Chapter 19. A stroke of red in the forest

He wouldn't say he was avoiding Cass when he boarded the train, he just didn't actively go look for her. He saw Potter and jumped into his carriage with him, making small talk about the holidays. It was cool. Life was fine. No big, he was catching up with a friend. This was completely normal when one saw an old friend.

Potter seemed to guess that something was up. "Are you sure you're okay though? You seem a little jumpy."

Scorpius jumped in his seat. Was it that obvious? Yikes, he better move quickly. "No, I'm fine. I should probably go find Westlock and Nott. They're probably pining away without me." Yet leaving would mean that he may come across Cass and that wasn't very good. He stood up in an indecisive manner when a womanly figure slipped into the compartment and shut the door with enough vigour that Potter flinched.

She looked the same: helmet hair, unflattering muggle clothes, same blank look that was usually on her face when she was near Scorpius (but now by the slight furl in her eyebrows this was probably annoyance). "What are you doing next Saturday morning?"

"Uh, me?" Potter said. He looked at Scorpius with a confused look.

She rolled her eyes. "I'm not even looking at you Al."

"Hey, just because you're pissy at your brother doesn't mean you have to take it out on me."

Weasley glared at him. "I'm not pissy at my brother. He's being a real dickwad right now and annoying me. I'm talking to Malfoy. Saturday morning?"

Oh she was in a mood, good to know that all was normal in the world. "Oh Hi Scorpius, how was your Christmas? Why quite lovely, thanks for asking. I ate loads of food, didn't kill my cousins, survived a Christmas party where everyone besides blood relatives and the Westlocks hated my guts, planted a thousand seedlings, and didn't open a single book for two straight weeks. Couldn't have been better! Yours?"

"Oh boy." She sat hard in the seat next to Al and folded her arms. "It was fine."

Scorpius waited, an expectant smile on his face.

"Oh bloody hell. I ate loads of food as well. Killed only two cousins, avoided all Christmas parties with outsiders, read nine chapters in two different textbooks, read three novels, and wrote two papers. Happy? Now, the morning?"

"Well – it's free as far as I believe. You know sleep is the main priority in my life at all early hours."

"Alright. Free is good. Wear some old clothes you don't mind getting dirty. Cap found me and asked how the challenges are going and it's been awhile … So we have another on Saturday. We're painting in the common room with Emmy." The left side of her mouth was slightly raised, in a way that could only be described as mischievousness, or slyness.

Something dropped in Scorpius's stomach. It took a moment to find his voice.

"No."

"Yes."

"Hell. No. I hate her. She hates me. No. That's a terrible idea."

"You'll survive." She brokered no opportunity for rebuttal. "Al, Lily told me to tell you that James stuck some stink bombs in your trunk. And also that you owe her now." Rose turned back to Scorpius before leaving.

"You look as though I told you the world was going to end. Seriously, you'll survive."

She left them both in a state of anger.

Potter scowled. "Damn brothers. And sisters."

"Damn your whole family."

"Weren't you the one who brought this on yourself by insulting her in front of your team?"

"Don't remind me of my terrible life choices of talking in public."

"How will you grow as a person if you aren't constantly reminded of your failures?"

"Ew. You sound like Jazz … umm … What are you doing? Didn't she just tell you there were stink bombs in your trunk?"

"Yeah but I might as well see if I can – " Scorpius quickly got up and opened the door, " – figure out a way to take them out without – " There was a bang and the room quickly filled with brown acrid smoke. Scorpius shut the door behind him before the potent cloud reached him. "Shit! They've gone off," came the muffled voice of Potter through the door.

"You don't say?" Scorpius said. He noticed some brown residue on his arm but brushed it off. "You really know how to clear a room Potter."

Potter's surprised face set him off though and he cackled like a baboon in the corridor. Terrible fate to have a brother. Though mayhap it was a worse fate to have a friend that decides to open a trunk with stink bombs inside an enclosed space.

