Jigsaw Falling Into Place (A Draco Malfoy Gen Fic)
Reveals have been up at springtime_gen for a while now, and I figured it's about time I posted my fic here. Yay!
Originally posted here.
Title: Jigsaw Falling Into Place
Author: turkeyish
Recipient: teshara
Character(s): Draco Malfoy, OC, Astoria Greengrass (Cameo)
Rating: G
Wordcount: ~3500
Warnings: None
Summary: When Draco Malfoy is still a very young child, Lucius and Narcissa hire an artist to take their only son on as a pupil.
Author's Notes: To a fantastic pinch-hitter. A million thank yous to the amazing mods, who continuously put up with my antics. And thank you, Radiohead, for the title.
Betas: xalexandriam - you know how much I love you!
Jigsaw Falling Into Place
When Draco Malfoy is still a very young child, Lucius and Narcissa hire an artist to take their only son on as a pupil. While the Malfoys insist that Draco cultivate a number of talents, - art, piano, and fencing chief among them, - it is art that Draco ends up continuing well into his years at Hogwarts. Piano is all well and good, but it is difficult for him to pack one into his trunk. And as for fencing, well - it is always meant more as a foundation for his wand work.
Piano, for Draco, is all about memorization. Remember to place your hands here to play this note, and remember the key change that comes in midway through this score. Fencing, in much the same way, involves a lot of Place your feet here for that defence, and sweep your sword arm up in this way for that attack.
Yet art is always different. Of course, there are techniques that are useful to be aware of, but for the most part, there is a freedom that Draco finds in art that he sees very little of elsewhere. Besides, he can indulge in it anywhere, provided he has, at the very least, a scrap of parchment and a quill.
Narcissa thinks it is wonderful that Draco makes sure to maintain his talents. Lucius thinks it is fine as long as it doesn’t interfere with his son’s other obligations. Pansy Parkinson thinks it is the most romantic thing in the world, even after she grows out of her infatuation with her best mate. And Blaise Zabini finds it amusing that the Prince of Slytherin is secretly a tortured artist type. Outside of those few people closest to him, Draco sees no reason to broadcast his hobbies to the rest of the world. At any rate, there is precious little time to indulge himself while at Hogwarts - particularly in his later years. Lord Voldemort never is the type to encourage such activities.
-
It is two weeks after the Second War ends with the Battle at Hogwarts. One month until Lucius will have to stand trial before the Wizengamot. Of course, Harry Potter has made it well and universally known that Narcissa saved his life. But in the bloodlust for closure, the masses are demanding that Lucius make an appearance at the Ministry. And it is such zeal that keeps the Malfoys secluded in their Manor - the last time Narcissa left the grounds, she had the dubious pleasure of becoming acquainted with a trio of burning effigies.
Draco tells himself that leaving is the best and only option he has. Who is he to refuse the opportunity to study once more with the famous artist who taught him all those years ago? Not to mention the fact that Pansy is lounging around in France, Blaise is holed up in Italy, and he knows that his parents could do with a bit less stress whenever they can find the opportunity. And so it is that he finds himself, alone and with only one trunk, on a plane headed to New York City. Only on a Muggle plane, of course, is he able to travel without being recognised by anyone. Anyone with a burning effigy, that is.
-
The hotel room is nice, even by a Malfoy’s standards. Standing at the window his first night there, Draco takes in the city spread out before him, all twinkling lights set in the velvety darkness. It reminds him of staring up in awe at the Hogwarts castle for the first time the night that he was sorted into Slytherin. Somewhere within him, the homesickness throbs. Turning, he begins to settle himself into the room that will be his home for at least the next month. There will be no space for homesickness in this new place.
-
Alastair Mook looks exactly the way Draco last saw him, the summer before he left for Hogwarts as a first year. The older man is all silver hair and simple, paint-splattered clothes from the moment he swings open the door to his studio and greets his former pupil with a no-nonsense sort of nod.
“Draco,” he says, waving the tall, blond youth forward. “I have been expecting you.”
“Sorry, Alastair,” Draco says, taking in the airy expanse of the room, stuffed as it is with easels and canvases and potions and paints. “My plane only arrived last night.”
