Here Comes the Rain Again

Weak sunlight seeped into the room from floor-to-ceiling windows on five sides, dully illuminating a long-ish table covered in wooden canvas stretchers and other bits and bobs.

Two of the remaining three walls were painted white and housed rolls of canvas and racks of pigment arranged by colour. A large window – small compared to the others, but still large enough to frame a pleasant view of an enclosed courtyard garden accessed via a small door – made up nearly a third of the eighth wall.

"That won't work for ever." Much as he wanted to, he didn't glare at the portrait balanced on his easel. "I know you. Eventually, the urge to show off will get the better of you. I'll paint over her, just as I always have."

The lone figure in the painting peeped out from behind his own easel, which he'd angled away from the sight of his so-called creator. "And I know you," the figure in the portrait called out. "You will tire of wasting pigment and oils whilst I have an unlimited supply to repaint her. And then eventually, that much-vaunted intelligence of yours will reassert itself in the form of curiosity. I can wait you out."

"Or, my foot might slip as I carry a bottle of white spirit past your canvas."

The artist in the portrait smirked. "You wouldn't dare destroy me. I am your greatest creation – if the number of self-portraits you've got hanging around are any indication. Besides, you'd have to do away with them all to truly get rid of me."

The artist in the room with eight walls said nothing. He simply stalked over to a wall covered in shelf upon shelf of many-hued powders and, pressing a hidden mechanism, slipped through a cleverly concealed door and out of the studio.

~@~

While the first nine of the artist's clients mightn't have been as forthcoming as she would have liked, Granger had better luck with the vendors who supplied the tools of the mystery wizard's trade and the witches and wizards who trained others in the art. For a man who was supposedly working in the utmost secrecy, Granger thought, word about his work had certainly got round in certain rarefied circles. Not that any of them knew anything concrete about him, of course, but more than a few had theories on how he'd accomplished his feats of magic.

The trail of evidence was easy to follow after speaking with pigment grinders and master portraitists and purveyors of fine canvas. Another CDW might have thought it too easy, but Granger knew her worth and could say – without the least bit of conceit – that her aptitude for deductive reasoning was sufficient to have frequently led her down paths her spurious colleagues on the Patrol couldn't have located on a map. While she wouldn't call them idiots, they weren't the MLE's brightest lights, either. Otherwise they'd all be Aurors, wouldn't they?

But Granger wasn't especially focussed on the incompetence of her fellow constables; Granger was too gratified to stumble upon a deal-in-the-making only a week into her investigations to give them much thought at all. Tracking down a tenth client just before he was to meet with the artist had been nothing short of genius-level work.

"Do you really need to go now, CDW Granger? Using my 'key?" Delvin Derwent seemed hesitant to hand over the battered 38ml tube of Daler-Rowney's Alizarin Green, but at least he hadn't got her rank wrong. "I support you coppers one hundred per cent – but what shall I give the missus, then?"

"Tenth is tin," she told him, taking advantage of his momentary shock to prize the paint from his reluctant fingers. "Some say they don't recommend it if you want to make it to your eleventh, but Horace's Horologes in Diagon Alley sells a lovely punched tin clock in the shape of a heart."

Fortunately, the Portkey activating saved her having to say anything more, or even having to hear his response.

~@~

It was a performance he'd put on eleven times already. He'd long since stopped thinking about how ridiculous it was. If the idiots wanted to pay a bit extra for a bit of superfluous flair, who was he to complain? The moment he felt his wards react to the Portkey, he went into action.

"So glad you could make it, Mr Derwent." The artist spun around in a truly spectacularly dramatic display of billowing robes and flowing hair, already reaching towards the cloth-covered portrait resting on an easel in the centre of his studio. Outside the tall windows, darkness and rain provided a stirring backdrop to his presentation. He whipped the cloth from the canvas as he completed his turn...

And stopped short, his mouth agape.

But that was nothing compared to his guest's reaction.

Her eyes bulged, and her jaw went slack, and she had to suck down several breaths – some shallow, others deep – before she could sputter, "B-b-bugh..." Several more breaths preceded a nonsensical "I... Y-you..."

In the meantime, the artist regained enough composure to have

1. glared at this intruder who was decidedly not Delvin Derwent,

2. realised what had happened, and

3. begun to smile at her inability to form a coherent word, let alone a comprehensible sentence.

"Pr-Professor? You're, erm... You're supposed to be..." she finally managed to spit out.

How the hell is she seeing through the charm?

"Dead?" he supplied. "Hardly, though my survival is no thanks to you and your dunderheaded friends."

"But... how?"

"Not that it's any of your business," he snapped, "but I was something of an expert at potions and countering hexes. Did you honestly think I wouldn't see my method of demise a mile away whilst pretending to serve a deranged megalomaniac who had an unhealthy affection for his cursed halfbreed snake? Honestly, Ms Granger. You disappoint me." A malicious gleam lit his black eyes. "Or is it Mrs Weasley now? I seem to remember... Oh, that's right! Left you at the altar, didn't he?"

He expected more of the gaping and sputtering. Or perhaps big, sad eyes and a trembling lower lip. He hoped for tears. What he got instead was righteous indignation.

"How could you?" She stormed across the room till she stood just under his prodigious nose. (She smelt quite nice, he noticed.) "How could you pretend to be dead all this time? Harry grieved for you! He's naming his next son after you!

"And you stand here, alive as anything, mocking me because I couldn't hold on to my fiancé? How dare you not let us know you survived?"

Then she did burst into noisy sobs.

A full ten minutes passed before she had cried herself out. He spent the entire time standing in place, less than half a metre from the witch, staring. The tears weren't nearly as satisfactory as he'd expected. Odd, that. He hardly noticed that the portrait of Ailis Sweeting, who in life was said to have joyfully cast dire imprecations on her own daughter's wedding day, was also sobbing loudly enough to rattle the windows.

~@~

Granger swiped the last of the tears from her eyes with the back of her hand and used a handkerchief transfigured from the tube of Alizarin Green to blow her nose. The portrait of Ailis Sweeting was back under a cotton drape. A few flicks of Professor Snape's wand brought an easel holding an altogether different, far larger canvas to its side.

"I thought you might like to see what you're in for if you insist on keeping up your ridiculous hobby," he snapped.

She didn't realise he'd been speaking to the painting till after he glanced her way and beckoned her over to the easel.

"My adaptation of the portrait-animating spell is supposed to ensure that only the subject's 'best self' is captured," Snape explained. "Obviously, there is a flaw somewhere in its application. The higher degree of interaction is just a side effect. But even that is nothing that should truly interest the Ineffables."

"How did you..." Her wand was in her hand before she was conscious of drawing it.

He laughed – laughed – at her. "Oh please. Bagnold's lot is far worse at keeping secrets than the Unspeakables."

"Hermione, dear, there's no need for wands!" The voice was Snape's but it came from the painting.

Granger turned to look and saw a portrait of a smiling Severus Snape who held a palette in one hand and a paintbrush in the other. Over his shoulder, she saw a canvas propped on another easel. She could just make out the back view of a nude feminine figure standing near a bathtub.

The woman turned, reaching for a towel.

"Severus, who's with... Oh! Expelliarmus!"

To the surprise of everyone present, human and painted person alike, Hermione Granger's wand flew through the air, into Snape's self-portrait and on into the portrait the self-portrait had painted.

And it promptly fell through the other Granger's unfinished fingers, leaving smudges of oil-bound pigments as it landed at her feet.