It was during the windy fall of fourth year that Dean decided he would finally learn to add magic to his art. He'd picked the perfect painting, you see, one he'd worked on all summer. He'd hidden it from his parents and from Seamus too, when the boy came to visit him in the city, because it was to be a Christmas gift – for Seamus. The only ones who'd seen it were his three younger sisters, who'd snuck into his tiny attic room one day with the express purpose of seeing what he'd been hiding from them since he'd returned from school.
The painting, of course, was of he and Seamus, his absolute-best-mate-forever-cross-my-heart-and-hope-to-die. It was a reproduction of a photo Colin had snapped of them in the Gryffindor Common Room, laughing at some stupid joke Seamus had made, sitting together in a big, saggy armchair, legs tangled together in a way that only the most comfortable of friends did. Dean's painting skills had gotten better since first year, and he'd pored over every colour, carefully brushed on every single detail, transforming the plain canvas. He'd chosen to omit most of the things that surrounded them in the photo, like fallen pages and open books and a first year picking his nose in the background. Instead, the painting focussed solely on them, Dean and Seamus (whose names were usually said so fast and so often together it was more like deanandseamus). He was positive Seamus would love it; he'd painted it especially for him, after all. Seamus always loved whatever Dean made. And it was the perfect painting — or at least, almost perfect.
All it needed was a bit of magic.