A/N:Something different from my normal stuff. R&R

Disclaimer: J.K. Rowling owns the Potter verse.

Expressions in Oil

It was uncharacteristic for a Malfoy to yearn. But I did. I do.

She had meant something to me, I realized too late. It was so long ago now, a year that dragged out like ten. One year of being haunted by a decision that was wrongly made.

We hadn't been together long when I decided that it had to end. I told her so on that night a year ago, I told her in no uncertain terms that we could never be.

I broke her heart. I broke her and then she said three words that broke me.

"I loved you." she had whispered, and the look on her face was so... strange. Delicate, as if it would crumble any second and her eyes, they had dimmed somehow. The chocolate brown of her irises darkened to a stormy, soil color and they shimmered with the lightest blanket of oncoming tears.

I dip my brush into a dab of creamy white paint and daub it onto the canvas, gently. Trying desperately to capture that face—capture the expression that haunts me.

I paint it all; the dusting of cinnamon freckles that coated her skin, the three darker, coffee colored ones that form a triangle on her right cheek bone, and the freckle that lives on her upper lip, drawing the eye to their fullness. I add what I know she believed to be her 'imperfections' with utmost care-- Lovingly detailing the portrait, so that the viewer can see her. See how I hurt her.

I leave her hair in an abstract red cloud around her face, using it as a soft background for the beauty of her face and the narration of her countenance.

The stars are twinkling brightly when I am finally finished. I cast a drying spell on the portrait and shrink it and my supplies so that they can fit in my pocket. I'll resize it later, and look at my work in better light, add to it until it is perfect. Until it is her that I am looking at and not a painting.

They're calling it Malfoy's red period. Isn't that funny? All of my pieces are red, I know that, but the color is not the theme. The color is not her. It is a part of her, the part I see when I dream. Her hair undulating around her as we make love, her red nose after she has been in the sun gardening, her full lips red from kissing, her red rimmed eyes the night I hurt her.

She is the theme, the muse, the art. It is because of her that museums are fighting to house my art. Every piece is different, some are abstract while others imitate Monet's impressionism, and still others realism.

The expressions are different as well. I've painted her in every way I can think of, every expression, every age, and every state of dress. Here through these canvases she is mine. She understands without questioning and she stays. She knows that I never really meant for her to leave.

I was never inspired to paint until I met her. Painting had been my mother's passion, not mine. I grew up, watching her painstakingly detail vibrant flowers and landscapes but I never had the desire to even swirl paint on a pallet. But that night, the night that I broke Ginny Weasley's heart I became a man possessed. I made my way to my mother's studio, a room no one had entered since her death just after the war, and had perused the oil paints there. I didn't move from my spot until I had a finished painting in front of me, and my hands were covered with thick red paint.

The red never seemed bright enough, and my paintings suffered for it, for they were not her. Not her essence.

I finally found a museum worthy of her, of her image on multiple canvases and the 'Grande Opening of Malfoy's Red Period' came and went.

My pieces had been up for a week now and I still perversely hoped that she would come to see them. The art show was advertised in every paper, and still every night I was disappointed that she wasn't in attendance.

I watched, as I did every night, as people entered my part of the museum. I watched as they tried to conclude what I was thinking whilst I painted. I listened to them deem me a genius, beautiful, tortured… and I wanted to scream at them, to tell them that it was her. All her.

Some would call me insane if they knew. Obsessed. But I'm not. Insane, that is. She is the only thing that makes me want to paint and when I feel the urge to dab oil on fabric or wooden board, no matter how hard I try to detail something else, another image, it always ends up being her.

I watch, with a bored expression, as another person enters my gallery. I can't see her face but she looks like just another plain looking woman in a heavy winter cloak, her hair covered by a large handkerchief. All women looked plain to me now, if only because they weren't Ginny.

I gazed around the room, watching as the people went from portrait to portrait, some faster than others, as they admired my work.

After a few minutes, my eyes turn back to the plain looking handkerchief woman, to see her still standing in front of the same painting. Her body looks incredibly relaxed as she stares ahead of her, her head tilted to the side in careful examination.

I sip my wine as I watch her. She's looking at 'Broken'. It was one of the first paintings I was ever pleased with; it was the one that captured Ginny's expression after my rejection of her.

I turn away from the woman, trying to focus on the other people in the room but I can't. I keep turning back to her and the way she never seems to move. Just another statue in the museum.

Without asking myself why, I find myself moving over to her. Drawn to her in a way I was only ever drawn to one woman.

When I am only a few feet away from her, I study her closely, while she is unaware of my presence. There is something so familiar about her and as my eyes travel down her body I notice pale fingers hanging out of her jacket sleeves.

Pale and freckled fingers.

I step up to her quietly, looking at my painting as I stand by her silently.

After a moment she speaks, and I shiver at how well I recognize the sound of her voice.

"I'm not that girl anymore. She doesn't exist." She says as she continues her perusal of my painting.

"I know." I agree, with a nod.

"Do you?" she asks calmly and I smile.

"Yes. She was never you; Just a shade, an expression that I witnessed once. She is just canvas and paint, arranged in an attractive way… a poor imitation."

Her mouth curls slightly at the corner in what I recognize is a sad smile. I know all of her expressions.

"I loved you", she says, reciting the last words she ever spoke to me, so long ago.

"I never stopped." I admit to her, "I realized too late, but I never stopped." I answer her, unsure of how she will react.

She turns to me then, and I can't help myself, I reach for the handkerchief that covers her hair and push it back reveling wave upon wave of deep scarlet. She watches me as I touch her hair reverently, her brown eyes searching my grey, a mysterious smile curving her lips with a whimsical sort of warmth.

It's an expression I don't recognize and it makes my fingers itch to paint. I want to know all of her, intimately, body and soul.

"Neither have I."