Once Upon a Miserable Girl's Plight...

I am going to attempt to finish this before July 16th but that probably won't happen as this story will be about ten chapters long when I've finished it. I will still try, though, so watch this for updates.

-Kait

Disclaimer Read this and weep, for I am not J.K. Rowling and thus have no secrets to give you about anything concerning Harry Potter. The plot is mere speculation on my part and the characters most definitely do not belong to me.

Chapter Four: Broken Smiles Behind Photographs

September 1st, Fifth Year

Photographs are a funny thing when it comes to their differences from the wizarding world and the, well, what Petunia might call the normal world.

Most of the photographs I have are muggle ones and the thing about those is that they capture a moment. I take that back, though. Especially considering that half the time you are told to get together and smile. In that sense, all a normal picture does is capture a neat little pose that would look quite unnatural to most people if a camera wasn't in front of you.

Magical pictures, I like to think, capture the essence of a person. It's kind of like how some people (the superstitious ones, I suspect) think that a photograph steals a little bit of a person's soul. In those pictures, you see what the person was thinking during the picture, how they normally act, how they smile... Gentle reminders of what the person is like in life.

I only think of this because I'm currently packing for Hogwarts and some of the old photo albums my mother made for me to take to Hogwarts every year are in my hands, waiting to be stuffed into my trunk among the school books and clothes. They contain numerous photographs of my family and I, my friends from primary school, our house... Almost anything that someone could possibly get homesick over. With my mother's sense of humor, in the books you can always find some random pictures of a closet with the door closed and Petunia nearly tripping over the neighborhood stray cat.

My mother, I believe, would share my opinion on normal photographs. She hated it when Petunia and I would pose for pictures. She always liked to take pictures when we were unaware that there was a camera around. Hence why there was a picture of me sticking my hands in my birthday cake when I was seven and so eager for that delicious chocolate cake.

And even though I have a few photographs of my mother, caught while she was unaware of the camera, somehow, I wish I had a wizarding picture of her. Then maybe I could remember exactly how she would twirl her hair around her fingertips or laugh openly at a little joke. I was beginning to forget the little things about her personality; her habits, her little crazy quirks...and I hated myself for it.

So in order to forget why I felt so angry with myself, I quickly set the photo albums in my trunk and looked down to see what I had left to pack.

Next to me is a photograph I found on the street in Diagon Alley. You tend to notice things when you walk down the streets alone. My father, who is still understandably shaken up about my mother's death, might normally have come with me but under the circumstances... And Petunia, she wouldn't be caught dead...

Well, the photograph is another reminder of Hogwarts. I suppose it was left about by James Potter or Sirius Black as it is a picture of the two of them in the Three Broomsticks. They look so natural in the picture with their usual habits evident. Potter is sitting on the left, rumpling his hair and grinning haphazardly as if he knows a prank somewhere is about to be pulled. Sirius Black is seated next to him, poking James stealthily in the in the back and winking to someone off-camera who, by my general instincts, is no doubt, a girl.

It is the perfect photograph to classify them as what they are. Two silly boys who enjoy getting into trouble. It was just the sort I'm sure my mother would have loved, had she seen them. They seemed to be proper and charming when they needed to be and darting away from hexes when they stepped on the wrong person's toes.

But boys could be as proper and charming as the greatest salesmen and I still wouldn't trust them. My own mother had been charmed into accepting a lunch date with a man we all thought to be a family friend. If only she hadn't, maybe I wouldn't be dreaming of having enchanted photographs to remind me of how her hair used to fall into her eyes and how she brushed it back... Did she brush it back or did she gingerly toss her hair out of her eyes? Anyway, it wasn't much use to me now to try and find out... She was gone. It had taken me all summer to accept it but now I did. She was gone and there was nothing I could do to bring her back.

I could feel tears welling up in my eyes again. Now that I was back at home, her death seemed so much stronger. Maybe it was that I was away at school, so I hadn't had little reminders of her wherever I went. In every room, there were a million different things that made my heart scream out in agony, 'I know she's gone but can I just be allowed to pretend for one minute!' But there was no way to pretend. I had no one to tell my secrets to. She had always been my confidant; the one person I told everything to. From all the details I told her about Hogwarts, she probably knew the school better than I did. She used to watch me with an amused look on her face as I begged her to let me hex Petunia when she would tell me off. There was nothing, nothing that could replace that. Oh, I desperately wished that there was someone or something that could fill that void, but there was nothing. It was just me, alone in my room; trying to pack away all of my things before tears were splattered on everything.

That stupid, hateful man, I thought while I packed away my Hogwarts Prefect badge and some black socks. Why did he have to kill her?

I used to consider him something of an uncle. At dinner parties, Petunia and I would give him hugs before he left for home. How could we have trusted him? And how could he, how could he have betrayed that trust? He had confessed something of the sort that she "knew too much." What could that possibly mean? I hated him for what he did. Why didn't he just rip my heart out and feed it to a Red Cap instead? It felt like that was what he had done. I had never experienced an intense and hollow pain such as this.

I couldn't stop the tears from coming now. The least I could do was reach up for a tissue from the desk next to me and use it to quickly cover up my tears.

I had had photographs of that man in my albums at one point. Once I found out what he had done, I took the liberty of ripping them out of the leather bound volumes and reducing them to ashes with my wand. Now when I think about him I wonder why I never saw the horribleness in his cold, dead eyes.

It is the worst feeling; to be betrayed deeply by someone you trusted. And as my father calls up faintly to say that it's nearly time to leave for the train station, I think about how it only took fifteen years for me to figure this out.