Fic Challenge #7, Part 1
Title: The Talking Photograph
Summary: While trying to hide a failed experiment, Lily Potter and Hugo Weasley find a talking photograph in the Room of Hidden Things. The woman in the photograph wants to know if they can help her find her baby...
Characters/Pairings: Hugo Weasley, Lily Potter, OCs
Genre: Mystery
Rating/Warnings: PG
Medium: Fic
Word Count: 3,288
The seventh floor corridor was empty when a door appeared in the wall where no door had been before and two third-years quietly slipped behind it. Hugo Weasley suppressed a grin. It had all gone so well- not bad for their first time trying out the Room of Requirement. But there would be time to celebrate later. Right now they had a mission, and he still had to convince Lily.
"Are you sure this will work?" she hissed at him as she carefully closed the door behind them. "I know James said it would, but do you really trust him? Are you sure no one will be able to find it?"
"Lily, we can talk in here," Hugo said. "It's completely empty. Besides, just look at this place! It's perfect. Even if anyone figures out where we put it in the first place, what are the odds they'll be able to track it down in here, with all this other rubbish everywhere?"
Lily turned from the door and looked around, taking in the cavernously large room with high windows. Hugo admired it with her. The walls were streaked with black soot, as if there had once been a very large fire in the room, and even the floorboards looked a bit charred and discolored. In some corners, there were piles of ash that might once have been objects. Some of the piles of abandoned or hidden things in the room also bore telltale signs of fire damage, but there were plenty that looked relatively untarnished as well. Hugo found it hard to tell just how long ago the fire had occurred. Had it been decades, or merely years? What had happened to cause so much damage? In any case, it was clear the room had continued to receive use after it was burned.
While Lily was still looking around, Hugo seized the Snitch from her hand and began weaving his way between rows of rubbish, warped desks and wardrobes, rusting cages of various sizes, and a disassembled suit of armor. The Snitch in his hand still twisted and bubbled faintly, struggling against the effects of the experimental spells they had clumsily cast on it. He could feel it leaking something damp onto his hand and thought that it was probably still sweating ink. Behind him, Lily's trotting footsteps caught up and she fell into step beside him as they wandered the room, looking for an appropriate hiding place.
"I don't like this," she muttered. "I feel like someone's about to walk in and catch us."
"Then let's hurry up and get rid of this thing," Hugo replied, pausing and casting a glance about their immediate vicinity.
"And let's not do this again," Lily suggested. "Stick to charms we know and stay out of the Restricted Section."
"Well, I don't know about staying out of the Restricted Section," Hugo said slyly. "Admit it, that was pretty cool."
The corners of Lily's mouth twitched up in agreement. "It was kind of fun. I just wish we hadn't decided to waste a perfectly good Snitch."
Hugo rolled his eyes just as he noticed a likely-looking chest. "How about we put it in here?"
Lily nodded and they stepped over to the cracked, dirty chest. It was streaked with lines of soot and also something suspiciously shimmery, so Hugo tried to touch as little of the lid as possible. Inside was a hodgepodge of yellowing envelopes, bits of broken glass, several old books, and assorted prank items. With a soft cry of triumph, Lily grabbed a single brown wool sock and Hugo, taking the hint, promptly shoved the Snitch inside and wrapped the sock around it. The sock continued to wriggle with decreasing ferocity and they were about to close the lid and be done with the whole messy affair when a soft voice made them both jump about a foot in the air.
"Hello? Is someone there?"
Lily froze, suddenly tense, and glared at Hugo. "I thought you said there was no one here! I told you this was a bad idea," she hissed.
Hugo shrugged helplessly, eyes wide with panic.
"Hello?" the voice, melodic and feminine, called again. But it didn't seem to be coming from anywhere near them. It almost seemed to be coming from...
"The chest!" Hugo cried, and immediately began digging around through the rubbish. After a few seconds, he pulled out one of the old envelopes.
"Is someone there?" the envelope asked.
Lily squeaked and stared at it.
