Chapter 14

After Baron went to sleep – turning into a porcelain figurine – Haru lit a couple of candles in her room and turned once more to her now varnished canvas. She'd had an idea, talking to Baron, but she was tentative to try it.

"…you have that same sort of potential…"

Haru calmed her thoughts, cleared her mind, and mixed her paints. She loaded her brush and closed her eyes for a moment, breathing deeply and slowly, before she once again opened those glowing brown orbs and set to work.

She wasn't entirely sure what she was doing, but she knew what she wanted the result to be. She wanted to paint a way for her and the Baron to be together. Her first thought had been to turn herself into a doll, but that was both impossible, and in no way guaranteed that she would wake up from the experiment. So many dolls didn't, after all.

Haru's second, better thought, had been to try magicking the Baron into a man.

The candles burned down, and down, and down, until they were great puddles of wax with a tiny spot of flame in the centre. Haru dropped her paintbrush into the jar of water she had been using to clean off the previous colour and sighed, content and relieved that it was finished. The candles snuffed out at last.

Haru sighed again and cautiously rose from the floor and felt her way to her bed. Finding it, she flopped gratefully and closed her eyes to sleep. She didn't sleep long. Haru hadn't just worked all day; she'd worked all night. It was about two hours after the candles ran out of anything to burn that the sun started to rise, and a loud thump type sound, like someone falling, startled her awake, though her eyes drooped insistently.

She was just swinging her legs over the side of the bed, having lost the fight with herself to stay in bed, when a knock came at her door.

"Come in," she called. Haru didn't worry about not being decent, she hadn't undressed before flopping down to sleep, and she hadn't really slept for long enough for her hair to become more than just a little mussed.

"No, I think I'd better not Miss Haru, it might be inappropriate," came the Baron's voice from the other side of the door, which he had opened just a crack so that he didn't have to yell to be heard through it.

"Baron, as long as you ask me to marry you before you ask me to share your bed, you're not being inappropriate," Haru answered, standing up and searching out her hairbrush.

Silence resonated from the slightly opened door, and Haru looked up at the thin wooden barrier in wonderment. Had she hit the nail on the head?

"I just wanted to ask what you would like for breakfast," he said at last.

She had heard him swallow quietly in the silence before he spoke, and she looked back at the portrait she had re-painted during the night, turning the Baron from being a handsome cat into being a handsome man.

"Cereal please, and a nice tall glass of orange juice," she answered, trying not to think about what she might have done.

"Uh, one other thing, Miss Haru," Baron's voice was tentative, and that worried her. "I think you might have to get me to sit for you again, for the portrait. I can't account for how it happened, but my appearance seems to have altered during the night, I can't return to my porcelain state any more either."

Haru's heart leapt. Had she done it? Had she really turned Baron into a man? Would that be a good thing? – The thought suddenly occurred to her that things had been just fine before, and there had been no reason for her to change them. No reason whatsoever.

She crossed the room quickly, carefully stepping over and around her paint supplies, and yanked the door open the rest of the way, forcing herself to face Baron, who was still standing on the other side.

"Oh my," she said. Of course, she knew what she was painting. She had been painting a perfect person, according to da Vinci's golden ratio and her personal taste. However, the face she had been painting was much smaller, on canvas, and now it was looking down at her with shocked green eyes, locks of orange hair hanging around his ears and down his neck. "You're human."

"Yes."

That seemed to cover it really.

"I think it's my fault," she added, towing him into her room to see what she had done to the painting. "Sorry Baron, I don't really know what came over me, and I certainly didn't know that this would happen." Haru was not going to add that she had hoped that it would, or that she had started because of the idea that it might. All those details were lost in a stupor of sleep-shortage.