A/N: This is a submission to the Minor Characters round of Madam Pomfrey’s Character Triathlon under the Parents prompt by epiphany212 of Gryffindor House.

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The critics had arrived first, hours ago, and his friends had slowly trickled in later. Seamus had come, of course, and Fred, who had donated money to sponsoring the show after Dean had spent some time sketching the reconstruction of Weasley’s Wizarding Wheezes. Even Ron and Harry had made an appearance, their robes still grimy from Auror work, the bags under their eyes nearly as dark as the grape juice in their glasses. He could tell they were wishing for something stronger to wash away the hard day, but they laughed and grinned, shook his hand, clapped him on the back.

Everyone, even Ron Arfomoksy from New York’s Imagine magazine, had had nothing but kind words to say. Dean couldn’t shake the slight feeling of disbelief that this--his show--had actually come together after weeks of frantic final touches, that it had gone so well. But he was probably jumping the gun; maybe critics took pity on you and said nice things at the end of your show even if they were going to bash you in their review the next day. Who knew what would come out in the papers tomorrow?

After all, it was his first time doing a formal gallery opening. The juice in champagne flutes, the suit he had to wear, the recessed lighting and white walls of the gallery all seemed completely foreign to him. In some ways, the setup seemed artificial, like the art couldn’t stand alone without the artist’s performance: a dance of formalities, shaking hands and smiling with the, as his agent put it, “people who mattered.� The last time--the only time--he had shown his art to someone besides himself, he had been in a sun-lit sitting room, a cup of tea warm in his hands, dressed in last night’s pajamas. His palms had been sweaty that morning, his voice shaking with nerves.

Now, after months of planning and a frenetic push to the finish line of opening day, it was over. He should be smiling; the tension that had pooled in the soft centers of his temples and the tightness in his gut should evaporate. He wasn’t worried about the critics; they were strangers who hadn’t lived through the Battle of Hogwarts, who didn’t know the co-founders of Weasley’s Wizarding Wheezes, who hadn’t seen with their own eyes the moments he had captured with ink and paper. And his friends had assured him the work was brilliant--even Hermione, with her copies of Da Vinci sketches tucked under her arm, had smiled at him beatifically when she came out of the gallery.

This moment had been hard earned, and yet, standing here in an empty gallery, he felt anything but triumphant. Instead, it was as if he were hanging in mid-air, poised to tip over the edge of a crevasse. He had just now realized it was there, was just now staring down to see the dark bottomless depths, because there was finally, for the first time in years, nothing to move forward towards, nothing to distract him from what had been right there the whole time. Dean felt bile rise in his throat. She didn’t come. I told her it was okay if she didn’t; I should have meant it. But I never imagined--I thought, for me, she would make an exception, or maybe that I was overestimating how much this would hurt her. But I was right, after all; she didn’t come.

“So that’s the last of them, Mr. Thomas!� crowed his agent as he approached the end of a long corridor filled with his client’s drawings. “Brenda Ha of Hanoi’s Finest couldn’t stop talking about how charming you were as I walked her to her cab.�

“Thanks, Charles. I couldn’t have done this without you,� Dean murmured. “Listen, I’d like to wait around and see... There was one more person who I thought might come. D’you mind if I close up?�

“Of course.� Charles handed him the keys. “I think my warning to you about this being a shark pit may have been a little unnecessary; I’ve never seen the critics be less, well, biting. I think that went very well indeed for your first opening. Congratulations!�

Dean pocketed the keys and watched his agent hurry out. Charles had a family to get home to, two daughters and a smiling wife. Dean had seen their picture on his agent’s desk each time he went in to settle more details about the opening. A happy family.

He watched the golden dusk turn into a purple, starry night through the glass of the gallery’s rear exit door, his thoughts drifting aimlessly from Hogwarts to the War to more recent years and back.

Footsteps echoed in the hallway behind him. “Dean?� He turned

“I’m late, I know,� she murmured. “At first, I was worried about what to wear, and then, you warned me about--and I was worried, I didn’t want to ruin this for you...�

“S’all right, Mum,� Dean said gently. “I waited.� He opened his arms. As she came closer, he could see the tear tracks on her cheeks glistening in the moonlight.

