Disclaimer: Nothing Harry Potter related is mine. I don't want it to be. Yay.
Smile
There's something beautiful in the way he smiles.
It shines out from the page, glistening despite the grainy photograph. He's been delegated to an obscure page, because the war is over and he's done his duty, but it remains even after there's no story to accompany it, as if someone can't bear to throw it away, doom it to a life of shining on discarded wads of gum and crumpled papers.
It's not the nervous, hidden laughter of his youth or the outrageous grin of his school days. It bears little resemblance to that short lived smirk that marked those seemingly endless days of insanity, but perhaps there is a remembrance of that in the way it quirks up slightly at the side, or the way his eyes flash, because it's not something that he'll ever forget.
And maybe that's why it's so special. As though every detail, painful or wonderful or anything in between, can be obtained if it's looked at closely enough. As if, in that small crease in his eye or the slightly crooked tooth on the right side, there's another story of acceptance, defeat, sorrow, overcoming fears. Representing everything he is. The face that he puts forward for the world to see, but also the things he never said, the things he doesn't need to say.
Because there's not just the perfect Golden Boy in that smile, but also the anger and the fear, the pain and the madness. And looking at it is, in it's own way, painful, because suddenly, in that instant all assumptions, all concepts of who the Boy-Who-Lived is, are shattered, melted, torn, burnt.
Because even those he is The Savior and The Chosen One and The Boy-Who-Lived and so many other things besides, the simple sweetness of that smile leaves no doubt about the fact that he's still in love with life, still accepting of death, still real.
And still just Harry Potter.
And that's the most important thing of all.