The Last Painting on Magical Arts Room and Sports

Jane Carey

December 21, 2012 11:05 PM

The Last Painting by Jane Carey

A few slower sparks fell from the end of Jane’s wand, drifting down until they settled onto the canvas in front of her, which immediately began to change. The colors grew deeper and brighter than they had been before as they spread out, shifting and blurring into a kaleidoscope of fragmented pigments which kept moving independent of anything Jane might have wanted to do.

For a moment, she was tempted to simply freeze it as it was and call the effect the painting, but she didn’t, and after a minute, the colors slithered back to their original positions, fading back to something closer to their original hues as they settled again, and she put down her wand and picked up a paintbrush, dipping it into the yellow she needed for part of the wing of a bird in the image she was working on. The paint was heavier than what she usually used, and had a different gloss as she applied the next layer of it to the two she had already painted, each being set with a different spell.

If painting – or at least, painting well – was an expensive and time-consuming hobby, magical painting was one which put it to shame. Her father was much better off than the size and looks of the farmhouse they lived in suggested, mostly because her grandfather and great-grandfather before him had not been men who much cared what the neighbors thought of their house and who had not spent ridiculous amounts of money on parties very often, but Jane had still felt almost guilty about asking for the paints and books she was using to dabble in the art at the moment, which was why she was taking even more care than usual with her work. She only, after all, really had enough supplies for two paintings because of all the layers of paint that went into a magical one, and she intended to make the second one something she could give Father for his next birthday. He was, she thought, most likely getting tired of vases and other ornaments, though he kept all the ones she’d given him – and, however briefly, Mother – since MARS had opened in her third year on a shelf in the living room at home.

She had been coming into MARS daily for a while now, working out her mild feelings of anxiety about the near future and the recent past, but Arthur had not come back. She was not worried about it – not least because Edmond had assured her that Arthur did not want, and was very aware that he did not want, to talk about what he had seen in her head, that something pretty nasty would happen to him if he did and that he was aware of that – but she was a little annoyed. There wasn’t, after all, much time, and there were things she wanted sorted out before the end of the school year, when things would become ever so much more difficult and stay that way after he came back in the fall and she got married.

She would get to him sooner or later, though. Jane didn’t think he was very trustworthy, but she knew he still saw her as someone who could tell him things he didn’t know even if she was wrong about him being very attached to her. She had bigger concerns, like cramming in as much of the rest of the library as she possibly could in her last few weeks here, and writing at least one letter a week to each Father, Edmond, and Jethro, and, not least, painting.

Little details, after all, were what held everything together, and painting helped her appreciate them. Little details were what made a painting turn out right or end up a useless mess at least half of the time. Plus, everyone had to have some kind of outlet in their lives, and this was hers. Even if she had been worried about her RATS, trying to study constantly would have just rendered her unable to take any more information in after a while; taking time away from it to paint was essential for her if she wanted the reading to do her any good. And so she painted, and tried not to think too much about how this forest scene was almost certainly the last thing she would paint here, and how much she was going to miss this place once she was gone.

0 Jane Carey The Last Painting 160 Jane Carey 1 5

Autumn Collins

December 22, 2012 11:09 PM

That's a sad way to look at it. by Autumn Collins

It was over, almost over. Soon school would be done and she'd be free. Autumn had always liked her classes and whatnot, but she would be glad to be away from the watchful eyes of Medic Bailey, to have some control back in her life.

There was much work to be done. She had surely put on several pounds since her last hospitalization. When she got home and free, and she was the only person monitoring what went in her mouth. Autumn felt completely controlled, like a prisoner, yet out of control as the pounds packed on. She would shed them all, every last one-and then some. She'd be thinner than ever before!

These excess pounds would no longer be weighing her down. Autumn would be free. She'd be done with school and its stresses-she was still super worried about her RATS scores, but at least she'd made it through without fainting this time, she didn't know if she could handle it if they came back anything but perfect though-she would be thin and beautiful and then she'd get betrothed and not end up a fat old spinster.

The thought of it all was nearly exhilarating, to leave her slow sluggish overweight body behind. To be free, to float. Yes, Autumn would be controlled, but it was self control, not that of another person over her. She could be the person that she wanted to be not the one they wanted her to be. There was so little in life that Autumn could control, but there would be this again.

