Cho is supposed to be an artist, but how can she draw if she doesn’t have any colors? She knows that this horrible time without her colors will pass eventually. It has to - has to - since she is a witch, and soon she will be back where she can simply conjure her tools for drawing, of any color she wants. A pencil, watercolors, pastels...

The first color she retrieves will be alizarin, she decides, a pot of alizarin paint. It is a red tone, though she has always thought it sounds more like a blue. With it she will draw inter-house unity, because it’s a Gryffindor color, but it ought to be Ravenclaw.

Next cerise, she thinks, a deep pink, almost purple. It would clash so horribly with her alizarin that she believes she could make it work. Absently she reaches for her pencils to try it out, forgetting that the plans she is making are concerned with which colors she conjures back first, not which ones to draw with now. Her colored pencils are no longer at their proper place.

I’ve lost my colors, Cho thinks frantically, before she remembers that he took them from her. Ever since her father died her mum has had many boyfriends. Some of them have been real jerks, but this one has got to be the worst. He thinks it’s not proper for a girl her age to waste time with arts. Focus on your studies, he said, and he hid all of her colored pencils and paintbrushes and canvases and watercolors.

He’s made her lose her colors. Even her bright walls seem black and white today as she laments her loss. She knows some artists who draw in black and white, but not she is not one. Cho needs emotion and openness and color!

She falls back onto her bed, thinking about her precious colors. She remembers the portrait she painted of her brother, using yellow tones only. Golden hair (how he had laughed at that) and saffron skin. But he’d loved it in the end, proud Hufflepuff that he was, and he had kept it.

She longs to draw something, right now. She longs to draw to get away from the memories of when her brother still lived with them, or when her father was alive. Perhaps, when she can get colors again, she will conjure a robin egg blue pencil. Robin egg blue – it’s too dark to be baby blue, but it’s not yet a royal blue, nor is it a distinctive turquoise. Maybe she will draw her friend Marietta using robin egg blue, because what are the two of them but two no-longer-baby-but-not-quite-royal blues?

Cho feels tears in her eyes, as she longs to draw. She wants to draw so that she can forget about Mum’s boyfriend, and so she can forget about him. The thought seems so unrelated, and yet, in truth, Cedric is related to every one of her thoughts lately. And now she’s thought his name. She can never get rid of the thought of him once it's wormed its way in.

Without thinking, she grabs a quill, because it’s the only thing around, and she sketches his features. His ink portrait makes the tears that have welled fall thick and fast. Why him? Why did she love him, and why did he have to die? Why, why, why?

She wants her colors, because she could draw a still-life of the flowers on her windowsill, or her favorite comic hero. But without colors what can she dwell on besides his face? His face, in black ink.

Cho throws her quill across the room, staring at the drawing she’s done of him. He was so handsome, he was so young. He wasn’t supposed to die like that. She recalls his last words to her: “I’ll win this thing, and see you after!�

She’d told him to be careful. It seems so weak, so pointless. Why didn’t she say she loved him or talk him out of participating? It hadn’t seemed dangerous then. He’s dead now.

Cho walks over, legs shaking, and carefully picks the quill up from the floor. Back on her bed, she adds a few lines to her portrait. The black and white rendition doesn’t do him justice. Just black on white, and what kind of a legacy is that? Black, she decides, black must be the color of loss.

Cerulean is another blue tone that she will conjure when she can. Cho forces her thoughts back to the pencils she longs to have back. She will use the new cerulean to draw water – an ocean or the Hogwarts lake. Neither one could contain her feelings, neither one could be expressed with only one color. Cho will need azure and dodger blue and maya blue, to create a blue, blue, blue compilation of the depths of her sorrow.

But for now, she only has black with which to portray him. I’ve lost my colors, and I’ve lost him, she realizes, and so his portrait will be in black.

Her room is sky blue, but through her tears it looks just as black as her drawing. It’s a black and white world, drab and lonely without her colors. Cho draws his expression as proud, though he was such a modest boy. His steel-gray eyes, his sharp nose. He was an artist’s dream, and back then, when she loved him, she was an artist. Now what is she? What can she be without her colors? What can she be without him?

He is a black and white warrior, facing the unknown, facing the blackness of the world. She draws him determined, her thoughts flowing through her hand into the black ink and onto the paper.

She means to make him sad, really, but she never saw him sad, so she doesn’t know what it would look like on him. Surely sadness wouldn’t have suited him, and so she draws him fierce and proud and moving forward, even though he’s dead and he can’t move at all anymore.

But as she draws him, a fighter until the end, she wishes the black weren’t surrounding her like this. She needs her colors, and then she can draw something else, but if she only has black what can she draw but loss and sorrow? Black is, after all, the color of mourning. Why should black not be the color of loss?

When she deems the portrait finished it is tear-stained and inevitably black and white. She tacks it to her wall nonetheless and somehow, though he is still black, black, black and gone, the blue walls around her gain a little bit of their color back.

Cho won’t ever forget him, of course not. But maybe the blackness won’t swallow her just yet. Her world is black and white for the time being, but maybe someday it will be colorized once more.

She doesn’t think about her lost colors – both the pencils and the colors of her world – but she looks forward grimly. He was a warrior, and I will be a warrior. He is lost to her forever, but she still can get back her colors if she tries. And until then, she will do her best, drawing with her black ink on her white parchment. Staring at his face, she considers the possibility that while black is the color of loss, white is the color of fresh starts.