I do not own Harry Potter. Colin doesn't get nearly enough love.

A man from their world comes to help with the police-it's not every day a healthy fifteen year old boy drops dead without a mark on his body, and they'll need a story. And thank God he's come, because Edith can't move, much less lie to the police. Dennis tells them what happened-he says there's a war, and she thinks of deserts and bombs, but it's much more quotidian-a castle in Scotland and a jet of green light that struck at exactly the wrong place. Of course she'd put him there, when she agreed to the whole foolhardy endeavor nearly six years ago. He also says they won, and almost smiles when he does, but there's never been a more meaningless victory in the world.

The walls of his bedroom are all plastered with photographs, each one moving. She's gotten used to it over the years, but she's never really been comfortable to look at them as she does now. There's the same boy, repeated over and over, bright green eyes smiling up in surprise at the camera flash. She pictures Colin's nervous grin at the other end of the lens, the way he would blush and fiddle with his fingers while talking about Harry Potter. She thinks, at least he was in love, then wonders if maybe he would be alive if he hadn't been.

There's an open casket at the funeral, and people are mostly kind enough not to whisper about the strangeness of it all in front of her. Of course he's been away at school for the past five years, so all his aunts and uncles crow over how tall he is, and how mature he looks. Edith knows it's not nearly mature-he's a boy, and they had him fighting their war. Dennis slips Colin's wand into the casket, closing his bluing fingers around it. She wants nothing more than to pull it back out and snap it in half, in a million pieces, but there's her fourteen-year-old son kneeling beside the fifteen-year-old, and she can't move.

She doesn't cry until they're singing-Amazing Grace-and even then it's not really crying, but she can't breathe, somehow, and she's gasping for air, and-he'd stopped taking summer classes two years ago, he'd left their world, he'd left them. He probably couldn't have told you the name of the Prime Minister.

His coffin is light. The pallbearers set him in his grave as if he is nothing. And that's the last she sees of her boy. She wonders if maybe he's disappeared from beneath the earth, magicked himself away, magicked blood into his veins and electricity into his muscles, pictures him laughing at her grief. She's never really understood what it means to be a wizard.

She doesn't sleep that night, but stays awake and looks at photographs of him, snickering and smiling until the age of twelve, when he dwindled away to the eye behind the lens. She stares at empty landscapes until her eyes ache, trying to will him safe inside them, but she keeps thinking of green light and wondering if it hurt much, if he knew what was happening, if he had time to be afraid.

Dennis is crying upstairs, and she ought to go to him, of course, but her legs seem to have broken.

When she asks Dennis if there's a spell, a charm, anything that can undo it he starts sobbing. But then she already knew that answer, because if there was something powerful enough to will breath back into his body surely it would have been the way she wants to tear her own soul in two and offer it up to him. Her boy.

She doesn't sleep, and she keeps the light on in his room, and she waits, as she has since he was eleven, for her son to come home.

Thanks for reading! Hope you enjoyed it. Reviews are always welcome.