Disclaimer: The Harry Potter trademark and concepts belong to J.K. Rowling and all of her related publishers.
Summary: A mother reflects upon her son.
Beneath
Were it not for the way her hands shook in anticipation, she would have been seen as a cool and collected woman of stature. Tonight was the night which, for years had marked the most haunting day of her life- and this year it was doubly so.
Halloween was meant to be haunting, wasn't it? But to the extent that it haunted her?
She swallowed and willed her hands to calm, and even though it didn't work as well as she had wished it would her hands composed themselves slightly- enough for her to open the latch on her jewellery box.
Nothing apart from a loving female hand would ever open this box; her boys which she saw to be both immature and adult were uninterested, there was an unspoken agreement between herself and her husband which meant that if he was allowed to obsess over his funny contraptions, she was allowed to keep some private things. The daughter she had longed for and bourn had long since passed.
Buried in the jewellery box, beneath the beaded necklace she had made when she was eleven, and under the wisdom teeth were the fruit of her labour.
Funny, she had used to think that they were called wizard teeth, after all- everything revolved around magic and if the planets could be named after gods and the stars could be named after heroes then why shouldn't teeth be named after wizards?
Gods. Heroes. Wizards.
Patriarchs. Males. Splendid.
The wonder of it all, magic and wizards. Mages, dragons and damsels in distress wearing ice-cream cones on their heads. She dug deeper.
Photos of herself and her husband, when they were teenagers. She was more kempt and he had more hair. Deeper still was but one of her sons, healthy. He had let the family down of course, and had she admitted that he was not made of gold she may have been able to teach him, instil into him the moral fibre which would have saved him as a man.
Deeper still was the picture she sought, her forgotten son distracted by a soapy strip of tarpaulin in the backyard which he had created to amuse himself as a young boy. She had made sure that he hadn't seen the picture being taken- posing ruined the natural aspect of photos.
He hadn't been totally without happiness as a child- in fact he had smiled much more than any of the other family members. He had a nice smile, too. Lips that could have belonged to a little girl, and eyes that were so innocent that sometimes she could only cry at what the world would do to him.
She allowed herself to stroke the face of the boy in the photo, and looked around before allowing his name to roll forth from her lips, she savoured the moment, she could speak it so freely, without tears, without others erupting. She let out a sigh as she placed the photo of the boy and all photos which had come before it into the box and left to the kitchen.
Vernon would be wanting his dinner soon.