Hugo carefully opened the envelope and pulled out a photograph of a lovely blonde woman in silky robes standing in front of a blank stone wall. She had very long eyelashes and a confused, frightened expression. Darkness seemed to creep in from the edges of the room where she stood, making her look like a cornered prey animal. The woman in the photograph blinked at them.
"Can you help me?" she asked plaintively.
"But photographs can't talk," Lily said instinctively.
"Obviously this one can," Hugo retorted.
"Can you help me?" the woman repeated.
Hugo dropped the envelope back into the chest and took a seat on the floor, regarding the woman with intent curiosity. "What do you need help with?"
"I can't find my baby." She looked around the inside of her photograph, seeming to glance past the edges and around the room she was in, and lowered her voice slightly. "I think Antoine took my baby. He left me a note, but I don't know where he put it. It had a black seal on it with a rose, his seal."
"Maybe it's in here," Hugo suggested, pawing around through the old envelopes some more.
"Who are you?" Lily asked, staring wide-eyed at the photograph, her voice unusually quiet. "Who's Antoine? What happened to you?"
"My name is Charlotte Deschamps," the woman replied. "I can't find my baby."
"Is this it?" Hugo asked, holding up an envelope with an unbroken black seal, imprinted in the middle with the shape of a rose. He showed it to Charlotte.
"It's his seal!" she gasped. "The note! What does it say?"
Hugo began trying to break the seal, but Lily put a cautionary hand on his arm. "Are you sure we should be doing this right now? Shouldn't we just get out of here before we get caught, like you were saying earlier? Besides, I don't think there's anything we can do to help her."
"We could at least read her the note," Hugo protested, any worries of being found completely forgotten. He cracked the seal down the middle and opened the crinkling paper of the envelope. A folded piece of parchment and small whitish stone tumbled out. While Lily studied the stone, Hugo immediately went for the letter.
"La vérité est dans la gemme," Hugo read aloud. "That's it. Just one sentence in the middle of the page, in French. What does it mean?"
Lily shrugged. "I don't know, I don't speak French. We should ask Dominique or Louis. Can we get out of here now? Something doesn't feel right."
"That's what you've been saying this entire time," Hugo complained. "And has anything bad happened? I don't think so. But I reckon we probably should get back before anyone starts wondering where we are."
He closed the chest and picked up the photograph of Charlotte and the letter, ignoring Lily's impatient glares. They picked their way out of the room and back into the seventh floor corridor across from the tapestry of Barnabas the Barmy. The door to the Room of Requirement disappeared behind them.
*****
It wasn't until breakfast the next morning that Hugo found time to go over to the Gryffindor table and seek out Louis for a translation of the note. He left Lily drooping half-asleep over her eggs, mumbling about how useless it would all be, and stared at the note once more as he unfolded it on his way over. The parchment it was written on was thick and high-quality, but whoever had written the note had used some peculiar sort of red ink and had truly atrocious handwriting. The only reason Hugo had been able to read it at all was due to practice reading his own atrocious handwriting.
Without preamble, Hugo dropped the note next to Louis's plate and recited, "La vérité est dans la gemme. What does that mean?"
"Good morning to you, too," Louis muttered, staring down at the note. "The truth is in the gem, I think. Or gemstone, maybe. I'm not the best at French. Who wrote this, anyway? It looks creepy, like it was written in blood."
"No idea who wrote it," Hugo replied, snatching the note back up. "It might have been someone named Antoine. That's what I want to know, too."
Louis tried to strike up a friendly conversation, making small talk about breakfast, but Hugo was halfway back to the Ravenclaw table by the time his cousin finished the sentence.
"Louis thinks it means 'the truth is in the gem'," he explained to Lily, who was still looking decidedly drowsy. "What gem do you think he means? Do you think it's about the truth of what happened to Charlotte?"
"I haven't got a clue," she replied, a bit snappishly, then suddenly looked thoughtful. "Unless it's referring to the stone that was in the envelope."
"What, that little white rock?"
