The Portrait by the_evenstar
Chapter Notes: (Any parallels to The Picture of Dorian Gray are entirely intentional, and any similarities to Shelley's Frankenstein were entirely not, but I acknowledge the influence of both on my story!)
There was another world – a much vaster world – above the reflective surface that enclosed Merda's village. She caught glimpses of it sometimes, when she floated near the warmer waters at the top of the lake, and saw fuzzy, indistinct creatures ambling around on two strange limbs. They took little notice of her, and likewise, most of her fellow merpeople took but passing interest in the affairs of the wizards above. Logically, there was no reason to concern oneself with the inhabitants of a world you could never visit, but Merda had a hard time believing in the impossibility of dreams.
Most times, she imagined. She concocted elaborate stories in her mind of what the people in that upper realm might do to occupy themselves, what thoughts dominated their minds, what they dreamed of when they were young and imaginative like herself. And while she knew that fantasies of another life were useless, they filled her with an indescribable passion. She longed to be something she was not, and that hope made her different and distinct from every other creature she knew. It was as if, through her imagination, she had become another person, in addition to herself, Merda, the mermaid. She had grown legs, a beautiful face, and walked among the witches and wizards and reveled in the memory of her former, imaginary glory.
As he poured over textbooks in the poor light of the common room while all his peers were long since asleep, as he pleaded with professors to expand upon their theories of magic as his classmates hurried to lunch, Mark realized that he was different. Though he was one of Ravenclaw's students, he had often been called “boring” by his fellow classmates who, though they recognized the importance of their studies, thought his passion for them was a bit misguided. But to Mark, “boring” might only be applied to those individuals who had no interest in life, while he... he longed to drink it indefinitely, to consume life, to be life, and he found the answers he wanted in books, in people, in art. He was never satisfied with the life his fellow students chose, a life of meaningless toil and purposeless amusement. He fused the two together with his passion for learning, a passion that led him to push the limits of magical existence. He wanted to know more, he wanted to be more, than anyone had ever thought it humanly possible.
But he started small, because if his accusers had one fault, it was overlooking the subtleties that make life sublime. While they might take it for granted that there was a lake outside the school, and at the bottom of that lake lived creatures they had never seen but in the pages of books, Mark didn't want to found his own ideas on so flimsy a foundation. How many people had experienced life under water? How few, then, were the ideas circulating as to what it felt like? No one knew but the select few who chose to experience it, and with the opportunities open to him, Mark felt that it would be a betrayal of his humanity if he did not take advantage of the gifts life so freely offered.
He began by mastering the Bubble-Head Charm – a simple spell, in theory, but it was quite new, and Mark soon realized that not all the kinks had been worked out. The first time he tried it underwater, he found that the bubble was not so useful in keeping the water out, and he nearly drowned. With time, though, he perfected the charm for his purposes, and he walked out to the Hogwarts lake with a spirit of adventure. He cast the charm, and dove in head first.
Merda raced to the boundary of worlds with a passion that might have been mistaken for a sense of urgency. To her, though, it was, in a way, because her imaginary life was swiftly becoming as important to her as the one everyone else acknowledged as true, as the only. As she neared the water's edge, however, she heard a splash of submergence, and saw an indistinct figure clouded in bubbles.
Without knowing why, Merda rushed to hide behind an overgrowth of weeds. From this vantage point, she caught sight of an uncertain swimmer with a strange, indissoluble bubble about his head. It was a moment before she realized that his lower half was not comprised of fins, but of legs! real wizard legs! and his face, though partially obstructed from view, was both exotic and inexplicably beautiful. She hurried out from her hiding place and within seconds found herself face to face with a creature like those in her dreams, but this one was so real. The clarity shocked her, because she had never seen a creature like this without the glass of the water's surface to distort the image. In this complete clarity, Merda read in his facial features an uncertainty, of which she determined herself to be the cause.
Mark had not imagined that within mere seconds of his arrival would he be greeted by such an exotic creature. She moved with such agility that Mark had blinked his eyes, and then she was there! He was half afraid that she was nothing but an illusion, a hallucination brought on by weeks of imagining what mermaids might actually be like, but he reached out to touch her face and found that she was quite undeniably real. The mermaid reached up with her fins and delicately felt his own features. She smiled, and Mark understood that she had been waiting for this moment as anxiously as he had.
