A/N: Sorry it's so short, but I wanted to be sure you had somethingnew in time for the holidays.

Chapter Thirty-One: A Painting

I didn't care about those old men in the Chronologie Mechanique anymore, let alone what they thought of me or who they thought I should marry. Once I completed my masterpiece, they would have no further say about me or my life, and I found that I didn't even care about my reputation or what the wagging tongues of the old hens in Diagon might say about what I'd done.

Or what we'ddone. Whatever.

Funny how, when people completely misunderstand something, the people on the girl's side say the man's a cad and she's a fool, the people on his side say she's no better than she should be and either way it's the girl who gets the dull end of the bayonet? Yet another reason to take their opinions and chuck 'em all.

I put my hair up in a fashion that wasn't likely to get in my way during the masterpiece trials, even the gold-casting or plating phases. Lord knows that at home I singed my hair often enough to justify the new fashion for short hair and even those little combs I'd seen on some shopgirls, but why wear a lot of frippery on your head when there's always a growing charm to put your hair long again after a bit of a fire? Besides, he liked my hair long and his was the only opinion I cared about anymore –and what a freeing feeling it was. I even shivered a little remembering…well…a nice bit of remembering.

We'd shared a single compartment on the train, overnight, barring only a short stop near the Scottish border to take care of a bit more paperwork than the usual Customs rigmarole, as it were. The scandal would be fizzing the minute anyone noticed, but I found that I couldn't muster the proverbial tinker's damn, even as he saw that I was ready and offered his arm out of the stateroom. We didn't even bother to watch and be sure no one saw. It didn't matter a fig.

Part of this shocking boldness was happiness making me giddy and therefore less than usually sensible, but part of it was definitely and clearly his influence. It seemed that if he hadn't shown me all the ways a woman could blush last night and then taught me to enjoy them all, I'd never be able to so much as take his arm the way I did as he escorted me toward the Guildhaus without going redder than currant wine.

I expect that last has shocked you, but I don't even care about that. That day, I had everything I'd ever wanted and longed for, and once I conquered the last fiddly obstacle, I would be able to claim the full joy of it. And what was reputation, compared to happiness?

Not that I'm all that especially known for caring about my reputation. A woman in my profession can hardly be expected to ignore the talk, but after a certain amount of self-denial and suffering for things one hadn't even done, it was positively delicious to actually have some sins for them to object to and not to care in the slightest.

We entered the Guildhaus and he took me to my appointed seat. I almost wished he'd kiss me right then and there, for luck, but rules are rules even on such a day as it was for us, so I made do with the Continental kiss on my hand and a last look in his eyes before names were called for the trials.

And then, for his sake, I put him out of my mind.

I can make a clock or a watch from nothing but lumps and scraps of metal. I've done it before, many times, but to make something truly perfect, a design out of my own head, with no notes or paper, that takes nearly every ounce of my concentration. Only at the stages where I must wait, when the alloy melts, the sand-cast rough cools, the mainspring hisses in temper until cool enough to touch…only then could I think of his hands tight around my wrists, the rough kisses that would have felt stolen if I hadn't wanted them taken, the…

All of my concentration is needed. I felt my thoughts snap back to the watch in my hand with a jarring harshness more than once that made me bless the heat of the little forges and crucibles for justifying a drop of perspiration or a pant in my breath when my mind strayed back a night.

Finally, I realized that the watch, if it passed the five tests and was truly a masterpiece, would be his, and that let me clear my head.

For him. It had to be perfect for him. There was no other way to stop the thoughts of those new memories sizzling into the cold water of my rational mind like hot metal, the hopes for our future shaping up like these bits of gold and steel, or even the way we just…fit, like these tiny gears. Our minds had been so for so very long, our hearts had followed and the night before had been like releasing the mainspring we'd wound since…well…

It also can't have helped that I was sitting the masterpiece on about two hours of sleep, as if I haven't shocked you enough.

