Nearly Seventeen

"I have to tell my parents. Who else will?" Dennis Creevey breaks the news of Colin's death.

Rated K+. Everything belongs to JK Rowling; it's her world, and we're all just playing in it. Reviews, etc., appreciated!

I.

"I'm going to go back in there. I'm nearly seventeen, anyways," Colin says. "You in?"

"Maybe later," Dennis mumbles. "You first."

You first, Colin: always Colin first.

He waits in the Hog's Head, trying to work up the nerve. He rubs the pad of his thumb along the ridges of his Dumbledore's Army coin. He still hasn't mastered a proper Shield Charm, after all this time. ("Practice!" Colin exhorts.)

Then people start coming back, flush with news.

"Potter's done it!"

"You-Know-Who's gone, really gone!"

"Did you hear about what happened to Snape?"

Colin's voice isn't among them. But it will be, soon. Any moment, and Colin will be back. Any moment now. Soon.

They are taking people from the Hog's Head into the school, now that the battle is over; with the passage to the Room of Requirement destroyed, they use the Floo Network. Dennis climbs out of one of the fireplaces, wipes soot from his face and looks around, stunned. Stone stairs have crumbled into dust; debris clutters the halls and passageways. Voices, tears and screams and, surprisingly, even laughter, bounce off the walls and floors. It takes Dennis a second to find his bearings: this, still, is Hogwarts.

He recognizes one of the Gryffindor fifth-years, a few yards up the hallway, by the long blond curls falling down her back: Vicky Frobisher. He cobbles together the four things he knows about her and then calls out, "Vic!" She stops and turns around. "Do you see Colin anywhere?"

She is carrying a calico cat, most likely escaped from one of the common rooms. It mews softly in her arms. Then she fixes him with a strange expression of pity and sadness. Dennis waits, hands at his sides. Finally, Vicky Frobisher says, "Try the Great Hall or the lawn. That's where everything—that's where everyone is."

He asks the same question again, in various iterations. "Do you see Colin?" becomes "Have you seen Colin?" becomes "Is Colin alive?" Still, nobody can give him an answer. A Hufflepuff boy sends him to another Gryffindor girl, whom he remembers, very vaguely, from when she played on the house Quidditch team two years ago. He thinks her name might be Alicia. Now, she wipes sweat from a woman's forehead with an embroidered handkerchief. It has little flowers on the hem, stitched in pink and yellow thread. When Dennis asks her about Colin, she, too, gives him a strange look. "Oliver," she says, inclining her head towards nothing in particular. "I saw him with Oliver."

"Who is Oliver?" Dennis asks, but she's turned away. I saw him with Oliver. Five words, and Dennis clings to them, like a mantra, a prayer, a compass.

After much asking, Dennis finds the mysterious Oliver slumped over a table in the far corner of the Hall, along with a few other people who look similarly beat-down, dog-tired, any of those words Dennis's father would use to describe coal miners after a long day underground. "Alicia said you knew where Colin was," Dennis says, by way of introduction.

Oliver looks up, startled. "Alicia?" The note of alarm in his voice is palpable.

"I think her name was Alicia. I don't know. She said you saw my brother. My brother Colin."

"Your brother Colin," Oliver repeats. He speaks in a hoarse, hollow voice. His hands are rough with healed-over calluses. He looks at Dennis carefully, not because he knows something Dennis doesn't but because he does not know Dennis at all: then something registers with him and he lets out a long, low sigh. "Yeah, I did."

"Do you know where he is?"

"I—do you know Neville?" Dennis finds the question both confusing and unnecessary: why does it matter if he knows Neville, and why wouldn't he know Neville, anyways? But Oliver is the only person who seems to know where his brother is, and so Dennis nods, mutely: yes. "Neville should…" His voice trails off. But he stands up anyways, heads towards another part of the Hall and beckons Dennis to follow. I saw him with Oliver: but she didn't say when, or how, or why.

Neville and Oliver stand on either side of Dennis, looking at Colin on the ground below them. They are much taller and much older and their presence makes Dennis feel like he's standing between two pillars. "We carried him in," Neville says.

Dennis's mouth feels dry. He wants to say thank you, but the words don't come.

There's no camera nearby, on Colin or anywhere. Colin had said when he'd been Petrified, back in his second year, the film in his camera had burned and sizzled to a crisp. And I'd gotten some good pictures, too! he'd said in his letter, as soon as he'd been unpetrified.

