Draco Malfoy was invited to the gala as one of the featured artists. The room was set up with portraits of all of the war heroes, including Malfoy's painting of me. I thought that that one painting was more than enough of me to share and still wasn't eager to share even that. But as always with him, he took it a step further and brought three more portraits of me. They were the last three in the collage: me after the war, me during the trials, and me returning his wand to him.
They were a type of single image portrait. Not the type we had at Hogwarts that featured semi-sentient figures interacting with a static scene, but the rarer type that was more like a short movie, or a comic even. They were flat, nearly sentient images that told a story, moving through time the way a wizarding photo did. These were the new style, used mostly in wizarding comic books, not the style of the founders. They were like giant wizarding comics done with oils instead of pen, except each was magnificently and artfully crafted and an exact representation of the event they captured and there were no words.
The post-war scene in the Great Hall showed a me that was exhausted, grieving, and relieve, just as I'd been a year ago. The me from the trials had details in his full painting that hadn't been there in the abbreviated version; details that indicated that this wasn't just me at any trial, but at Draco's trial. Other Death Eaters were there as witnesses for the prosecution, trying to earn a lighter sentence by turning on Draco, but I had taken the stand and said that the witnesses were the guilty ones and Draco was the innocent. I had saved him and he was there in the background to witness it, shock on his face.
The last portrait, the most recent of the bunch, showed the last time I'd seen Draco Malfoy before tonight. It showed the full scene, from me surprising him by showing up at his gates, to the elves leading me in, to me handing over the wand, to the look of hope on his face, to him using the wand as he did a pureblood ritual to honor the dead. Honoring the dead seemed like the perfect way to end and well, that was what I was doing here today.
All in all, I couldn't fault him for his work, any more than I could be happy that he was sharing my personal memories. I decided to avoid him and his paintings, hiding out as far away as I could get, while still being at the same event. I did get asked about him and people kept telling me how much they loved his work and that they were going to buy one or all three; he came with reprints to sell after all. But, I did my best to put him and the paintings out of my mind and focus on the real reason we were gathered: to honor all of those who had died fighting Voldemort.