“I-I’m so sorry!� she cried as she fell forward into his embrace. Her tears soaked the lapels of his jacket as she shook within the firm skeleton of his arms.

Dean tucked her head under his chin and held on tight. When she came apart, it was his job to hold her together. Suddenly, he was doing something instead of hanging suspended over the unknown. As painful as it was for him to see his mother’s tears, her catharsis saved him from standing still.

~.~.~

People usually assume that I always knew I was going to be an artist. They figure that my talent took up so much room in my head when I was younger that there wasn’t any space for anything else, like dreams of being a Mediwizard or an Auror. They picture me, as a little kid, jotting little sketches down on paper all the time, like every moment led up to the present: the gallery opening, the critics’ rave reviews.

It didn’t take me long to understand why they make assumptions. To these people, art is Gubraithian Fire, and for centuries, they’ve huddled around its warmth through times of peace and times of war, through youth and old age, through love and anger. My gallery opening was like my initiation into this tiny community, and I think they’re all a little surprised that I survived so long outside of it. For them, art is all encompassing, the only thing they’ve ever loved--no, the only thing they’ve loved and can never lose--and so they can’t imagine that it’d be different for me.

Seeing the way they are, I understand. Aside from the few months leading up to the Battle of Hogwarts when I was working with the Order and Dumbledore’s Army, I’ve never seen a group of people imbued with as much passion as these artists, critics, and patrons. And they didn’t need the impetus of life-and-death stakes to create this feeling; it’s remained for years, unchanging, never faltering. If I felt something like this about my work, it would be impossible to have lasted as long as I did outside of this tight-knit circle.

But they’re wrong about me. You see, the central pieces in my first gallery show were sketches of my hands. Most people I've met who have got as much attention as I have in the art world spent years slaving over their work, painstakingly honing their gift. But those sketches of my hands were my first drawings. I didn't draw them a thousand times over, changing a shadow here or an angle there until the sketch was just right. And I started to draw not because I was driven by an instinctual urge to create or because I was possessed by a demanding Muse. I started to draw because, frankly, I had no other option.

Since before I can remember, I've always had to be moving. When I was a kid, I spent hours outdoors, dribbling and trying out new tricks with the older boys in my neighborhood. I even played for the U-13 team as an eight-year-old; I was that good. But at Hogwarts, most kids hadn't even heard of football. Even worse, I was in classes all day, sitting behind a desk, reading books or listening to professors' lectures. I would have done anything to get a football in my hands, to spend hours running and playing outside.

That's when I started. I had to do something during Professor Binns' lectures or Trelawney's insane rambles. And my quill and ink and parchment were right there in front of me--everything I needed to start. There was no way that I wanted to draw the bookshelf in the corner of the History of Magic classroom or the piles of cushions in Divination; those are just objects people have left behind, set up to look a certain way and tell a certain story. Artsy Muggles will call pictures of things like that "still lifes," but to me, bookshelves or cushions can't lay claim to any kind of life at all. They don't have a story of their own.

So I started with my hands. They have traced the pout of Parvati's bottom lip, squeezed the sharp edges of Seamus's shoulder when he got too cheeky with our housemates, gripped the plastic, cold curve of a football. To capture something well on paper, you have to learn its story, inside and out. At fourteen, I was still figuring out my own story; I had no time to learn anyone else's. Merlin knows, early on, I wasn't ready to try something as complicated as Seamus' grin or the quirk of Ginny's eyebrow when she was pissed at Ron. But I knew my hands' story better than any Charms lesson or History of Magic fact; I've lived it. After all, they were right there in front of me, had always been right in front of me. My hands were convenient.