Alastair’s smile is enigmatic. “I have been expecting you for years, my boy,” he says, and Draco finds that he doesn’t quite know how to respond to that. Not that the other man is expecting a reply.
-
They don’t really do much the first day. Draco sheds his jacket and rolls up his shirtsleeves, but is content to merely watch the old Master at work. Alastair is currently working on a commission for a Muggle politician, and it’s all minute details and bold colours. He periodically asks Draco to bring him this brush or to mix that colour, nodding in silent approval when he sees that his old pupil still remembers everything he’d been taught all those years ago.
“Tomorrow,” Alastair says at the end of the day, “bring me whatever it is that you are working on.”
“What if I’m not working on anything in particular at the moment?” Draco asks, all lean, elegant lines framed by the doorway.
Alastair smiles that same enigmatic smile from before. “An artist is always working on something.”
-
In his hotel room, long after he’s taken his simple dinner in solitude, Draco sits in front of his open trunk and studies the small canvas he’s just pulled out from the bottom. Nearly forgotten, it’s been hidden at the very depths of his trunk since his fourth year at Hogwarts - the last time he had an opportunity to work on his art. Neither Umbridge nor the Carrows, after all, ever were the types to encourage that sort of thing. He frowns at the square and turns it upside down and then right side up again. It will have to do, he decides in the end.
-
Alastair silently studies the canvas in the light of the next morning, cobalt eyes unwavering. He finally turns his gaze to Draco, who is slightly ashamed to feel the back of his neck beginning to burn hot at the prolonged scrutiny.
“Today, we will paint,” is all Alastair finally says.
-
And paint they do. The first few days are for Muggle painting - the scenery and the subjects are all completely stationary. For this, they use regular paints. Alastair takes Draco to his favourite paint shop one afternoon, and it surprises Draco. For all that Alastair is a well-respected artist in both Muggle and Wizarding circles all over the world, he pledges his allegiance to a tiny shop tucked away into a quiet corner of New York City. The proprietor of the shop is a Muggle woman of Chinese descent, and jade bangles shimmer all up and down her arms as she ushers Alastair and his pupil towards the back of the shop in a flurry of accented chatter, where she’s stored a brand new shipment of oils that’s just come in from Amsterdam. Beaming toothily at the pair of them, she squirts a glob from one paint tube out onto a blank canvas in order to display its rich colour. It’s a particularly fine hue of red that Draco’s never seen before in any other paint, and Alastair catches him nearly gaping at it.
“They are rather like magical paints, are they not?” he asks with a wink.
-
Draco is pleased to find that he hasn’t really forgotten anything. Underneath Alastair’s watchful eye, he flies through canvases - all of them small, simple scenes. They are beginning to create quite a decent stack in one corner of the older man’s studio. Alastair is nearly done with his commissioned painting, he says, though there are still a few finishing touches he will need to add. The two men spend long days working quietly beside one another, and the silence is only broken if Draco has a question or if Alastair has a suggestion to make. Draco likes that even Alastair’s criticisms are more suggestions than anything else - it reminds Draco of the amount of freedom he’s always had in his art, more than in anything else.
But above all else, Draco finds that he’s glad that Alastair is, to this day, not much of a talker. He’s already received a number of owls from Pansy and, to a lesser extent, Blaise. They’re both demanding that he come stay with one of them, but Draco doesn’t know if that’s what he needs at the moment. Besides, there’s no Alastair in Europe. Which means, of course, that there’s less art. He’s had enough of less art, to be honest.
-
They’ve got a pattern going on, Alastair and Draco. Draco arrives at the studio early in the morning, the two men paint in the Muggle style until a spare lunch, and then they paint a bit more, until Alastair announces that it is time for the both of them to retire for the day. Draco takes his dinners alone in his hotel room, not that he minds the solitude. It’s rather nice, actually. And he’d never confess it to Narcissa or even to Pansy, but he’s grown quite fond of the freedom to eat while sitting on his couch with his socked feet propped up on the coffee table.
And then, one day, Alastair sets his brush down with a flourish and announces that it is time for lunch. Draco is expecting their usual fare of sandwiches and something that Alastair informs him the Muggles call soda (“Their version of Butterbeer”), so he is taken by surprise when the old Master hands him his coat and tells him that they’re going for a walk.
