darkhairedgirl | Fic Post: give you back the open sky

Title: give you back the open sky
Characters/Pairing(s): Dean Thomas/Padma Patil, Parvati Patil
Summary: All artists have to be liars, just a little.
Word Count: 4241
Rating: PG-13
Warning(s): None.
Disclaimer: Harry Potter characters are the property of J.K. Rowling and Bloomsbury/Scholastic. No profit is being made, and no copyright infringement is intended.
Notes: Title and inspiration comes from two places: the Florence + The Machine song “Landscape (Demo)” and the Paul Gauguin painting "Spirit of the Dead Watching." Based on a prompt left by LRThunder at interhouse_fest’s 2016 Exchange: "#101: Parvati was very reluctant about posing nude for his paintings. Fortunately, her sister is a lot more enthusiastic about it." Thank you so, so much my beloved mortal enemy/beta, Sonja – you are a midwife of ideas, and I really couldn’t have gotten this to work without you!

Padma is dressed in red the day of their first session, which surprises Dean in a way he wasn’t expecting at all. He realizes later that he thought she’d be decked out in blacks and greys, neutral browns and khakis, white if he were lucky. There is a part of him, an ugly part, that thought she’d given up on color since they let her out of St. Mungo’s; that she’d throw on the ugliest jumpers, the dullest colors, something unobtrusive. Something she could hide in. Padma walks through the studio doors in a button-up blouse a shade he can only think of as Gryffindor red, her hair tied back in a long plait that ends with a matching ribbon, and Dean forces himself to finish setting up his canvas, lay out his tools.

Padma isn’t alone: her father leads her into the room, patting her hand where it rests at his elbow, and he walks her slowly, carefully, to the raised dais at the center of the studio. They talk for a minute, low and quiet, and Dean doesn’t interrupt. It’s strange seeing Mr. Patil again after all this time; without his Healer green, the ever-present specter of his medical bag, he is somehow simultaneously smaller and more imposing than Dean remembers him being. He says something to Padma that Dean can’t hear but glances over at Dean as they talk, an indiscernible look on his face, eyes dark behind the thin wire frames of his eyeglasses. Dean knows he’s seen the Gauguin painting, knows Parvati’s talked herself hoarse trying to get him to agree. If he has any objections to the four-poster bed, the gauzy curtains, Abhinav Patil doesn’t let it show.

Mr. Patil’s footsteps echo when he finally leaves, the door shutting behind him with a hollow click of the lock, and Dean’s hands shake slightly once he realizes that he and Padma are alone. He tells her to undress and she nods, all business, before pushing her braid back over her shoulder. First goes the blouse, then a lacy grey camisole she pulls over her head that he recognizes as one of Parvati’s. Her bra is black, utilitarian. She steps out of her shoes, peels off her socks with her toes, and Padma tips her face toward the ceiling as she shimmies first out of her denims, then her panties. Dean watches her for a moment and then looks away, embarrassed – not that it matters. He coughs once she’s finished undressing, ducking down to help her pick up her things, but when he reaches for her shirts Padma lashes out with her hand, nails catching sharp against his wrist when she smacks him.

“Don’t,” she snaps, “I don’t… I can do it. Just show me where I can put them,” and Dean is quick to oblige her: she doesn’t flinch when he sets his hand on her arm, guiding her carefully toward the shelf she can leave her things on. Padma folds her clothes neatly, methodically, sets her shoes directly in front of the cubby, and shirks out from under Dean’s touch as they walk back to the dais. He can hear her counting her steps under her breath: seventeen towards, twenty-three back. Her hand is warm over his as he helps her step up on the dais, lay down on the bed.

It shouldn’t unsettle him this much, having Padma pose for him, but that comes with the territory, he supposes, of letting Parvati volunteer her sister in her place for his final MAGI project. Their breakup was amicable, mutual, but it is disorienting, knowing that face, that body, and even still knowing that it’s all ultimately just another artist’s trick, a mirror image; similar, but not the same. Padma settles uneasily into the pose, lying stiff on the mattress with her ankles crossed, her hands splayed out beside her on the pillow. Her eyes are turned toward where he sits at the easel, following the sound of his voice, and as Dean lifts his charcoal to the canvas he reminds himself, again, that it doesn’t matter where she looks.