"Yeah. I think it might have been some kind of gemstone." Her face screwed up in concentration as she tried to remember. "Moonstone, probably. But I didn't get a close look at it. I picked it up and then got the shivers. You know how I kept feeling like something was weird in there."
Their conversation was interrupted by the arrival of the mail and Lily's copy of the Daily Prophet, which proved to be enough distraction that both of them forgot about the note and photograph for several hours.
*****
They were sitting in Divination, Hugo trying desperately not to fall asleep due to the heat of the room and the lack of anything to actually interest him and Lily staring intently into their crystal ball. It was just like any other Divination class, really. Hugo was nearly starting to drift off, staring blankly into space, when suddenly Lily let out a quiet gasp. This brought Hugo back to alertness enough to give her a curious look.
"I think I can see something," she explained, leaning in so close to the crystal ball that her nose nearly touched the glass. "More than the usual misty blobs, I mean. Like an animal. It's got four legs, and that might be a tail, but it's not very clear... Almost like the shape of it is changing. I can't tell if it's big or small. See, now it looks like a dog, but now it looks like some kind of weasel, maybe. "
Hugo leaned forward and looked into the crystal, but couldn't see anything even vaguely clear. He shrugged. "Whatever you're seeing, I can't see it. I wonder what it means."
While Lily continued to stare, brow furrowed, Hugo rifled through the chapter on crystal balls in their textbook, searching for possible interpretations. His search proved to be less than helpful. By the time Professor Trelawney came over, Lily had lost whatever she had been seeing in the crystal ball and the pair of them made up a description of a large bag of galleons. Hugo claimed he expected one of them to win a bet in the near future, and the aging professor merely nodded in satisfaction and moved onto the next table, where she began exclaiming dramatically about death omens in Brenna Finnegan's crystal ball.
Lily was still preoccupied with the misty animal by the time they left Divination and headed down to Charms. Hugo, on the other hand, had turned his thoughts once more to the letter.
"How could the truth be in the gem? It didn't have any writing on it, did it? Could you see anything unusual about it?" he asked Lily, hoping she could pull herself out of her own thoughts long enough to answer.
"Was it a weasel, like Weasley?" she muttered under her breath. "And what was the dog, then?"
Hugo huffed in annoyance and neither of them noticed the group of first year Hufflepuffs walking directly toward them until Lily had collided with one and sent them both sprawling to the floor. She immediately picked herself up and began helping him gather his things, as his book bag had fallen open.
"I'm so sorry," she apologized, handing the small brown-haired boy a stack of books. "I wasn't watching where I was going."
"It's fine," the boy replied, taking the books with a shy smile.
"Oi, Mark! Hurry up!" one of the other first years called. They seemed to be in a hurry to get to their next class and the rest of the group were already halfway down the corridor. The boy called Mark gave Lily another slight smile, gave Hugo a polite nod of acknowledgement, and hurried over to join his housemates. Lily watched him go with a curious expression on her face, but only shrugged when Hugo asked her what she was looking at. They continued on to Charms without further incident.
*****
"I think something bad happened to Charlotte," Hugo announced over dinner.
"Who?" Lily asked, her mouth full of peas.
"The woman in the photograph, remember?" He ignored her look of boredom and continued on. "I was looking at it again earlier. She looks so scared. And do you remember the way shadows seem to creep in at the edges? It looks like she's in a dungeon."
Lily rolled her eyes. "I don't see why you're so obsessed with that stupid photo and that letter. They could be fifty years old for all we know. I don't think you'll be able to find her baby or whatever you're trying to do."
"As if being obsessed with some animal blob in a crystal ball is any better," Hugo shot back.
"But what I saw was real!" Lily protested, voice rising in volume. "There's been actual proof of people seeing things in crystal balls, you know. Or you would, if you ever paid attention in Divination. It's like you live in your own imaginary world, Hugo. 'Oh, let's try out these weird charms from a book in the Restricted Section, let's talk to a strange photograph from the Room of Requirement.' Since when do photos talk, anyway? I thought only portraits could do that. It's probably just a prank photo. You should try living in the real world sometimes, where stuff has consequences. Now, if you don't mind, I'm going to do something that actually matters, like homework."