"I have to tell my parents," Dennis says, after a while. "Who else will?"

II.

The next morning—or so late in the evening that it might as well be morning—they walk along the road to the Creevey house. Dennis walks ahead, hands shoved deep into the pockets of his jacket; Neville and Oliver follow behind. "I don't like this," Neville murmurs to Oliver. "There had to be someone who knew him better—someone else who'd do a better job of it, right?""You did know him," Oliver says. "Dumbledore's Army, wasn't it?"

"No, it was. I did. Know him, I mean. But I'm no McGonagall, you know?"

"Well. Nobody is."

They laugh, despite themselves, but it isn't really that funny, and they settle into silence again.

The Creeveys live in a terraced house in a village called Hatfield: the northern one, in Yorkshire. A blanket of fog smothers the whole town. They pass by block after block of identical terraced houses until Dennis stops outside one marked 70. A light is on; in the front window Dennis can see his mother's put lilies in the windowsill, distinguishing their house from the rows and rows of identical ones. He raises his hand to knock on the door, and then stops. He looks back at them.

"Go ahead," Neville says. "Knock when you're ready."

Dennis nods. He is grateful for their presence; he doesn't want to carry this alone and more importantly, he doesn't know how. He knocks on the door, presses his face next to the grain of the wood and calls out: "Mum, Dad, it's me. Open the door, it's really important."

Mrs. Creevey makes them all tea with a kettle that plugs into the wall; while she waits for the water to boil, she stares out the back window, motionless. Mr. Creevey sits at the table with his head in his hands. Then he looks up. "How'd you know my son?" he asks, jerking his head towards Neville and Oliver. His voice is gruff, clipped at the ends.

"We were in his house," Neville says. "He was a year behind me. We had this tutoring group—get together—practice defensive skills…"

"Dumbledore's Army?" says Mrs. Creevey.

"He told you about it? …But yeah. After our headmaster." Neville closes his eyes for a fraction of a second and then opens them. "Colin and I were in it. Dennis too."

"And you?" Mr. Creevey looks toward Oliver.

"Only carried him inside, after the battle."

The kettle clicks off. Water splashes into chipped mugs. Mrs. Creevey loads everything onto a tea tray and brings it to the table. "Would it have hurt him?" she asks.

"It's not supposed to," Dennis pipes up. "Not usually."

His voice cracks; he looks to Neville and Oliver for confirmation. In the grand scheme of things they are not much older or more knowledgeable, hardly more advanced wizards: Neville is seventeen, Oliver twenty-two. They are neither McGonagall nor Dumbledore nor a Muggle liaison wizard.

But for now they are here.

Oliver shakes his head, as Neville takes a cup off the tray and bobs the teabag in the water. "No," Neville says firmly. "It didn't hurt."

They drink tea in silence for several minutes, until Mrs. Creevey clears her throat and says, "This battle. Was Colin supposed to be there?"

"He snuck back in, Mum." Dennis stares miserably at his shoes: scuffed and dirty, cheap old sneakers that they'd bought in Leeds city center. "They told him not to but he wanted—wanted to fight anyways." He tries to sound important, to give this fact all the dignity and respect it deserves.

But Mrs. Creevey only looks at him with incomprehension. "But why didn't you stop him?"

"He was fighting for a cause," Dennis says. His face grows red and hot, eyes prickled with tears. "A good cause. Fighting for people like us, who aren't from magic families. He didn'twant to stay back and just wait—just wait for other people to die for him."

"Dennis," Mr. Creevey says.

"I'm serious! He wanted to go and do something important. What was wrong with that?"

"Nothing was wrong with that." Neville says, gently.

"Listen," interjects Oliver, who up until now has said comparatively little. "The house we're in, Gryffindor house? It's meant to be the house of bravery and of courage and"—Mrs. Creevey opens her mouth to object, but Oliver, about to launch into something like a speech, with the practiced air of someone who has done this before, but under appreciably better circumstances, holds up a hand—"and standing up for what you believe in. And that's what Colin was doing, it sounds like. He was being a true Gryffindor. Except sometimes being a true Gryffindor means we want to be…we want to be on the front lines, whatever the lines are. It means that sometimes we do reckless things in the name of causes that are good. It means we charge forward without thinking of the consequences. That's being a true Gryffindor, too. He was being true to his house."

