This is really godsdamned bad and I wrote it because I was reading some HP fic and it was really bad, too, so I figured this would fit right in. And it's also part of a bargain with Gd. If I write this, I want Gd to get my favorite fanfic writers to WRITE ME MORE CRACKFIC and make me happy-happy and high as a helium balloon in the open air. Again, reviews not strictly necessary, and I'm really, really sorry I'm neglecting my other fics.

And before you ask, this is all meant to be posted as one chapter, although you couldn't call it oneshot. I just think it's really really important to be able to see where all the pieces in this fit in, partly because THIS IS A BAD BAD EXPERIMENT, and because i wrote it that way, and to split it up into little pretty chapters wouldn't let it fit back together since I have weird structures.

oh, and it's probably hideously inaccurate. But I was obsessed, for a time, with wizard photography and what AN ABSOLUTE MOCKERY it made of REAL PHOTOGRAPHY, which is about capturing a unique moment and using its stilled movement to appeal to the viewer. So I thought I'd just go nuts, get it out of my system. And Have A Good Tuesday for tomorrow, y'all.

1)

Sirius never told anybody who didn't already know, but he had a photograph of himself and James that had been taken on their leaving day. He could remember their leaving day very clearly; it fell exactly seventy-seven weeks after their first date, and everyone knew that seven was the most powerfully magic number. He remembered how James had kissed Lily, glowing with a wild, intense joy the minute the ceremony was over and how the Gryffindors had cheered when they saw the Head Boy and Girl kissing in the Great Hall as though they didn't care who saw them. It had been spontaneous, exuberant. Remus had not been there; unfortunately, it was full moon, so he was in the Shrieking Shack. Peter was squeaking in excitement, but Sirius gave a wolf-whistle and a cheer, clapped a little, but then he put his hands into his pockets and tried to look nonchalant.

It was unfortunate that the ceremony had fallen on the 17th; everyone assumed that Sirius' half-hearted cheers and slightly bored, dejected appearance was simply due to his friend's absence and the sheer embarrassment of standing beside Peter with his high-pitched cheering, and the way his best friend was ignoring him in favor of kissing a girl in front of the whole school.

They were wrong, of course. Lily wasn't just a girl to James. She was the girl.

Sirius always knew that it wouldn't last. It should have mattered more to him that James was kissing Lily, but it didn't.

It should have mattered, but it didn't, because he saw. He saw. He saw that they loved each other.

Other people were just extra pieces that had ended up in the puzzle-box by accident.

There had been copies of this photo. Lily had been the one operating the camera, so she wasn't in it. They had given one to Remus, and Lily had told them about some kind of Muggle style of photography where people who weren't in the photo could insert themselves. Superimposing. Composites.

The upshot of it was, Lily took the film and after the first test prints, one for each of them. That made five copies of a photo with three people in it.

So much for the four Marauders.

She was as good as her word, though. She took the negatives to a darkroom, and learnt how to develop photos from a friend of her parents', and then she took a negative of Remus and somehow, in an empty patch where previously there had been nobody, Remus appeared, a little thin and tired.

They each took a copy.

It didn't look quite right, of course. Remus wasn't entirely solid in some of the prints; you could see the grass growing through his feet on some of them, and on another, where she had tried to cut out the image of Remus and stick him on, there had been odd edges around him and the shadows came the wrong way. Either way, it looked a little like he was in a different place, a different level of reality. It skewed the perspective. It was all wrong.

2)

In wizarding photographs, the odd thing was that time was both capable and incapable of passing within a print. Day might turn to night, trees might burst into bloom, and people might move, or even walk out of the sides, but nothing truly changed. The people could come back, but nobody who had not been there during the taking could appear. Some people said that nobody could technically disappear from photos, that the little figures just walked into the background until they were so miniscule they couldn't be seen, but they were the sort of people who ran the Quibbler, ( like that mad young journalist- what was his name? Something to do with love, Sirius thought, absurd as it sounded. That madman who had only last week run an article on Voldemort's apparently stunning teapot collection and how he intended to use them as weapons in order to subjugate their minds), so Sirius was reasonably certain that they were wrong, also because he'd seen foreground figures walk out the side and disappear.