As she stormed off, Hugo noticed that everyone around him was staring.
"Guess it's her time of the month or something," he muttered, earning a few laughs, then got up and left the table.
He went to the library and looked up books about photography. Most of the old books failed to mention anything about what he was looking for, which was disappointing, but some of the more recent ones mentioned developments in fancy cameras that were able to capture voices as well as movements. One of the books had a discussion about whether someone with enough skill might be able to capture a bit of personality as well. It was like capturing a person in time, saved in a photograph. Food for thought.
Hugo began compiling a list of things he wanted to know, questions to ask Charlotte. When he was satisfied and had found nothing further of interest in the photography books, he headed back to the tower. He went to his dormitory, removed Charlotte's photograph from his bedside table, and found an empty bit of common room where he could talk to her under the guise of reading his Potions book (so long as he didn't talk too loudly or move his lips too much).
"Where are you?" he started off quietly, getting right to business once he was comfortably situated.
"I'm in a photograph," Charlotte replied.
"No, not that. I mean where were you when the photograph was taken?"
Charlotte appeared to think for a moment. "In my house. Mine and Michael's house. In the cellar."
Hugo nodded. "What happened before it was taken?"
"I... Michael wasn't home. It was stormy. I had just put the baby to bed. Antoine showed up at the front door and let himself in. He had a letter, put it on the table. He shouted at me and took me down to the cellar and took my picture." She bit her lip and looked off to the side guiltily. Hugo wondered how much she wasn't telling him.
"Who are Michael and Antoine?" he continued on regardless.
"Michael is my husband. Antoine used to be my... I left him. He was supposed to stay in France. I thought he'd forget about me when I stopped writing back." She still looked a bit uncomfortable.
"Oh," Hugo said, intrigued. "What happened after he took your picture?"
Charlotte stared blankly.
"You don't know," he figured out, disappointed. "Well, how old was your baby?"
A loving smile crossed Charlotte's usually frightened and confused features. "Just over a year. He had a lovely little party with just the three of us for his birthday."
Hugo glanced down at his list, trying to figure out which direction to head in next.
"Are you talking to your Potions book, Weasley?" a voice suddenly asked.
Hugo quickly closed the book, hiding Charlotte between the pages, and looked up to see Will Davies staring at him.
"Why do you need to know?" he asked in a neutral tone of voice, then happened to glance around the common room and saw how empty it was. It would be much harder to go unnoticed now, and it must have been getting late if it was so deserted. He probably ought to start working on homework... Hugo reluctantly turned his attention to the essay that was due tomorrow, and set aside thoughts of Charlotte.
*****
Hugo was delighted to find that Lily was no longer angry at him in the morning when she plopped down next to him at breakfast. After a moment, however, he noticed that she was barely touching her food and had a frazzled, wide-eyed look quite unlike her usual sleepy morning demeanor.
"Are you all right?" he asked, watching her push pieces of bacon around on her plate.
Lily looked up at him. "Fine. I just had a really weird dream last night."
"Want to talk about it?"
After a minute of thought, Lily nodded. "It was mostly about this strange man. He was tall, skinny, and had all kinds of scars on his face, like he'd been attacked by something. He talked to me, but I don't remember all of what he said. He mentioned Charlotte and something about letters. That's the part I figured you'd want to know. He kept talking about Charlotte and her baby and the truth. I can't get his voice out of my head. I really think we should go back to the Room of Requirement, to the trunk where we found the picture. Usually dreams like this happen for a reason, I reckon."
Hugo tried not to look too excited, because it had clearly not been an entirely pleasant dream for her, but couldn't keep a slight smile off his face. "I think we should go this afternoon, since classes end early and we'll have most of the afternoon free."
Lily nodded, and he was thrilled that she was finally getting a bit more serious about the whole thing.