Padma can’t see him at all.

…

“Why did you choose this painting?”

Padma asks him this in their third session, her cheek pressed into the crisp white pillowcase and the last vestiges of golden-orange sunlight streaming in through the window. Their sessions have been quiet so far; Dean doesn’t ask her much, save a few directions here or there – lift your hand and bend your knee and please stop fidgeting – and Padma always moves her body into place without question. He glances over at her from time to time, pausing in his work to check if she’s comfortable, but she might as well be made of marble.

Dean tells her again about his MAGI studies, the finer details of his last graduate project: they’ve all been imitating Muggle paintings, trying to put their magic into something that already possesses a different kind. He tells her this and Padma only gives an arrogant sniff, tells him, “I know that. Why did you choose this one?”

Dean stops what he’s doing, setting down his palette, his brush clattering back into the cup of water. Padma doesn’t move, just stays where she is, milky eyes fixed on where Dean sits at his canvas. What can he tell her? He tried different paintings at first: Dean tried sketching the Hogwarts grounds as Van Gogh’s wheat fields, house-elves in the style of Modigliani’s serving girls; in his sketchbook he has the street outside his mother’s home done in Chagall’s blues and greens, a bare-bones reproduction of Klimt’s The Kiss which bears a striking resemblance to Ron and Hermione. He almost finished a Tissot party scene with Lavender at the center: Lavender dressed in high-necked pink silk, her hair pinned up and away from her scarred, lovely face, but for whatever reason Dean couldn’t bring himself to finish it, and now every piece of work he’s scrapped seems to only exist to taunt him in its incompleteness.

He thinks of the first time he saw Gauguin’s purples and whites and blues, the ghost in the background, the look on the girl’s face: equal parts fearful and dreamy as she gazed back at the artist. Dean has never seen the painting in person; it has only ever stared up at him from the glossy pages of a book, but even that small reproduction struck a chord somewhere inside of him – even the title, Spirit of the Dead Watching, it made something twist in his heart, and how can he make her understand that? Padma has never seen the painting, not once, and to Dean knowing this feels like pressing on a bruise.

“I chose it because I liked it,” he says finally, and Padma shifts slightly on the bed, flexing her toes. She must be stiff from lying so still.

“That’s not an answer,” is all she says, and Dean agrees.

…

He saw her at the shops, once, on his way back from picking out an engagement gift for Seamus and Lavender, and it startled him to see her outside the studio, arm in arm with Parvati as they walked into Flourish and Blott’s. Dean followed them inside without really knowing why, hanging back as Parvati led Padma through Fiction and Mystery and Romance, past a rack full of self-sorting three knut-paperbacks and into the Medical section. There were few people this far in the back, just Dean lingering near the law books, watching them through the gaps in the shelves; Parvati in her Auror finest, reading out titles for her sister; Padma in a yellow sweater that didn’t quite suit her, her hair in a tight fishtail braid down her back, absently running her fingers over the spines on a nearby shelf.

It was books on diseases she was looking for, books about Spattergroit and Harpy Pox, Conjunctivitis Curses and at least five different kinds of blood malediction, all of them freewheeling and pirouetting around the pair as they floated down to land in Padma’s outstretched arms. Parvati seemed amused by the topic, listing off worse and worse ailments, infections, calling down healing texts and biology books so that they landed in heavy thumps at Padma’s feet, but Dean couldn’t look away from Padma, standing so still at the shelf while books piled up around her; there was a lightness in her face that Dean hadn’t seen before – a sense of peace, of calm – that when a clerk approached the two of them, empty basket in hand, it took him a moment to understand what was being said.

Parvati declined the clerk’s offer of help, choosing instead to gather up their hardbacks and pour them into the offered basket. Padma was the one with an actual question, asking if she would be able to convert the text of these books, and the clerk’s answer was far too chipper for the situation.

“You should!” he said brightly. “There’s this one spell that can increase the size of the font, you can find it in the –”

Padma shook her head. “No, I want to know if there are any charms set on them to prevent translation into Braille, and I –”

“Oh, well, I wouldn’t worry about that, there are lots of spells that can narrate –”

“That is not what I asked,” Padma snapped, and the clerk’s glued-on smile peeled away.

