Title: As Long As You Love Me So
Author: Kate's Master, aka Emma

Summery: Response to TheOriginalHufflepuff's Twelve Fics challenge. The lives of Percy and Penny, jumbled and muddled…just as they should be. Canon.

Disclaimer: Characters belong to JKR, basic idea belongs to Lady Altair…I currently own even less than normal…lucky me.

Authors Notes: Back again! I've decided I am going to finish this by Christmas – you guys are in charge of holding me to this!

The idea behind this chapter was inspired by a oneshot by Lady Altair. I have emailed her and asked for her permission to adapt it for my own means, but had no reply – if you read this and wish me to remove it, just let me know. Everyone else, I highly suggest you go take a look at this highly prolific author; she is one of my all time favourites on this site.

Prompt Eight: Photograph


Hopes and Fears of All the Years

It is a beautiful building. Many storeys high, two perfect cylinders joined at the top by a glass-enclosed bridge, a marvel of modern magical architecture. Percy grips Penny's hand as they approach, and she squeezes his back. Both know what they will find inside, and yet, at the same time, neither of them is entirely sure what to expect. The project is nearly six years old, finally complete, and tonight those who took part are being granted the first viewing.

The entrance is not grand: a single room taking up the entire ground floor, the base of a huge white column standing in the centre. To one side is the beginning of a walkway, which winds its way upwards, a gently sloping path with the wall of the building on one side and a railing, allowing a person to look over and see the entire height of the building, on the other. The column stretches up above their heads, right up to the glass roof of the building, far enough away to prevent the walkway becoming closed in, and yet near enough for the writing on it to be easily read.

Large gold letters are printed into the side of the column opposite the doorway: "Lest We Forget," and, below them, a desk offering brochures detailing each individual exhibit. Percy takes his with his free hand – he has still not released the grip he has on his wife, and he does not intend to anytime soon – and together begin the walk.

The first photo, right at the foot of the walkway, contains no people. It shows a small, pale blue bedroom, a few posters tacked up, almost obscured by the hundreds of photos that look down from every surface. In the centre of the frame is a desk, covered in bottles of chemicals, a few half-developed photos hanging from a stand, and, in pride of place, a camera. There is a fine film of dust over everything. Colin Creevy never returned to finish those final pictures.

Opposite, carved neatly into the white stone of the column, is a date from May 1943, followed by a name, shining gold. Myrtle Rowlands. The first of many.

Penny shakes her head.

"It's funny. I never thought of her like that."

"That's the point of this." Points out Percy quietly. "To make us think like that."

His wife nods stiffly, and together they move on, stopping to read every name, carved chronologically into the stone pillar. The brochure from the desk in the entrance details the circumstances of each death; after the first few, they stop reading.

And on the opposite wall are the pictures, a mixture of ones taken when the subject is not paying attention, and those posed and sat for. The frames are arranged in no apparent order, but then, for this, order is not really needed. As they walk up the building, they pass small groups of people, all standing and staring, mainly in silence, at the picture that, in some way or another, means more to them than the others.

A girl Percy recognises as a Hufflepuff, from Ron's year, he thinks, gazing at a picture of herself gazing at her reflection in a mirror, wedding dress on and an empty space where her mother should have been standing.

They pass Harry, staring at two pictures in the same frame: a lightening bolt scar above a pair of green eyes, and the back of a hand reading "I must not tell lies". A few pictures on, an old Sirius Black wanted poster laughs silently at them.

Further on, picture-George sits alone within his frame, staring straight ahead, the laugh totally gone from his face. The picture is uneven; looking at it makes you feel slightly off-kilter, because George is slightly too far to the left, as though there should be something else next to him to balance him out.

Which, of course, there should be.

More photos, more lives, a thousand scars of different types. Angelina Johnston, minus one arm, and Katie Bell, the left hand side of her face appearing slightly blurred and melted, and the gap between them where tiny Alicia Spinet should have stood. Mandy Hewitt, a Hufflepuff Percy remembers as a prefect from his own year, gazing blindly out of her frame. Lavender Brown standing half naked with her back to the camera, looking at it over her shoulder, her skin a mess of raised scars courtesy of Fenrir Greyback. Josie Moss, completely bald. A house, blasted into a thousand pieces by the force of a backfiring curse.

The one Percy both looks for and dreads is near the top. It had been one of the first to be taken, and, looking at it now, Percy wonders if he was right to allow it to be done at all.

Penny, in the sitting room of their flat, looking as lost and alone as a small child separated from its mother on the streets of London. She is clutching the arms of the chair she sits in, gazing rigidly ahead at something only she can see, pale and drawn with limp, straggly hair, wearing clothes that will barely stay on her body anymore, so thin she has become.

Next to him, the real Penny gasps.

"Was…was I really like that?" she asks quietly, and Percy has no choice but to nod, because the proof is in front of them.

"Oh."

Silence for a while as they both look at the picture-Penny, and then real-Penny speaks again.

"I'm sorry, Perce." she whispers, and Percy suddenly reaches out and pulls her into a hug, because she should never feel the need to apologise to him for those months.

After a while, they move on again, to the top of the first tower and across the joining bridge to the top of the second. At first glance, the set up appears to be much the same – a large, circular building, with the walkway and the column. But there is no writing on this column, and pictures are not arranged in frames. Instead, they are pinned to the wall, covering it from floor to ceiling all the way down, hundreds upon thousands of photographs of waving, smiling, laughing, living people, captured in moments before Voldemort touched their lives.

Families, friends, weddings, quidditch matches, nights out and nights in…Dennis Creevy turned up one day carting with him every photograph his brother had taken during his seven years at Hogwarts, captured moments that had seemed so unimportant at the time, and now mean the world to some, and more to others. Cedric Diggory, standing proud and smart next to his father in front of the Hogwarts Express at the age of eleven. Moody's photo of the old Order, enlarged to display everyone at once. Lewin Michaels, Head Boy in Percy's first year, in Hogsmeade with his girlfriend, weeks before her entire family were killed, and him with them. An old, yellowed photo of a tiny girl with flame red hair swinging merrily off the arms of her elder brothers, the Prewett boys who should have lived to see their sister and nephews and niece grow into what they always knew they would be. Sirius Black, proudly posing with his bike. The Potters, a baby Harry trying to grab at the man behind the camera, restrained by his mother and encouraged by his laughing father.

As Neville Longbottom had pointed out at the first meeting to plan the memorial, there was no point having one at all if you were not going to commemorate how they were, as well as how they ended up.

By the time they reached the bottom, night had fallen. The building was still full, lit by a light that seemed to be coming from the central columns themselves, and Percy suspected that there would still be people here long into the early hours of the morning.

They would come back, one day, and bring the children, once they were old enough to understand. And then they would bring their children, and so on and so on, so that no one could ever forget the price that had been paid. Percy's head wasn't naive enough to imagine that the gallery alone was enough to stop something similar ever happening again, but his heart couldn't help but hope.

Taking each others hands once more, the Weasley pair moved out into the darkness. Tomorrow would come, and bring with it what it did, and thanks to the faces they were walking away from, they were still there to make sure it happened.

All had their story here. And they will never be forgotten.


And there we go. The photo of Hannah Abbot in her wedding dress without her mother was inspired by the Cancer UK advert, with all the people saying who should be there.

Three more to go…can we get there by Christmas? Only time shall tell!