3288/30 = 110
3288/500= 7 for challenge
Total: 117 points
Summary: While trying to hide a failed experiment, Lily Potter and Hugo Weasley find a talking photograph in the Room of Hidden Things. The woman in the photograph wants to know if they can help her find her baby...
Characters/Pairings: Hugo Weasley, Lily Potter, OCs
Genre: Mystery
Rating/Warnings: PG
Medium: Fic
Word Count: 3,288
The seventh floor corridor was empty when a door appeared in the wall where no door had been before and two third-years quietly slipped behind it. Hugo Weasley suppressed a grin. It had all gone so well- not bad for their first time trying out the Room of Requirement. But there would be time to celebrate later. Right now they had a mission, and he still had to convince Lily.
"Are you sure this will work?" she hissed at him as she carefully closed the door behind them. "I know James said it would, but do you really trust him? Are you sure no one will be able to find it?"
"Lily, we can talk in here," Hugo said. "It's completely empty. Besides, just look at this place! It's perfect. Even if anyone figures out where we put it in the first place, what are the odds they'll be able to track it down in here, with all this other rubbish everywhere?"
Lily turned from the door and looked around, taking in the cavernously large room with high windows. Hugo admired it with her. The walls were streaked with black soot, as if there had once been a very large fire in the room, and even the floorboards looked a bit charred and discolored. In some corners, there were piles of ash that might once have been objects. Some of the piles of abandoned or hidden things in the room also bore telltale signs of fire damage, but there were plenty that looked relatively untarnished as well. Hugo found it hard to tell just how long ago the fire had occurred. Had it been decades, or merely years? What had happened to cause so much damage? In any case, it was clear the room had continued to receive use after it was burned.
While Lily was still looking around, Hugo seized the Snitch from her hand and began weaving his way between rows of rubbish, warped desks and wardrobes, rusting cages of various sizes, and a disassembled suit of armor. The Snitch in his hand still twisted and bubbled faintly, struggling against the effects of the experimental spells they had clumsily cast on it. He could feel it leaking something damp onto his hand and thought that it was probably still sweating ink. Behind him, Lily's trotting footsteps caught up and she fell into step beside him as they wandered the room, looking for an appropriate hiding place.
"I don't like this," she muttered. "I feel like someone's about to walk in and catch us."
"Then let's hurry up and get rid of this thing," Hugo replied, pausing and casting a glance about their immediate vicinity.
"And let's not do this again," Lily suggested. "Stick to charms we know and stay out of the Restricted Section."
"Well, I don't know about staying out of the Restricted Section," Hugo said slyly. "Admit it, that was pretty cool."
The corners of Lily's mouth twitched up in agreement. "It was kind of fun. I just wish we hadn't decided to waste a perfectly good Snitch."
Hugo rolled his eyes just as he noticed a likely-looking chest. "How about we put it in here?"
Lily nodded and they stepped over to the cracked, dirty chest. It was streaked with lines of soot and also something suspiciously shimmery, so Hugo tried to touch as little of the lid as possible. Inside was a hodgepodge of yellowing envelopes, bits of broken glass, several old books, and assorted prank items. With a soft cry of triumph, Lily grabbed a single brown wool sock and Hugo, taking the hint, promptly shoved the Snitch inside and wrapped the sock around it. The sock continued to wriggle with decreasing ferocity and they were about to close the lid and be done with the whole messy affair when a soft voice made them both jump about a foot in the air.
"Hello? Is someone there?"
Lily froze, suddenly tense, and glared at Hugo. "I thought you said there was no one here! I told you this was a bad idea," she hissed.
Hugo shrugged helplessly, eyes wide with panic.
"Hello?" the voice, melodic and feminine, called again. But it didn't seem to be coming from anywhere near them. It almost seemed to be coming from...
"The chest!" Hugo cried, and immediately began digging around through the rubbish. After a few seconds, he pulled out one of the old envelopes.
"Is someone there?" the envelope asked.
Lily squeaked and stared at it.