“Pads, come on,” Parvati said, her voice low, “Don’t do this now,” but Padma’s voice just carried over Parvati’s, sharp and loud and clear.

“I asked you,” Padma said, “If these particular volumes have anti-conversion charms set on them. A lot of the reprinted editions do, and I want to make sure they aren’t tamper-proof before I waste a thousand galleons on books I can’t even read.”

The clerk was clearly embarrassed, taken aback by her outburst. He mumbled an assent when he promised to check with his manager and Parvati offered to go with him, apologizing as they went and leaving Padma on her own in the back. Dean was still there, hiding in the shadow of a tall bookcase, and without her sister at her side Padma somehow seemed both more comfortable and more anxious, one hand balanced on the low ledge behind her. She looked exhausted, miserable, and all at once her face seemed to crumple. She bit her lip and brought her palm up to the side of her neck, closing her eyes and very clearly trying not to cry, and Dean felt his own shame run cold down his spine. He shouldn’t be watching this – shouldn’t be watching her, should not be a witness to this moment.

Dean left, self-conscious and guilty, and when she walked into his studio on her father’s arm the next morning, Dean did not mention it at all.

…

Dean comes into the studio one day to find Padma already there, sitting fully-dressed at his easel, straight-backed and staring at the canvas as if she can see the outline of the bedframe, her own painted body. Dean is surprised: in all these weeks, all these sessions, Padma has never come to him alone – her father is always with her, leading her in, waiting in the lobby like a faithful dog. There is no sign of him today.

“Good morning,” he tells her, setting down his bags, hanging his coat, but Padma doesn’t respond; she stares straight ahead, her face weary, and she looks as if she hasn’t been to bed at all. This in itself isn’t entirely new; she’s mentioned in passing her trouble sleeping, how it’s been two years and she still has a hard time adjusting to the constant dark. She fell asleep during one of their sessions and was slow to wake, laughing under her breath at Dean’s apparent nervousness when he tried to help her. I get the best rest here, she’d said then, bringing the top sheet up to cover her chest as she sat up in bed, and Dean never asked her what that meant.

There is no sign of that Padma now – quiet and funny, little glimpses of her former self breaking through the gloom. Dean pulls up a second chair to sit beside her and the legs scrape across the floor. Padma stays silent and still, a letter crumpled between the hands resting in her lap, and she doesn’t react when Dean moves to take it from her. It’s Ministry letterhead, and Dean skims the contents while Padma flexes her fingers, still staring straight ahead. We regret to inform you jumps out first, followed by classified Auror apparatus and regrettable timing; commend your reapplication; our deepest apologies. Gawain Robards’ signature flourishes at the bottom.

“The worst part is that they’re all old tech,” she says, making Dean look up from the letter. “Vati’s been lobbying for me, and Andromeda Tonks. They’ve gone through at least three generations since Mad-Eye’s day, but I still need full Auror security clearance and at least a decade of Ministry work before they’ll even consider giving me that kind of prosthetic.”

Dean knows hardship, he knows pain: he has scars, nightmares, everyone their age does, but Dean has never felt the full unfairness of Padma’s loss until this moment. It’s not just that she’ll never see this painting once it’s finished, never read another book, never not need someone to hold her hand, to steer her away from the sharp edges and obstacles of a world not made to help her. It’s that all those small, petty things have been taken from her – things he’s taken for granted, has all along – and she’s had to mourn their loss alone.

“I’ve got tricks,” Padma says, as if she’s read his thoughts. “Charms around the house, and things like that. Things that help me function. But it’s… I thought I’d get it back –”

Padma ducks her head, lets out a small, mirthless laugh; he thought she would cry, and Dean finds himself surprised by the quiet anger he hears instead, the green tinge of jealousy that creeps up hard in her voice. There’s a painting propped up against the farthest wall – a Pollock piece, Blue Poles – that Dean’s studio partner has been working on for weeks, dripping orange and brown and yellow in alternating swirls that twist and turn under the Kinesis Charm she’d placed on the paint. It’s still drying, a dropcloth spread out underneath, and Dean stares at it for a moment, watching the pattern shift and change against the canvas before Padma reaches out and takes the letter back.
“I’m sorry,” she says then, folding the letter twice by halves, finally turning to face him. “I don’t mean to put all this on you. I just… I didn’t have anyone else to tell,” and Dean lets her apologize: he is a coward, he is unsure. He gives his hand for Padma to take and she lets him help her down from the stool, squeezing her fingers over his.

