To Dance Lavender in the Colorless Rain

My gold lion heart could never measure up to her steadfast badger's yellow. She would smile indulgingly orange as I insulted her and her house and her bumblebee colored pride. And as I stood scathingly in my self righteous red she painted me lovingly in pink.

Her study of me appealed to my vanity and I would spend hours basking in the topaz sunshine, immerged in the cerulean water, and surrounded by the pastels of flowers. And beneath her fingers my pale pink form was always encased by the colors of the rainbow.

"You were meant to be surrounded by colors, you were named thus."

She never paints me in black, assuring me that my brightness would overtake the dark and force sunlight from the most shadowy corners of the room. I know that she is hiding, keeping her onyx immersed in her shadows, the one place sacred from my coral fingertips.

I ask why she always paints me in pink, and she smiles fuchsia at her inside joke, and refuses to answer, telling me that she will confide one day when I am ready. Her pink is a soft flush while my red cuts bitterly carmine into her faded black sable.

It's ironic, I tell her, how her colors contrast so boldly. Yellow for the sunshine and black for death. She asks me if I truly believe that black is the color of death, of destruction. I reply with the bubblegum answers of the girl I still am. "Shadows are always black, wouldn't that be death?"

"A ghost can't cast a shadow."

Her cornsilk logic startles me, and I can find no answer to her query. That day my pink is somber as I stare onto the emerald carpeting my feet. I inquire to her what color she sees death. Her face is motionless, and if I hadn't heard her words I wouldn't know she had spoken. "Green."

"But green is the color of life, of plants and growth."

"Brown is the color of growth, life, and revival."

"But I am Brown."

She looks at me and nods before going back to her drawing. I notice that she doesn't paint the viridian grass, and that she's never painted me on green. Her subtle turquoise shields me from anything in shades of kelly. I am still pink.

That week I read of a Death Eater attack. The green mark residing above the house seemed to shimmer and laugh in its death defying chartreuse dance. She is reading over my shoulder and her cyan eyes are ashen with no emotion.

"Green is the color of death."

The clouds are taupe when it rains that night, and I see her painting as I dance within the transparency. I examine the shadowy sere sky and the colorless drops which glitter against my eyes; Brown as I am.

"What color do you give to raindrops?"

Her smile is silver, still standing a shimmer above the dove gray storm surrounding us. She looks up at my drenched form, white as Bones and she; and her eyes snap cobalt in the hot white lightening. "I give no color where there is no color."

I watch her as she sits, huddled beneath the chestnut door way, keeping her book safe and dry. She is color in and of itself. Her hair is unoxygenated blood and her eyes are the sapphire of the lake as it is ravaged by the silver of the storm. My lemon hair and ironic eyes could never compete with her rainbow.

"My color falls short beside yours."

She smiles and shakes her head, though the pink is gone from her maturity, and she pushes me out of the salmon tinged nest I have been teetering on. "You are made of colors. They cling to you like the raindrops do. Even your name steals them from their hiding place."

I take her book and she makes no protest as I examine the black and white background, the colorless raindrops. Indeed, I have stolen all color and stand out in stark contrast. Painted in my namesake.

"Where is my pink?"

Her navy eyes are shielded and her alabaster hands are shaking when she takes the book from my orchid fingertips. She refuses to look at me as she lovingly stroked the thistle figure in the midst of the transparency of rain and tears. "Don't you know? Lavender is the pink of adulthood." And the full force of it hits me, and I forget why I ever saw my lion's gold as beautiful compared to her badger's yellow.

Her sketchbook lies forgotten on the doorstep as I pull her into the rain. Her kisses are as yellow as her house color, and her hands are as red as my own. We dance Lavender beneath the living black shadows of the Forest, clad in nothing but the colorless rain. Her red inducing hands trace my body and she informs me that I am nothing but milk tinted skin and bleached Bones. I smile at her shadow tinged humor. "No, I'm not. You are Bones. And you are not as shadowy as you like to believe you are"

My lily white hand reaches down from between the red flame cradled within her pearl tinged legs, and I trace some of my Brown from the wet earth onto her Bone white face. "Now you are as colorful as I am."

I unwillingly come back to the dry Gryffindor tower, longing for the wetness of the colorless rain and her own red flame. Parvati is horrified when I throw every pink piece of clothing in my trunk into the Common Room fire. I tell her that Lavender is the grown-up pink, but Parvati has already chained herself to that cotton candy shade. That night I realize that Seamus' stalwart gold is found lacking beside her dauntless yellow, and that I am no longer the bubblegum of a little girl. Her yellow has made me violet.

Those last few months of school she paints every inch of me. The copper orange of my hands, the indigo blue of my legs. The ginger Brown of my eyes, the saffron yellow of my hair. The scarlet red of that place she loves to explore, and where I melt caramel beneath those red inducing hands. But she never paints me pink, and she never paints me green. Beneath her colorful fingers even the shadows induce rainbows.

Our lovemaking was flame tinged in a world of jaded death. She molded me scarlet and her heart stopping moans were glowing alabaster tying knots with obsidian depth. I who set my life by style, who never once dared to clash colors, was plunging headlong into topaz and amethyst. I wanted to mix her yellow with my purple so completely that no one could tell where one shade ended and the other began.

"I will love you vermillion," she tells me, as we stretch among the death-tinted natural carpet by the teal shores of the water.

"I will love you crimson," I reply to her, seeing my vermillion creep up her cheek bones to mix in with her crimson hair.

Perhaps the sage beneath our feet bore some emerald prophecy. When we left Hogwarts in its shades of rainbows and shadows, we left behind our crimsons and our vermilions, letting them slowly rot away with the pink I had burned.

The magical world we live in is adverse to the rainbows we make in our privacy. Our families expect powder pink babies and the blue of sons they've never had. I cannot disappoint, my nature has always been to conform to what I am told. The proper old lace British woman. I was never bred to be the wife of a traveling artist.

She went off to the diamond sparkle of Paris to paint her masterpieces. I was confined to the ivory gown of a bride. My something blue was the memory her eyes still invoke. The red rose petals the flush tinted flower girl dropped invoked her scarlet fingers when I should have anticipated Seamus' bronze.

I have lost my Brown now, though I still bear life. The baby's hair is goldenrod and I can see it as her yellow instead. I gave the pink baby her name, though none understand the daffodil color of Suzie's room, or why her cradle is wreathed by daisies. They don't know that I pray she wears the loyal bumblebee of the badger, rather than the gallant red-gold of the lion.

"Despite what your father says, my cotton candy darling, Hufflepuff is the better house. They see rainbows where all else see only shadows. They see the beauty in transparent rain."

Some nights, when I lie awake staring at the opaline moon with Seamus' honey gold beside me... and some nights when the baby's angry ruby cries do not cause my still quite coral mind to yank me back down to ecru reality, I remember her yellow. I recall the way her hands made me feel as scarlet as her hair. I am haunted by the way she loved me vermillion, and how intensely crimson I loved her in return. The sapphire blue of her eyes still stalk me, as does her Bone white face.

And I still dance Lavender in the colorless rain.