1. I'm not sure whether this is enough to count as a college au because the actual college part ended up very downplayed and the viewpoint character doesn't even go but this is more than I've written in about six months so at least that happened.
2. So rushed. So rushed.
Mona Luna
Luna tries her hardest not to dismiss people by the way they look. How silly would it be, don't you think, when it'd been done to her for years? But still she finds herself with notions of "boring" that would have kept them acquaintances at best. He's in every way a usual boy like the ones she knows in school: he cares about football a lot and is only emotional in a stiff way and he's handsome but the kind of bland handsome that you see all the time.
Most of the people who move in to the building with her and her father are art students. She's watched five or six of them come and go already and they've all been nice enough. Living with them has been fascinating sometimes: she's helped a girl move a four-foot welded sculpture back into her flat and posed for a series of double exposure photographs. But on the other hand it's been the end of some childhood assumptions. The creative types are no more inherently interesting than anyone else, and no more like her.
When Dean first spoke to her beyond a polite exchange of greetings on the stairs, he apologized. "Did you know I haven't spoken a word all day? I can't believe how much I miss having people to talk to."
"I've tried talking to myself," she said, "but it seems to bother people, so I don't do it very often."
He smiled at this as if she were kidding.
The next time she asked him if he'd found anyone to talk to yet, and he hadn't, besides a couple telephone conversations with people he knew back home. "I've lived in the same place my whole life," he told her. "I don't think I've made a friend in about ten years."
"You seem like you'll be better at it than I am," she said with an earnest nod. And then he asked what was wrong with the way she did it, which might have been a little offensive but it was a question that seemed genuine all the same.
Dean is not like her. He is not as natural or whimsical or as open as she is. What he is is the first person to try to understand her in a while.
"Are we going on a jolly holiday with Luna today?" His shadow dims the pink chalk sky over the lake she's filling in with turquoise. She peers up at him from under the brim of her wide hat.
"How I wish," she replies. "It's awfully dreary outside." She's made a conscious effort to dress in spite of the clouds, in a late-sixties minidress with bell sleeves and leather sandals over tall yellow socks. Dean's outfit is dreary as the day, but she knows his clothes aren't as indicative as hers tend to be.
The portfolio he carries over his shoulder leans against his knees as he sits on the bottom step beside her. He gazes at her scene on the pavement. "Does look pleasant in there."
"It's the sort of place I wanted to go today."
"Is it sunrise?" he asks.
She hasn't thought about it. "Maybe," she says. "Pink looked right." When she glances at him he's smiling with his head turned away a little. She can't tell whether he thinks she's wonderful or ridiculous.
He says a quick goodbye and disappears up to his flat, and while he's gone she smudges in purple clouds and a reflection of the orange sun on the lake water. It is nearly dusk when he comes back through the front door and descends the steps again.
"I'm going to go get something to eat; would you like to come?" He tilts his head and she is reminded strongly of a hopeful puppy.
"Oh, I'm sorry…" His lips flatten into a tight, regretful smile and she wonders, has she ever disappointed someone in this particular way? "I was going to make vegetable biryani for Daddy and I. You're quite welcome to come over, though."
Dean bows his head "That's alright. Maybe another time." She watches him leave toward the bus stop at the end of the street but he's no more than five feet away from the steps before he appears to remember something and stops. "Hold on, I was going to…let me do something."
He leans down and carefully rubs away a small patch of chalk dust above the boat until the bare concrete shows through. For a moment she's bothered with him for changing her scene without asking but she sees him swipe waving lines of yellow chalk over an odd shape of peach and can't help but smile.
"It doesn't really look like anything," he says self-consciously. He has colored the tiny Luna a red shirt and is now trying to add facial features with the corner of the black chalk. "I don't use these very much."
"She's perfect," she assures him.
Dean looks up and squints at the sky. "It's supposed to rain tomorrow, you know. You might want to take a picture."
Luna doesn't answer for a little while, thoughtfully considering. "I don't think so," she decides. "When it rains, only a few people will know what it looked like. Or even that it was there at all, I suppose. It'll be like a secret."
He gives her a bemused look and she knows he doesn't get her, but he doesn't say anything about it. For this she's grateful.
She doesn't go to the college herself, but she finds herself at the exhibitions from time to time. She wanders around the gallery and wonders about the students behind each piece.
It's impossible and she knows it but sometimes she's convinced that she can see the passion in brushstrokes. She'll feel something artificial as she looks at an immaculate still-life or a photorealistic portrait strategically arranged to be interesting. There's far more life in smudged colors and thick, textured paintings.
"I think you're biased," Dean tells her, laughingly but honestly. "That's just the style you like the best."
That subjectivity of good and bad is exactly why she doesn't understand art classes, but she doesn't tell him so.