Photos were not like paintings; characters couldn't flit in and out of them, and each figure could have counterparts in other prints, unlike paintings, where there was only ever one character, who flitted between frames. Photographs could not speak, either.

The little characters: their number could never really change, since although characters might disappear intermittently, they were still there, beyond the screen of sight; there would never be more people in the photograph than there had been when it had been taken, and they could never grow old. A bush might flower, and a moon might rise, but they would always be the flowers that grew that day, and the moon that rose the same night. Consequently, the photo had been taken one day, and each day that followed was exactly the same inside the photograph, even if what the people were doing was different. It might create an illusion of change, but in the end, nothing was truly capable of changing.

Once, to Sirius' surprise, he saw that the little figures had walked out of the photograph, all of them, and that there was nothing but the bank where they had sat and talked. It had hurt to see the empty scenery, because he was alone in his apartment. James and Lily would be married in a few months, he knew. Give or take a few months, at least. It was all so clear. Peter was working as a secretary, and Remus was researching something overseas.

He had nothing better to do than watch the photograph. Day turned to night, and there was an almost-full moon in a cloudless sky in the photograph outlining the tree branches in a faint, pale shade of blue, but it was still empty.

3)

James and Sirius. Sirius and James. "Quite the double act, " Madam Rosmerta used to say, laughing. Sirius and James. Their charm, their arrogance. They were legendary, lionised. Boys wanted to be them. Girls loved them, but Sirius had always known that the one James wanted was Lily. Lily Evans. The girl.

Girls. Girls had... come into existence in fourth year, but Sirius knew that James had always loved Lily, even if James didn't know it. Knew that he'd always loved Lily, but the other thing Sirius knew was that James was possibly the only person Sirius loved.

Not love in the romantic sense, at first. Just a sort of deep-seated love that watched rather than did.

Sirius had been hounded by girls, due to his dark, easy grace and casual good looks, but he'd never really cared all that much for any of them, and his entire history of romances from Hogwarts tended to end at first dates. They might not have realised, but he wasn't the kind of boy that likes girls.

He'd watched. He'd hoped, he'd dreamed, and he'd irrationally refused to kiss any of the girls, because he wanted his first kiss to be with James, because James was enough of an arrogant blockhead that he didn't realise that he loved Lily or that Sirius loved him.

Sirius could still remember the moment when he gave up hope. It was one minute past midnight on New Year's, in his fourth year. He'd realised there wasn't any point waiting, that James simply wasn't that kind of boy. He'd reached the decision, sculled his entire glass of Butterbeer, reached for Keira Destler's arm, and pulled her hard against his body and kissed her soundly, and tried to ignore James' catcalls and his best friend's eyes, shining with happiness. At least he had been able to pretend that she was James, and with her mouth against his he hadn't been able to feel anything, let alone the pain. It had ended badly, anyway- James had, in order to separate them, poured a bottle of Butterbeer over their heads, and she had pulled away, spluttering.

Sirius had cuffed James over the head, affectionately, as rivulets of Butterbeer travelled down his collar, making his robes sticky. He tried to smile at his grinning, bright-eyed best friend, but inside his throat felt empty and hollow.

He loved James so much.

4)

Back to the photograph: they'd taken one to Remus afterwards. He'd tried to smile and thank them, but they could see the strain leaving Hogwarts had left on him. Who, after all, would want to hire a werewolf? He had applied for a job at the Ministry and been turned down. He had applied to work part-time as a waiter at Fortescue's ice-cream parlor in Diagon Alley and been turned down. He had applied to be a teacher, and been turned down.

He had been at his home, and when the three- no, four- of them had shown up, it had been... odd. They'd given him the photo, and he'd studied it for a moment. Watched the laughing figures, watched his own figure, which didn't quite fit in, since the light didn't fall right on it and on second inspection, the feet didn't seem to touch the ground. Seemed to be moving on a different level. Watched himself try to put an arm where light shadows were coming from the wrong side around James and Sirius, then he looked up and attempted to smile.

