A Brush Stroke of Relief Solo

Backdated: Late March, Evening

There was a lot going on in Willow's life currently, she was in the middle of a lot of complicated feelings about her best friend, sure they had made up but that hadn't made everything better. Words had tumbled out of her mouth leaving her scars reopened for him to see, she was worried that the rest of the world would start to see them too. The carefully crafted persona she had created coming to Hogwarts was slowly falling apart. The happy, sociable, sunflower type girl was breaking, and breaking fast. With Flash wanting to genuinely know her, with letting Mildred in even the tiniest bit, Ruka and Jack seeing her in her most vulnerable state possible... how much longer could she keep this up?

Her daily outlets were gone, the daily routine with her family and the rituals they had set, daily communication with her God and Goddess, an environment completely surrounded with nature and greenery, all ripped away when she got to Hogwarts. The dark cold walls seemed to trap her in. She had tried to keep up with the routines she had at home but everything here was so complicated, and there was always so much to do. She was tired. Emotionally and physically, she was drained. There was a continual push for her to continue to be happy for the others around her that seemed to continually be falling apart. When would she join them in the falling, she wondered. She was already tripping and slamming against the walls, down the endless rabbit hole of learning how to exist outside of her small town.

Everything around her said she was doing great at keeping it up.
But truly she felt like she was suffocating.

The Hufflepuff dorm was usually a place of comfort and warmth, welcoming her to relax and let go just for a little bit. But today it felt just as suffocating as the rest of the castle. There was an itch to do something, anything to let this all out. She went to the Plant Palace and silently packed up her painting supplies and grabbed a canvas and easel, there was no guarantee there was one in the rehearsal room and she'd rather be safe than sorry and have to make a second trip. For her tiny arms this was a lot to carry, but her determination to do something got her to the rehearsal room only panting a little bit. This castle had too many stairs.

Setting up was almost as therapeutic as the painting itself. The familiar smells of the paint, the feeling of the canvas under her fingers, the painters palette being weighted in her hand by the various colors she distributed around it. She didn't exactly have an idea of what she wanted to paint, she just needed to get something onto a canvas. There was a darkness in her heart that she had to release before it overflowed and escaped, tainting her sunny persona. The last thing she did was tie up her hair, putting it into a messy bun atop her head. It wouldn't stay if she needed to go for a run, but it would stay long enough for her to get her hands messy.

With a deep breath, she made the first brush stroke.

Silence filled the room, being broken only by the soft sounds of a brush against a canvas. To her it was a beating drum of resistance, of relief, of pain. Not many people knew she painted, although with the upcoming talent show that would change. This was like her private secret, a ritual that only she knew the answers to unlock her heart unlike anyone in her life. No one knew the fully pass code, she didn't know if she could let anyone know it all for free of them taking hold of her soft heart and squeezing the last of her life out of it.

Hot tears streaked down her face as she began to cry, mildly obscuring her vision. She hated crying. But the painting was calling to her, begging her to let go for this moment. The tears dripped onto the palette and mixed with the paint as she began to attack the canvas with her brush. As if it held everything she was afraid of, everything she couldn't let go of, every person she started to get close and wanted to push away. She wasn't unlike the many people in the school who wore masks, she had plenty of her own. But people were quickly helping her remove them and she didn't know how to deal with it. Especially when she had just figured out what it was like to have them on in the first place.

Her hands were shaking, she had to pause. Gently placing the palette on the ground she collapsed to the ground, laying out on the cold rehearsal room floor. Her crying was quiet and muffled, for fear of anyone else walking by and hearing it. She wanted to be alone, for once she wanted to let the impending loneliness suffocate her in this giant room. Just her and a canvas. A canvas that she had to fill, she felt like maybe she did that to others. Filling them with a happiness of her own, to try and forget the void that existed within her.

Slowly she sat back up, not ready to look at the canvas she had created. She hadn't been paying attention to what she was doing, she was just doing. Her hand moving on it's own accord as if it knew how to remove the knife from her heart through the strokes of a paintbrush.

Wiping the tears from her eyes, streaking her face with a blend of paint colors, she was finally able to see. The once white canvas was now filled with color. Emblazoned in red the word "WITCH" across the middle, jagged and broken, like her. But sprouting out of the top was life, flowers and greenery. Magical and mundane plants alike filled her canvas. As it moved to the bottom they died, shriveling up and falling from the trees and bushes they were once apart of. She didn't know which way she was moving, was she blossoming or shriveling? Only time could tell, and time was always cruel to her.

After staring at the painting for an uncomfortable amount of time and letting it dry, she wrapped it up in a cloth she had brought tying it securely so no one else would have to see her bare her soul. She didn't want anyone else to see it. She needed time to recover from the first time that she did it. When she reached her dorm, she silently packed up her supplies and curled up into her hammock for the rest of the night.

The silence continued to suffocate her once more.