He was faced with a dilemma now. Where to go? He didn't want to talk to Cass yet. He had mostly decided he wanted to break up with her and he couldn't break up with her on the train. To the front or the back was the question. What was safe? Westlock and Nott were at the back for sure, but then most likely Cass would be too. But maybe Cass was further back than them and he wouldn't have to pass her. Alternatively, he could go to the front. Try and find their youngest Ravenclaw to annoy for a bit. He rather missed the quick sass of Gebhart.

Gah. No. He was a chickenshit. Back it was. He passed a few compartments of Weasleys – all safe. Passed Rennings and her crew – no Cass. Passed some of the people he shared his dorm with – no worries. Passed loads of students he didn't know – still good. But still no Westlock or Nott, and then he saw Cass sitting with Julie in a compartment.

Unfortunately Cass saw him and waved exuberantly. He couldn't pass by pretending that he couldn't see her. Merlin that would make him a terrible person and he already felt horrible about it all.

In the end, it wasn't that bad. He felt slightly awkward the whole time and didn't say anything because Julie was there. They shared stories of their break, Cass sat curled up next to him, and it was nice. It just wasn't what he wanted anymore. But she was so friendly and welcoming! Why couldn't he like her and want to date her. Why was he such a terrible person?

They got to Hogwarts, Scorpius still not having seen his friends at all, because now that he wanted to break up with her, everything felt way too obvious. If he left her to find his friends, she would know. Everyone would know. And that could not happen at all. They would talk when it was time, so as a result they spent the hours together, got off the train together, went up to the common room together.

"Scorpius we thought the train left without you!" Westlock said with a grin and a slap to his back after he got to the sixth-year dorms. "How have you been? I missed you."

"It's literally only been a week since you last saw me."

"But go a few days without seeing your ugly mug and I forget how ugly you actually are."

"Mhmm, I feel so welcomed." He looked at Nott who was hovering right behind Westlock. There was a small white mark on his forehead from where the goblet had hit him. Scorpius took a breath and stuck out an arm. "All good mate?"

Nott nodded and clasped arms with him. "All good."

He wasn't going to go. There was no fucking way he was going painting.

The first week went by fast. The first week always had sleep deprivation because of holiday indulgences, and more Quidditch practices on his slightly untrained body. He had worked out at home to maintain his fitness, but it was never quite the same as an actual practice.

He wasn't going to go painting.

That was his mantra for the week. There was no way. Weasley skipped the full Monday morning, and all of a Wednesday afternoon. Didn't go to any Defence classes for the week so he didn't see her much, and when he did see her, she didn't even mention painting at all. She missed one Quidditch practice, rarely went to the Great Hall for meals, and then the weekend was here.

He knew the time and place. It was the same year after year for Emmanuelle. On Saturdays, she painted in the corner. That was the only sure thing about her. But he wasn't going to go. No way. He wasn't going to set an alarm. He wasn't going to be in the common room at seven. No.

He showed up.

Goddamn it he was wide awake at 6:30 am. That was the first Saturday he'd woken up naturally that early in years. Sullenly, he went down to the common room at seven.

"Morning Scorpius," greeted Rose. She was smug. Of course she was that rat bastard. "There's breakfast on the table and you can pick your size of canvas. Emmy has a plethora of different colours of paints that she graciously allowed us to use," the warning glare Emmanuelle sent to him could have peeled armour from a knight, "and we'll get started."

"Say one word to me bird brain and you're banished from here forevermore." Emmanuelle's gravelly voice was such a delight in the morning.

"What she means is don't make a mess of her paints, and you'll be fine."

"I still can't believe I'm here doing this," muttered Scorpius.

"Well it's a reality, so you might as well start acknowledging it. You choose what you want to paint – these paints have some magic shit in them. They make your image move a little bit – colours shifting and all. I've got some photos here, or you can paint something from memory, or whatever else."

He shrugged. She handed the photos to him and he flipped through them. They were nice – but they were all landscape photos. A mountain scene. A different mountain scene. A reflection of trees on water. Green forests. Looked really pretty. But –

"Where's the people?"

Rose was stuffing a crumpet in her mouth. "Idffgughhge."

"Oh right. That made total sense."

"I don't like people."

"That made even more sense."

She smiled in her weird way of not actually really smiling and then pulled a picture out and set it up near her canvas. She was doing one of the mountain landscapes.

