Can you paint with all the colors of the wind

TAG: OPEN | OUTFIT

The world changed.

Every day, something was new. Someone was born, someone died, someone excelled, someone failed.

Hogwarts had once been a safe haven for Sylvie. It was as consistent as it was interesting. With architecture that would inspire even the most muse-blocked artists, it was impossible to feel uninspired. But, since everything had happened…since the new regime had taken hold of her school, Sylvie sometimes felt stifled. Even her brother seemed to be falling into a strange mood. AJ seemed more distant than ever before. She had thought that things with Freya were going well, but ever since the Valentine’s Day he had become quiet and withdrawn. He said he didn’t want to talk about it whenever she brought it up, pushing her further and further away. It hurt. They had always been the best of friends. Leaning on one another when times were tough. But the longer this went on…the further apart they grew. Sometimes, Sylvie felt like he didn’t want to talk with her at all.

The strange feeling of abandonment and the pressure to be…someone she wasn’t weighed heavily on her. It weighed heavily on her art. Sylvie’s most recent pieces were dark, shrouded in thick oily lines of paint. Faces were blurred out in her charcoal drawings. She was struggling…but she would have to push through.

She missed the days when she could paint sunshine into the sky and smiles on faces. Today, she swore that she was going to change it up.

Sylvie hadn’t even packed her dark paints. She’d locked them away in her trunk and swore that she would use yellows, greens, and pinks. Standing in front of her easel near the Black Lake, she picked up her brush and began moving it across the horizon on her page. The sun playing off the dark waters would be difficult to portray without the dark paints, but she would make do. Pausing, she looked up and realized that someone had entered into her frame of vision…and all of a sudden, creativity seemed to strike a gold mine. “Wait!” She said, holding out her paintbrush at the person who had just walked into her frame. “Wait, wait, wait, don’t move! It’s perfect!” Silhouetted against the sunrise and the landscape surrounding the Black Lake, it was the first time she had felt inspired in weeks…and she didn’t want to lose it.

He'd stumbled more in the last few months than in the last year since getting his diagnosis.

On one hand, it was hard to keep things so under wraps all the time, to try to keep himself isolated just in case something happened around other people.
For his own peace of mind, ironically. But on the other Regulus had never felt so alone. He'd pushed away all of his friends and most of them had already graduated. He was hurting near-strangers, sometimes in the same house as him, through his new method of thinking. Not consciously. He was a stranger to himself let alone to others but he couldn't tell anyone that except his therapist and the healers at Mungo's that he had to visit during the holidays lest someone... well, freak out. He wasn't the same guy he'd been for the first five years in the castle and that much was evident to those who had ever known him. The people who chose to avoid him. The people who blended into the walls for him.

He hated his father. He hated his upbringing. But hatred didn't change anything and it didn't bring back what once was. Only when he was entirely lucid did it ever start to bother him and those were the times where he generally seemed to find himself alone. The rest of the time he had an arrogance about him and a sharp edge to his thoughts so people were discarded as simply as a scrap piece of parchment from his mind. Yet he didn't have it in him at the moment to actively seek out someone. Who would he go and speak to, anyway?

The grounds held a kind of solace for him. Nature didn't discriminate and it didn't judge. They came from the Earth and they returned to it when they had done all they could do, giving back to it a semblance of what it had given. It had a beauty of its own. Even the forest that was oh so forbidden to them. The trees had stood there for the last millennia and woukd likely stand for more to come; sprouting new saplings and giving up their space to another when their time came. Everything in the forest worked and called for no interference. He loved sitting in there just listening to the sounds even though it could end in certain death. Life without risk was no life but merely an existence that was half lived. He breached the treeline, planning to cross past the Lake and head for the clearing behind it, but as the water came into view he was halted in his tracks by another student. "I... what? What's perfect?" He called back, then his eyes settled in the easel set up before her. He didn't know how he felt about that; art had always intrigued him to a point but he had never truly paid attention to it since he was a kid. Was she painting him? "I'm just passing through..."