…

Parvati is late to their meeting, citing Auror business as the reason when she sweeps into his corner of the café in a grand flurry of blue robes; “It’s classified,” is her cheeky answer when he asks what kept her, falling into the booth opposite him and folding her arms on the table. Parvati smiles at him, making small talk, and Dean sometimes thinks of all his friends, Parvati has changed the most since the war’s end. The silly, flighty girl of their youth has been replaced by a pod person Dean doesn’t always recognize: gone is the girl who read palms in the Common Room and threaded butterfly clips into her braid, who cried over the cats the Carrows tortured; she’s since cut her hair short and wears her Auror badge like a talisman against evil. She still carries her tarot cards in her utility belt.

Their relationship was unexpected and burned out just as quickly; they were good together those few months they dated, good until they weren’t anymore, and sometimes Dean misses her but most days he doesn’t. Still, he’d rather have her as a friend than not have her in his life at all.

“How’s the project going?” Parvati asks, blowing on her latte, and Dean shrugs. They’ve talked about the painting before, Padma’s involvement, but not in some time, and when Parvati flashes a grin at him Dean can’t stop himself from thinking of the difference: Padma has a dimple in her right cheek when she smiles that her sister doesn’t have, and she drops her head when she laughs, sometimes, as if she’s embarrassed to be seen being happy. He has his sketchbook with him, pictures of the painting’s progress, and he slides them both across the table when Parvati asks to see.

A year ago, meeting like this, he might have said I miss you. Today he isn’t sure what he wants to tell her, so he lets Parvati flip through the sketchpad instead of talking.

“I think it’s great, you helping her like this,” Parvati says after a moment, and Dean gives her a questioning look. She nods, pulling one of the photographs out from its protective sleeve. “Baba wants to lock her up in the house like she’s, I don’t know, blind bloody Rapunzel, or something, and Mrs. Tonks and I still don’t know if the Minister will override Robards’ decision on getting her a pair of eyes. You know she wanted to be a Healer? She had the OWLs for it, took all the right classes, and I bet even now if she sat them she’d still get all E’s and O’s on her NEWTs. Right now, the closest she gets to grand rounds at St. Mungo’s are when she’s waiting for Baba to finish his and take her home.”

Parvati leans forward over the table, pushing the photograph back towards Dean. The painting is three-quarters complete, missing the Kinesis Charm, the finer detail on the background. Padma’s likeness stares up at him with dark eyes, knowing and wistful; he hasn’t told her that it isn’t a true likeness, he hasn’t told Parvati, either, until this moment. All artists have to be liars, just a little.

“Dean, you’ve got her back in the world. Even if it’s just laying naked on a bed for hours at a time, it’s still a thousand times better than the alternative.”

Dean fidgets in his seat, wrapping his hand around his coffee cup, and asks, “Is that why you kept putting me off when I asked if you’d do this for me? Not just because of, well, us?”

Parvati reaches across the table and lays her hand over his wrist, giving it a good squeeze. That’s the only answer he gets; it’s the only answer he needs.

…

There was a DA meeting back in their fifth year, right before they broke for the Christmas hols, where Harry had them sparring before they moved into Patronus Charms and somehow, Dean and Padma had wound up partnered together. They’d all been volleying hexes back and forth, the whole room lit up with jets of multicolored light, the grey-blue bubble of their Shield Charms, and Dean had lost his balance when Padma sent an unexpected spell at him, nearly knocked himself unconscious on the stone floor as he fell out of the way. The spell left a scorch mark where it hit the wall behind him, purple sparks flickering out as they fell around his shoulders, and Padma laughed as she held out her hand to help him off the floor.

She laughed, he remembers that, because back then it was the very opposite of what her sister would have done. Parvati would have fawned over him, just a little, would have apologized for not getting his attention, would have tried to make him feel better. Padma didn’t do any of that: she laughed at him, her hair coming out of the long plait she flicked back over her shoulder, and she held out one nail-bitten hand and helped him up from the ground.