She entered the art room. The Crotalus had always been a very gifted painter, but her time spent on the hobby had dropped off in favor of studying. Her grades had to be perfect, there was no question of that. She'd felt the same way about RATS. Still, Autumn had been ordered by her therapist to continue her artwork. She resented this, not because she didn't love to paint, but because she just knew the therapist was analyzing every last one. Honestly, the seventh year very much wished she could just drop therapy all together. It was someone else trying to control her when she wanted to be in control of herself.

But it was all a means to an end. Autumn would tell the therapist what she wanted to hear. She would allow her to think the Crotalus was developing what they considered healthy eating habits and positive self affirmations. As if stuffing oneself like a blimp was a good thing! She tried to paint the sort of things that her therapist would see as healthy instead of the images of food that Autumn desired to paint.

She would play these games, for only by playing them could she get others to back off and once again attain her goal of thinness. Of perfection.

It turned out that the art room was already occupied but seeing who the other occupant was brought a weak smile to Autumn's face. "Hello, Jane." Sometimes the Crotalus worried about whether or not her best friend still was. She always thought she'd done something to screw things up, feared they weren't as close as they once were, that Autumn's deep flaws, the ones she hated so about herself, ruined everything between them.

She took a spot at an easel near her friend's. They wouldn't be able to do this much longer, this might be the last time. Soon they'd be graduated and Jane would be married and Autumn would be...thin, if nothing else. She wondered if the two of them would stay in touch or if the Crotalus would do something-maybe had already done something-to mess it all up.

11 Autumn Collins That's a sad way to look at it. 164 Autumn Collins 0 5

Jane

December 24, 2012 12:56 AM

Sad but true by Jane

Jane’s brush paused for one moment after she heard the door of the room open, but she was working again by the time the opener stepped in. When Autumn sat down at a nearby station, Jane smiled at her. “Hello,” she replied, making a dot with the yellow paint as she did. “How are you today?”

She supposed it was none of her business, and so she had not said much about it, but she thought Autumn was looking much better recently, anyway. Not quite so much like a barely-animated corpse which had not had a very pleasant death. Jane thought that was most likely a good sign, even if she of all people knew that what something looked like could be something completely different from what it was. As she understood it, Autumn’s problem was all in her head, but it involved what she looked like, and when she was ill, she looked more like Mother had when they’d finally gotten to bury her, after she’d been dead for nearly a week, than like a living person.

It made Jane uncomfortable, and she thought that public, visible aspect of it was part of that. She just couldn’t understand it, not when she thought about Autumn refusing to eat, or Edmond going to pieces over the second half of his fifth year, or even Alasdair, dreaming up spells to turn an entire house into a weapon just to kill his children and his unwelcome son-in-law when really, poison or an Avada Kedavra while they slept would have done the trick much better. There had been a million times, in the first year after her mother died and everything else had happened, when Jane had wanted to fall down screaming herself, but in the end, she had never been able to do it. She hadn’t been able to let go like that. Instead, she’d just smiled anyway and kept going, until it hadn’t bothered her so much anymore.

It was one thing to be crazy, she thought, but another to be so in a way that everyone saw all the time. What went on in her head was her business, but…even when it had felt like it would be a relief just to let go, to be as crazy as she needed to be without worrying what anyone thought of how she behaved, she hadn’t been able to do it. Which left her with the question, which she could hardly ask: had they chosen to let go, then, or had things simply overwhelmed them until they no longer had a say in the matter?

“I’m going to miss this room,” she remarked, finishing the bird and beginning to clean her brush. “It’s very nice here, isn’t it? But I’m hoping I can repurpose a room somewhere after I get married and paint there. Jethro enjoys painting, too.” She finished with the brush. “’It’s how we met, you know.”

She didn’t know for sure, of course, that that had anything to do with it. It could have happened anyway, she supposed, given who they were and where they stood in society. She did think, though, that them knowing each other as they had had been part of it – most people these days did give their children at least a little bit of a say, she thought – especially considering how soon the proposal had come after the mourning period for her mother.

0 Jane Sad but true 0 Jane 0 5

Autumn

December 26, 2012 11:41 PM

Indeed by Autumn

"Oh, I'm doing great." Autumn replied. It was a lie of course, how could she be when she was so fat? Still, she had to pretend everything was great. Not only because that's what pureblood girls were supposed to do, but because she had to fool everyone, even her best friend.

Besides, it would be that way soon, she knew that. As soon as school was over, Autumn would go back to her diet, but first she needed everyone to think she was fine so they wouldn't be breathing down her neck. So she could have control back. She wasn't being weak right now, she was being forced, she had to think of it that way, rather than admitting she wasn't able to stick to her diet.

