Moving Pictures
Sometimes when all the others were asleep, Ron snuffling and Dean snoring, he would take out the creased photo from where he kept it, safely rolled up and tucked inside one of his shoes. He didn't need light to see it, he had looked at it so many times that he could imagine every plane of his father's brow, every hollow and curve of his mother's cheeks. He could see with his minds eye the tenderness in his mother's expression, the love in his father's eyes. He could scarcely remember them any other way now. He would pull the rolled up picture from his shoe, and snatch it quickly against his chest, diving beneath the covers again, and just lying there and holding it over his heart.
It was a long time since he had cried while he held them like this.
Instead he listened to the voices that his traitorous memory insisted on replaying over and over again… Poor boy… so young to lose his parents…poor boy… so young to lose his parents… such a horrible thing that happened… oh, poor boy…
They filled his head and he hated them. Because all he wanted to hear, and all he couldn't hear, were the words his mother was saying in the picture, the words that made her lips move silently, the words that he held close every night in the hopes that even if his ears couldn't hear them then maybe his heart could.
"We love you Neville. We love you so much."