-
Draco has never been to Central Park until this moment. It almost feels like home - the trees and the ponds, especially, and the way everyone generally is, not that he can quite put his finger on the whys of the feeling. Alastair pauses at a stone table, making Draco follow suit - a group of old men are playing Muggle chess, so engrossed in their game that they ignore the people milling around them, agonizing over each and every move while the crowd waits with bated breath. It makes Draco think of old wizards doing the same in Diagon Alley, only with pieces that move and threaten each other at the tops of their tiny voices.
He wonders briefly what everyone he knows is doing at that precise moment, on the other side of the world.
-
Draco actually flushes in embarrassment when Alastair finds out that he’s never been to the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
“What have you been doing in New York City this entire time, then?” Alastair wonders aloud, before guiding his pupil towards the stone steps that lead up to the famous building.
After a swift lunch on the Roof Garden, and content in the comfort of their shared silence, Draco trails behind Alastair as he weaves his way through winding hallways and crowds of tourists, stopping at a Degas sketch, a Warner sculpture, a van Eyck painting. A cast of Rodin’s Les Bourgeois de Calais dominates one hall, and Alastair pauses for a long while in front of the towering work. Draco takes in the expressions and the postures and all of the other hundreds of details that give the impression that the sculpture is bursting at the seams with suppressed life.
This is what war does, he thinks to himself. The Burghers remain resolute in the face of their imminent deaths.
Alastair turns the force of his gaze onto his pupil. “Tomorrow,” he says, as he begins walking again, “we will create in the magical way.”
-
D,
Am back at home. Wouldn’t mind seeing your unfortunate face. Am relatively sure I’m annoying B to no end.
P
-
D,
P’s driving me mad with whingeing about your not being here. My home’s safe - come put us out of our misery.
B
-
The owls come bearing missives from Pansy and Blaise that grow increasingly more impatient with each passing day, but Draco tells himself that he’s too busy with Alastair to respond. Alastair had never had the opportunity to teach him how to work in the Wizarding way before he left for Hogwarts, and Draco is quickly finding that there’s nothing else quite like it. Alastair begins the lesson with a sketch.
“Do you remember the elderly chess players in the park?” Alastair asks as he sharpens a graphite pencil. Draco nods as he is handed the tool and a sheet of parchment. At the Master’s urging, Draco shuts his eyes and recalls as many details as he can - the frayed cuffs of one man’s jacket, the faded colour of another’s hat, the blue of the veins on the back of yet another’s hand as he slid his queen forward across the board. Alastair murmurs a charm before instructing Draco to open his eyes and begin to draw, and then sits in silence as his pupil quickly and deftly transfers his memories to the parchment. As soon as Draco sketches in the last bishop, a leaf on a tree in the drawing drifts slowly to the cobbled stones underneath the men’s feet. And, much as someone that has just been roused from a long sleep, the chess players shake their heads and blink their eyes and resume their game. Draco leans forward eagerly, expecting to hear the music of the birds and the chatter of the bystanders, but Alastair pats his shoulder with a warm smile.
“There is much for you to learn yet.”
-
The owls come and go, some even while he is with Alastair. The old man never says anything, not even when Draco unceremoniously stuffs the parchment into his pockets without blinking an eye.
And then: “You never write to your friends,” Alastair observes one afternoon.
Draco never answers, and Alastair never pushes.
-
The walls of Draco’s bedroom are plastered with graphite figures that go about their business within the borders of their parchment. The Muggle paintings are strewn all over the living room, as Alastair insisted that they were not his to keep.
Looking at the art, one would never guess that Draco is from England - all of the scenes are taken out of New York City, a study of sorts of the famed locale. The chess players continue to haggle over tactics from their place of honour by his bed.
-
Magical painting takes much more out of him than anything else he’s learned thus far.
“Your memories need to be fully absorbed by the paints in order to paint a truly lifelike and faithful scene,” Alastair says, “and thus they need to be many and they need to be strong. Concentration is of the utmost importance.”
There are many charms and potions to learn - this charm enables the memories to flow through and out of the medium like liquid through a straw, while that potion, when mixed with the paints, gives the subjects life.
Draco decides that he wants to paint the chess players.
“Why not try something a little bit closer to home?” Alastair suggests.