Because she could, she had twice before and both times, they had interfered, forcing her into hospitals in order to fatten her up. Autumn still shuddered remembering the first facility she'd went to. Her parents had been new to the whole thing, and had put her in a place close to home. That had been a mistake, and she knew her parents still felt bad about it. She could use that to her advantage somehow.

Autumn nodded. "It is." She regretted not spending enough time here during her years at Sonora but she'd just had to study. The seventh year would have an abundance of time to paint in her life but only one chance to get perfect grades. It was another thing that she could do once she was free of school. Not that she hadn't liked academics, it was just that painting was what she'd always loved the most. What she'd been good at. Or thought so before. Now, Autumn felt like she couldn't do anything right. Like she was a failure.

And Jane's comments about Jethro just reminded her of how big of a failure she was. Her friends were everything and she was nothing. A big fat nothing. "It must be nice to be betrothed to someone you have something in common with." Autumn replied. She hoped Jane wouldn't read anything into that comment, like that the Crotalus was jealous or hurting over not being betrothed herself. Which she was a bit on both counts, the former of which Autumn felt horribly guilty about. She didn't begrudge her friend anything, it was just that she felt so inferior in every way.

Soon, though, things would all be better. Soon, she'd be thin again.

11 Autumn Indeed 164 Autumn 0 5

Jane

December 27, 2012 2:39 PM

It's a hard, cruel world out there by Jane

“It is,” Jane agreed when Autumn said it was nice that she and Jethro had something in common. “Especially since I think it’s going to be quite an adjustment, being away from my family….”

Her brush paused for a moment as she felt a wave of melancholy at the thought. She was almost used to being the ‘woman’ of the house now, after so long without her mother, but not yet to the idea of being permanently far away from Father and Edmond. They would both see her as much as they could, of course, she was sure of that, but Father’s health didn’t allow him to travel very much now and she had no idea when, or even if, Edmond would really live anywhere again instead of studying abroad, so she didn’t know how often ‘as often as they could’ might really be. Certainly, things would never be the way they should have been for all of them. Even if Edmond was right and he could somehow heal some of the damage his father had done to theirs, too much had happened for their family to ever really be the way it should have been again.

“So it’ll be nice to be with a friend,” she concluded, resuming her work as she pulled herself back. The darkness was always there, just waiting at the back of her head, but she didn’t sink into it. There was nowhere to go in it. Things were what they were, and they would all have to just make the best they could out of it.

She still felt awkward, though, talking about marriage to Autumn. Her friend, after all, would almost certainly never marry. Not after she’d been so visibly ill two times, now. No one wanted damaged goods; that was why Jane had had to lie, why Edmond had lied for her until it nearly drove him mad, so that no one would think of her in those terms. Everyone, Jane thought, knew the standards girls in their world were held to were really impossibly high, so no one expected perfect adherence to it, but there were still only so many degrees of failure a girl was allowed. Serious, publicly-visible illness, like involvement in a major scandal involving dark magic, was probably far beyond the acceptable degree for many people; Jane was sure it was for the Careys, anyway. Neither she nor Autumn, had the family somehow found out all the details of their pasts, would have been deemed acceptable daughters-in-law under most circumstances by the family.

“Do you have any plans for this summer?” she asked, thinking that seemed neutral enough. It was a question she could have asked if they could have come back next year, not something that involved the long, messy-sounding ordeal that was entering into the adult world permanently and trying to make places for themselves there as best they could. It was the safest thing, anyway, she could think of at this moment to ask to keep the conversation going.

0 Jane It's a hard, cruel world out there 0 Jane 0 5

Autumn

December 28, 2012 8:25 PM

I hope I'm ready for it. by Autumn

She nodded sympathetically. Autumn honestly thought it would be nice to be away from hers and their prying. Especially if she was married. The Crotalus wanted to be more than anything and though she didn't like to think about it, she had her doubts. Being pulled out of school didn't look too good, though her parents had been very discreet the first time. She'd only told her friends because she couldn't take it there and needed their support. Plus, Autumn really didn't think there was anything wrong with her that they said was wrong. She needed to lose weight, not gain it and so in her letters, she'd made the whole thing sound ridiculous and never really truly opened up about anything but the other girls and staff being mean to her.