Emmanuelle had decided that she would respond, to Scorpius's surprise. "That's why Rose and I get along so well," she said. She didn't wait for a response; her gaze reverted back to her canvas where she was putting colourful strokes down. Scorpius frowned at her methods. For someone so dark, she painted very light. Bright colours, broad strokes.

They were set up in the corner of the common room, enough out of the way that most people didn't look around at them as they descended to go to breakfast. Scorpius eventually decided to paint a forest trail, but goshdarnit he was going to put some people in it. He chose a smaller sized canvas like Rose and started with some green and black paint on his plate.

It was a surprisingly chill morning. Time flew – in the sense that they didn't talk much outside their focus on the canvas.

"Do you paint often?" Scorpius asked Rose during a lapse in his painting.

"No … well, more than you. I paint with Emmy once or twice a year maybe. It's relaxing. I'm not very good at it but that doesn't matter to me."

"You've improved since first-year," Emmanuelle commented. "Those first few paintings you did were pretty shit."

Rose gave a small smile (right side slightly lifted). "You didn't say that back then."

"Well of course. You never would have painted again." Emmanuelle's painting had progressed from series of lines to lines that made sense in a rhythm. It was a monochromatic dancer – she was all shades of blue surrounded by a rainbow of colours in a rainstorm. It was stunning. The magics imbued in the painting made the dancer's outline blur and shift as if she was moving slowly.

Rose shrugged. "It's rather neat to see the progression. But I can't come up with pictures in my mind like you. I need to see something in front of me."

"Mhmm. You could. With practice. This is something I saw at home over the break, not made up. My sister at a dance recital."

Rose nodded. "It's beautiful."

"It won't let me go until it's on the paper."

Scorpius nodded along with Rose like he had an idea what that meant. His painting didn't look that bad, really, but it was missing the connection of colours and strokes. It looked like trees, but didn't look like a forest, even though there were subtle movements of the paint. Looked like a human, but not his mother. His aim was to draw her with a basket. A memory of foraging for potion ingredients once … and he wanted her not to be on the paper: she needed to be in the forest. Connected.

Shadows were hard. She didn't look real.

He got back to work. By the time he finished his painting he also had eaten six crumpets, two muffins, and an orange. And it was almost noon.

Cass had stopped by earlier in the morning on her way down to the Great Hall, and then she appeared again later. "Look's a lot better than before. What's your plan for today?"

Scorpius shrugged. "Homework, I guess. Have to do the Transfiguration assignment."

"Ah, I've finished that with Julie. We're about to start on our Divination project. See you tonight maybe then?"

Scorpius nodded as he focused on a stroke of red he thought would add more depth to the forest. It sort of looked like a stroke of red in the forest. He was done, but it didn't look done. "I have Quidditch, but will be free after – oh you're gone."

Cass had already left the dormitory.

Emmanuelle had pulled out a different completed painting and was touching it up. This time it was four kids in a pile of leaves. It was a very bright painting – leaves all colours, humans all colours, and the sky and grass centering the image. Scorpius watched her paint for a little. She had a very fine attention to detail, almost like in potion making. But there she could follow the instructions in a book to a T, here she was following instructions in her mind – very detailed instructions that many people couldn't even formulate or imagine.

"Who's in this painting?" he couldn't help but ask.

"Hmmm. My younger brothers and sisters. A childhood memory of all of us playing before I was forced away." She sounded a little bitter and Scorpius found himself curious about what she meant.

"By forced, you mean you turned 11 and came to Hogwarts," Rose said. She seemed to be finishing up the final touches on her painting as well.

"Yes. It sucks being the only witch in a family. They're all growing up without me, making memories and stumbling through life without me. I'm fading from their existence and lives. Missing all the moments of growing up."

"It's hard, for sure."

"It's never enough time … I don't know. Education sometimes doesn't seem as important as family."

"Have you ever looked into the study abroad programs? Maybe you could study abroad from home?" Scorpius said.

"Errm. No. Didn't know about it."