"True to himself," Neville adds pointedly.

At this, they all look down into their tea mugs, contemplative.

"He was really proud of his house," Mr. Creevey says eventually, setting his mug on the table with a slight tap. "You know, he took a bunch of pictures of the school. People he knew. What he was doing. Wizard sports…" He tries to laugh, but it comes out strangled and he swallows it back down. "He got the pictures to move, d'you know that?"

Neville and Oliver nod; yes.

Mrs. Creevey presses her lips into a thin line, knits her fingers together: draws herself inward, like some kind of protection. "But does it change anything," she says. "Him being a Gryffindor. Fighting for a cause. Fighting for a good cause. Any of it. All of it. Does it change anything?"

"No," Neville says. "It doesn't. It can't. But it means—it wasn't meaningless. It wasn't for nothing. Sometimes it helps, to just have that." He drains the last of his tea and looks across the faces in the room. "Trust me, I know." Neville and Oliver make eye contact, give each other the briefest of nods. "We'll leave you—we're going to step into the village for a bit, I think, but we can take you back to Hogwarts or Hogsmeade when you need, Dennis. Come find us after."

III.

Dennis heads upstairs to the bedroom that he and Colin share. Shared. Used to share. Not anymore. Past tense. Past tense, now. The room is mostly empty of stuff, the dresser remarkably free of clutter and the half-closet still and empty. They'd taken what they had with them. A Sheffield football club poster hangs on the wall. Above Colin's narrow bed hang a collage of photographs, some moving, some not. Dennis extends a hand toward the photos, and begins to peel one off the wall. It's a picture of them standing next to their dad's milk truck. The corner comes clean away from the paint.

But they're Colin's photographs; they're not Dennis's to take. He drops his hand by his side and slumps on the edge of the bed. The world around him seems to spin.

"Does it really help?" Oliver asks Neville as they walk towards town. "It not being for nothing?"

After a long time, Neville replies, "It helps because it has to help. Otherwise it would just—the senselessness of it. The pointlessness. Drives you mad, if you let it."

"It helps because it has to," Oliver repeats. He takes a moment to think it over. "He was so small."

Later, Dennis finds Neville and Oliver in the village square, outside Hatfield church. "I should get—I need to get his things. Colin's things."

"Right," they say in unison. A short, half-laugh: great minds think alike! Then Oliver says: "I bet you could find Professor McGonagall, back at the castle. She'll know what to do. More than us, at least." His voice is no longer as hoarse as it was when they'd first met, but the hollow, shell-shocked quality of it remains.

Dennis nods. It seems to him that they know plenty already. He looks up, at the church, and then back at them. The skin under their eyes looks purple and bruised; soot and dried blood stripe Neville's face and Oliver's sweater is singed in places.

Before he can stop himself: "Did you see what happened?"

The looks on their faces tell him everything he needs to know.

"You don't know. You just found him." They nod. "But you brought him inside together." Another nod."I tried looking for him. I asked everyone. If they'd seen him, if he was alive. And then…well, he wasn't." A hand on his shoulder; Neville's. "It feels different, without him."

"I bet it does," Neville says.

Dennis adds: "He asked me if I wanted to sneak back into the castle, too."

Another one of those long, low sighs, but Dennis—focused on the ground in front of him—does not see to whom it belongs. It doesn't matter. It doesn't change anything. (You first, Colin.)

IV.

In the weeks after, there are investigations, and commissions, and hearings, and trials, splashed across the front pages of the Prophet and played on radio stations from Kirkwall to Kent. Dennis listens to some but not all of it. They have a small funeral for Colin. Closed coffin. It rains the whole day and turns the cemetery grounds to mud. The rest of Colin's things stay locked in his school trunk.

Dennis spends the summer as a stock boy at the local Sainsbury's, loading milk jugs and Jaffa cakes and Weetabix onto store shelves as the electric lights hum and flicker.

Once the store runs short on Caramellos and the patrons nearly riot. "Not as good as Chocolate Frogs," he mutters as he restocks the milk fridge.

"Did you say chocolate frogs?" one of the other stock girls says. She's holding a carton of yogurt and looks faintly like Natalie MacDonald in his year, except she's taller, with blonde hair, and a much wider mouth, and she doesn't actually look like Natalie at all.

"Chocolate prawns," Dennis clarifies, speaking to the floor, instead of Natalie-but-not-Natalie. "My aunt had some in America. You know, all those bizarre foods they come up with over there."

