21 SEPTEMBER, 2001

—

what rarity that we may find
our way together miles apart

- excerpt from poem #24, "never seen yet understood," in my poetry book aftertaste

—

There's a lot you can tell about a person from what they do on a train ride.

Anastasiya, on one hand, prefers to sit in silence, but she keeps herself busy. She's brought along a bound journal, which she seems to be sketching inside of. Draco tries on multiple occasions to see what she was drawing, but she angles the book up towards her chest at the slightest of movements, to which he smirks and looks back down at the articles and paperwork in his lap. He's glad he brought his reading assignments with him. There's two things Draco has already noticed that haven't changed about her — that she won't talk to anyone if she doesn't have to and that nobody can interrupt her drawing. Even though he was used to it back in fourth year, Draco can't help but notice how tense it feels between the two of them. This could just be standard treatment for everyone in her life, but he would also hate to be just another person to Anastasiya.

Draco offered to apparate from Wiltshire to Cambridge so they could take the train into London together. He hasn't been to Cambridge in many years, but he has to admit the city fits Anya well. It's refined and put together, yet comfortable and homely. Even as she finds solace in her sketching, she does not once sacrifice her poise. Occasionally, the sleeve of her knit sweater falls back down to her wrist, and she pushes it back up with ease, her eyes never leaving the page and her charcoal continuing its meticulous marking.

"I'm assuming you're still friends with everyone who was in your house and year at Hogwarts, then?" Draco's eyes shoot up from the crinkled parchment he's holding, surprised that Anastasiya was the one to break their silence this time.

She must have sensed that, because she quickly adds, "It's all just from my observation that most everyone you spent time with in fourth year was with us at the dinner party last week."

He sets the papers down next to him and props one leg across with his ankle resting on his other knee. Leaning forward Draco responds, "You always were the most observant person in the room." Clasping his hands together and settling his elbows down on his thighs, he continues, "Yes, most of us have kept in touch to some degree."

"You seem hesitant to say that."

"Well, I'm not good at continuing contact with those I'm not physically around, which I'm sure you noticed all those years ago. Honestly, that first party we went to at the start of the month was the first time I had spoken to Blaise in over a year. He's been busy with his family, now that he has a child, and I don't see why I should bother him."

She softly closes the cover of her sketchbook, but keeps her thumb on the page she was working on.

"I see Theo very regularly because of PRIME. Tracey's actually on the board of it, but I've always assumed she'd be too busy to meet up for tea or something of the sort. Meanwhile, Daphne and Millicent have been traveling for about eight months now. I think they're in Thailand or maybe New Zealand at this point."

She's awfully quick with her math. "What about Goyle?"

He lets out a long sigh and leans back. "We've seen each other here and there at parties." His eyes move up to the ceiling of the train. "But I haven't really spoken much beyond small talk with him." Twiddling his thumbs, Draco quietly adds, "Not since Crabbe's death."

She catches his eyes, perhaps for the first time since they greeted each other this morning. "I'm sorry you had to go through that, Draco." As if gauging his openness to the subject, her dark eyes probe a little harder, further into his light ones. "Was it—"

"Yes, the Battle of Hogwarts."

"I see."

"But it wasn't during the crossfire, or at least not in the end." Draco can feel his heart begin to gain speed as flashes of red and orange enter into his head again. He sets his hand down on the leg that has started to bounce up and down. "Are you going to tell me about your friends?"

"I am equally as bad as you are at remaining in touch with people, if not worse. There's the occasional owl from Astrid which never fails to remind me that I should be writing letters to everyone else too, and of course annual Christmas cards. We're pretty scattered throughout the continent though. Harper is in Spain, Paloma is on a suspiciously long trip around the Greek islands, and I honestly don't think anyone knows where Brielle is. She likes to disappear from time to time."

"Look at us, two well-educated magic folk who've somewhat become recluses, sitting on a muggle train together to go stare at paintings." Draco never would have believed it a few years ago, much less if someone had told him Anya would be the one accompanying him.

"We aren't just staring at paintings," she teases and gently kicks his shin, to which he feigns deep anguish. "We are going to let said paintings tell us stories, and I'm going to make sure you pay attention and listen."

"Well I must have lost my sense of hearing, because I don't ever recall hearing a piece of art utter a word."

"That's because you don't have the patience for it. Trust me, there's a lot more than what meets the eye." She opens her sketchbook back up and seems to examine a particular spot from various angles, switching off tilting her head and tilting the book.

"How is Viktor's sister doing? Alyona was her name, right?"