Painting ended rather unofficially. Scorpius and Rose cleaned off the brushes and plates they used and packed up the paints. With a lot of prompting and pretending he was indifferent but still interested, she took him up to her dorm so he could look at some of her previous paintings.

He'd been in the sixth-year Ravenclaw dorm a few times before, but never had he paid any attention to Rose's bed and belongings. It wasn't like Cass had given him a tour.

It was really impersonal: one book and an origami frog on the nightstand. Curtains all closed around her bed, nothing else visible. She didn't seem to own very much stuff, or at least, kept it all locked away in the ancient trunk at the bottom of her bed. The trunk was nicked, dented, and had scratched up black metal with two large brass locks on the front and brass covering the corners. He was sure that trunk could tell some stories.

His eyes wandered to the rest of the dorm that was rather messy. Books, clothes, makeup, bottles, and all sorts of random things were all over the floor. He didn't even remember if it was like this when he'd been up previously – he'd had the singular mission of getting to Cass's bed.

Weasley tapped her wand on the trunk to open it and then dug through it for a few minutes before pulling out a pile of papers and some canvases and setting them on the trunk after she closed it.

They all had years in the bottom corner with her initials in a messy scrawl. The neat thing was he really could see the progression in her skill from the first few paintings done in first-year to her sixth-year paintings. They weren't Emmanuelle good or anything, but she had a consistent style. There were about 10 of them. They were all scenes devoid of humans – forests, mountains, fields. An empty, overgrown town. A river meandering the countryside. All peaceful paintings with the way they subtly moved as if alive. The older paintings didn't move as much as the newer ones, as if the magic was fading.

There was one of a dark forest with a set of glowing yellow eyes – the only indication that there was some creature – human or other – in her paintings.

"What's the importance of this one?" He pointed to it. "Only one with eyes."

"It was a dream."

"Thanks for showing me. When are you going again? To paint, I mean. I maybe, slightly would be interested in trying it again. Emmanuelle was not quite that bad – outside a Potions lab."

Rose locked up all her paintings again in the trunk, tapping the trunk with her wand to lock it up. Oh the secrets he'd find in there if he could break in. "Oh really? Funny how actually spending time with a person changes your perception of them."

"Oh shush. Are you going to make me spend time with Rennings then? Doubt you could change my mind on her."

Rose froze up briefly and he remembered that she had allegedly done a memory charm on her. Merlin he wanted to know and hated that the thought was in his head because of Rennings.

"No. Never. However, that's unfair for me to say. We don't have a good relationship right now but she's not actually a bad person … Maybe Melody though. We'll see how timing goes with the challenges, I have a few ideas."

The airhead? "Ermmm. I may reserve my comments on that one."

"Wise."

"Do you have Defence homework still? Want to go work on it before Quidditch?"

She indicated at him to follow her out of the dorm. "I do have homework still."

"So, want to work on it together? It may be quicker."

"Yes, it'll probably be quicker."

"So the library then?"

"Possibly."

"Why are you being so evasive?"

She stood in the middle of the common room as Scorpius collected his bag. It was really quiet still, only two students out doing homework. Emmanuelle was long gone, no evidence she had been there in the morning. "Debating if I want to work on this right now."

"What else are you going to do? It's due on Monday, right?"

Silence.

"What. You're going to skip class on Monday?"

Silence. She shrugged. "Hadn't decided yet."

"Wow, what luxury." Her face was blank. "I'm assuming it's still due on the same day though right? Let's just go. I mean, it makes sense. Bring your Quidditch stuff too and we'll head to the pitch after."

She was still silent.

"Okay. Seriously, what's your problem?"

"We're not friends, okay? I mean, let's do homework together sure. But we're not friends … so yeah. Keep that in mind."

"I'm not asking to exchange a blood bond with you," he said, a little annoyed. "It's only homework." Why would she assume he wanted friendship? It made sense for today. They both had Defence class and homework, both had Quidditch later.

He had all his homework and gear and so waited with his arms crossed thinking rude thoughts about people who assumed too much as she went back to her dorm for her bag. Why would she assume he wanted friendship? Not with her certainly. They were teammates. That's what people did.

Merlin, women were crazy.