she could have been called beautiful. Maybe she still can be – but she's definitely not a conventional beauty.
The right half of her face is covered in thick, ropey scars, prominent around her eye and marring her cheekbone. Some of them are still blood red – in between poses, Lavender tells him the Healer doubts they'll ever return to the colour of her flesh – and most of them are thick and raised.
In the end though, the most striking parts of the photo are her eyes, and the way they seem to bore into a person's soul with their calm and collected gaze, and the smile that's in the process of creeping up her lips, full of confidence and self-worth.
Padma and Parvati aren't happy about it, but Dennis just knows that that's how they're supposed to be shot.
There are two frames, one for each of them. They're almost identical, with the same scars having been burned into their flesh by the Carrows' unforgiving wands. They always reserved the personal punishments for Harry's year mates.
Each frame has two pictures in them. One's just a head shot, with the girls smiling sweet and almost innocent smiles which would have been believable – had it not been for the other shot which shared each frame.
They're simple, just a half-bared leg in each – but both the legs are mottled red and purple, as permanent as Lavender's scars, burned with a magical fire whose only distinguishable aspect from fiendfyre is the fact that it isn't fatal and out of control.
He titles them Similarity, and leaves it for the world to understand just what he means.
Susan Bones is a pureblood whose parents took her and fled immediately after Dumbledore's funeral. None of them begrudge her the fact that she wasn't there during the battle – her family had already lost enough, and apart from that, they know just how many more people would have died if she and her mother hadn't been there to help Madam Pomfrey after the dust had settled.
Susan's scars aren't conventional. Instead, he shows her dressed in Wizengmont robes, a monocle over her left eye, and no hint of a smile on her face.
Just because her scars aren't conventional doesn't mean she doesn't have any.
Orla Quirke looks even tinier than he remembers, which is saying something. After all, she was smaller than him when they started Hogwarts.
She throws him a shy smile from between interlaced fingers, her palms covering most of her face. It's a pose that allows the back of her hands to be seen clearly – along with the silvery lines etched into them forever.
I will not try to help students avoid the detentions they have earned.
Ginny Weasley comes in bearing both her scars and a photograph.
Her hands and arms are completely bare, the photograph held up in front of her face. The criss-crossing scars glint in the light of the flash, and the picture she holds up has nine smiling, happy – whole – faces in it.
Fleur Weasley is the one he least expects, but she comes too.
She reveals the long expanse of her neck to the camera, bear apart from the black lines of a Muggle tattoo. Even from afar, the design – a perfectly recreated image of the wound from a werewolf's bite – is unmistakeable.
Hers is one of the few full length photos there is. It's something Dennis debates about, but the juxtaposition is too perfect to pass by.
The tattoo is striking, but so is the lightly pregnant belly that Fleur displays proudly.
Luna silvery hair falls down her back in waves, partially obscuring, but at the same time highlighting her scars. She has whip marks criss-crossing across her back in what could easily be mistaken for a delicate patchwork pattern.
Unlike Lavender's, her scars aren't thick and ropey and raised. She talks about how that's only thanks to the fact that Draco was the one who had to deal with her, as she calls it, and how he'd always been as lenient as he could afford to be.
She talks about how they're her reminders, reminders of things she keeps to herself.
She's the only one he photographs twice. The second time around, the lines on her back have been permanently etched over with silvery ink, flowing sinuously every time she moves.
It's a contrast, both opposites and similarities, and save for one, it receives the greatest attention at the exhibition.
The final picture he displays at the charity exhibition that Hermione convinced him so easily to do is his masterpiece, the photograph that he feels is shows what they're trying to say the best.
It's a simple picture, with no effects at all – just a reflection in a mirror. Part of an arm, and etched on it, in blood red crooked handwriting, is a single word.
MUDBLOOD.
He titles his exhibition Phenomenal Woman, after a poem he remembers hearing about once. He can't place it, but the title's apt, he feels.
The soul of it all is Colin's – and in a way, the pictures are too. But if there's one thing the exercise has taught him, it's that they belong as much to him as they do to his brother.
He wonders is Harry and the other boys would be opposed to being photographed in the same way the girls were.
an: we were studying the poem in class yesterday, and this is literally my first reaction, all down on paper.
because scars are difficult, especially when so much of your worth to the world is based on your looks.
i hope you guys liked it! as always, please don't forget to drop a review on your way out :)