Rather than respond, Draco begins to outline a knight. Rather than push, Alastair suggests a different brush.
-
One morning, Alastair gifts Draco with a small Pensieve.
“I find that one helps me in isolating and thus strengthening my memories when I am painting,” Alastair explains. “And it has helped me in many other ways over the years.”
Draco accepts the gift without asking what the other man means by the last part.
-
Draco,
It is done.
-
Draco doesn’t respond to his mother’s note. He tells himself that they will already know he is glad to hear of the news, that they will understand how committed he is to his art.
Alastair remarks, one day, that he expects England must be slowly reverting back to normal by now, and Draco pretends that he doesn’t hear him.
The moon waxes and wanes.
-
“I was just about your age at the end of the First War,” Alastair begins one afternoon, moving to watch Draco’s progress. “During the war, there was no time for art, only for fear and hiding. I was not able to find my art again for a long time. Oh, I sketched a few scenes, completed a few paintings, but none of it meant anything. I left the country, thinking that my true art had merely been misplaced elsewhere. But after many years of searching, I realised that I had never left my art, nor had it ever left me. I merely had to come to terms with everything that I had seen - the love, the death, all of it. The entirety of it was my art, so long as I allowed it.” He pauses as Draco slowly paints the finishing stroke on one chess player’s hand. And like a candle flaring up for the first time, the finished painting begins to pulse with the life that Draco has given it. Draco misses the sad sort of smile that Alastair gives him.
“There is nothing left for me to teach you, my boy.”
-
The next morning, Draco takes his usual route to Alastair’s loft. It is a particularly fine day in the city, all warm sunlight and clear skies, and he finds that he shortens his strides this time. Inside Alastair’s building, he climbs the same thirty-three steps that he has become well acquainted with in the past few weeks, inwardly grumbling at the perpetually broken lift.
But today, it turns out, is to be a different sort of day. He comes face to face with a note pinned to the locked door, and a sole canvas leaning against a doorjamb.
-
It is time for you to remember your art.
-
Draco picks up the canvas that he’d shown Alastair all those days ago, the last thing he’d been working on before the war tumbled everything he thought he knew upside down. He studies the blank, pure white surface for a long while, until finally the ghost of a smirk flickers across his face.
-
“Draco Malfoy!”
Draco turns at the sound of his name, confused. The only person in this city who knows him by name is Alastair, and the voice he just heard certainly isn’t one that belongs to an old man.
A girl who looks vaguely familiar rushes up to him on the pavement, blonde hair streaming behind her. Her cheeks flush prettily as she slows to a walk and halts just in front of him, peering up at him shyly even though she’s just called his name out in the middle of a busy city.
“I’d heard you were here, but I never thought I’d run into you while on holiday,” she says, and Draco finds that he is taken in both by the small, cheeky grin that she shoots at him as well as the musical tone to her voice. Somewhere in the back of his mind, a bell rings.
“You’re related to Daphne Greengrass, aren’t you?” he asks. “I know you from somewhere.” The girl’s face lights up becomingly.
“I’m Daphne’s younger sister,” she says matter-of-factly, sticking a hand out. “Astoria Greengrass, two years behind you at Hogwarts. You always used to pass the pumpkin juice to me at meals. Pleased to meet you again.”
Draco laughs for the first time in what feels like ages as he shifts his canvas so that he can properly shake Astoria’s hand.
“What’s that for?” Astoria asks, eyeing the object curiously.
“It’s for something I’ve been meaning to paint for a while now, although I’ve only recently realised it,” Draco explains. Astoria nods solemnly at this cryptic response.
“That sounds lovely,” she says.
“It really is,” Draco replies with an easy smile.
Astoria’s heart stutters at the way his eyes are like quicksilver in the dappled sunlight when they’re not shadowed by the burden of war.
-
One week later, Draco sets the half-finished letter to Astoria down on his desk, next to the one waiting to be sent to Alastair. Pansy and Blaise have just returned to their respective homes after spending the day alternately reprimanding Draco for not writing them and filling him in on all the gossip that he’s missed while away. Lucius and Narcissa are busy elsewhere in the Manor, putting up all of Draco’s newest art.