She whips her head up towards the top of the wall above Draco and quickly says, "This is our stop." Her sketchbook and charcoal go into her bag in a hurry, yet still in an organized fashion.

He raises his eyebrows slightly, lips pursing as she stands up even faster than she spoke or put her art supplies away. She squints as the blood rushes and she has to adjust, all while avoiding eye contact once again, despite staring so intently at him just a minute ago. It all happens within seconds, but Draco somehow finds his body following after her without his mind ever commanding it to do so.

—

From the way Anastasiya rapidly moves through the crowd, easily maneuvering through the exhibits, Draco reckons she is a regular patron to the National Gallery. They started off in the larger halls, which she explained were arranged by time period. She seems to have a distaste for the flocks, as she skips past a painting of water lilies and another of outstretched arms that has dozens of muggles clustered together in front, each pushing forth to take a photo.

She shows him some more grotesque paintings of severed heads on plates and men turning into monsters. The latter strikes Draco, his brows furrowing as he realizes there are still magical motifs that have made their way into muggle art.

The two finally settle into a small alcove, where a family of three is admiring the last painting in the circle before leaving them alone. The walls are painted a muted burgundy and a few small lights illuminate the pieces.

"This is my favorite muggle artist, J. M. W. Turner," she whispers as her eyes trace the first canvas.

"That's a mouthful of a name," He chuckles down at her.

He would have missed it if his focus was on anything else, but Anastasiya glances up at him for half a second, the faintest glimmer in her eye. "It's much less of a mouthful than Joseph Mallord William Turner, don't you think?"

"I stand corrected, then. Now tell me, darling, why is he your favorite muggle artist?" He tilts his head up at the ceiling, hoping to mask the blush that creeps up on his cheeks due to his gaffe. He brings a hand up to cover the smile that has inevitably made its home across his mouth, hoping to mask it as a deep pondering at the canvas in front of him.

"On a technical level, his brush strokes are compelling. They're somehow both smooth and powerful, both clean and meaningful." She gestures in the direction of the bristles.

Draco has to admit he has never once put thought into brush technique.

"But his subjects are what really draw me in. He brings out the vast characters of nature, capturing both the sublime and the ghostly."

Draco and Anastasiya move over to the next canvas, of which he doesn't need the tag to recognize the subject. "That's Carthage, isn't it? Father used to tell me about the ancient cities when I was young."

"Very good, Draco," there's a playful tone to her voice as her finger traces in the air over the cityside, careful to keep her distance from the painting.

There's a piece named "Regulus," and Draco's thoughts float over to his mother's cousin, dead long before his birth. Several canvases depict various seascapes with boats similar to the one Anastasiya lived on during the year they spent together, although many of the paintings show them falling to their demise below the stormy waves.

He feels a light nudge at the back of his elbow as Anastasiya quietly says she wants to show him one towards the end of the alcove. "This one is of a sunrise at Mount Rigi in Switzerland. My parents used to take me there as a child. We would go using side-along apparition of course, but I found out a few years ago that the three hour train ride has views that make it much more worthwhile."

The watercolors let the Alps speak for themselves, a colossal beauty that instills an awe that could easily become fear.

"Did you like growing up in Switzerland?" He asks her, barely above a whisper. He's noticed even as they stand alone in this exhibit, she still speaks softly, as if the paintings are sleeping infants she would hate to disturb.

"It was beautiful," she says with certainty as she moves the hair that has fallen in front of her eyes behind her head. "But, it was isolating. There were maybe three or four other magic families in the whole country, most of which were further up north so I don't even know them. Most days I enjoyed that; I liked the quiet serenity of it. I had the mountains and the water and the forests and the vineyards all surrounding me. It wasn't until I got to school and realized it would take me much more effort to see my friends during holidays that I started feeling some resentment." She gestures at the lake that sits at the base of the mountain range.

"I think I would like that kind of solitude now. I don't like the way I'm stared at everywhere I go here." Draco stares down at his feet as he gathers his thoughts. "I understand why, of course. I just think it would be nice to be someone else sometimes. If I can't do that, it would at least be nice to go somewhere else and pretend like it." He chews down on his lip, knowing there is no way in this lifetime he will be able to escape the societal branding of the Malfoy name. No matter how many PRIME projects he picks up and how much money he donates, his family's and his own actions will never be erased from the memories of others.

"I think that's why I moved to Cambridge. Even if I don't meet anyone new here, at least nobody knows anything about me and nobody wants to ask anyway. At the very least I can play a game of pretend with myself." Her feet, which are usually steady and grounded, lightly tap around at the lines between the tiles on the floor.