Hugo carefully opened the envelope and pulled out a photograph of a lovely blonde woman in silky robes standing in front of a blank stone wall. She had very long eyelashes and a confused, frightened expression. Darkness seemed to creep in from the edges of the room where she stood, making her look like a cornered prey animal. The woman in the photograph blinked at them.
"Can you help me?" she asked plaintively.
"But photographs can't talk," Lily said instinctively.
"Obviously this one can," Hugo retorted.
"Can you help me?" the woman repeated.
Hugo dropped the envelope back into the chest and took a seat on the floor, regarding the woman with intent curiosity. "What do you need help with?"
"I can't find my baby." She looked around the inside of her photograph, seeming to glance past the edges and around the room she was in, and lowered her voice slightly. "I think Antoine took my baby. He left me a note, but I don't know where he put it. It had a black seal on it with a rose, his seal."
"Maybe it's in here," Hugo suggested, pawing around through the old envelopes some more.
"Who are you?" Lily asked, staring wide-eyed at the photograph, her voice unusually quiet. "Who's Antoine? What happened to you?"
"My name is Charlotte Deschamps," the woman replied. "I can't find my baby."
"Is this it?" Hugo asked, holding up an envelope with an unbroken black seal, imprinted in the middle with the shape of a rose. He showed it to Charlotte.
"It's his seal!" she gasped. "The note! What does it say?"
Hugo began trying to break the seal, but Lily put a cautionary hand on his arm. "Are you sure we should be doing this right now? Shouldn't we just get out of here before we get caught, like you were saying earlier? Besides, I don't think there's anything we can do to help her."
"We could at least read her the note," Hugo protested, any worries of being found completely forgotten. He cracked the seal down the middle and opened the crinkling paper of the envelope. A folded piece of parchment and small whitish stone tumbled out. While Lily studied the stone, Hugo immediately went for the letter.
"La vérité est dans la gemme," Hugo read aloud. "That's it. Just one sentence in the middle of the page, in French. What does it mean?"
Lily shrugged. "I don't know, I don't speak French. We should ask Dominique or Louis. Can we get out of here now? Something doesn't feel right."
"That's what you've been saying this entire time," Hugo complained. "And has anything bad happened? I don't think so. But I reckon we probably should get back before anyone starts wondering where we are."
He closed the chest and picked up the photograph of Charlotte and the letter, ignoring Lily's impatient glares. They picked their way out of the room and back into the seventh floor corridor across from the tapestry of Barnabas the Barmy. The door to the Room of Requirement disappeared behind them.
*****
It wasn't until breakfast the next morning that Hugo found time to go over to the Gryffindor table and seek out Louis for a translation of the note. He left Lily drooping half-asleep over her eggs, mumbling about how useless it would all be, and stared at the note once more as he unfolded it on his way over. The parchment it was written on was thick and high-quality, but whoever had written the note had used some peculiar sort of red ink and had truly atrocious handwriting. The only reason Hugo had been able to read it at all was due to practice reading his own atrocious handwriting.
Without preamble, Hugo dropped the note next to Louis's plate and recited, "La vérité est dans la gemme. What does that mean?"
"Good morning to you, too," Louis muttered, staring down at the note. "The truth is in the gem, I think. Or gemstone, maybe. I'm not the best at French. Who wrote this, anyway? It looks creepy, like it was written in blood."
"No idea who wrote it," Hugo replied, snatching the note back up. "It might have been someone named Antoine. That's what I want to know, too."
Louis tried to strike up a friendly conversation, making small talk about breakfast, but Hugo was halfway back to the Ravenclaw table by the time his cousin finished the sentence.
"Louis thinks it means 'the truth is in the gem'," he explained to Lily, who was still looking decidedly drowsy. "What gem do you think he means? Do you think it's about the truth of what happened to Charlotte?"
"I haven't got a clue," she replied, a bit snappishly, then suddenly looked thoughtful. "Unless it's referring to the stone that was in the envelope."
"What, that little white rock?"