People from the village drop by his parents' house with flowers and meat pies and strangely insipid sympathy cards, which Dennis's father tears open and then drops unceremoniously in the rubbish bin.

Ginny Weasley, who was in Colin's year, occasionally owls. The first time she writes, Neville told me about Colin. I liked him a lot. We used to pass notes back and forth in History of Magic. It doesn't surprise me he snuck back in. But I bet you miss him. I miss my brother, too.

The next letter: Hope you're well. They're talking about paying restitutions to Muggleborns injured or killed in the past year. I told Dad it was all bollocks because no amount of money would help, but then I thought maybe I was wrong. What do you think?

She sends along updates about old Dumbledore's Army members, too.

Lavender Brown: seventh year if you remember her—got out of St. Mungo's yesterday, half her face is unrecognizable but thank Merlin Hermione did what she did. They're friends now, can you believe it? I can't.

Justin Finch-Fletchley: apparently he's from a very blue-blooded family in the Muggle world so he's going into wizard-Muggle relations. I'm sure he'll be brilliant at it…

Anthony Goldstein: rumor has it he's gone blind now, one of those dark curses. Or so says Hermione, who heard it from Lavender who heard it from Parvati who heard it from Padma (Merlin's beard) but if Hermione believes it so do I. You know, he liked photography too.

Dennis always unfolds the letters so they aren't wrinkled, and keeps them in a milk crate underneath his bed. But he doesn't write back.

Once he gets a telephone call, at his parents' house. He, Dennis Creevey, gets a telephone call, at his parents' house. When Mr. Creevey hands Dennis the receiver, Dennis can hardly form the words, so inconceivable is the whole thing. "Hello?"

"Rita Skeeter. Daily Prophet."

"How did you get this number?"

"Not important. Important: exclusive interview. How the tragic loss of your brother Caleb"—

Dennis balls his left hand into a fist; his nails make deep crescent moons on his palm. "Colin."

"Colin. How this loss has impacted you. You know. The human face to all the tragedy."

Dennis opens his hand again, and drops the receiver on the floor without even bothering to hang up.

In August, a list of school supplies comes by. Dennis reads it aloud tonelessly. He needs the Standard Book of Spells, Grade 5, and Intermediate Charm Theory. "Parents are reminded that first years are not allowed their own broomsticks," he finishes. "Signed, Minerva McGonagall. Did you guys get that?"

It's a feeble attempt at a joke, and Mr. Creevey merely fixes Dennis with an inscrutable look, before picking the letter up with two fingers to read it himself. Mrs. Creevey, at the sink doing the washing-up, says, "We could get you into the high school in Doncaster. Good school. You could do your exams in a couple years time. Maybe you could go to university. Sheffield Hallam's not too dear. Be the first of us to go, aye?"

Dennis does not particularly want to go to the high school in Doncaster. He does not want to take GCSEs or A-Levels or go to university. But he isn't sure he wants to go back to Hogwarts, either.

(Who would remind him what the passwords to the common room were?)

Dear Ginny,

Thanks for your letters. I didn't know Anthony Goldstein liked photography. I don't have Colin's camera anymore, but I wish I did.

He doesn't have a quill or parchment; he writes with a Bic pen on an A4 legal pad.

Are you going back to school next year?

He writes a few more lines, but then crosses them all out. He isn't sure what he wants to ask or tell her. Finally, he settles on:

I'm sorry about your brother.

Dennis

Ginny writes back within two days. It's a short letter, and written in a hurry: her handwriting is big and loopy, with big drops where the ink pooled on the parchment.

Dennis—

Come back. Come back and we'll try to make something of it. Promise.

Ginny

V.

Months later, many months later, Dennis gets a package: a cardboard box, sealed up and tied with a little twine.

Inside is Colin's camera, nestled in green tissue paper, battered and scratched but essentially intact. Dennis lifts it up from the box and sits down on his four-poster in Gryffindor Tower to examine it. A roll of undeveloped film is still tucked inside the camera: Colin's last photographs. The last things Colin saw. The last things Colin wanted to remember. The last things he thought were important.

But he knows if he developed the film, that then would be the last of it, and so he wraps the camera back up in the green tissue paper for a day when it will hurt less.

I'm going to go back in there. I'm nearly seventeen, anyways. You in?

Yeah, Colin. I'm in.