Draco crosses one of his arms, creating a resting point for his other elbow that he props his chin on. "You're a woman of many secrets, Anastasiya Oberle." He thinks of all the little things she revealed to him at fourteen, and wonders what vast infinity of stories have been written in their six years apart.

She laughs softly as they move over to the next painting. "It's easier that way. Nothing scandalous gets out if you don't reveal anything in the first place."

"Ooh, scandal, I see now. What great mystery lies beneath the woman with sealed lips?" The corners of his mouth curve up wickedly as he eggs her on. The action reminds him of the days he would go after timid first years, only this time there is no malice.

"You wouldn't want to know, oh great inquisitor." She still refuses to meet Draco's gaze, but there's an almost magnetic pull between them, a warmth circling that compels him closer, deeper. Maybe it's just the temperature inside catching up to the layers he's bundled up in this morning, or maybe the layers of frost that was amidst them this morning has finally started to crumble. His eyes trace over to the spot on the canvas where she's staring, the apex of the mountain. Draco wonders how many memories she has of sitting up there with her parents, looking over the lush greenery as if she ruled the land.

They find themselves moving over to the last painting, which sends a jolt down his spine.

The colors resemble those that always fill his mind right before Draco wakes up, heart pounding and skin damp. They're softer, more muted, but there's no doubt of what they're staring at. Sharp cries echo faintly in his head, echoing from ear to ear, as he observes the bright flames. They feed off of each other, a hunger that cannot be satisfied until it demolishes everything in its wake. The blue shades of the sky are still preserved, but a haze fills in from the back, darkening the evening to appear later than it actually is. Only, it's not a wondrous night sky — it looks dirty, tainted, like a blackened heart that cannot be washed clean after the committing of a crime.

Next to him, Anastasiya's body has tensed similarly. Her gaze dips lower than his, focusing on the crowds of people gathering outside the buildings that have been consumed by red and orange and yellow. Some watch the flames consume a portion of their lives that will never be quite the same, while others weep and hold each other as they run. Her eyes scurry around as if counting every individual, like she is in the scene and keeping track of who is accounted for. Her fingers gently twitch in a muted agitation, an involuntary action that she seems to have tried to gain control over before. Several strands of hair have fallen in front of her face keeping him from reading the perplexing cocktail of emotions that dance around her.

"I always forget this painting is in here." She breaks the silence, but her point of vision is still stuck like stone in place. "It's interesting, isn't it? How tragedy is such a common human experience."

He lets out a sound of mixed confusion and agreement.

She continues, "All these people's lives were changed by the same event, yet each one still cannot understand the experience of the one next to them. We are all bound by the unforgiveness of grief, but there is nothing we can do to comprehend the complexities that someone else has seen."

He stares blankly at the painting in awe of how Anya could have picked all of this up by observing someone else's work created centuries before her. "I suppose that can be comforting, knowing someone else in the room has felt the same things as you."

"I don't think we can truly know if another person feels the same things as us because logically we can only understand our own emotions. Even if we seek to describe them, we can't possibly interpret them perfectly." She pauses, her thumb rubbing the back of her other hand as she chooses her words carefully. "I assume this leaves us to make a choice of whether we try to bridge this block in communication as best we can or to never speak about our feelings."

He tilts his head, short pieces of blond hair falling forward to shape the edges of his face. "Perhaps the beauty of it all is that we get a choice."

Draco and Anastasiya stand there, the cold afternoon disappearing away in this hidden alcove where a 19th century world of water and fire and life and death fills their vision with polished strokes of color. They could have stayed for hours or just mere minutes, to which neither could have found a difference. They don't know if any other patrons walked in, but if they looked at the same pieces as the two of them, nobody else would have seen identical canvases. Even surrounded by these stories of wretched calamity, some of which resembled ones eerily similar to Draco's own, he felt stillness unfolding in the air. It may have been the obtaining of an answer long lost, or the opening to the chances of vast possibilities he could explore himself.

—

okay i am so sorry for not updating in six (?) weeks. i had a lot of projects and essays and presentations and exams at the end of the semester.

i am now done with my third year of university! however i am going on a road trip with my family in a week (we are all fully vaccinated) so hopefully i will get another chapter up before i leave.

i don't know how i feel about this chapter other than the fact that i miss art museums so much; let me know what you liked and didn't like! i would appreciate feedback on the third person perspective A TON.

qotd: what is your favorite painting, artist, and/or art era?

thank you all so much for your patience; i love and appreciate you all!

have a great day/afternoon/night!