He turns to the canvas that he’s been steadily working on since he returned home, and, picking up his brush, Draco continues painting the perfect image of everything that matters the most to him.
Fin.
Originally posted here.
Title: Jigsaw Falling Into Place
Author: turkeyish
Recipient: teshara
Character(s): Draco Malfoy, OC, Astoria Greengrass (Cameo)
Rating: G
Wordcount: ~3500
Warnings: None
Summary: When Draco Malfoy is still a very young child, Lucius and Narcissa hire an artist to take their only son on as a pupil.
Author's Notes: To a fantastic pinch-hitter. A million thank yous to the amazing mods, who continuously put up with my antics. And thank you, Radiohead, for the title.
Betas: xalexandriam - you know how much I love you!
Jigsaw Falling Into Place
When Draco Malfoy is still a very young child, Lucius and Narcissa hire an artist to take their only son on as a pupil. While the Malfoys insist that Draco cultivate a number of talents, - art, piano, and fencing chief among them, - it is art that Draco ends up continuing well into his years at Hogwarts. Piano is all well and good, but it is difficult for him to pack one into his trunk. And as for fencing, well - it is always meant more as a foundation for his wand work.
Piano, for Draco, is all about memorization. Remember to place your hands here to play this note, and remember the key change that comes in midway through this score. Fencing, in much the same way, involves a lot of Place your feet here for that defence, and sweep your sword arm up in this way for that attack.
Yet art is always different. Of course, there are techniques that are useful to be aware of, but for the most part, there is a freedom that Draco finds in art that he sees very little of elsewhere. Besides, he can indulge in it anywhere, provided he has, at the very least, a scrap of parchment and a quill.
Narcissa thinks it is wonderful that Draco makes sure to maintain his talents. Lucius thinks it is fine as long as it doesn’t interfere with his son’s other obligations. Pansy Parkinson thinks it is the most romantic thing in the world, even after she grows out of her infatuation with her best mate. And Blaise Zabini finds it amusing that the Prince of Slytherin is secretly a tortured artist type. Outside of those few people closest to him, Draco sees no reason to broadcast his hobbies to the rest of the world. At any rate, there is precious little time to indulge himself while at Hogwarts - particularly in his later years. Lord Voldemort never is the type to encourage such activities.
-
It is two weeks after the Second War ends with the Battle at Hogwarts. One month until Lucius will have to stand trial before the Wizengamot. Of course, Harry Potter has made it well and universally known that Narcissa saved his life. But in the bloodlust for closure, the masses are demanding that Lucius make an appearance at the Ministry. And it is such zeal that keeps the Malfoys secluded in their Manor - the last time Narcissa left the grounds, she had the dubious pleasure of becoming acquainted with a trio of burning effigies.
Draco tells himself that leaving is the best and only option he has. Who is he to refuse the opportunity to study once more with the famous artist who taught him all those years ago? Not to mention the fact that Pansy is lounging around in France, Blaise is holed up in Italy, and he knows that his parents could do with a bit less stress whenever they can find the opportunity. And so it is that he finds himself, alone and with only one trunk, on a plane headed to New York City. Only on a Muggle plane, of course, is he able to travel without being recognised by anyone. Anyone with a burning effigy, that is.
-
The hotel room is nice, even by a Malfoy’s standards. Standing at the window his first night there, Draco takes in the city spread out before him, all twinkling lights set in the velvety darkness. It reminds him of staring up in awe at the Hogwarts castle for the first time the night that he was sorted into Slytherin. Somewhere within him, the homesickness throbs. Turning, he begins to settle himself into the room that will be his home for at least the next month. There will be no space for homesickness in this new place.
-
Alastair Mook looks exactly the way Draco last saw him, the summer before he left for Hogwarts as a first year. The older man is all silver hair and simple, paint-splattered clothes from the moment he swings open the door to his studio and greets his former pupil with a no-nonsense sort of nod.
“Draco,” he says, waving the tall, blond youth forward. “I have been expecting you.”
“Sorry, Alastair,” Draco says, taking in the airy expanse of the room, stuffed as it is with easels and canvases and potions and paints. “My plane only arrived last night.”
Alastair’s smile is enigmatic. “I have been expecting you for years, my boy,” he says, and Draco finds that he doesn’t quite know how to respond to that. Not that the other man is expecting a reply.
