A/N: Hey all, it's me again. Posting this here as well, since I just know you've all missed me... /sarcasm Anyway, this is how I plan to occupy my time until my muse allows me to pick up LC again. It's a bit on the strange side though, so you can't say you weren't warned!
I don't know why he does it.
That filthy little half-blooded squatter who has tainted the house of my ancestors for more time than I care to recall… It is true that most portraits lose their ability to track time, but not I. It is simply that I no longer care to. With nothing to look forward to, the act is merely depressing. But that is quite beside the point. Which was…
Ah, yes. Him. Scraggly hair and scrawny limbs, overlarge glasses sliding down his nose; he looks the worst sort of ragamuffin. I don't know how many nights he has come down to sit curled against the wall, just staring at me with his wide, empty eyes—perhaps he has a streak of the masochistic in him, which would explain some of his…friends—but I do know that this isn't the first night. Nor will it be the last, if I'm any judge of character—which I am, of the highest caliber.
I can only assume he's been coming here a long while, for I've hurled at him every insult and barb that I have at my command. With as many years as I've hidden beneath my skin, that arsenal is quite impressive, if I do say so myself. Which I do. Now there is nothing left to do but stare. Stare as I have the past few times he's come to darken the only space of house left to me. It used to be I could escape, roam the house through the other portraits and leave behind that space…but the fool Dumbledore has managed to trap me here. It gives him joy, I think, to feel he has conquered me, but he'll never truly do so. Perhaps it was…uncouth to disrupt their meeting as I did, but with those filthy muggle-loving intruders tromping about my ancestral home at all hours, I became—shall we say—a little desperate. Any woman of breeding would do the same for the house she loves.
He must have put up a silencing spell, for I cannot hear the rest of them and no one ever rushed in to quiet me when I would scream at him for hours upon hours. He's not healthy, this boy. No one should willingly seek out such vitriol as I have at my disposal. Even now, as I stare at him with what I am proud to say is a scorn to make that traitor Snape seem as cuddly as a newborn crup, he simply smiles at me in that infuriatingly endearing way of his.
After a while, he starts to talk, quietly. So quietly, in fact, that I almost cannot hear him. He tells me—or himself, I'm not quite certain—about his life. From the earliest memories until the latest tragedies and I cannot help it. He is so similar and yet so different. Raised with all the harshness and chill of an aristocratic upbringing without the luxury of wealth and prestige to soothe that ache, he knows the suffering of our kind, but none of the consolation—chill and empty though it may be. I…I empathize with him.
Damn it. The brat is… No, I refuse to think such things, even to myself. And yet… When dawn's first fingers stretch to claim the sky, eeking light through windows so dusty it seems more twilight than sunrise, he stands, offering me a warm smile sunnier even than the morning outside. And when he departs with just the lightest of farewells—his light French accent pleasant to listen to, even if it's just on the one word—I tell myself it's for my own amusement that I send the boggarts to plague the batty auror's dreams instead of his. Though how he knows to address me with the name even my own sons did not know… He is—and I grant him this with all due seriousness—a very strange child.
After all, what normal child would address a terrifying, vicious portrait of a withered old haunt as Grandlupe?