"Yeah. I think it might have been some kind of gemstone." Her face screwed up in concentration as she tried to remember. "Moonstone, probably. But I didn't get a close look at it. I picked it up and then got the shivers. You know how I kept feeling like something was weird in there."
Their conversation was interrupted by the arrival of the mail and Lily's copy of the Daily Prophet, which proved to be enough distraction that both of them forgot about the note and photograph for several hours.
*****
They were sitting in Divination, Hugo trying desperately not to fall asleep due to the heat of the room and the lack of anything to actually interest him and Lily staring intently into their crystal ball. It was just like any other Divination class, really. Hugo was nearly starting to drift off, staring blankly into space, when suddenly Lily let out a quiet gasp. This brought Hugo back to alertness enough to give her a curious look.
"I think I can see something," she explained, leaning in so close to the crystal ball that her nose nearly touched the glass. "More than the usual misty blobs, I mean. Like an animal. It's got four legs, and that might be a tail, but it's not very clear... Almost like the shape of it is changing. I can't tell if it's big or small. See, now it looks like a dog, but now it looks like some kind of weasel, maybe. "
Hugo leaned forward and looked into the crystal, but couldn't see anything even vaguely clear. He shrugged. "Whatever you're seeing, I can't see it. I wonder what it means."
While Lily continued to stare, brow furrowed, Hugo rifled through the chapter on crystal balls in their textbook, searching for possible interpretations. His search proved to be less than helpful. By the time Professor Trelawney came over, Lily had lost whatever she had been seeing in the crystal ball and the pair of them made up a description of a large bag of galleons. Hugo claimed he expected one of them to win a bet in the near future, and the aging professor merely nodded in satisfaction and moved onto the next table, where she began exclaiming dramatically about death omens in Brenna Finnegan's crystal ball.
Lily was still preoccupied with the misty animal by the time they left Divination and headed down to Charms. Hugo, on the other hand, had turned his thoughts once more to the letter.
"How could the truth be in the gem? It didn't have any writing on it, did it? Could you see anything unusual about it?" he asked Lily, hoping she could pull herself out of her own thoughts long enough to answer.
"Was it a weasel, like Weasley?" she muttered under her breath. "And what was the dog, then?"
Hugo huffed in annoyance and neither of them noticed the group of first year Hufflepuffs walking directly toward them until Lily had collided with one and sent them both sprawling to the floor. She immediately picked herself up and began helping him gather his things, as his book bag had fallen open.
"I'm so sorry," she apologized, handing the small brown-haired boy a stack of books. "I wasn't watching where I was going."
"It's fine," the boy replied, taking the books with a shy smile.
"Oi, Mark! Hurry up!" one of the other first years called. They seemed to be in a hurry to get to their next class and the rest of the group were already halfway down the corridor. The boy called Mark gave Lily another slight smile, gave Hugo a polite nod of acknowledgement, and hurried over to join his housemates. Lily watched him go with a curious expression on her face, but only shrugged when Hugo asked her what she was looking at. They continued on to Charms without further incident.
*****
"I think something bad happened to Charlotte," Hugo announced over dinner.
"Who?" Lily asked, her mouth full of peas.
"The woman in the photograph, remember?" He ignored her look of boredom and continued on. "I was looking at it again earlier. She looks so scared. And do you remember the way shadows seem to creep in at the edges? It looks like she's in a dungeon."
Lily rolled her eyes. "I don't see why you're so obsessed with that stupid photo and that letter. They could be fifty years old for all we know. I don't think you'll be able to find her baby or whatever you're trying to do."
"As if being obsessed with some animal blob in a crystal ball is any better," Hugo shot back.
"But what I saw was real!" Lily protested, voice rising in volume. "There's been actual proof of people seeing things in crystal balls, you know. Or you would, if you ever paid attention in Divination. It's like you live in your own imaginary world, Hugo. 'Oh, let's try out these weird charms from a book in the Restricted Section, let's talk to a strange photograph from the Room of Requirement.' Since when do photos talk, anyway? I thought only portraits could do that. It's probably just a prank photo. You should try living in the real world sometimes, where stuff has consequences. Now, if you don't mind, I'm going to do something that actually matters, like homework."