-
They don’t really do much the first day. Draco sheds his jacket and rolls up his shirtsleeves, but is content to merely watch the old Master at work. Alastair is currently working on a commission for a Muggle politician, and it’s all minute details and bold colours. He periodically asks Draco to bring him this brush or to mix that colour, nodding in silent approval when he sees that his old pupil still remembers everything he’d been taught all those years ago.
“Tomorrow,” Alastair says at the end of the day, “bring me whatever it is that you are working on.”
“What if I’m not working on anything in particular at the moment?” Draco asks, all lean, elegant lines framed by the doorway.
Alastair smiles that same enigmatic smile from before. “An artist is always working on something.”
-
In his hotel room, long after he’s taken his simple dinner in solitude, Draco sits in front of his open trunk and studies the small canvas he’s just pulled out from the bottom. Nearly forgotten, it’s been hidden at the very depths of his trunk since his fourth year at Hogwarts - the last time he had an opportunity to work on his art. Neither Umbridge nor the Carrows, after all, ever were the types to encourage that sort of thing. He frowns at the square and turns it upside down and then right side up again. It will have to do, he decides in the end.
-
Alastair silently studies the canvas in the light of the next morning, cobalt eyes unwavering. He finally turns his gaze to Draco, who is slightly ashamed to feel the back of his neck beginning to burn hot at the prolonged scrutiny.
“Today, we will paint,” is all Alastair finally says.
-
And paint they do. The first few days are for Muggle painting - the scenery and the subjects are all completely stationary. For this, they use regular paints. Alastair takes Draco to his favourite paint shop one afternoon, and it surprises Draco. For all that Alastair is a well-respected artist in both Muggle and Wizarding circles all over the world, he pledges his allegiance to a tiny shop tucked away into a quiet corner of New York City. The proprietor of the shop is a Muggle woman of Chinese descent, and jade bangles shimmer all up and down her arms as she ushers Alastair and his pupil towards the back of the shop in a flurry of accented chatter, where she’s stored a brand new shipment of oils that’s just come in from Amsterdam. Beaming toothily at the pair of them, she squirts a glob from one paint tube out onto a blank canvas in order to display its rich colour. It’s a particularly fine hue of red that Draco’s never seen before in any other paint, and Alastair catches him nearly gaping at it.
“They are rather like magical paints, are they not?” he asks with a wink.
-
Draco is pleased to find that he hasn’t really forgotten anything. Underneath Alastair’s watchful eye, he flies through canvases - all of them small, simple scenes. They are beginning to create quite a decent stack in one corner of the older man’s studio. Alastair is nearly done with his commissioned painting, he says, though there are still a few finishing touches he will need to add. The two men spend long days working quietly beside one another, and the silence is only broken if Draco has a question or if Alastair has a suggestion to make. Draco likes that even Alastair’s criticisms are more suggestions than anything else - it reminds Draco of the amount of freedom he’s always had in his art, more than in anything else.
But above all else, Draco finds that he’s glad that Alastair is, to this day, not much of a talker. He’s already received a number of owls from Pansy and, to a lesser extent, Blaise. They’re both demanding that he come stay with one of them, but Draco doesn’t know if that’s what he needs at the moment. Besides, there’s no Alastair in Europe. Which means, of course, that there’s less art. He’s had enough of less art, to be honest.
-
They’ve got a pattern going on, Alastair and Draco. Draco arrives at the studio early in the morning, the two men paint in the Muggle style until a spare lunch, and then they paint a bit more, until Alastair announces that it is time for the both of them to retire for the day. Draco takes his dinners alone in his hotel room, not that he minds the solitude. It’s rather nice, actually. And he’d never confess it to Narcissa or even to Pansy, but he’s grown quite fond of the freedom to eat while sitting on his couch with his socked feet propped up on the coffee table.
And then, one day, Alastair sets his brush down with a flourish and announces that it is time for lunch. Draco is expecting their usual fare of sandwiches and something that Alastair informs him the Muggles call soda (“Their version of Butterbeer”), so he is taken by surprise when the old Master hands him his coat and tells him that they’re going for a walk.