Autumn was certain, though, that her family would do everything to find her a husband; what that entitled exactly, however, she did not know. They tended not to want to worry their daughters with pureblood politics and alliances and a Collins was still a good connection. Perhaps, they'd find someone who could overlook her 'illness' in favor of that. She'd heard somewhere that Valerie Lennox was betrothed and she was always ill. If anyone asked, Autumn would just tell them she'd had mono though there had been a rumor going around that she had lupus.

Though, she didn't think anyone outside Sonora necessarily knew she'd been out. Her parents had not let that out either. Both they and the clinic were very discreet because it catered to girls of her status. There had to be families that didn't necessarily know anything about her and it wasn't as if there was anyone at Sonora for her to really get betrothed to anyway. There were only three boys in the seventh year class and none were purebloods.

Still, Autumn could help but worry and she worried a lot. She always had been the sort to fuss about every little thing and whether or not it was good enough. Whether or not she was good enough and always found herself sorely lacking. Girls like her were held to such high standards of perfection and that included how they looked. How much they weighed was part of that. Pureblood girls had to be pretty and skinny. Look at Fallon Crandall. Her betrothed had run off with Chelsea-though Nina had insisted that was because Fallon was actually such a wretched snob that she made Chelsea look nice and sweet in comparison. Autumn still thought her weight played a part in it. Fallon was huge .

"Not really." The Crotalus admitted. She didn't dare tell Jane that she was going to try to lose the weight again. Not that it was all that hard, especially at first. It did get a bit frustrating when Autumn stopped dropping it quite so fast. The key was eating as little as she possibly could. However, she couldn't tell her friend this, because people seemed to have an issue with it. Best to keep it to herself. "I'll probably have to attend balls and whatnot." She sighed to herself. That was one of the normal ways people were introduced to potential spouses and she wasn't all that thrilled about it. Autumn had always hated parties, with all the people and noise. She'd never been the most social person and to go out looking like she did right now was just unthinkable.

11 Autumn I hope I'm ready for it. 164 Autumn 0 5

Jane

December 29, 2012 7:47 PM

We'll do what we must, because we can by Jane

“Dancing is fun,” Jane remarked when Autumn said – with a noticeable lack of enthusiasm – that she thought she would have to attend balls this summer. “I wish I could dance more often, but we’ve never gone out very often.”

That had been inevitable, of course. For one thing, her father was a very minor member of the family, so high society had never been a great concern of theirs anyway, and for another, for most of their lives, they’d had to worry about Edmond. Their parents had done their best to keep them from knowing that, of course, and had done a good job of it for most of their lives, but now it was obvious. When your son happens to really be the son of a violent and unstable Dark wizard who’d been brought up with all of the same nonsensical ideas about family as the rest of them, it wasn’t really safe to go out too much. Now, that problem was gone, but her father was a widower without the desire or health to remarry and she was already safely promised for while Edmond insisted he couldn’t take the risk of having a wife and family, so they still didn’t go out very often.

“I’ve got to finish up another magical theory course when I get home,” she said. “I’m looking forward to it, in a way, but I think it might be my last tutored lesson, and that’s going to be a little sad. Some of our tutors have been with me since I was four. I suppose I can always hire them when I have children, though.”

She didn’t share her brother’s concerns about how her children might turn out, and not only because she was not a close relative of any of the family’s more dramatic head cases, though knowing that she and Jethro didn’t have that many explicitly malignant genes between them was a help. She believed it was what happened to them, combined with what they chose to do, which made them what they were, and unless something unexpected, like another Alasdair, which was not very likely, happened, she would be able to control what happened to any sons or daughters she had.

“Your sister will come here in the fall, won’t she?” Jane asked, remembering that as she thought about children. “Is she very excited? I was so jealous when Edmond got to come here before I did.”

0 Jane We'll do what we must, because we can 0 Jane 0 5

Autumn

January 02, 2013 2:38 PM

I hope I can. by Autumn

Autumn nodded. "I guess so." She replied without any more enthusiasm than she'd shown before. At least dancing was good exercise, though she'd always been more of a dieter, she didn't really have time for exercise with all the studying she'd had to do. Besides, she wasn't a terrible dancer, it was only part of the training that seemed to be required of all pureblood girls of her status.It had never been one Autumn had enjoyed though, because she'd not been able to take it completely privately and interacting with other children had never made her anything about anxious. That was why it was surprising to her that she'd made friends, good friends. Friends she was terrified of losing and worried about being in contact with after graduation.