So much had changed, for all of them; Remus had gotten very thin and pale since leaving Hogwarts. His robes were shabby; his skin seemed translucent, stretched slightly over his high cheekbones, as he sat quietly, listening. Sirius slouched in a corner, looking down at his fingers curled around his teacup, moodily studying the odd contrast between the tealeaves and the bone-white china. Lily and James cracked jokes, burning with their intensity, their vivid life, and Remus smiled wanly, hollowly. Peter laughed at everything those two said, even the things that weren't funny.

Sirius could feel it inside, obscurely.

5)

Another time: for some reason, it was just him and James, lounging easily back on the grass, and his little doppelganger leaned over and kissed James. Sirius leaned closer to watch his photographic self, and saw James pull away. He thought he felt his heart jolt; he couldn't bear to look after that. He turned the photo face down with a sharp click, hard enough to dislodge a few of the side decorations, put the incident out of his mind, and turned to read a riveting article on the coming Quidditch World Cup in the Daily Prophet instead.

It was a pity. If he had stayed a little longer, he would have seen James kiss Sirius back. It never happened again, though. He hadn't been certain whether or not that was a good thing.

It wasn't as though it had never happened in real life; the first time had been when he was staying with the Potters, and they had sneaked a bottle of Firewhisky and gotten so drunk that they'd somehow wound up kissing, and Sirius knew at that moment that he'd never fall in love again. It had happened a few more times, mostly when James was between girls, but he suspected that for James, Sirius was a fallback plan. A haven of comfort. James just wasn't that kind of boy: that was all there was to it, aside from the fact, the hard, cold, fact, that James loved Lily. He always had, and he always would. Sirius was his best friend; nothing more.

They'd never gone beyond kissing.

6)

A short time before James and Lily died, a little after Regulus and his parents were dead and Grimmauld Place belonged to him properly, Sirius had noticed that Peter had disappeared from the photograph. It had been curious, slightly disturbing, but he ignored the slight discomfort that seeing this brought. It was absurd, after all, he told himself, that he was looking at the photograph, anyway. He was a hunted man; so was James. He hadn't heard from Remus for a few months, but he had seen Peter only a few weeks ago to arrange the Charm. He was in hiding; so were the Potters. He did not have time to be sentimental and have presentiments about photographs, but he had a strange inability to throw things away; hoarding was a Black trait that even their house-elves acquired, as though by osmosis. So he put the photo safely away into an album at Grimmauld Place, because although he hated the place, it was the safest place possible to keep a memory. After all, it had nurtured his bitterness and rancor, and had ensured that every single memory of his miserable childhood survived. If it could keep those alive, it would certainly be able to keep the memory of that last golden day alive.

Consequently, he did not see the photo for years: James' death, Lily's death, Peter's death, Azkaban- they all intervened, and he did not see it- not until Harry, James' son, James' son who was so much like James it had made Sirius' heart clench at that first meeting, was fourteen going on fifteen, and Sirius had escaped from Azkaban.

Even then, after all those years, he studied it briefly, saw exactly what it was that he had lost, even if he did not understand what it was, and closed the album on the little people. But he kept the album in his room, so that if he ever did want to see it again, it would be there.

7)

After he died, Harry did not find the photograph. Perhaps that was good, or perhaps it was bad. There was no certainty about what he might have seen: it might have been a group of friends, laughing on their last day at school, waving at their future selves, wherever they might be. It might have been a scene where all of them stood the way they had been that last day at Remus' place: James laughing, vivacious, Remus, hollow and pale, Sirius, moody and cavalier, slouched with his hands in his pockets, Peter sycophantic and with that disquieting look of calculating eagerness in his eyes. It might have been themselves in their Animagus forms, stalking along the bank on one of their illicit outings, or them under that gnarled old tree in summer, playing Exploding Snap, or James catching his stolen Snitch. It might have been Sirius kissing James, or the other way around. It might have been a fight, where they were all disgusted with Sirius' later self for killing Lily and James, or a denunciation where Peter was the target. It might have been anything: there was absolutely no certainty about what their little photographic selves might do, and that was the most worrying thing of all.

What would have been best, though: if Harry had found it. If he had opened the album, and all the pictures were empty, nothing but empty landscapes. That way, not being a Black, he might have thrown them out and never realised that anything had been wrong.

That way would have been... best. For all of them, not just Harry.