"Soul sister, blood sister"

    Maeve, are you really wearing that? Yes, mum, hell on a popsicle stick. This was why she didn't go out on many excursions with her mother if she could help it. Tracey liked to go to fancy places, wearing high heels and her hair done up. She liked being posh and rich and talking to equally or even more posh and rich people. Maeve thought it was all a waste of time, being uncomfortable and pretending to like it just so people would think she fit it with a certain class. Usually that class was full of selfish snobs anyway, why did mum even want to deal with them? Maeve knew for a fact that she didn't like them, as she often complained very loudly and with a lot of swearwords about all of them after having her second glass of wine with dinner. So she really didn't see why Tracey wanted to bring her along to some art gallery on their day out together. Sure, the paintings were pretty and all that, but it was supposed to be about them and not about everyone in there with them. Instead her mother had spent the entire morning complaining about Maeve not wanting to dress up for some gallery she didn't even want to go to in the first place. Ugh. Why couldn't she have gone with Mason? If girils' days out with her mum were going to be like this from now on then she preferred hanging about with her stupid brother and his stupid, bratty friends.

    When the hell was Mal coming back from holidays anyway? Or maybe dad coming back from whatever stupid trip he was doing now? He hadn't even left word, but she hadn't expected him to anyway. It was fine, really. Nowadays he wasn't gone for more than a few weeks at a time and she supposed he would remember to come back before her summer break was over. He could've taken her along, really. That would've been nice. An adventure holiday. All her mum took them on was on those extended stays at spa resorts. Sure, it was nice for a few days, but afterwards it got really borings. She didn't want to read the whole time, that only made it words. Really, the more time she spent with her mother, the more different she realised they were. Merlin, she couldn't wait to be old enough to move out and not have to depend on her for every little thing. Yeah, she might love her mother, but she didn't love this.

    With an annoyed sound, she turned away from Tracey and walked around the corner to the next room. Even from there she could hear the polite conversation mum was having with her posh acquaintances -or friends or business partners or whatever Tracey decided to call them- and she pulled a face. She didn't even want to come here, couldn't she have chosen another day to go networking? Instead of a day that was supposed to be for just the two of them, at least. Huffing, she turned to a painting of a woman with hair as red as hers.

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Rebel Girl

After walking through the corridors and past the pieces of art displayed, Lucy had come to a rather depressing conclusion. This was a place to which she didn’t need to return to this gallery. Next time, she’d check more thoroughly in advance whether she’d like the art displayed. She did like the furniture. It was pretty and she liked wood and carving. But she had found that especially the paintings had absolutely no interest for her. The drawings were nice, and she had spent the last half hour or so looking at these, but then a whole group of people had entered the room though they didn’t show all too much interest in the art, far more in conversing with each other. Lucy wasn’t quite sure why they had come to this place when the majority didn’t seem to care all too much about what was displayed. But what did she know why people went and looked at art. A really good painting, in her unprofessional opinion, represented something into which she could imagine herself. Like a Monet painting. Her mother had known after what they had called their first dog. She loved his landscapes with their warm colours and unclear contours. She loved the gardens and the bridges and the water-lilies. These were places where she wanted to walk herself. It was calming. And as they were not focusing on details, it was all the more easy to lose herself in them. She had found almost no painting here that would have that effect on her.

So she decided to go home, half shaking her head at herself and wondering why had she wanted to come here in the first place after having spent the early morning at the hospital. And she’d have to return for the late afternoon. She’d have better gone for a walk in the countryside instead, that would have been more relaxing. It also would never have got as loud as it now was. She turned and squeezed herself past the crowd and back along the paintings for which she didn’t care. Almost all showed people. Why should she want to look at someone she didn’t know? What was the point? It was well done, that was not her problem. She knew little more but the basics of painting, so her appreciation couldn’t be more than superficial. And she couldn’t care for the motif either. There was no point in goggling at strangers. In fact, she almost felt like she was doing something indecent, voyeuristic. Weren’t these paintings originally meant for the family? She wasn’t sure, she really didn’t know enough about history of art, but the uncomfortable feeling remained. Who actually enjoyed this? Her eyes fell on a girl and for an absurd second she thought she was standing before a mirror until she saw that it was just a portrait. But this was at least a sight that had some charm to itself. She only had to pretend the woman in the painting was the great-grandmother of the girl and the piece of art suddenly had a meaning. Though it was not that nice of her to make up stories about people she randomly watched. As if the visitors were a part of the artistic exposition.

