Disclaimer: JKR's characters and world belong to her, and I lay no claim on them.
Daguerreotype
Tiamat's Child
Sometimes Colin thinks that if he could just find the right camera angle, or maybe the right developing solution, he could catch the world and make it stop. Not forever, not for always, but he could hold people safe and beautiful, just for a moment. And it would be real, and you could see the truth in it.
Colin's always been good at finding the way a person stands that makes them beautiful, the way they hold their hands, or their head. He loves that. He's good at showing it. Always has been. Even those painful pictures of Harry he tried to take during his first year at Hogwarts are like that. He's always amazed that no one else seems to see what he's recorded in those photos, or why he's so proud of them. He managed to catch Harry's shyness, written in chemicals and ink and magic.
Colin used to be afraid that it was only the magic, and the solution that the wizards use that let him hold a slice of soul on the negative that way. But he's stopped taking moving photos, he hasn't used the solution since first year, and he can still catch who a person is, and pin that to paper like a butterfly on cardstock.
Only his never die. Their wings keep beating, and they never stop, just keep stuttering open and stuttering close. Always and always. Bright wings, like living enamel, always in glowing motion.
He hates color photography. Some of it is lovely, but little is truly to his taste. He grew up on Ansel Adams, who didn't need to show color to give it. He is a firm believer in light and shadow, in crisp whites and blacks and smooth shades of grey. He's only taken a few color photos, and none of them he's liked very well. They aren't his medium. So he sticks to the black and white, and dazzles himself with the spectrum of greys strewn across his darkroom workbench.
The darkroom is his refuge. He used to have a friend, an older girl from the local high school, who told him about how, when she and her motorcycle tried to outrun the dawn, she could almost feel as if she was something outside herself, mixed up in the speed and the clinging grey dark. Colin feels that way in his darkroom sometimes. As if he's become part of the silence, and the chemicals, and the images he holds in his hands, and they have become him.
It terrifies him.
He loves it.
This summer he has work to do. He takes pictures of Dennis, playing and laughing, and always covered in bruises and scrapes. Dennis never changes, he only grows bigger, not older. Not that he ever gets that big, but he is growing, and Colin is trying to catch it all. He almost thinks sometimes that he could pin Dennis with the glass of his camera lens, and then he wouldn't have to worry about things that should never have come back and certainly should never have been able to hurt anyone like Harry, or Cedric. Because if Dennis is safe from them then he needn't worry, since he's quite certain he himself won't die until he's taken every thing in, and held it all down and breathed its own breath into it with acid and other things less pleasant. It's a foolish belief, and he knows it, but he can't help holding it anyway.
This summer the sun tumbles in his hair when he blinks in the mirror, and he wonders if maybe he could catch the warmth of it, and the joy it brings him. And the sorrow too, because he knows that the picture isn't true if he doesn't show it all. But he doesn't know yet how to catch sun and emotion in the same frame without something to help, so he sets it aside, into the back corner of his mind, for next summer.
Next Summer.
The phrase carries more meaning than it used to. In his mind he often sees it capitalized, with all the importance that implies. There might not be a Next Summer for some of the other children. Maybe not even for Dennis. No more bright sun and messy ice for someone, just the way there'll never again be sweat soaking into the collar of a cotton shirt for Cedric. Colin seizes every time he remembers that. He has to stand, and shake, and throw his mind into frozen, ancient cold caught in perfect majesty in black and white and grey. Then he can breathe again.
It's stupid. He knows that. He didn't talk to Cedric, except for a shouted, "Good game Saturday!" across the courtyard. He wasn't Cedric's friend. He was too much younger to be that, and in the wrong House besides. He didn't know Cedric.
And yet he did know him. Take enough photographs, catch enough slices of someone's soul, and you can't help but start thinking you know them, at least a little. Colin does.
He only has one of those photographs left. Just the one, of Cedric on his broomstick, racing something Colin still can't see. It's just a little blurry, but Colin doesn't care. It's probably best that way. The other photographs were found by Cho Chang, set neatly into the center of her bed. A whole thick stack of glossy black and white shots. Some of them had her in them too. Colin was almost proud of himself for that. It took a great deal of persuading to convince one of the house-elfs to deliver them. They were afraid the photographs would be upsetting. Maybe they were. Colin doesn't know.
There's another set of photographs he only has one of anymore. But that was because of an accident. No one meant for a girl with a wild laugh and an addiction to fast motorcycles to tumble and fall and be crushed. It wasn't supposed to happen. Just one of those sad things that chance causes sometimes.
He took pictures at her funeral. He needed the glass between him and the world. No one yelled, though a few seemed to be angry.
The picture he has of her is blurred too. He likes that. She looks as if she'll ride forever.
He wants to keep all of his photographs of everyone else.
Colin likes the view from behind the glass. You see things other people don't. You see how tight three friends can be bound, and you see how frightened a professor who's supposed to know everything can be, and you see that people with thorns are often lonely. But you forget things too. Things like sometimes people need to not be looked at, and that you can't touch the world through glass, and that glass needs to come down from time to time. Old photographers learn to remember, but young photographers haven't brought that understanding into their marrow yet.
Colin's still a young photographer. He forgets, and he has wild aspirations, the sort that are born from need and desperation. He tries so hard to hold time, because time is dragging everything he loves down and down and down, and who knows if they'll ever make it back up. He doesn't want anyone to fall.
Colin is afraid.
Colin is afraid, and so he takes his pictures, and tries to hold back the sun from slipping another inch lower, and tries to keep his brother in the air. Maybe if you catch enough moments you can weave eternity. He hopes so.
Colin believes in chemical salts on silver plates. They last so long. If he could just find the right angle, the right developing solution…
if-
…He could stop time. He knows it.