In the right light, from a good angle, they can even be beautiful. My long, thin fingers would be too delicate for a man's hands if not for the broad span of my palms, which are too large to belong to a girl. My life line splits into a fork at the end, my ring fingers are a little longer than my pinkies, and the contrast between the dark backs and light palms can be captured beautifully in charcoal. It's difficult to make them look bad, honestly; it doesn't matter if you use ink and parchment or charcoal and oil paper. Hell, a sculptor last week even asked me if I wouldn't mind sitting for a mold casting. He wants to shape them out of marble, like they used to do with ancient aristocrats and philosophers. Can you imagine? Someday, in a museum somewhere, a model of my hands, whose most notable accomplishment is that they didn't shake when holding the wand that cursed Dolohov, could be sitting alongside those of Cicero, who stopped the Roman Republic from being overthrown, or Archimedes, who designed a machine that made water flow uphill, defying gravity!

I know it sounds crazy, but people in the art world have fixated on my hands. For a while, I thought it was just in my head because I've always been weirdly conscious of them, but even Seamus noticed it last week after a critic's review discussed the graceful gestures of my hands during our conversation at the gallery opening for an entire paragraph, as if the finesse he perceived in the nervous fluttering of my fingers was a portent of my future potential as an artist. When we first started planning the gallery show, Charles even asked me if we could use a picture of my hands as the titular picture for my debut rather than a portrait of my face. He called it a novel approach, said that the mystery of it all would draw greater hype. But it's the same thing as the art, I guess--people think my hands are beautiful so they assume I've always treasured them, but I'm not struck by the same feeling they have.

To me, my hands, the art--it's all just serendipity. My hands are body parts that I was born with; I never did anything at all to earn them or to shape or refine them. Even with art, I never actively pursued drawing as a career; it just fell into my lap. I mean, I practically doodled my way into a gallery. I've never really admitted that to anyone--not the critics, not my agent, not even Seamus, but that's the truth. The central pieces at my gallery showing were just expanded versions of sketches I had jotted down as a teenager. Knowing what I do about my own work, how can my drawings compare to the portfolios of my friends�real artists, people who’ve made their work the focus of years of passion and effort--in this community?

At least with my drawings, I can appreciate their value to others. I don't find them as beautiful, of course, because I know the truth about how they were created. Besides, for me, the art is work, nothing romantic. I create pieces that are judged and assessed by experts. In retrospect, it might seem as though a fountain of beauty erupts from my pen onto the paper, but I never know how things will turn out until I put everything out there for the public to see. Today, critics might call me a "modern day Degas," but tomorrow, I could be the poor guy etching chicken scratch into the sidewalk outside the gallery. I may not be an experienced aficionado like most of the people who attended my opening, but I know that much about the way this community works. But even with all of those complications, I can see what people enjoy in the delicate ink lines of newborn James Sirius Potter's downy hair or in the minute, jarring detail of a broken window in my Battle of Hogwarts drawing. And even if I am working off beginner's luck rather than established practice, there is some modicum of talent involved in creating these pieces; it's not as if Harry or Ron could amble in from Auror Headquarters after a day of training and do what I do with ink and parchment. So I can understand why people assume I've always been--that I am--immersed completely in the world that I draw rather than the world where I live; it comes from their appreciation of my art, which I can accept and honor.

But my hands, I'll never understand why people are intrigued by them. They don't have any intrinsic value. Merlin's bloody balls, they're a body part--everybody has them. I was born with them; I've done nothing to earn them or to refine or shape them in any way. It's ridiculous that they've somehow earned me some degree of respect and following in their own right, aside from the role they played in the work that I showed at the gallery opening. It's as though people have attached value to my hands for simply existing, giving them extraordinary appreciation for being completely ordinary. Somehow, the recognition my hands have received makes all of the other praise for my artwork, for my actual skill, feel less valuable because it comes from the same people. Is this how Quidditch players whose gear or gloves are stolen from the locker room feel? All those fans chase after those inanimate objects as if they possess the skill that made the player famous, as if their success can be captured in the cool, smooth leather of a glove.