"Soul sister, blood sister"

    The painting before her wasn't particularly pretty, the background was sombre and the clothing was normal for the time period -the sign said 1715- and the woman herself was no great beauty. Hair flaming red, a lot of freckles, grey eyes. Her face was broad and her eyes were sharp and her eyelashes were too light to be clearly seen. It must be so boring, to hang here in a gallery, people walking by to ogle at you day after day. Some of the paintings made conversation with the guests but they were clearly told to stay in place, so they could be observed. Wasn't it sort of like an orphanage for paintings, where the families that once owned them sold them to and where they waited to be taken home by another person to hang in yet another place. It must be a lonely, depressing sort of life. Maeve decided that she didn't like places like this, she didn't want to be here any longer. She'd thought that it would be an art gallery with still life pantings, the sort that wouldn't realise where they were and what was happening. Wasn't this also like a zoo? Most people that came here just came to stare and watch and then go home and gossip amongst themselves about what they'd seen. She hated it.
    The woman's eyes snapped to hers and Maeve almost jumped, but instead of anger there seemed to be interest in her eyes. Maeve offered a smile and the woman... tilted her head. Maeve copied her. There was a flicker of recognition and the painting's lips curled upwards, which Maeve once more mirrored. Now, she lifted her right hand and the painting lifted her left. She couldn't help but laugh, amused, and the painting looked pleased. "I'm Maeve," she offered and the painting opened her mouth to respond, but there was a hesitance there and she shut her mouth again. Maeve couldn't help but frown, but she shrugged even so. "It's okay. It must suck to be in here. Has it been long?"
    The painting nodded and Maeve's shoulders fell. Well, if mum was so adamant about her and Maeve spending quality time together... she could make up for ruining it by buying her the painting. That would be better, right? They had tons of paintings at home, Maeve had never thought about where they came from. Tracey must have bought them from places like here, the Davis grandparents weren't poor but they were definitely not rich enough to have any paintings made. They had just started appearing since Tracey started making god money with the Harpies, and since then with her job as a trainer. Yeah, mum could afford to buy her this. "I'll ask mum if we can take you home. It'll be better than hear, yeah?"
    The painting blinked in surprise but offered a small nod and Maeve grinned. Decided to look for her mum, she turned around on her heel and looked around the gallery. Tracey wasn't in this room, which made Maeve frown, but there was another woman who... had been watching her. She flushed.

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@ lucy

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She wasn’t completely unsophisticated. At least, she usually felt cultured enough. But then, she was often enough surrounded by animals that were naturally not raising the bar for her to feel refined. And she didn’t want to most of the time. It became painfully obvious to her that she was not very ladylike only when she was in her sister-in-law’s presence. There, she felt like she had to take care that she appeared elegant and erudite in all sort of fanciful matters. Things she didn’t much care about. It wasn’t like she considered these things superfluous. She loved music, even played a little bit on a very dilettante niveau, but she saw no point in talking about it. She enjoyed it when she heard it for what it was. She didn’t care much for who wrote it and whether it was better or worse than something else. As long as she liked it, it was good enough to be listened to. Lucy was perfectly okay with good enough.

She felt like a lady should have higher criterions than her own pleasure. A lady was someone who was society smart, who always knew in what exact tone she had to address who. Lucy talked with everybody the same way. Her aunt hated it, that was no counterargument for Lucy. She only wanted to be herself. To do as she pleased without restrictions, and she felt that if she wanted to be how she pictured a lady, she couldn’t be herself. It made it all the more grating how often she was being called a lady. And some even seemed to judge her for it if she tried to make them stop using the word. Her mother had told her to just accept the word for what it was and stops fussing about it. But it bothered her. As if the word wanted to take charge of her and tell her what she was supposed to want.

The pictures here had if anything made her think about who she was supposed to be in the eyes of the world (if she considered her aunt’s eyes to be the world’s — an opinion her aunt would certainly support). But she didn’t like these pictures here, or at least almost none of them. So many were portraits, and that just for art’s sake. The portraits at Hogwarts had been fun because they had opinions, showed students around in the castle, could convey messages, could give tips. Most of the paintings here didn’t show any similar sign to interact with her. Though, the little girl she was watching now seemed to have been luckier. Lucy couldn’t hear what she was saying, which was definitely better because she felt rude enough as it was to watch her like that. If she were not the most entertaining sight in the whole gallery, Lucy’d have stopped her observation long ago, but after finding everything else so lifeless, this appeared more charming than anything else she had seen today.

Still, she wished she had been attentive enough to look somewhere else when the girl turned and turned red. She hadn’t meant to embarrass the poor child, not when she was the one to blame. “Hi,” she said to break the awkward silence that was suddenly there between them. Where had the other persons in the gallery went all of a sudden? “You know each other?” She indicated the portrait.

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