The real problem with going out was that she knew that attending balls would be done for the purpose of finding Autumn a husband. Her parents seemed to want her to find a guy that was genuinely interested in her. Autumn didn't see that happening. Not looking the way she did now. She simply wasn't presentable. She needed to drop at least ten pounds, probably more.

That was how it was, it was never enough, no matter how much she lost, she wasn't satisfied. Plus, people kept stopping her, sending her off to places where she was fattened up, had her watched. Autumn was so glad that she would soon be free of all that. It was hard to be strong when people wouldn't let her be. She didn't really think of herself as weak though. It wasn't her fault that she'd gained the weight back. It was theirs. Soon everything would be fixed and she'd be thinner than ever before. Autumn would get past the point where people had caught her before.

The Crotalus smiled. "A magical theory course sounds like fun. I personally think I'm going to work on my painting. I've not gotten to do as much as I'd have liked, being so busy with studying all the time. Aside from attending balls and whatnot, I'll probably have an abundance to time to paint." She'd always been rather loved it. Painting had always been something that made Autumn so happy but so did getting perfect grade and being thin, so her favorite hobby had rather taken a back seat.

"Oh, yes." The seventh year replied when Jane spoke of Willow. "I imagine she is." The truth was that Autumn hadn't spent much time with her sister recently and when they were together over break, she'd mostly looked at Autumn with the same concern in her eyes as everyone else. "I think she's more hopeful about making close friends than interested in academics. I know she wants to be in Crotalus like me and Lily, but I really think she'll be in Teppenpaw. Is there anybody coming from your family?"

11 Autumn I hope I can. 164 Autumn 0 5

Jane

January 02, 2013 8:22 PM

Here's hoping by Jane

“I’m sure that will be pleasant,” Jane said when Autumn seemed happier about the prospect of having a lot of time to paint. “Perhaps we can arrange to paint together a few times over the summer, that would be nice, wouldn’t it?”

It was interesting, she thought, the things she based her relationships on. With Autumn and Jethro, it was paint, with Arthur and Edmond, it was magic. Was it a Crotalus-Aladren thing, she wondered, or just how things had happened? Though, she was leaning toward the second possibility because really, her relationship with Edmond was more like her one with her father, based on far too many hours of studying and talking about philosophy. Besides, it was hard to compare them to people she knew outside of them; most of the people outside her immediate family hadn’t been There, and even those that had been had not grown up with her, either raising her or being more like a second self than a sibling to her until it had all gone wrong.

Another interesting thing was how Sortings ran in families. When Edmond had gone off to Sonora, Jane had been sure she would follow him into Aladren when she got to school just because of that near-total unity they’d had before, but she hadn’t, and over the years their personality differences had grown more visible. The odd thing was that he was the softer one, which she thought most people would expect of a Teppenpaw. Aladren was often perceived as a hard House, but then, hard could be brittle, and what was brittle often ended up broken. Autumn’s sister might be better off in Teppenpaw than either of their siblings had been in the more conventionally popular Houses.

“Not that I know of,” she said when asked about family of hers that might come in the new year. “No one close to me is coming, I’m sure of that, but….” She shrugged. “My family is very large, and I’m not close to very many people in it. It’s possible someone from my branch, even, could be the right age and I’d never know it.”

Her line was the second of those which had come to America two centuries ago, not one descended from Anthony II. This, in the eyes of many, meant they were not at all important and could be safely overlooked. Jane found she didn’t mind that. For one thing, it meant she was safely out of the way of the grand scheming that went on among Anthony’s descendants as they fought to overpower each other, and that she was going to stay that way because no one had thought it was important to make her marry an heir or anything like that. For another, it meant she could do almost anything she wanted, so long as it looked right in public, without them really noticing. Any of them but Edmond, anyway.

She repressed a sigh as she thought of him and applied a fleck of blue paint to her picture at the same time. Poor Edmond; she almost hated to think of him at all now, though she still faithfully wrote at least once a week, even if he hadn’t replied to her last letter. Sometimes, she still thought that it could somehow be all right again, someday, but really she knew –

“It will be strange, not having anyone here at all anymore,” she said. “I keep thinking of all that’s going to happen next year, but then I remember I won’t even hear about it. I suppose I’ll ask you all about your sister whenever we see each other just to hear the Sonora gossip.”

0 Jane Here's hoping 0 Jane 0 5