Through the Camera Lens

A.N: Whoa, a chaptered fic! This was particularly difficult, so I want to thank (as usual) Suburban House Elf for the support and tips! Colin is proving a difficult subject, so please excuse the probable delay between chapters! Enjoy!

Chapter 1- A Strange Letter.

Colin Creevey pushed his breakfast plate away from him and smiled at his mother.

‘Thanks, Mum,’ he said as Mrs. Creevey took the plate and turned to dump into the soap-filled sink.
Colin’s brother, Dennis, immediately pushed his plate away too, echoing Colin’s words. The siblings smiled at each other, Dennis’ face expressing something akin to hero-worship.

‘Now that you’re going to high school, we’ll have to go shopping this week and get all your things,’ Mrs. Creevey said proudly, giving her eldest son a contented smile.

Her little boy was growing up. It seemed like only yesterday they’d brought him home from the hospital. At least that experience had been hassle-free, unlike Dennis’ birth. THAT had involved an incident with a window somehow mysteriously losing a pane of glass when two year old Colin had been visiting.

Colin’s life up to this point had been extremely average. The son of a milkman, Colin and his family lived a standard middle-class life. He had attended the local school and would be moving onto high school in a few weeks. At school he had a couple of friends, none of them particularly close, since his slightly geeky appearance and over-enthusiastic manner caused the other children to avoid him, and call him ‘weird’ behind his back (and sometimes to his face).

It was true that he looked rather odd with his protruding teeth, thin blonde hair that never sat any other way than a precise comb-over despite Colin’s frustrated work on it, and large, milk-bottle glasses. The glasses had been the bane of Colin’s existence since he was around six years old and the other children had begun taunting him with cruel remarks. One bully had even thrown a rock at them, intending to break them but the lenses were so thick that they simply refused to shatter. Unfortunately this only made the situation worse. The bullies began to call him ‘Blindie’, a pointed alteration to the friendly ‘Blondie’ that his one friend at the time had taken to calling him. To be quite honest, most of the time Colin didn’t mind this teasing. His father once told him that it made him a stronger person and Colin was quite proud of the thick skin he’d developed over the years.

His brother had been a good friend over the years. When his other friends had disappeared without bothering to inform him of their whereabouts, Dennis was always happy to sit with him at lunch until Colin could go into the library. He normally borrowed out books on photography now; his mother had given him an old CLR camera for his last birthday in the hope that he would develop some sort of hobby. Fortunately for her, Colin had loved the gift and taken to carrying it with him anywhere. Soon he had an impressively large stack of photos, including some truly spectacular shots. When Colin realised his passion for capturing not just important moments and posed shots, but also random displays of human emotion, he began to learn everything he could in order to get the most out of his camera. His father was even helping him to set up a dark-room, so that he could develop his own photos the way he thought they would turn out the best. This project thrilled Barbara Creevy, who was so pleased that her eldest son had finally displayed some sort of talent and enthusiasm for a hobby that she quite happily consented to the under-stair cupboard being unceremoniously emptied of its coats, shoes, broken appliances and the vacuum cleaner one rainy Sunday afternoon, and her husband proceeding to spend a small fortune and many more hours, ensconced in the tiny room.

Suddenly they were interrupted from this moment of happy reminiscing by a sharp tapping noise.

‘What…?’ Barbara Creevey pondered as they looked for a source of the noise.

‘There!’ Tiny Dennis pointed at the window, where a large, regal-looking brown owl was watching them, an envelope in its beak.

Colin’s mouth dropped open in astonishment as Dennis bounced up and down in his seat laughing delightedly. He was not yet at the age where he would possess the maturity to consider such an occurrence strange, and, unlike Colin, thought it was a marvellous trick. Colin, however, was glued to his seat, utterly speechless. Not only was there an owl sitting on their windowsill-their WINDOWSILL! - in broad daylight, something which Colin had never seen before, but it also appeared to want to enter the kitchen. Not to mention the fact that it clasped an envelope tightly in its beak, quite comfortably, as though it did this sort of thing all the time!

Barbara opened the window, intending to shoo the creature away, but before she had a chance it had flown past her, landing briefly in front of Colin. It dropped the letter in front of him and ruffled its feathers importantly before disappearing once more through the window, just as Barbara got over her total astonishment and began to scream.

Dennis had sat, clapping his hands and bouncing in his chair, throughout the entire episode but Colin now moved for the first time since passing his plate up to his mother. He stretched out a hand to take the envelope, noticing the red seal on the back, and the envelope’s unexpected weight. A curious feeling rose in the pit of his stomach that he couldn’t describe, something he had never felt before. Truthfully, it felt as though, for the first time in Colin Creevy’s extremely average life, something totally unpredictable was going to happen. It felt like his whole life was about to change.

Little did he know that within five minutes, that was exactly what would happen.

Staring at the envelope, Colin wondered, just for a split second, what would happen if he didn’t open it. He turned it over and looked at the front, checking that it was in fact addressed to him. What he read astonished him. It had his name and his address, but in between these two normalities, were the words ‘The Kitchen Table’.

Colin frowned in confusion and mouthed silently a word that could have been, had he been speaking out loud, something akin to ‘what…?’

Barbara was watching her son curiously. There was something about him with that letter in his hand that made her feel distinctly strange. As though, in the space of less than a minute, he had grown up, become somebody totally different so that she had no idea who this strange young man was, who happened to be inhabiting the body of her eldest son. There was a strange presence about him, almost…ethereal in nature. Barbara snapped out of her reverie with a jolt, urging herself to get a grip.

Colin was still staring at the envelope as though expecting it to either bite him or disappear into a puff of smoke. In reality, he was expecting to wake up any minute in his bed to discover that everything that had happened that morning, even the mundane routine of breakfast, had been a dream. Perhaps that would have been more believable. 

‘Are you going to open it, Colin?’ Dennis asked curiously, his childish anticipation evident on his face.

Colin blinked, as though rousing from a trance and turned the envelope over again, examining the red seal. It had a crest on it with four animals, he couldn’t make out what. He carefully pulled the seal away from the thick paper and lifted the flap on the envelope, sliding out the several thick pieces of paper within. Colin began to read the first page silently, but within less than a minute he had dropped the pages, his whole body shaking.

‘What? What is it?’ Barbara asked anxiously, concern for her son blocking out any intention to pick the paper off the table and read it for herself.

Colin opened and shut his mouth several times, his whole face a picture of total disbelief, amazement, and most significantly, utter joy. Finally, he managed a hoarse whisper.

‘Hogwarts.’