Now that I think about it, though, Quidditch players don’t have it bad. Those gloves Gwenog Jones wears, those are her dragon hide gloves, no question about it. No one’s ever owned a pair made from Horntail hide before her. The hands that everyone is so fascinated with, the ones that created all those drawings in that gallery, the subject of the central pieces of my portfolio--they’re not mine. Ask my mum; she tells me all the time. “You have your father’s hands, Dean,� she murmurs, with this funny look in her eyes. She holds them sometimes, both my hands in both of hers, not for any particular reason. She just grabs them, twines her fingers through and squeezes, before carrying on whatever conversation we were having, like she’s done nothing out of the ordinary.

It’s not a big deal. Everyone has bits and pieces of their parents; Harry’s got his mum’s eyes, and Ron has that red hair you could spot meters away. Besides Mum, no one even knows where my hands come from, since my dad disappeared before I could even walk. If nobody knows about it, it can’t be a big deal--it doesn’t matter to my agent or the critics or the patrons, so it shouldn’t matter at all.

Except I’ve always hated those sketches of my hands, even when Charles told me I had to make them the centerpiece of the show, even when all the people stopped and stared, huddling in the gallery around their singular, larger-than-life depiction. I would rather be drawing on that sidewalk outside the gallery, completely unknown, than be famous for that drawing, for my hands. When my hands are still like that, whether they’re trapped in my mother’s grip of caught on parchment by my quill, I can’t forget. Even if nobody else knows, I know that they’re his.

Remember when I said that my hands have had a life that I know better than anyone else’s? When I confine them to parchment, they lose all of that. The critics call those sketches expressive, captivating, but to me, they’re just motionless. There’s nothing in them of the softness of Parvati’s cheek or the sharpness of Seamus’ shoulder. All that’s left is their shape--my dad’s long fingers, his knobby wrists.

Those drawing, they’re no better than still lifes. These hands are just objects my dad left behind, and captured with ink, without all the memories I’ve worked into them over the last twenty-two years, they don’t tell my story. They tell the story he’d want them to tell: I’m his son. When he left, he didn’t take anything of my mum or me with him; there’s nothing to remind him of us, and he’s never looked back. But I can never escape, because I have his hands. I won’t ever be able to forget that I, like a beggar, have gratefully accepted what he left behind unintentionally. He rejected me completely, and instead of denying him in return like I should, I’ve glorified him, made his hands the keystone of my career, both the creator and subject of my best work.

People assume that I always knew I was going to be an artist. I didn’t. People assume that today is a triumph for me. It isn’t. Because, you see, the only thing I’ve always known is that I need to always be moving, to never remind myself of my father. And I’ve realized today that he’ll always be a part of my life, no matter what I do. He’ll always be a part of me.

I have his hands.

~.~.~

"I'm sorry, Mum," Dean whispered into his mother's hair. "I know I have his hands. I wish--"

Ms. Thomas pulled away from her son, cupping his face in her hands. "Dean, don't apologize." In spite of the glistening traces of tears on her cheeks, her voice was firm. "I'm not crying because of your father."

"Y-You aren't?"

"No," she responded emphatically. She sighed. "I was so surprised when you warned me that sketches of your hands would be the centerpiece of your showing. I wasn't in tears because I was thinking about your father; I was crying over the mistakes I've made as your mother. I've only just realized how much my grieving over your father leaving us has affected you. I'm sorry that I ever made you feel as though you were a reminder of your father for me. I never realized how perceptive you were as a child, how much you understood--and misunderstood--about my grief. That's why I never talked about it; I didn't think I needed to.

"But, Dean, you are so much more than your father's son. Of course, pieces of you come from him: your hands, the dimple in your left cheek... Beautiful things, things I loved in him once and still love in you. But you are so many things he wasn't-- you've lived through a war and stood by your friends, never wavering. You are brilliant at football, and he was the clumsiest man I've ever met."

Dean shook his head. "Mum, you've always told me that I had beautiful hands, just like him. You don't have to pretend that you're okay, that my hands aren't what they are, aren't my father's, just to protect me. I can handle the truth."