Dean thinks of this now, Padma redressing in her usual spot at the shelves, pulling her sweater over her head so that he can see the cups of her bra, the smooth plane of her stomach. She was Ravenclaw clever, then and now; he and Seamus used to make fun of that laser-focus work ethic, that inability to think outside their prescribed boxes, and as he nears the completion of his painting Dean has been unable to think of little else. He’s been mulling over how to help her – could he make a sketchbook’s drawings tactile? Work on a grid system, charm charcoal to follow her voice? – but until today he hasn’t been able to figure out a course of action.

“I want your opinion,” he starts, and Padma brushes her hair back from her shoulders before she faces him. It’s unbraided today, long and wavy down her back, and she crosses back across the room with surprising ease. Dean realizes, almost from a distance, that her feet have learned this floor.

He lists off a few artists, a few paintings, and when he asks if she knows them Padma only shrugs. “I saw a Rothko once,” she says, “And some of Magenta Comstock’s work, but I never liked modern art.”

“Abstract expressionist,” Dean corrects, and then: “Neither do I. But I have an idea, for – for you.”

Padma’s face reveals her surprise but she lets him lead her over to another easel, his hand a light weight at the small of her back; it’s colder by the windows but he knows she can not-quite-see very bright light, like spikes of grey through her constant black. He’s already stretched and prepped her canvas, laid out brushes, set up thick acrylic paints in small trays. Dean lets her map the space, then steps back in and takes her hand in his, taps her palm against the edge of each paint in turn: red, yellow, green, blue. Dean tries explaining about a Kandinsky piece he saw once, the twists and turns in James Brooks’ Boon, and when he tells her what he wants her to try Padma presses her lips together, turns her face away.

Padma stares at the empty canvas and Dean thinks, just for a moment, that she’s going to cry – that she’ll tell him she can’t do this, won’t be able to, that it’s not even worth trying. She passes her free hand over the row of brushes, the paints, and Dean steels himself for disappointment as Padma hand stops to hover over the purple. It’s a shade that echoes the long shadows on the studio walls in the evening, that he sees in the edges of the sunset; it’s a color of uncertainty, he thinks, a color of the future. Padma drops his hand to pick up a brush and it isn’t until she draws it across the canvas that Dean realizes that the look in her eyes, the working of her jaw, it’s isn’t tears she’s been trying to hide – it’s a smile.

…

The painting has been complete for a week before he decides to tell Padma that he’s finished. He’s long since cast the Kinesis Charm, finished the ghost, the scrollwork at the corners; his advisor will be viewing it tomorrow, the institute’s whole panel of professors will. All that’s left in the meantime is to let it seal and dry.

When Padma comes to the studio she’s halfway out of her clothes before Dean moves to stop her; he has to physically put his hands on her shoulders before she stops unbuttoning her shirt, inquisitively tilting her face up toward his before Dean walks her toward the drying portrait. “It’s finished,” he says as they walk, “It’s been finished, I didn’t… I’m sorry I didn’t tell you before.”

Padma stops short in front of the easel and Dean feels a swell of pride in his chest as he looks at the finished painting: it’s his best work, there’s no doubt about it, Padma’s likeness lounging carefully across the unmade bed, the ghost in the background folding and unfolding her hands in her lap. It’s not a true reproduction of the Gauguin; Dean’s taken some liberties with the background, some of the smaller details. The canvas shudders under her hand, silver stars swirling against the violet backdrop overhead as Padma’s painted double stretches her legs across the mattress, pulls her hair back from her face with one hand. The paint is still wet at the edges but dry at the center, and Dean cannot look away from the real Padma’s face as she ghosts her fingertips over the texture of the canvas: he sees apprehension there, confusion, awe. She can feel the paint moving, and silence pools between them for a long minute as her double lifts her hand from the bed, reaches out to touch her back.

“This wouldn’t have worked without you,” he admits to her. “And I know that this isn’t – this is what you wanted, but I’m glad you did this. I’m glad you posed for me.”

Padma doesn’t say anything when she turns to him, only smiles as she stands on her toes, smiles as she draws him in for a kiss with that uncanny accuracy he’s come to expect; even blind, he thinks, she still knows where to look.