As she stormed off, Hugo noticed that everyone around him was staring.
"Guess it's her time of the month or something," he muttered, earning a few laughs, then got up and left the table.
He went to the library and looked up books about photography. Most of the old books failed to mention anything about what he was looking for, which was disappointing, but some of the more recent ones mentioned developments in fancy cameras that were able to capture voices as well as movements. One of the books had a discussion about whether someone with enough skill might be able to capture a bit of personality as well. It was like capturing a person in time, saved in a photograph. Food for thought.
Hugo began compiling a list of things he wanted to know, questions to ask Charlotte. When he was satisfied and had found nothing further of interest in the photography books, he headed back to the tower. He went to his dormitory, removed Charlotte's photograph from his bedside table, and found an empty bit of common room where he could talk to her under the guise of reading his Potions book (so long as he didn't talk too loudly or move his lips too much).
"Where are you?" he started off quietly, getting right to business once he was comfortably situated.
"I'm in a photograph," Charlotte replied.
"No, not that. I mean where were you when the photograph was taken?"
Charlotte appeared to think for a moment. "In my house. Mine and Michael's house. In the cellar."
Hugo nodded. "What happened before it was taken?"
"I... Michael wasn't home. It was stormy. I had just put the baby to bed. Antoine showed up at the front door and let himself in. He had a letter, put it on the table. He shouted at me and took me down to the cellar and took my picture." She bit her lip and looked off to the side guiltily. Hugo wondered how much she wasn't telling him.
"Who are Michael and Antoine?" he continued on regardless.
"Michael is my husband. Antoine used to be my... I left him. He was supposed to stay in France. I thought he'd forget about me when I stopped writing back." She still looked a bit uncomfortable.
"Oh," Hugo said, intrigued. "What happened after he took your picture?"
Charlotte stared blankly.
"You don't know," he figured out, disappointed. "Well, how old was your baby?"
A loving smile crossed Charlotte's usually frightened and confused features. "Just over a year. He had a lovely little party with just the three of us for his birthday."
Hugo glanced down at his list, trying to figure out which direction to head in next.
"Are you talking to your Potions book, Weasley?" a voice suddenly asked.
Hugo quickly closed the book, hiding Charlotte between the pages, and looked up to see Will Davies staring at him.
"Why do you need to know?" he asked in a neutral tone of voice, then happened to glance around the common room and saw how empty it was. It would be much harder to go unnoticed now, and it must have been getting late if it was so deserted. He probably ought to start working on homework... Hugo reluctantly turned his attention to the essay that was due tomorrow, and set aside thoughts of Charlotte.
*****
Hugo was delighted to find that Lily was no longer angry at him in the morning when she plopped down next to him at breakfast. After a moment, however, he noticed that she was barely touching her food and had a frazzled, wide-eyed look quite unlike her usual sleepy morning demeanor.
"Are you all right?" he asked, watching her push pieces of bacon around on her plate.
Lily looked up at him. "Fine. I just had a really weird dream last night."
"Want to talk about it?"
After a minute of thought, Lily nodded. "It was mostly about this strange man. He was tall, skinny, and had all kinds of scars on his face, like he'd been attacked by something. He talked to me, but I don't remember all of what he said. He mentioned Charlotte and something about letters. That's the part I figured you'd want to know. He kept talking about Charlotte and her baby and the truth. I can't get his voice out of my head. I really think we should go back to the Room of Requirement, to the trunk where we found the picture. Usually dreams like this happen for a reason, I reckon."
Hugo tried not to look too excited, because it had clearly not been an entirely pleasant dream for her, but couldn't keep a slight smile off his face. "I think we should go this afternoon, since classes end early and we'll have most of the afternoon free."
Lily nodded, and he was thrilled that she was finally getting a bit more serious about the whole thing.
3288/30 = 110
3288/500= 7 for challenge
Total: 117 points