Oil and Canvas

For seven years, she has looked out through a fog of oil and canvas. She is like one of those peeping toms zeroed in on one section of a beach with a pair of binoculars - she sees only cross sections, only snippets of a life as it floats, darts, sometimes strolls past her.

Her particular small circle of knowledge is the Ravenclaw common room. For how many centuries has she watched her namesakes come and go? They speak her name, wear her colors, sometimes even glance reverently at her through her portrait - and yet, it was not until seven years ago that she really began to pay attention.

The girl had curly black hair that verged on bushy, slightly thick ankles, and the beginnings of acne even at age eleven. Her eyes were also the brightest shade of blue that Rowena had ever seen in nature, and when she looked out of her portrait the day that the girl traipsed in with the other terrified first years, something lit inside of her.

So for the next seven years, she watched Penelope.

She saw her curl up in front of the fire with textbooks, and later, with Muggle romance novels that she kept hidden in her trunk. She watched every morning as Penelope was the first one down the stairs and out into the castle, and Rowena wondered every day for seven years what it was that Penelope did in that extra half hour before breakfast began. Jogging? Library? Tea? She listened raptly when Penelope took aside one of the other sixth year girls and confided her relationship with Percy Weasley. Later that same year, she awaited anxiously for any snippet of word concerning the girl's health, after hearing whispers of basilisk attacks.

She'd never liked Salazar, and she liked him even less after that.

She watched with voyeuristic delight and embarrassment when Penelope snuck Percy into the common room and they shared a kiss underneath a tuft of mistletoe. It seemed so invasive, spying there through the canvas, and yet she'd spent so much time studying Penelope that anything else seemed alien. In truth, seven years made hardly a dent in the time that Rowena had spent on the wall in that room, and yet it seemed to last forever.

Rowena never spoke. She didn't understand chatty portraits, or those who climbed in and out of their frames as if they still had the run of the living world. She knew that the other Founders felt the same way - after all, if they were available for consult, imagine how little the Headmasters would learn on their own! So they all kept their mouths shut and their movements slight, and behaved like proper portraits for all those centuries.

Now, Penelope is leaving. A term has passed since that stolen kiss, and the long nights of studying for NEWTs by the fireplace have come to an end. Rowena can hear some of the other portraits giggling about her, making snide comments about the stolen looks they've witnessed over the last seven years - Rowena Ravenclaw fancies Penelope Clearwater! But they know nothing, with their brush stroke hearts and watercolor souls.

She almost breaks her vow of silence, on that last day. When Penelope drags her trunk down the stairs and pauses - when she stares for a moment at Rowena, her eyes searching the canvas.

"I've always felt like you were watching over me," she says. "Funny, that. It was a nice House, though. I think I would have liked to have known you." She brushes a strand of black hair behind her ear and picks up her trunk again, and Rowena can hear the thud, thud, thud as it bounces down the stairs.

The students next year don't notice the difference - that their Founder's face upon which lit a half smile now houses one full and clear. It is a knowing smile, a content one.

Portraits can't do much of importance, stuck inside that fog of oil and canvas - but out in the world of the living, Penelope Clearwater, she can.