It is August. Somewhere in the middle of it, or perhaps nearer to the end. You can tell by the way the trees let go of their leaves, releasing them to the wind; not for autumn, but from the heat. And it is hot. You know it is, though you cannot feel it now. Not the prick of sun against your bare skin, nor the oppressive air that soaks your shirt with sweat. Not even the thirst that once had you reaching for a water bottle every few minutes.
Not even the sweet release of shade.
But though you cannot feel it, you can see it. You can see it all.
You can see him, impossibly young and energetic despite the weather pressing down on him, cheeks flushed with excitement as he talks animatedly about something or the other. You’re too far away to hear what he’s saying but you needn’t hear to know it – you’ve been here before. Many times, in fact. You always start in this garden, on this day, in this weather, with him talking about some new stuff he got for his camera.
And then you watch him. You watch his bare feet and his brown legs as he sits in the grass, looking so happy and carefree and alive that it hurts. His hair is lighter and brighter than you remember, no longer a mousy brown but more blond, the tips bleached by the summer sun. His skin shines faintly from the sunscreen, the same cheap stuff you both used, with that strangely chemical smell you can almost (but not quite) recall. It’s been too long.
And he’s missed a streak along his jaw.
And he’s laughing.
And though you knew it was coming, the sound knocks the breath from your lungs, and you have to take a moment to recover. A moment in which he rolls a red rubber ball towards you. You watch yourself nudge it back leisurely, complaining about the heat as it thuds dully across the dry grass until it stops before Colin.
He laughs again.
‘You’re just hot because you keep thinking about the heat,’ he says, and he claims the best way to survive weather like this is to lie under a tree and photograph the dying grass and the restless insects.
You suspect he thought photography was the best way to survive any moment (until, of course, it wasn’t).
Colin stands up as if to demonstrate this, releasing the ball. It falls from his hands and rolls aimlessly. You watch it for a while, then look back.
He’s small for his age. He looks more a boy than a sixteen-year-old teenager, yet he already moves with purpose and that kind of mature energy that made everyone forget how young he actually was. He moves towards a small, white butterfly and crouches over it, his fingers curling lovingly around the camera as he snaps a picture.
You have followed him and are now staring at the small white animal with puzzling intensity, as though insects could ever be more important than Colin. You wonder why you ever decided to look at the butterfly and not at Colin. Wonder why you never thought to cherish all the moments you had together. Wonder why you never noticed how perfect he looks in this light, and why you would choose to disregard even this shared activity; you walk back to the grass you just sat in and pick up the half-empty bottle of sunscreen that lies on the ground. You give it a squeeze, smearing the liquid across your neck and rubbing the excess onto your arms. Then you sit back down, mouth open from the heat, head away from Colin (who is still taking pictures of the butterfly with much enthusiasm).
And you stay seated like that, even as Colin laughs again.
His laughter disturbs the butterfly and it flies across the garden. Colin chases after it, still laughing. Always laughing. Always happy. Always excited. Even now, even though you know better, it seems impossible that his face could arrange itself into anything but a wide smile, and it cuts right through you. It makes your sides hurt and turns your mind all fuzzy.
The next thing you see is that Colin stops running; the butterfly has flown out of his reach and left the garden. He wanders around until he’s near the ball, and he kicks it. It rolls towards you, and you reach out to catch it.
Then, without warning, as you are trying to catch the ball, Colin turns the camera on you. The shutter clicks. He captures the boy you were: scowling and impatient, pushing the lens away, telling him to shut it, coming with excuses, telling him it’s too hot for pictures when you were actually just sick of them. Sick of him.
You didn’t yet know that these were some of the last ordinary moments you would ever share with your brother. You couldn’t have known these were the last few hours without the constant threat of being captured and killed. The world already wanted you dead, yes, but you could still easily pretend it wasn’t so.
And you pushed him away. Literally. And you wish you could do over this moment. Wish you could tell yourself to behave. To enjoy this moment. To stop caring about the heat and just appreciate him.
And you wish Colin could take a hundred more pictures and then some, pictures of you both on this day, in this moment.
