When didn't this portrait Duke frown? There were some wonderfully amusing portraits at Hogwarts - Tybalt had been a nosy sort, happy to strike up conversations here and there with more eccentric characters than the common room portraits - but the only thing better than the eccentrics was making fun of the poor grumpy painted souls who had to exist in a school eternally and seemed to hate noise, and children, and life.  

"Oh, what are you going to do?" Tybalt challenged the portrait when the other lad trailed off, grinning brazenly at the dour old man and the lack of its ability to do anything about being teased but grumble. "He's lucky I don't have a feather on me," he joked, with a conspiratorial eyebrow-quirk at the ginger. A little wave of the feather under the old fellow's nose, and the elephant-trumpeting would be echoing right up to the Astronomy tower. A tried-and-true tactic.

"'Course, he's not a patch on Headmaster Black, as curmudgeons go," Tybalt said brightly, not in the least worried about the prospect of the portrait feeding this assessment back in vengeance, being that he wasn't even a student anymore - and it wasn't as though he was the only student (or professor, probably) who had spoken ill of Phineas Black before. "Wouldn't you say?"

---