Author's Note: I do not and never will own Harry Potter.
Written for the Occasion-a-Day Competition/Challenge. September 15 Prompt: Write about someone discovering a hidden talent.
He gets a camera for his birthday from his aunt, the one with too much perfume that hangs in a perpetual cloud around her, and nails that look like lacquered claws.
"It's a bit...expensive, isn't it?" his father asks dubiously. "For an eleven-year-old..."
"Nonsense," his aunt scoffs. And that's that.
At first, he's hesitant with it, fingers tentative around the smooth casing. He has to read the instructions through three times before he feels comfortable so much as "point and click"-ing it.
"Try it outside," his mum encourages. There's just a regular street outside, with scrubby trees growing beside the driveway, but through the lens of his new camera, they look magical. He takes pictures of everything, the play of sunlight on the roof of his parents' car, the bed of flowers beside the house (he vows to ask his mother later precisely what flowers bloom there, as he's never been interested in plants before), the next door neighbour's cat, a sleek tortoiseshell who likes to wind around his legs and meow just loud enough to startle him. As the sun starts to descend, he takes pictures of that, too, watching the landscape take shape around him through the camera, in a wash of muted blues and roses. It's beautiful, and he regrets when his parents make him go to bed, though he takes pictures of that, too, watching his little brother sprawl out on his own bed and snore, arm flopped across the top of his pillow.
The letter from Hogwarts comes three days later, and it is a shock (a marvelous one), but once the shock has worn off, the first thing Colin asks Professor McGonagall is whether or not they have cameras in the wizarding world.