-
Draco has never been to Central Park until this moment. It almost feels like home - the trees and the ponds, especially, and the way everyone generally is, not that he can quite put his finger on the whys of the feeling. Alastair pauses at a stone table, making Draco follow suit - a group of old men are playing Muggle chess, so engrossed in their game that they ignore the people milling around them, agonizing over each and every move while the crowd waits with bated breath. It makes Draco think of old wizards doing the same in Diagon Alley, only with pieces that move and threaten each other at the tops of their tiny voices.
He wonders briefly what everyone he knows is doing at that precise moment, on the other side of the world.
-
Draco actually flushes in embarrassment when Alastair finds out that he’s never been to the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
“What have you been doing in New York City this entire time, then?” Alastair wonders aloud, before guiding his pupil towards the stone steps that lead up to the famous building.
After a swift lunch on the Roof Garden, and content in the comfort of their shared silence, Draco trails behind Alastair as he weaves his way through winding hallways and crowds of tourists, stopping at a Degas sketch, a Warner sculpture, a van Eyck painting. A cast of Rodin’s Les Bourgeois de Calais dominates one hall, and Alastair pauses for a long while in front of the towering work. Draco takes in the expressions and the postures and all of the other hundreds of details that give the impression that the sculpture is bursting at the seams with suppressed life.
This is what war does, he thinks to himself. The Burghers remain resolute in the face of their imminent deaths.
Alastair turns the force of his gaze onto his pupil. “Tomorrow,” he says, as he begins walking again, “we will create in the magical way.”
-
D,
Am back at home. Wouldn’t mind seeing your unfortunate face. Am relatively sure I’m annoying B to no end.
P
-
D,
P’s driving me mad with whingeing about your not being here. My home’s safe - come put us out of our misery.
B
-
The owls come bearing missives from Pansy and Blaise that grow increasingly more impatient with each passing day, but Draco tells himself that he’s too busy with Alastair to respond. Alastair had never had the opportunity to teach him how to work in the Wizarding way before he left for Hogwarts, and Draco is quickly finding that there’s nothing else quite like it. Alastair begins the lesson with a sketch.
“Do you remember the elderly chess players in the park?” Alastair asks as he sharpens a graphite pencil. Draco nods as he is handed the tool and a sheet of parchment. At the Master’s urging, Draco shuts his eyes and recalls as many details as he can - the frayed cuffs of one man’s jacket, the faded colour of another’s hat, the blue of the veins on the back of yet another’s hand as he slid his queen forward across the board. Alastair murmurs a charm before instructing Draco to open his eyes and begin to draw, and then sits in silence as his pupil quickly and deftly transfers his memories to the parchment. As soon as Draco sketches in the last bishop, a leaf on a tree in the drawing drifts slowly to the cobbled stones underneath the men’s feet. And, much as someone that has just been roused from a long sleep, the chess players shake their heads and blink their eyes and resume their game. Draco leans forward eagerly, expecting to hear the music of the birds and the chatter of the bystanders, but Alastair pats his shoulder with a warm smile.
“There is much for you to learn yet.”
-
The owls come and go, some even while he is with Alastair. The old man never says anything, not even when Draco unceremoniously stuffs the parchment into his pockets without blinking an eye.
And then: “You never write to your friends,” Alastair observes one afternoon.
Draco never answers, and Alastair never pushes.
-
The walls of Draco’s bedroom are plastered with graphite figures that go about their business within the borders of their parchment. The Muggle paintings are strewn all over the living room, as Alastair insisted that they were not his to keep.
Looking at the art, one would never guess that Draco is from England - all of the scenes are taken out of New York City, a study of sorts of the famed locale. The chess players continue to haggle over tactics from their place of honour by his bed.
-
Magical painting takes much more out of him than anything else he’s learned thus far.
“Your memories need to be fully absorbed by the paints in order to paint a truly lifelike and faithful scene,” Alastair says, “and thus they need to be many and they need to be strong. Concentration is of the utmost importance.”
There are many charms and potions to learn - this charm enables the memories to flow through and out of the medium like liquid through a straw, while that potion, when mixed with the paints, gives the subjects life.
Draco decides that he wants to paint the chess players.
“Why not try something a little bit closer to home?” Alastair suggests.
Rather than respond, Draco begins to outline a knight. Rather than push, Alastair suggests a different brush.
