Disclaimer: Harry Potter belongs to J. K. Rowling.

Day 24: Picturesque

Dennis was looking for Christmas stockings in the attic when he stumbled across the box of old photos. His mum must have put them up here at some point. Forgetting the stockings entirely, Dennis sank down to sit on the dusty attic floor and pulled a handful of photos out of the box.

The first one was of Hogwarts castle. Dennis had no doubt that his brother had taken it the moment it had been light enough the day after his arrival at the school. He remembered the mixture of awe and envy he had felt when Colin had shown him the photo over Christmas break.

The next few photos were snapshots of the Hogwarts grounds, picturesque and beautiful. These photos had done nothing to decrease Dennis' sense of envy when he had first seen them. He felt a sharp pang as he remembered his older brother's face lit up in delight as he told Dennis all about how amazing Hogwarts was. Merlin, Dennis missed his brother.

The next photo brought a bubble of laughter from Dennis' mouth. There was Harry Potter, looking younger and smaller than Dennis had ever seen him, irritably doing his best to tug his arm out of the grip of a beaming, handsome man Dennis remembered his brother telling him was Gilderoy Lockhart.

It felt like another lifetime that Dennis and his brother had once been so obsessed with Harry Potter. Before the war, before…. Dennis' amusement vanished as quickly as it had come in another flash of pain. It had been just over two and a half years since his brother's death in the Battle of Hogwarts and though the pain had gotten easier to bear, it had never gone away entirely. It was always worse around the holidays.

Swallowing hard, Dennis flipped to the next picture in the stack. This one, unlike the others, hadn't been taken by Colin but by their mother. Dennis stared down at the photo with a queer mix of pain and joy. He wasn't sure how it had gotten into the middle of the stack. It had been taken before Colin had gone off to Hogwarts. It was just a regular Muggle photograph, the two small boys in it didn't move as they beamed at the camera, frozen in time in a moment of simple joy and exhilaration, their arms flung around each other. Colin was dressed in his Hogwarts robes, holding his wand proudly. The picture had been taken just after Colin's first trip to Diagon Alley. Seconds before the shot had been snapped, Colin had laughingly placed his wizard's hat on Dennis' head, and the delight the younger boy felt in wearing it was as clear as day from his smile.

Dennis realized suddenly that it wasn't just Colin he missed. He missed both of those little boys, so bright and happy, innocent and unafraid, completely unaware that the magical world they were about to enter held as much horror as it did wonder.

His mother's voice snapped Dennis from his reverie. He hastily stood, dropping the pictures back into the box and grabbing the stockings he had been sent up to collect. But just before he left the attic, Dennis strode back over to the box and scooped it up. Colin would never have wanted his precious pictures to just sit up here gathering dust. He would have wanted them to be seen, enjoyed. Each one of those photos was like a tiny piece of Colin himself. A catalogue of his life, of all that he had seen and experienced. And suddenly Dennis didn't feel as if his brother was quite so gone after all.

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