His eyes were what really lit up the setting. Although the boy was still a few meters away, Sylvie could see such confusion on his face. She could see the way his brain was trying to work around exactly what was happening. She could see the way that he looked at the easel and then finally looked at her. It looked like wonder. Wonder, she could paint. It wasn’t dark or gloomy, it wasn’t full of shadows and pain. Wonder was a kid in a candy shop — it was this boy silhouetted against the morning sunrise. "You!” she answered, barely missing a beat. Sylvie realized what that sounded like — a come-on. It wasn’t like she was trying to flirt…she was trying to finish the first painting that didn’t feel like a self-expression of sadness and abandonment. “Sorry, I just want to get this right.” She sounded daft — certifiably insane! If she were this boy, she would high tail it out of there and let all of his Ravenclaw friends know that soon loon was trying to hold people hostage next to the Black Lake.

“You're standing in my painting,” Sylvie realized it sounded accusatory and she immediately back-peddled. “But, wait don’t move! I want you to stand in my painting…if you want…if…erm…” she said, her hands moving like expert little machines across the canvas. The thin white line that she drew represented the shoreline, the bright blobs of blue were his eyes. They were larger than anything on the canvas — in fact, Sylvie wasn’t even sure that she would paint the rest of him. How could she when the eyes were what had trapped her in the first place?

Merlin’s Beard, she knew she probably sounded like a crazy person. He was probably going to walk away any second. But in that moment, she felt so inspired that she couldn’t bring herself to care. Expert hands moved in gentle circles across the right of the page, then waves, then she added a bit more of the blue. The eyes on the page were dull compared to the ones in front of her, she thought, as the boy moved closer.

Maybe if she could get a better look…

He hadn’t run away yet, though that didn’t necessarily mean much. He could bolt at any second, especially as she stood here staring at him, not saying a word. Sylvie’s lips parted and a question escaped: “Have you ever had your portrait done?”

This must be what a deer felt like when caught by headlights. What the rabbit felt when faced with the fox. It was officially the strangest situation he had ever found himself in and honestly he was so caught off guard by it that he didn't even know how to begin to react. Was she mocking him? That felt a bit far fetched at this moment yet he couldn't say why. She looked genuinely... happy. Or at least, cheerful. And wasn't that just the kicker. When was the last time someone had seemed so fervent to keep him around? Had smiled at him like that? It had been a long time. Maybe it was the fact that he didn't recognise her at all and hadn't seen her or her easel around here before. But he'd be a staunch faced liar if he said he wasn't curious, and he was inquisitive by nature, so for better or for worse he stopped fully and leaned back on his heels. Holding her gaze intently. Waiting on whatever was coming next. "Get... what right...?" He murmured to himself, his hands slowly coming to rest by his sides.

Making to move as she told him finally what she was on about, he was halted yet again as a contradicting statement chased her previous one and he sighed, frowning a little as he tried to reason it out. She had been painting before he had even gotten here so by that logic it couldn't be that she was looking to paint him, surely? What was there about him to paint? He mainly wore different shades of grey, so it wasn't like he could be accused of being colourful. This was really just so... weird. Even by his standards. And they were pretty broad. "Want me in your... why? Haven't I just disturbed the 'scene' by cutting through it?" His eyes dropped a little to where her hands were all but flying about across the white frame then rose again, intrigue written blatantly in the lines of his face where his frown had been. So she was painting him. For some reason. He had never really understood art so as such, he wasn't really getting her behaviour. Why was she stuttering? "You don't seem really confident with your statement..."

Risking the wrath of this particular artiste, he stepped forward yet again, disregarding the thought that he was messing with the perspective or whatever it was that artists tended to try and capture. Leaning slightly towards her, he pushed his hands into his pockets and blew out a breath before he laughed a little. This was... ridiculous. Or was it? His Dad would think so, but then Eddie had about as much interest about him as a gravel road. Besides, he hated the man, so distancing himself from him was always the better of ideas that he had. His Mum liked paintings, she bought them from second hand shops in Hogsmeade all the time and was forever smuggling them into the house while Eddie was distracted. This girl was nothing like either of his parents- obviously- and whatever it was that she was currently caught up in was piquing his interest.

He blanched, pulling back from her at the question and then looked away, down at the ground and just resolutely away from her. He hadn't even had his picture taken in nearly 10 years, let alone been painted before. He didn't even know why that bothered him. It wasn't like Regulus expected anything from his parents like that... they'd already shown that they really weren't the best pair to be attempting to raise a teenager. Pulling his bottom lip into his mouth, he finally looked back at her with his eyes slightly narrowed, and then shook his head. "...Nope. Never," he smiled, laughing again at nothing and yet also everything, "Have you?"