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Fic: A Photograph of a Boy
A Photograph of a Boy
A Harry Potter fic by Rose Williams.
Owned by JK Rowling.

Rated G. 765 Words.
With many thanks to kaydeefalls and aillil for their wonderful help.
Written for deepfishy, who, many months ago, won a ficlet request and asked for Sirius and photographs.
There's only one photo, but it's looked at very differently over the years.

*


Sirius keeps a book in his bedside table. It’s a journal, given to him as he packed for Hogwarts and embossed with the Black family crest. He keeps it as a reminder of the man he might become, as a warning of where he might end up, and because James won’t read it. And he keeps it because it’s a safe place to hide his photograph.

He was given a camera as a Christmas gift the year he turned nine, but he only has one photo with him now. It’s of his brother sitting in the middle of his bed surrounded by Christmas presents. Regulus is grinning broadly, and a little shyly, at Sirius behind the camera. His hair is mussed, and in the photo his hand strays occasionally to smooth it.

Sirius writes in the journal because he would never keep something like that for ornamentation. He writes plans for fabulous pranks, lists of the relatives Remus has to see and the ones he mentions casually in conversation. But sometimes Sirius is just pretending to write when he gets the book out. He sits with it on his knee and watches his almost seven year old brother blinking the sleep out of his eyes.

It turns out Remus only has two aunts. And while one of them has an allergy to nuts, neither of them has even reached the street, let alone Death’s door. Remus is obviously hiding something, and Sirius writes a list of where he might be going each month when he claims to have dying relatives. It takes him too long to work out what Remus is hiding. But when he does, Sirius begins to write down everything he learns about Animagi, and then everything he learns about the school. He never writes about his family or his hope that Regulus will follow him into Gryffindor, or at least away from Slytherin.

Regulus is a faithful son. Four weeks and three days after he is sorted into Slytherin, he calls Sirius a blood traitor in the Great Hall at lunch. But Sirius still keeps the photo, even if he never looks at it anymore. They are studying to become Animagi, now, and Sirius is able to ignore his brother when he remembers the duty he has to his friends.

Three more years and they are Animagi, and their notes on the school are becoming a map. The photo stays in the book in his bedside table; he packs it automatically when he leaves school, and puts it beside his new bed in London.

The four Marauders don’t see each other as often as any of them would like now they’ve finished school. Sirius writes reminders in his journal of the last time he saw Peter or received a message from James. He remembers his brother every time he flicks past the photograph, and he fears bad news every time Remus returns from secret missions to his doorstep, but he has never imagined the hollowness in his voice.

“Regulus,” Remus says. Sirius doesn’t understand.

“They killed him.”

“Why?”

“We think that he betrayed them, or tried to,” Remus says.

Sirius closes the door in his face. He pours himself a small glass of Ogden’s and stands the photo up beside his bed.

Dumbledore sends Remus alone to Sirius’s flat to search his things. Remus is never sure exactly why, but he understands that no one else could go through Sirius’s things. No one else could stand to find the proof that their friend had betrayed them all.

Remus finds the book in Sirius’s bedside table, just where he always kept it. The photo fell from its place against the lamp. Remus picks it up off the floor and stares at it for a full minute. He thinks it’s Sirius. He keeps the photograph, not despite the pain it causes him, but because of it. It is proof that Sirius was a Black, that he was once happy with his family, that he had a reason to turn back to them.
Remus skims through Sirius’s diary just well enough to know that nothing in it will incriminate James or Peter. It contains all he knew about Animagi, but nothing on their plans to attempt the spell themselves; notes on the school, but nothing on the tracking spells they cast around it. Even as a child, Sirius was circumspect.

Then Remus gives the book, with the rest of Sirius’s personal belongings, to Dumbledore, but does not mention the photograph. He slides the happy Black child into his own photo album and forgets about him.


~*~