Title: Wands in the Cabinet; Challenge: Colin Creevey

[vegablack62.livejournal.com]

Title: Wands in the Cabinet
Author: Vegablack62
Characters: Colin Creevey, Denis Creevey, their dad
Word Count: 1,250
Rating: G
Prompt: Colin Creevey
Summary:  After the return of You-Know-Who, Colin and Denis return home for the summer

Derek Creevey took his son's wands from them as soon as they stepped off the train from school.  The Hogwarts people had been very firm that the boys were not allowed to use them at home and would be punished severely if they did.  Denis and Colin were good boys but a bit exuberant, so to avoid all temptation, he thought it best to lock the wands up, as he would a gun or another dangerous weapon.  His boys could do powerful things with these bits of wood; at least he had been told they could by their teachers, and the boys themselves.  He wouldn’t know from his own experience, except from the day they'd purchased their wands, he'd never seen his sons use them.  He had no way to watch them work at school and they never preformed magic at home. 

 

He looked down at the wands.  Strange how in his hands they became simple polished sticks, inert and powerless while in the hands of his sons they were so much more.  He wondered if the sticks were asleep now.  Did their power lay dormant when they were away from their owners, or was it there pulsing beneath his fingers, but hidden away from him by his own lack of magic?  

Through the bus ride home the boys throbbed with bottled up excitement.  Most trips home they rarely spoke on the bus ride from platform 9 3/4, afraid of revealing too much to any listeners in the seats around them, but today the tension of keeping silent seemed stronger.   Their father became more and more nervous himself, afraid of what he would hear from his sons.  At Hogwarts an unusual event was more often than not, a dangerous one.

As soon as they were home and the house door shut behind them, Colin shouted, "You-Know-Who is back."

"And he killed Cedric," Dennis added, his eyes as round as coins. "He tried to kill Harry too, but of course he couldn't."

"You-Know-Who? Isn't he dead?  Didn't Potter kill him?  Isn't that why the boy is famous?"  Derek ignored the bit about killing.  He hoped Denis was exaggerating or dramatizing.  This Cedric was an older student the boys were jealous of, because he was competing with their hero Harry.  

"Harry didn't kill him -- he destroyed him, but he came back somehow, and killed Cedric," Colin answered.  "Poor Cedric, now that he's dead, I wish we hadn't hated him so much."

Both boys nodded at that very seriously.  Derek stared back at his sons, their wands still in his hands. After all he'd been through with Colin and Denis, the bizarre happenings, the explosions and burstings, the frightened neighbors, and the uncomfortable meetings with school officials over strange incidents; he had still been unprepared for life at the wizard school.  If Colin hadn't shown him pictures, he wouldn't have believed half of what he heard, and even with the pictures he found it hard.  But this he believed instantly, because it scared him so much.  That a boy died at school, no was murdered there by an evil man, known as You-Know-Who, was  the worst he'd heard, worse even then the news that Colin had been turned into stone, by some lizard creature. The comical name of the killer made the whole thing more frightening and more believable some how.

"Tell me everything," he demanded.  "Don't leave anything out."

What followed was a convoluted story that he understood with difficulty.  Potter and Cedric, both competitors in the Tri-wizard contest, completed the final task and reached the goal, together, coming up even.  They both decided to share the cup that was the prize and proof of winning, since neither felt they had defeated the other. 

"But Harry was a lot younger than Cedric, so that makes him the winner really," Colin insisted with Denis's agreement.

Derek had been shocked that a child so young had been allowed to compete in such a dangerous contest.   The excuse given, that the boy had been entered against his will into a magical contract that even the teachers could not break, made it even worse, though the teachers seemed to think it a decent explanation.    He nodded to keep the boys talking.  The story became even harder for him to follow.  The cup turned out to be a portkey – some method of travel. The word port in the name explainied it, he supposed.  Cedric and Harry were brought by this cup to a graveyard where You-Know-Who was waiting to be resurrected. Cedric was killed and Harry barely escaped with his life and his friend's body.  The whole story was unbearably horrifying.  To buy himself some time from Colin’s and Denis’s excited eyes he walked across the room and locked up the wands and then returned to his sons forcing himself to be calm.

 

When the witch from the school first invited him to send Colin to Hogwarts, the answer had seemed simple. He’d been relieved to find that he wasn’t mad – Colin really did have unusual powers.  He agreed with the teacher that the boy needed to learn to control them and the school was the best place for him to do that. Now, after hearing of the murder of a boy just one year after Colin himself had been frozen like a stone by a giant magical lizard monster, he wanted to stop the whole thing.

 

If Colin and Denis were in danger, he’d be unable to help them.  The whole year that Colin had been frozen he’d been unable to see him.  He didn’t even know how to find Hogwarts. While the teachers had been kind, they’d treated him like a dimwit who could never understand what the smart people knew.  They thought he’d best sit in the corner and wait for them to fix everything.   By the time Colin had recovered Derek had decided to end the boy’s time at the school, but Colin came home so happy, happier than he’d been anywhere else, so sure that the magical world was where he belonged that Derek allowed him to return to Hogwarts. He even sent Denis to the school after him. Now things were different, a student, a child really, was dead.

 

“Colin and Denis couldn’t you go to school here in our world?” Derek asked. “You could make new friends in the neighborhood, live here with me, we’d be a family all the time. You could go to school where boys don’t die.”

 

“No Dad,” Denis shouted.

 

Colin put his hand up in a motion that looked nothing like a child.  He was getting older. “Dad, I love Hogwarts. I’m a wizard and I should live with wizards.  I’m not leaving.  I’m going to stay at Hogwarts no matter what happens. I don’t belong anywhere else.”

 

Derek Creevey was defeated and he knew it. Colin had been completely smitten with his new life the day his father bought him a wand, the wand that had chosen him. “It picked me!” he said to his father over and over again on the trip home.  There was no turning back. The boys would return to Hogwarts and their life as wizards as soon as the summer ended.   He looked over to the locked cabinet that held the wands. They were a family just the three of them together, as long as those bits of wood stayed under key. He had less than three months.