Disclaimer: Anything you recognize isn't mine. Yeah, I know. Shocker.
A/N: This was written for the Hogwarts Online Prompt of the Day, "Sixteen Candles."
Sixteen Candles
"Make a wish, Colin," their dad says.
Colin shuts his eyes tight and blows hard, extinguishing all sixteen candles on his birthday cake.
"What did you wish for?" Dennis asks, knowing what the answer will be.
"Can't tell you, can I?" Colin says. "I'd ruin the magic."
"Colin," Dennis sighs. "It's just a wish. Not real magic."
"'Course it is," Colin says stubbornly. "It's funny, really, how learning that wizards and witches really exist makes you blind to all the other kinds of magic."
"What other kinds of magic?" Dennis asks, as their father begins to cut into the cake.
"Look at this," Colin says, shoving the newly developed picture under his nose. "Just look, and then tell me that you don't see magic."
Dennis knows his brother has always been kind of crazy when it came to cameras and photographs. He has to wonder, though, if he might just have a point. He's not sure if it's their smiles or the candles or the wish, or a kind of magic that comes from all three, but in the photo, their practically pitch-black kitchen seems blazing with light.
"Maybe," Dennis shrugs, handing the picture back to Colin.
"Told you," Colin smiles through a mouthful of cake. "It's getting harder and harder to blow out these candles, by the way."
"You just wait 'til next year," their dad grins. "I can't believe that you're going to be seventeen."
The three of them laugh, because it's Colin's birthday, the war raging in the wizarding world seems terribly far away in their peaceful Muggle neighborhood, and not one of them guesses that Colin never will.
Colin Creevey will be forever sixteen. He will be eternally young, unchanging, always the same, but all that really means is that Dennis's brother is dead.
(Why the Muggles ever wanted to find the Fountain of Youth is a mystery to him. Dennis would like to smash the bloody thing to pieces.)
His grief is as immortal as his sixteen-year-old elder brother, but there is one day when it is just unbearable - the fourteenth of June. Colin's birthday.
Everything is different now - the house is emptier and the world seems darker and there is so much sadness where there used to be laughter.
On June fourteenth, two months and twelve days since the Battle of Hogwarts, there is still rejoicing in the wizarding world that You-Know-Who is dead. No one seems to care that he brought Colin Creevey with him.
His dad doesn't come out of his room that day, and Dennis just lays in the living room with the television turned to some mindless program, his face blank and passive. He's hardly paying attention to it until the family in the show starts to sing "Happy Birthday" and that's when the pain that he has been trying to to think about surfaces. He cries for a long time, not certain if it's for his dead brother or for himself, Dennis, who got left behind.
Dennis doesn't know how long he lays there, but at some point, he picks himself up and heads to the kitchen. He takes out the recipe book and he starts to make a birthday cake. When it comes out of the oven, it doesn't look quite as good as the ones his dad makes. Dennis wonders if it's because of the extra ingredient he couldn't help but add - tears. He rummages around in the drawers for some candles, and somehow manages to find seventeen. Then he picks up the camera, which had been gathering dust on the top shelf since the day its owner died, puts it on a timer, and snaps a picture of himself, sobbing over Colin's cake.
The picture develops immediately, and Dennis sobs anew. The room is very dark, only fought off by the light of a few tiny candles and the white of Dennis's face. It was clear what would win. Colin had taken his magic with him, leaving Dennis completely and utterly alone.
He makes his older brother a birthday cake every year anyway, trying in vain to make the kitchen glow again, to give his brother more candles, more birthdays.
It the back of his head, though, he always knows that truth. It doesn't matter how many candles he sobs over, how many he can't blow out for crying, how many candles that melt to wax while he sobs for his brother. Those are Dennis's candles.
Colin will only ever have sixteen.