As quickly as it had begun, this magical moment was broken when yet another wizard face emerged beneath the water's surface, carefully covered in its own bubble. Godric Gryffindor's harsh features reprimanded the young boy without even saying a word, and, in a flash, Merda was gone. Gryffindor pulled Mark out of the water, and laughed to himself when they were once again on solid ground. “I would hate to see Rowena's face if I told her where I found one of her students lurking,” he jested, but Mark was too preoccupied to notice. His thoughts were filled with fantastic visions of another world, and even in the few seconds since he had been torn from it, his imagination began to reform what his eyes had seen in startling clarity, and he became quite certain that he had just been ripped from paradise.
But Gryffindor mistook Mark's preoccupation for fear of his professor's wrath, and Gryffindor laughed in his hearty manner. “Don't worry, Mark!” he said, patting the third-year on his waterlogged back. “I won't tell her if you don't. But you might want to change your clothes before she sees you!” Gryffindor urged him towards the castle, and Mark took off in a sprint, moved by the urgency of his artistic vision.
“Say, what is that?” a young fellow asked Mark as he walked down to the lake. Mark had set up his easel by the water's edge, and had been hard at work all morning. Being unable to reenter that magical world again, he resolved to recreate the beautiful creature he had met there just days before.
“A painting,” Mark murmured, not wanting to disrupt his concentration.
His friend inched around to the other side to view Mark's progress. “Er, why are her legs green?”
“Because she's a mermaid,” Mark answered stiffly.
“Then why does she have legs, anyway?” his friend asked in great amusement.
“Because, Richard,” Mark answered, as if lecturing a dull-witted child, “she's a mermaid turned witch, if you must know.”
“All right,” his friend answered, taking a seat by the water's edge and dangling his feet under the surface. “Whatever suits your fancy.”
Since her chance meeting with the inhabitant of that other world, Merda could not be pulled from gazing up through the glassy water's edge, straining her eyes for some sight of another of the strange beings. Days had passed before Merda's desires were finally realized, and she saw that very same wizard setting up some strange contraption by the shore.
He took out out his brushes, and began moving his hand across the canvas, leaving color wherever his hand traveled. Merda watched with great curiosity, and gasped in amazement when she saw such a realistic face emerge from the white background, and her eyes widened as she recognized it as her own, but... different. Merda saw her eyes staring out from a witch's face, though its slight green tint alluded to her true image. She watched raptly as he gave her legs, a human torso. She no longer looked like herself at all, but she knew more than anything that that image was her, and she felt a hole in her heart as she realized that it was her, but as he wished her to be.
In a moment of great conviction, Merda wished to herself that she might trade places with that entrancing portrait, and become human enough that she might not be thought of as the freak she was.
As the paint finished drying, Mark sat idly on his bed admiring his creation.
“Fallen in love?” Richard asked rather sarcastically as he entered the room.
Mark was entranced, and did not notice Richard's presence until he sat down on the bed beside him, shaking him from his thoughts. “Oh, hello, Richard,” he mumbled.
“Good God, you are in love, aren't you?”
“What?” Mark asked, completely taken by surprise.
“The way you stare at that painting! I was beginning to think that you believed she was real or something.”
Mark whispered to himself, quiet enough that Richard could not hear, “She is.”
Merda was floating idly through the gentle waters when she realized that something was not right. Suddenly, her throat constricted, and she thought for certain that she would die. As she writhed about in her pain, she caught sight of what should have been her fin, but instead were transforming to resemble very human legs, and Merda realized with a rush of joy that her desires had been granted, and she rushed to the water's surface and broke through the border.
“Hey, Mark!” Richard called out to his friend as he walked down from the dormitory into the common room.
“What is it?” Mark replied, looking up from his studies.
“I see you decided to give that girlfriend of yours a tail.”
Mark stared at him in utter incomprehension. “Excuse me?” he asked confusedly.
“Your painting,” Richard slowly spoke. “The mermaid-witch hybrid you concocted? I think she looks better, now that you made her a normal mermaid.”
“I didn't...” Mark stammered. “I never...”
Richard shrugged his shoulders and walked back up the stairs. Mark ran past him to look at the painting, wondering if anyone had defiled it while he wasn't looking.
But when he found the painting, Mark agreed with Richard that the mermaid now depicted looked much better than the witch he had painted. Exotic, he thought to himself, still wondering who had altered the painting. Richard had no skill with a brush, and he couldn't think of anyone else who did, besides himself. He walked absentmindedly back down the stairs and across the common room. As he walked out the door, the portrait there warned him, “You're not allowed to leave, young man!” but he pushed it aside, and went for a midnight walk on the grounds.
He walked down to the Hogwarts lake. It was much too late for him to be here, but likewise, it was a bit too late for logical thinking, and he simply had to get away. He wondered what had become of the real mermaid, the one he had seen here just one week ago. She had been haunting his dreams, and it tortured him that he didn't know why.
