He draws mostly her.
There is an air of secret guilty pleasure in the ratty shoebox stuffed under his bed, filled with sketches and drawings, even simple lines recorded on paper napkins from greasy diners and musty pubs. There is something, he reluctantly admits, about her that is perfect for his art.
The romance novelists happily scrawl about forbidden love, women soft, dainty, and delicate as brittle china, men rugged and strong with winning smiles. He has tried to draw like that before - taking a few lines from Emmeline, a few shades of colour from Hestia, the softness of Molly's cheeks, the youth of Ginny, bless them, but the results are always something alien, something strange and out-of-place in his rough hands. He has always crumpled up the lovely portraits, thrown them away to only be picked up and smoothed out with smaller, gentler, but hands as calloused as his.
When she sits, sprawled out on the floor with a rude comic or a cliche romance, oblivious to the world around her, he quietly stands and fetches the parchment, a pencil, and watches her, entranced. A few times he has started out with her eyes, sparkling and beautiful, but then it always turns out wrong, wrong like the beauties he has attempted to draw.
He starts with her jaw.
It is curved, curved gently like a river cutting into a hillside, but lifts at a sharp angle, raw and rough but fitting. There is always something about her jaw. He has watched it many times, watched it clench in frustration or relax with the chime of a gentle laugh. It stays at the angle, something cold and wrong on her soft face, but it fits her.
Next, he travels to the roundness of her lips, curved at the sides and full. Her top lip is always, somehow, ragged and raw, when she chews at the skin in concentration, her hair falling over her face and skimming the bottom of her mouth. The sensuality of her smiling mouth contrasts oddly with the sharp lines of her jaw and chin, but it fits her.
Her cheeks are soft, rounded over her cheekbone, but the is skin pulled taut over the hollow underneath. It has happened to everyone, everyone since the War has started, curves fading to sharp inclines, soft soft skin wrinkling deeply. When she cries, the tears roll down her cheeks quietly, over her pink lips to her sharp chin, hanging there until they drop, drop to forever. He worries for her, her ever-tiring face, but she tells him there's nothing for him to worry about. He does not like it. He does not like her youth being wasted, wasted on dark wars and tired cities where weather is cold and cruel and people are even crueller.
Her eyes dance, sparkle and twinkle even when tears threaten to spill from the corners of her eyes. There's something about them, something young and fresh and beautiful and mysterious. He cannot tell; her dark eyes may be young but they are wise. They don't whisper her secrets, don't give way to her thoughts, observing black in the middle of thin golden-brown rings fading into seas of dark, dark, brown. He thinks they would be out of place on anyone else, but they fit her.
She changes her nose far too much, but nothing looks perfectly right until she goes from the cute ski-jump to her natural looks. Her nose is pointed, slightly turned up and bumpy like a rocky mountainside. She does not like her nose, she thinks it's big and lumpy. He thinks it is beautiful.
Her hair is pink, often, bubblegum pink or lavender purple, sometimes electric blue or shocking lime green. It is lovely short and coloured but there is something comforting in the waved, sweeping locks of mousy brown, strands of hair he can twirl around his fingers while she complains but knows that she likes it. Either way, her hair makes each of his portraits different; she might wear pink or green or brown but the way each strand swirls around her ears is magical, magical in a way he does not understand. It fits her.
Her ears are too big for her face, a little too rounded above and a little too sharp below. The gold and silver rings she sometimes wears on them that sparkle in the light bring too much attention to those ears that are so, so wrong on her face. Still, there is something about them lovely and feminine that intrigues him, something in their oddly proportioned softness that looks just right on her.
Sometimes he draws just her face and shoulders, bare and sleeping when the quiet nights make him a little restless, when her eyes are closed and she breathes deeply, muttering often about war and death eaters and chocolate cake. Sometimes, he draws her disembodied face and hands, hands that should be soft and smooth - would be soft and smooth - were it not for the work she takes on, grimly, perhaps, but with a maturity that shouldn't be seen at her age. Her hands are calloused, rough from fighting and loading and signing forms and writing letters, raw from when the wood of her wand chafes the side of her fingers, blisters rising and hardening. Sometimes, he draws all of her, when quick sketches and rough lines compose her petite figure well in action.
Every drawing he does, every scrap of paper and leaf of ragged parchment, is carefully placed into that musty old box under the bed. There are many doodles there, some streaked with cheap colour from those scratchy children's pencils he found abandoned on the playground, others dark charcoal he has taken from the fireplace and wrapped in scraps of paper napkins from the small cafes that litter the streets. He thinks of the box as his little secret, a window to a life he might have had if the beast had not taken him, a life where yes, he could sit on the windowsill and sketch all day, or open up a sweet-scented book from the old, old Black archives.
The box sits under his bed, alone and lonely, a few splashes of bright, bright colour in a world where life is dark and cold and dismal. War has wreaked chaos on the lives of a few already living in secret, changing the lives of most and ending the lives of some who might have been brilliant. The headlines voice every day a death toll rising quickly and a world of war that must be ended soon, and his drawings being carefully placed into a shoebox under his bed are made less and less often, until the box is forgotten by a man too busy, too busy grieving for the dead and the lost.
Yet every now and then, smaller hands, younger hands, reach under the bed and gingerly remove the box, familiar dark, dark eyes gently roaming through a collection of pictures, hands caressing the many faces of one woman whose heart is set on the man who loves her but does not think he deserves her.
A/N: My first R/T for - oh, a year? Hope you all enjoyed it, it's good to be back. Thanks to everyone who has left reviews for my other pieces while I've been gone, I appreciate them a lot! Please review this one, compliments and con-crit are much appreciated.