So I made the watch for him. It was to suit him in every way. His favorite ideals of design, the very shape of his wrist –for I wanted it to be modern in every way, and as ever-present and enduring as what I felt for him, and that meant the latest design and the examiners' prejudices and preferences be damned. I ground colored glass to powders finer than what ladies wear on their faces and soldered wires half the diameter of a hair onto the face, then used a brush you could have made up a mouse with to put a paste of ground glass into the little spaces the wires left and heated it all into the hard-as-gemstone intricacy that was the traditional cloisonné he loved.

Every number seemed to grow out of the branches and knots of a tree and its' roots at the center of the face, and as I shaped the hands from gold wire, I shaped them with a chisel smaller than a number zero-zero-three screwdriver to make them into branches themselves. And it was a tree, a red-golden tree with shining numbers for fruits in every jewel color he loved, the branch for minutes long and stiff though it looked supple, the hour branch nearly as strong as the one on which we had hung a swing, that time…the second hand (for I had vanity enough to include one even in such a design as this,) was like the whip-thin branches of the tree in the field where I read his letters that horrible six months we were apart.

For the band, I chose rich, red-brown Corinthian leather stitched over the edges and center span of some common, tough field webbing in the dusty khaki we knew too well. Nobody had ever done a band of leather and webbing at once before, but it suited him, both as a reminder of the hard and rough times we'd endured in dusty khaki and a symbol of the brilliance and value I saw in him, like the leather-covered books he loved. I set an inch-and-a-half-wide crystal with just enough convexity to be useful for magnification or heat when opened into a steel-and-gold case I'd brushed so as not to shine under fire.

And by some miracle, the examiners of the Guild understood. The tough, elegant-under-fire outer case, the organic and colorful beauty of the face and hands…with the tightest, most precise movement I'd ever done, it was good enough for high honors, the ribbon and, though he never would have asked it, I felt that it justified his faith in me and the love we shared.

I signed the Guild register of masters as 'Jamesina Tickes' and a whisper went through the hall just as he took my hand. Easier than having it put into the papers, really, since there are rarely reporters at Gretna Green, and to be fair, it was the first time I got to write down my married name. He was due a portrait painted because there hadn't been resources before, so we both had them done in 1919 though he'd been a master for as many years as he was my senior and as long as we'd waited to belong to one another.

And here I am, in the Guild's portrait hall. I will always be twenty-three here, still in my uniform with three captain's stars on the shoulders and not the sleeve, since we had to avoid shining while we protected the witches and wizards caught up in the Muggle war. I will always be this happy, and since I don't age and only began to talk when I died out in the world, I will always be either in my frame or in my husband's across the hall. Here, we have been married a day, though I know in my heart that it must have been much longer out there where our real selves lived. If one has to be a shadow, let it be one as happy as me.

Have I shocked you, then, great-granddaughter?

Or is that look on your face as familiar as mine looked in the mirror that same morning? I hope so, even if we have still got the same first andlast name. Your time is a lot better than mine for women's rights, I do have to say.

Don't answer. Not for many, many years. You look about my age in your painting, so I'll have a good long time to admire and be proud of you. Then we can have a talk in a hundred years or so, not that time seems to pass for me.

Like what they did with your frame, by the way. High honors didn't always have the little band of blue in the oak.

The painting of then-Captain Jamesina Switch Tickes, c.1896-1980, is one of the stranger in the Portrait Hall of the Chronologie Mechanique. For one thing, the subject is one of only thirty in military uniform (and only four of those women,) and of the thirty is one of only five in actual battle dress. But perhaps more interestingly is the tendency of the subject to be caught in the frame of Ian Gardner Tickes III, 1892-1946, in what can only be described as a wholly indecorous posture, or in the frame of Siobhan McArran, later Tickes, c.1955-1980, where the subjects are frequently observed playing cards. The c.1995 portrait of Jamesina W. Tickes, 1976-, resembles both to a certain degree, but has not, to date, moved or spoken, given that the subject is presently alive.