The night wind wrapped itself around Mark's hunched shoulders, and the sound of crickets floated to him on the gentle breeze. He began to feel at peace with the world he didn't understand, when his reverie was broken by harsh, screeching sound that came from behind a nearby tree. “It's you,” said the cracking voice, and Mark took a few timid steps back. He was too afraid to respond, though his mind was producing questions in rapid-fire: “Who are you?” “What do you want from me?” and “How do you know who I am?” were among the first to materialize.
Suddenly, he heard a gentle rustling from behind that very same tree, and he heard something walk closer to him, though he still could not make out what it was, as the branches shadows covered it entirely. When the figure emerged in the open moonlight, Mark gasped in horror and fell to the ground, his legs no longer able to support his weight.
There in the moonlight stood a human-esque creature, though Mark easily recognized many of her features as those of a mermaid... and unless he were terribly mistaken, they belonged to the very same mermaid he had seen here last week. Her skin had a greenish hue, much like that of his painting, but her face had not changed one bit. She had legs, but barely knew how to use them – she had lost the grace of her mermaid form. Her arms hung limply by her awkwardly proportioned body, and her hair, still soaked, dangled lifelessly from her scalp. Mark noted that she had all the features that were common to humans, though none of the beauty; and all of the strangeness of merpeople without their grace, or their exoticism.
He was in shock. What had happened to his awkward creature? What Dark Magic had caused her to change form so crudely? The creature took another step towards him, and called out in her screeching voice, “Don't you remember me?”
Mark, unable to think of anything else, so terrified he was at the sight of the creature, replied in a nervous shout, “Get away from me!” and he ran back towards the castle.
For a moment, Merda could not feel anything. She had taken it for granted that this wizard would be delighted with her, as he had been so short a time ago. She sat by the water's edge, now on the other side, to cry, when she caught sight of herself in its reflective surface. Instantly, she realized why the wizard had turned away in horror, for she looked nothing like the portrait she had so ardently desired to become. The portrait had been beautiful, but she was nothing short of nightmarish, a hideous mixture of all the grotesque features of both races. She screamed in agony, and plunged into the water, wanting nothing more than to flee back to her familiar world, and surround herself in the comforts of normalcy.
Underwater, Merda grasped her neck ferociously, unable to inhale. She thrashed about violently, but her legs remained legs and she could not regrow her gills, no matter how hard she wished. She would be like this forever. She would haunt other wizards with her grotesque appearance. She would be forever in limbo between two worlds, unacceptable by either one, condemned to live a half-life. She... would stop trying.
At last, the water's surface smoothed out its ripples, and reformed into the very-solid border between two unbridgeable worlds.
Mark ran as fast as he possibly could, unwilling to turn back. Amid his terror, he felt a small twinge of guilt, though he was not sure why, or how any of this could even be his fault. He was certain of one thing only, and that was that he needed to see that painting again immediately.
He raced through the school into his dormitory, waking up his frustrated roommates, but he hardly noticed them at all. He pulled the painting out from underneath his bed, and realized instantly that somehow, this painting had stolen the mermaid's beauty. Everything beautiful or exotic about her that he had seen during their first meeting, had been captured on this canvas. At first, his painting had been but a crude imitation of the real image, but since then, it had transformed into something altogether more beautiful than he remembered her being. It was as if her life force shone through the paint, and he couldn't explain to himself why or how, but he didn't need to, because he knew.
He stared at the painting for so long that his eyes began to grow weary, and his vision blurred, but before he blinked his eyes, he thought he saw the mermaid wink at him. He rubbed his eyes, quite certain that he had grown delirious, but the painting began moving right before his eyes, and Mark threw it to the floor in horror. Her beauty? What of it? He had stolen her soul!
He picked up the painting and shoved it under his arm, not willing to look at it ever again. His roommates eyed him curiously, not having seen the portrait begin to move. But Mark raced through the halls and, once outside his common room yet again that night, he threw the painting down one of the staircases, and did not pause to notice where it landed. He ran back into his room and drew the covers over his head, taking sharp, jagged breaths.
He would never paint again.
On his way to breakfast, a young Prefect tripped as he walked through the halls. He glanced around, glad that no one had seen him fall. As he brushed off his robes, he stopped to pick up the curious canvas on which he had tripped. “A mermaid!” he exclaimed. “Why, this will look just perfect on the empty wall in the Prefects' bathroom!” He shoved the portrait under his arm with a sense of purpose, and turned back around to deposit the portrait in its final resting place.