The first time she sees his work hanging in public it is a collage bordering on abstraction, layered with paint. She pretends it is passionate because it is lovely and inspiring and it is the style she likes the best. But she remembers him struggling with this assignment. She's seen his sketchbook and knows the sort of ink drawings, high-contrast with vast fields of black and white and flat, saturated color, that flow naturally from his pen.
He's in the studio overtime for hours more than usual this week. The still life is set up in the center of the room on a rolling cart, baskets and glass and patterned cloth and all sorts of things just meant to be tricky. She keeps him company while he grumbles about colored pencils.
"I hate art," he says, "I loathe this."
"No you don't." It seems perfectly obvious to her. He is a person who works with shape and color in a fundamentally different way. He sighs and she can't stop herself from asking the question that's been pressing her. "Why are you here if you keep needing to make things you don't like?
From the way he looks at her, this time there's something perfectly obvious to him that she's missing. "Well, to learn."
"But if you don't like it, why do you want to learn it?"
He focuses back on defining the highlights on a brown glass ball. "You need to be able to understand realism before you can stylize." He repeats the line like he's heard it a thousand times. "And you should probably be able to do a variety of things if you want to make any money."
She blinks. "Money."
"Yeah, money."
It's an assumption she really should have made that this is something he expects to live on. But if there's anything she can't imagine herself forcing, it's art. What of the spontaneity and the genuineness that really makes the thing for her?
"I wish I could draw for money," she says, softly. "But I can't make myself do it. It feels dishonest."
"What sort of job do you see yourself with?" he asks, ignoring that she's called him a liar by implication. "Is there anything you love?" He has the look of someone who finds everything to be work on his face.
She tucks up her feet onto her stool and hugs her knees. "I don't know," she replies. "I'll know when I feel it."
His book has a lot of things inside, just as a representation of a person's mind should, but most recently it's become an official record of Luna Lovegood, age eighteen. On days he likes, he will sketch her in thin black pen and color her clothes in thick marker. There are pages of her, carefully dated, wearing handmade dresses and men's long coats, hair frothing out around her shoulders and half-escaping from plaited loops.
At first she liked it. It made her feel proud to inspire someone else, but as it goes on she feels like a novelty. He almost seems to expect her to be different every day, as if there is no Luna but characters she plays for his enjoyment.
She knows she's capricious but there is a Luna, isn't there?
As she dresses she's caught herself wondering what he would think, what he would like, and it makes her deeply uncomfortable. First and foremost this has always been for herself. She doesn't want to give such a part of her over to the opinions of others, whether they find her mad or beautiful.
Today she puts on something simple that she's already worn since she's known him. This is the closest to Luna she can come up with without pondering a while. She worries an irrational amount for a solitary person about seeing disappointment on his face and distracts herself with coloring in the squares of a crossword puzzle.
"Good afternoon," says Dean cheerfully as he stops at her door to say hello. "You don't look like you've had a very good day."
She looks up and his brows are drawn together, his smile half-faded in concern.
"Oh, no, I'm doing well," she says. Her casual laugh comes out sort of choked, with a rush of some emotion she can't place.
He told her some time ago that she looked like a woman out of a Waterhouse painting. There are very few artists she knows by name so he had to explain. "You've probably seen one, or really all sorts of paintings of women from myths, and things… All ethereal, with the sort of hair that floats…"
It would have been a dream to see herself as an ancient heroine but the first time he draws her it's as the present girl she is. Her hair is falling loose from a scarf she'd tried to tie like a midcentury starlet in a convertible; the silk has slipped from her head in the wind. She brushes a curl from her face and gazes aside, calmly pensive, with the barest hint of a smile.
She remembers this day. It hadn't seemed to her anything memorable, but to him it must have been. Had she done something? Had she even made that face?
"I don't think you did." He gives a sheepish shrug. "I just, I don't know, extrapolated that from other things you do. Kind of wanted something peaceful."
Her skin and hair is painted like a classical portrait, carefully shaded in red-brown and gray-green. Spare brushstrokes of ink shape her face and tangled hair. She is pale and plain, but her scarf, wrapped loosely around her neck, is vibrant and sky-blue. It's done in wide swaths of thick paint and offset just slightly from the lines.
"It seemed like it should be lively," he explains.
Luna rolls a lock of hair between her fingers and stares at her own face.
"I did make it for me," he says. "But, also… I didn't want this to be a secret. I wanted to get it down somewhere."
Her face reddens. He makes her feel such a muddle of things!
"With some luck you could be a little bit immortal." Her eyes snap over to him in confusion but he's smiling, joking. "The new Mona Lisa."
She leans against his tall shoulder. Privately, she isn't sure she wants anyone else looking at her through Dean's eyes.