-
One morning, Alastair gifts Draco with a small Pensieve.
“I find that one helps me in isolating and thus strengthening my memories when I am painting,” Alastair explains. “And it has helped me in many other ways over the years.”
Draco accepts the gift without asking what the other man means by the last part.
-
Draco,
It is done.
-
Draco doesn’t respond to his mother’s note. He tells himself that they will already know he is glad to hear of the news, that they will understand how committed he is to his art.
Alastair remarks, one day, that he expects England must be slowly reverting back to normal by now, and Draco pretends that he doesn’t hear him.
The moon waxes and wanes.
-
“I was just about your age at the end of the First War,” Alastair begins one afternoon, moving to watch Draco’s progress. “During the war, there was no time for art, only for fear and hiding. I was not able to find my art again for a long time. Oh, I sketched a few scenes, completed a few paintings, but none of it meant anything. I left the country, thinking that my true art had merely been misplaced elsewhere. But after many years of searching, I realised that I had never left my art, nor had it ever left me. I merely had to come to terms with everything that I had seen - the love, the death, all of it. The entirety of it was my art, so long as I allowed it.” He pauses as Draco slowly paints the finishing stroke on one chess player’s hand. And like a candle flaring up for the first time, the finished painting begins to pulse with the life that Draco has given it. Draco misses the sad sort of smile that Alastair gives him.
“There is nothing left for me to teach you, my boy.”
-
The next morning, Draco takes his usual route to Alastair’s loft. It is a particularly fine day in the city, all warm sunlight and clear skies, and he finds that he shortens his strides this time. Inside Alastair’s building, he climbs the same thirty-three steps that he has become well acquainted with in the past few weeks, inwardly grumbling at the perpetually broken lift.
But today, it turns out, is to be a different sort of day. He comes face to face with a note pinned to the locked door, and a sole canvas leaning against a doorjamb.
-
It is time for you to remember your art.
-
Draco picks up the canvas that he’d shown Alastair all those days ago, the last thing he’d been working on before the war tumbled everything he thought he knew upside down. He studies the blank, pure white surface for a long while, until finally the ghost of a smirk flickers across his face.
-
“Draco Malfoy!”
Draco turns at the sound of his name, confused. The only person in this city who knows him by name is Alastair, and the voice he just heard certainly isn’t one that belongs to an old man.
A girl who looks vaguely familiar rushes up to him on the pavement, blonde hair streaming behind her. Her cheeks flush prettily as she slows to a walk and halts just in front of him, peering up at him shyly even though she’s just called his name out in the middle of a busy city.
“I’d heard you were here, but I never thought I’d run into you while on holiday,” she says, and Draco finds that he is taken in both by the small, cheeky grin that she shoots at him as well as the musical tone to her voice. Somewhere in the back of his mind, a bell rings.
“You’re related to Daphne Greengrass, aren’t you?” he asks. “I know you from somewhere.” The girl’s face lights up becomingly.
“I’m Daphne’s younger sister,” she says matter-of-factly, sticking a hand out. “Astoria Greengrass, two years behind you at Hogwarts. You always used to pass the pumpkin juice to me at meals. Pleased to meet you again.”
Draco laughs for the first time in what feels like ages as he shifts his canvas so that he can properly shake Astoria’s hand.
“What’s that for?” Astoria asks, eyeing the object curiously.
“It’s for something I’ve been meaning to paint for a while now, although I’ve only recently realised it,” Draco explains. Astoria nods solemnly at this cryptic response.
“That sounds lovely,” she says.
“It really is,” Draco replies with an easy smile.
Astoria’s heart stutters at the way his eyes are like quicksilver in the dappled sunlight when they’re not shadowed by the burden of war.
-
One week later, Draco sets the half-finished letter to Astoria down on his desk, next to the one waiting to be sent to Alastair. Pansy and Blaise have just returned to their respective homes after spending the day alternately reprimanding Draco for not writing them and filling him in on all the gossip that he’s missed while away. Lucius and Narcissa are busy elsewhere in the Manor, putting up all of Draco’s newest art.
He turns to the canvas that he’s been steadily working on since he returned home, and, picking up his brush, Draco continues painting the perfect image of everything that matters the most to him.
Fin.