After Elodie had caught up to the rather smug Alexander, they spent the journey engaging in friendly conversation. She teased him, he teased her. They talked about trivial things, that didn't feel trivial. Lucky for them, by the time they had returned home, the rest of the ensemble had not returned yet from their day of shopping and so, after drying off and changing into fresh apparel, they headed out to the lawn, as Elodie had been coaxed into teaching Alexander to paint.

With the paper sprawled out in the grass, various globs of paint strewn across it, Elodie set up Alexander's easel and her own. She had confirmed that landscape was too easy a challenge for him, and so, to stretch his limits, she offered a class in portraits. Portraits of each other. It wouldn't be simple, but not outside his realm of knowledge, as they had so eloquently discussed on the journey home. Along with Elodie's creative juiciness and his strong rhetoric in the famous portraitists of the western canon, they were ready to create pieces that would transcend the expectation of a first time painter. Or at least she hoped.

Guiding him gently, she showed him the colours to blend, how to use red and blue to his advantage in the undertones of the skin, how to apply, then paint wet into wet. It took her some guiding of his own brush to start, but with her drawing already prepared it didn't take him long to accustom himself to the art of creation, and he enjoyed it, as she tried to problem-solve the paradoxes in the colours before him. He yearned to do her skill justice, to capture her fairly, to capture the shine in her eyes, the life in her face, the fragility of her self. Wasn't that what painting was all about? Capturing, somehow, the things that weren't just visual. The things that only someone who had watched a person for long enough could capture. The intangibility of a person.

To capture her giggle, that giggled amusement as she came to check on how he was doing, how she couldn't keep her legs still for more than two seconds, how she stuck her tongue out when concentrating, only ever so slightly. He very much enjoyed thirsting to get it down on paper, it was like he was chasing something that he was so close to getting.

Elodie was much faster in her expressive chasing, it was only thirty minutes before she left her easel in boredom, having finished. Alexander teased that she could have done better. She teased back. She sat for him so that he could finish his painting, but she couldn't sit still or look at him in the eyes without breaking down with laughter. It was happy. It was, good. It was, in fact, very good, seeing her so happy. He realised then that he hadn't seen her truly, boundlessly happy ever. And it made him happy too.

It was then when she suggested he write her some poetry. And he agreed. Why? Because he was damn well feeling very happy.

He got some paper, and a pen, and told her to leave him so that he could focus. Of course she didn't, and stayed near him like some yapping spaniel, rolling around in the grass, rolling in her glee, in her itching euphoric state. It made him grin, as she pestered his ironically precious process of writing. As if she knew, that no matter what he did, he'd still write something. How couldn't he? He suddenly felt so ecstatic. As if she had taken what he had said this morning and proved it wrong.

The ink felt smoother than normal, richer. The paper's grain felt finer, as if it had melted under the sun. He suddenly felt so happy, and so compelled to try and pull whatever he had stuck in his head out, to unravel it and to understand it.

She eventually tired herself out, and laid on the grass with him, watching as he wrote, watching him think hard, completely abandoning his nonchalance, the nonchalance that he cloaked himself in so often. It made her happy, to see him comfortable in an uncomfortably wild world.

It took him a decent amount of time to come up with something he thought worthy of sharing, but he eventually dropped the pen, read, as her eyes noted, the poem through twice exactly, and then composed himself, ready to give it to her.

And so, he gave it to her.

"Won't you read it to me?" Elodie nudged, her tone kittenish.

"No. My poems aren't meant to be spoken."

"Have it your way then."

"I will."

He rolled over in the grass towards her, and placing his arms beneath himself, lifted himself up into standing.

"I best be off. They will be back soon."

Elodie lifted herself to standing too, the poem, unread, clutched in her hand.

"I'll leave your painting to dry on my roof."

"How long will it take?"

"A day or two."

He turned to leave.

"Don't you want to see what i think of this?" she lifted the paper to eye-level, where its edge caught a crest of the sun.

He chuckled.

"No Elodie, in the fear you don't like it and you crush all my dreams."

Elodie smiled,

and,

as if some great force had taken hold of her, embraced him. Upon this he welcomed her into his clasp, a clasp of security, of warmth, of happiness, and held her. He squeezed her back with his arms but ever so gently, a contrast to her unbridled ferocity with which she reached around him. She then stepped back, and so did he.

"Thank you," he murmured, just loud enough that she could hear it, just quiet enough there was a chance that she might not.He then smiled a smile that shone with a hidden content. "I really enjoyed today. And i needed it. You made me feel - ah, i don't want to pick a word, in the fear it won't, well, fulfil my feelings."

She caught this comment, and it gleamed in the lustre of her eyes.

"Happy?"

He paused.

"Yes, yes, that might just be it."