Gilderoy found love at a very early age. He loved to draw, to paint, to make things come to life through his quill when he really should have been studying. The older boys in Slytherin house would make fun of this whenever they got the advantage, but Gilderoy didn't let it bother him. Most of his friends weren't in Slytherin anyway, and at times he wondered why he was. All the time.
Slytherins were all about claiming, about making things theirs. About who got the seat in front of the fire in the deathly cold common room, and really. Gilderoy couldn't see the use for it.
Sometimes, he supposed, drawing or painting was like a way of claiming things, making them his once they were on the page. And he did own them in a way, after that. Without him they wouldn't exist. He was the creator. And when a tree was in full flower, he could draw it, and then when autumn came, the tree wouldn't look the same, but Gilderoy could always remember how it looked because he would have the sketch. He was the preserver.
Gilderoy could remember showing his pictures to his mother only once…before the thing concerning the word he would rather not remember happened. She had smiled in a secretive type of way and handing them back to him, ruffling his hair and telling him they were lovely. Then she had continued to sit at her desk, looking at her lap and tracing a sickle-sized bruise on her left arm repeatedly.
His father hated it. Drawing, painting, these were things for girls, and never acceptable for a Lockhart. Gilderoy had come to have to hide his sketchbooks, paint and quills every time, for every time his father caught him with anything like that, it was burned, and Gilderoy was made to watch. Then he was punished. But it was the watching that hurt Gilderoy the most, seeing his creations go up in flames, and knowing that for while they seemed indestructible fresh on the page, these things of his were flimsy, weak, and susceptible to flame. And it was as he watched the paper curling, blackening at the edges, the strokes which had been so carefully executed devoured mercilessly, that he realized, each time anew, his own heady and sickening mortality.
But Gilderoy learned, and he hid these things away, worked on them when he could be relatively sure he wouldn't be caught by the condemning eye of his father.
When Gilderoy fell in love a second time, it was not easy to hide. In fact, he couldn't hide it. A giggle here, a shy glance there, and the girl, the girl who crept silently with the freckled face, the chestnut hair and the green eyes would come to watch him. Come to watch him paint, or draw, to make art and to struggle with some forbidden passion. She saw it, she was intrigued. And so every day the girl checked for him, and when he was there, she watched.
And soon he started doing it for her, more than himself even. Art was a selfish thing, always had been, and always would be to an extent. But she was his audience, his silent support, the breathing proof that he lived through his work, and she could see him in it too. In the next year, when the childlike shyness had left them for curiosity's sake, they became close friends. Her name was Vanessa.
His father hated her. The girl across the street was a nuisance, not very well off, and likely a squib. And every time Gilderoy was seen with Vanessa, he would be punished. But he could not hide her, not like his paintings and favorite bottle of ink. Vanessa was a different kind of love, a love that doesn't realize itself until it realizes it's not supposed to exist. Some days he would make excuses not to be with her, and he felt stupid on those days, for all they ever did was play, and watch him paint, and draw. Draw and paint. For her.
Gilderoy had always known he wasn't brave. If he had been brave, he wouldn't have hidden in the recesses of his mind, scared to come out, scared because he couldn't face his father, scared because girls were different from art. He couldn't claim her, she wasn't his. Did he want her to be? He knew he wanted her, and that scared him. Disgusted him. Because he was scared, and because she wasn't his, couldn't be his, he needed to get her. But he was scared. It always came back to that. Fear was, as only those who have known it in itself will know, the most life draining force existing.
So Gilderoy continued to play with Vanessa, and to hide from his father. But really he hid from them both, because she couldn't know how he felt. But sometimes, in a passing smile, in a radiant glance, he sensed that she did know, and was waiting for something, he didn't know what.
The garden grew around him and he moved imperceptibly to put the first strokes down of the shape he saw in the page. Because this day he knew how to claim…how to show…her.