Written for Hogwarts' Around the World Event: Palau - Item: Photograph, the Love in Motion Event: DeanLavender.

Word count: 416


Pencil and Camera

"Have you ever thought about taking up photography?"

"Not really, no," Dean replied to Lavender absently.

He had looked up from his work, so startled by Lavender's voice that his pencil had jerked to the left, leaving an ugly, jagged line where there should have been a smooth curve. He sighed and traded his pen for an eraser. With luck, that drawing was still salvageable.

Lavender was posing for him — her legs crossed and her back arched away from him. Despite himself, his lips quirked up in a smile. He had gotten that right in his drawing, at least.

She was holding a photograph now though, looking at it fondly.

"And what's that?" he asked, realizing that she hadn't had it when he had started drawing her.

"A photograph," Lavender replied, lips curled into a teasing smirk. "Of me," she added with a laugh when Dean rolled her eyes at her. "Colin gave it to me earlier."

She handed the picture to him and Dean immediately scowled at it as he saw what Colin had thought he needed to photography.

It was the scene Dean was trying to draw, immortalized in black and white on glossy paper.

"So, think you can do better?" Lavender asked. Her smile, bright and teasing, made Dean's heart skip a beat.

Dean nodded. "Of course."

He stared at the picture, analyzing it. Colin was good, he had to admit it — even if the picture was Muggle and as such didn't move, Colin had still somehow managed to capture the movement in Lavender's limbs, which was the part in his drawings that had always given Dean the most trouble.

But it wasn't as good as a good drawing could be. Maybe he was biased, or maybe it was true, but to his eyes the photograph lacked something.

Soul, maybe. Or substance.

It lacked the spark Dean tried so hard to put into his own drawings, that thing so typical of his subjects that when you saw it, you could only think 'oh yes, of course this is what he drew!'.

The Lavender in the photograph was pretty and happy, caught mid-smile, but she wasn't the true Lavender, wasn't the Lavender Dean loved.

The soul didn't shine through a photograph the way Dean could make it show with just a pencil and some paper after all.

So yes, he knew he could do better — and Lavender, with her laughing eyes and kind heart, deserved his very best.