His mother cuffed his ear. "Dean Thomas," she snapped, "you know very well that you're all I've got in this world. I've always believed that I'd do you no favors by sheltering you from the truth. I never hid your father's departure or my grief over him from you, though people told me I should. I raised you to be a strong, dependable man, to be different from your father in the most important way. Why in Merlin's name would I lie to you now?"

"Sorry, Mum," Dean muttered, staring down at the ceramic tiles between their feet.

Ms. Thomas tipped his chin up with her forefinger to meet her sincere gaze. "Sweetheart, your father gave me the most beautiful gift I've ever received when I became pregnant with you. But he hasn't been present for the past twenty-two years. He's played such a small role in your life, and to be honest, in mine. He was a man I loved a long time ago, and he is, biologically speaking, your father, but that's all. You are giving him credit where it isn't due by associating this success of yours, these beautiful pieces, with him."

Finally, Dean felt the tension coiled deep in his belly evaporate, replaced by butterflies of excitement, which fluttered up into his throat. "I understand, Mum," he said a little shakily. Looking down the hallway, he surveyed the series of drawings, large and small, which lined both walls. I did this. A warm tendril of pride unfurled in his chest, gradually blooming into a grin that overtook his face. I created this, with my own hands. Before this moment, he had considered the morning when he first showed his mother his drawings to be the happiest moment of his life, but the joy he had felt then couldn't compare to the weightless euphoria that had taken hold of him now.

From the Battle of Hogwarts to James Sirius Potter’s hair, his hands had always depicted what he saw, flawlessly. His perception of his own hands had shaped those drawings, not anything as arbitrary as the length of his fingers or the span of his palms. He had got it all wrong: it wasn’t the people who arranged the objects in a still life who created its story, but the artist who captured them on parchment.

He had always felt guilty because, unlike the artists he knew, his work wasn’t the focus of his life. He didn’t belong in this community of passionate, talented genius. He spent more time outside of the studio than in it. But living his life was the best thing he could do for his art. The movement in still life drawings didn’t come from the objects, but rather the creativity and strength of the artist’s perception. Every second of his experiences outside the gallery added depth and subtlety to the work he did inside of it.

Life was bigger than art. It didn’t belong just to him, and he couldn’t control much of it, least of all the fact that his father had left him before he could even remember. But his art was, had always been, his. His drawings told the stories of the relationships and emotions he knew to be true. Even if it was the most critically acclaimed gallery opening he ever had, it wouldn’t be the pinnacle of his career. He still had so much growing to do, so much living.

This could be the show that he would be known for. His hands might take center stage in the eyes of critics or art lovers, but Dean knew now that it didn’t matter which show he was known for: every new show would be his favorite, the depiction of the newest chapter of his life, a previously unwritten story. He hadn’t been waiting all night to hear what the critics said about his work or to accept the praise of his admirers;their opinions hadn’t been important. Even his mum--waiting for her hadn’t been about hearing her opinion; it had been about the past, about his fear, about living in the shadow of his father’s memory. And now, Dean was free. Free to live in the present, to see the world from fresh eyes, to make new memories, to create new art.

He grabbed his mother's hand, tucking her arm through his as he turned away from the gallery. It was time to be an artist, in every sense of the word.

~.~.~ Fin ~.~.~

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Endnotes: The effects of child abandonment have been extensively studied by psychologists and sociologists. In girls, abandonment by fathers has been associated with lower levels of educational attainment and higher levels of low self-esteem and depression (sometimes even eating disorders, among a list of other issues. (Interestingly, fatherless girls whose fathers died rather than actively choosing to abandon them escape the negative impacts of child abandonment.) This type of research provided the preliminary inspiration for Dean's characterization.

Stylistically, I drew from one of my favorite authors, Toni Morrison, for this piece. Her beautiful narratives seem to ramble, but gradually peel away the layers of her characters until you finally see their raw psyches, the pieces of their story that have made them the way that they are. Did I succeed? Was the story boring or fascinating in its meandering pace? Please leave a review and let me know! I'm going to continue playing around with this style if I feel inspired, so constructive criticism would be greatly appreciated.