Because right now, the world was still whole, and life was still good.
But it won’t last long.
Yes, you know exactly what happens next. And though you don’t want to watch it unfold, you still do. You see the shadow cut across the garden and hear the clumsy flapping of wings. The owl lands badly, its chest heaving, its feathers splayed out and puffed. It looks so absurdly out of place in the Muggle garden, the Daily Prophet clutched in its beak, a leather pouch tied to its leg, that you wouldn’t have blamed Colin for wanting to photograph it if he did. But he didn’t. He doesn’t. He sets the camera aside at once and coaxes it into the shade. You find a shallow dish, fill it with water. Colin feeds it scraps. The bird drinks greedily, then frantically dunks his head in, and then the rest of its body, cooling down.
‘That’s better, isn’t it?’ Colin whispers, stroking the feathers at the neck. You remember those fingers against yours as you take the Prophet from the owl. You remember them being warm and clammy then. You remember them cold later. Cold and stiff and slightly discoloured.
You want to turn away, leave it at this. You usually do. You don’t want to be reminded of what happens after this. You don’t want to see them smooth out the Daily Prophet on the grass, and you don’t want to see them find the names: Colin Creevey. Dennis Creevey. Not there. Not on the list of Muggle-borns that ‘failed to present for interrogation’.
But, well, you do. And you watch yourself fall silent. You watch the fierce, unstoppable spark in your brother’s eyes. You watch the quarrel about what to do next. Go on the run. Don’t come back.
‘We should join the fight,’ says Colin. ‘Do something before it’s too late.’
‘We can’t,’ you say, and you brace yourself for what’s coming, somehow unable to look away from these two boys, who argue about things they didn’t yet understand. Things you wish you never learnt to understand. ‘We don’t even know how to fight!’
But Colin doesn’t listen. ‘We do,’ he insists. ‘Harry taught us, didn’t he? He –’
‘He just just taught us a couple of spells – !’
‘He taught us what we need to fight! Harry would want –’
‘This isn’t the same as the DA! This is dangerous. It’s war!’
You suck in a breath; ‘I can fight,’ Colin says, and his face is serious. ‘I know I can. I’m good. Better than good. Outstanding. I got Outstanding –’
‘Doing well on a bloody school exam doesn’t mean you can run off into a war – !’
‘It means exactly that!’ he yells, his voice breaking. ‘It means I can’t just stand back and watch the world break and crumble and be destroyed!’
‘You can’t fight them, Colin. It’s a death sentence …’
You release your breath, walking away from the scene before Colin can shout his rebuttal. You wish you had walked away before, because you feel dizzy and your hands are trembling, even now the voices are far away and you can no longer hear them. Because you don’t need to hear them to know how it all went down. The memory is fresh enough, even if you stayed longer now than you normally do – you always leave before the owl arrives, before the newspaper, before this conversation, precisely because of what it does to you.
You always leave, even though you want nothing more than to seize him, shake him, scream that OWLs don’t stop curses, that nothing will protect him, that you can’t lose him because you will lose him. You want to take him in your arms and hold him so tightly he can’t ever leave you again. You want to do anything that might keep him here, keep yourself here, keep you both together. You want to rewrite the hours, the weeks, the years that come after this moment.
You want to feel whole again.
But you can’t. And so you leave, because you can’t bear to watch what happens. You can’t bear the fight, or Colin’s running away. You cannot bear that you ran after him. Not to stop him or bring him back, but to go with him. You cannot bear that he convinced you to go, to change your mind.
You cannot bear the fact that that ultimately led to his death.
And because you cannot bear it, you leave.
You wrench yourself out of the Pensieve, away from the memory.
When you resurface, the grass is gone. The heat is gone. The ball is gone.
Colin is gone.
You release the feelings you were holding back as tears trickle down your nose – anger, sadness, grief, an inexplicable sense of guilt – and look around your living room. It is dark. Cold. Silent but for the sound of your own heart in your ears, thumping hard.
You break down; you are not fourteen any more. You are not in that garden.
And you will never see your brother again.