Work Text:
The rain, I decide, is eternal. It is some ever-lasting affliction the British have brought upon their capital city in punishment for a terrible crime. It is also costing me precious time in which I could be working, and money, for it seems I must now pay for the services of a model who has turned unexpectedly reluctant to pose.
"It's cold," Schuldig whines, sounding more like a boy than the young man he will become. "Take your own fucking clothes off and see what it feels like."
"Do you really have to swear quite so much?" I say, hearing the snap in my voice. It is adult frustration, I tell myself. Not a whine in return. This argument has gone on for almost twenty minutes already. "It just shows you can't express yourself properly without profanity."
"If you don't like it, I don't have to fucking put up with it," he says, grabbing up his coat. "I'm going somewhere warm."
"No!" I say quickly, seizing his cap and gloves as hostages and smiling placatingly as he rolls his eyes at me. "You did say you'd work today – and I have paid you, haven't I?"
I am favoured with a glare from beneath brows a lighter, more golden shade than his hair, then he relents. "I'm keeping my clothes on," he says, unbuttoning the coat again. "You wouldn't get much good out of me if I got frostbite, would you?" His smile is sharp as he adds, "Though maybe you would – you could tuck me up tight in bed and warm me up."
"Please turn to face the light," I say, ignoring him.
He sighs, theatrically wounded, and obeys for at least five minutes then,
"Light the fire."
"No."
"Light the fucking fire, Crawford, it's cold."
"No. I've never lit that fire, and I'm sure soot and smoke would get all over the room and the paintings. Anyway, I don't have any coal – and who would clean the grate out? You?"
He laughs coarsely.
"Precisely. Face the light, please."
After another little while he takes himself to the strangely lumpy settee and wraps himself in the faded throw that adorns it, the fabric tight about him. He lies back at ease, a cigarette raised to his lips and grins at my annoyance.
"You can call it a study for a picture of a young pharaoh in the tomb," he says, crossing his arms across his chest with the cigarette's smoke spiralling thinly upwards, and I have to laugh.
"Very well, your mummified majesty," I say, and concentrate on drawing his face. I think of giving up on drawing by daylight – while this room usually has good natural light, the day is dark and its light is watery and melancholy. Outside the window all is grey and indistinct, and the drumming of the rain on the glass is incessant. Schuldig's imagined pharaoh would lie dry in his tomb, I think it cannot possibly rain like this in Egypt. This is the sort of day that in one of Silvia Lin's paintings would be shown as disgorging something glistening and unpleasant from the Thames, creeping out from the river to mingle with all the other wet Londoners.
I look back at the settee, at the way the fabric moulds itself about his legs, and think about the first time I saw him, leaping into a canal with other boys, all half-wild with the relief of swimming in the heat of summer. I turn to a fresh page of my sketchbook and start working again. An hour later I have several half-sketched ideas – the turn of a fin, a pattern of scales, a webbed hand parting weeds – and a larger piece, half-finished, but satisfying in its watery gloominess. I had thought at first to have him kneeling on a river bank looking down at some riverine creature, memories of Waterhouse's Hylas and the Nymphs in my mind - but here on the page Schuldig has become the creature himself, his body from the waist down a sinuous and strong fish-scaled length of muscle that wraps around the victim he has pulled beneath the surface. His face is as narrow and sly as in reality, though I think if I were to paint this I would hint at scales perhaps on his upper body and face also, even if not as pronounced as on the lower part of his anatomy. One strong, webbed hand is tight about his victim's arm, the other reaches out for the far, dark depths. I have not spent so much time on the other, dark-haired figure, but it is plain he is, if not already drowned, insensible or uncaring that he is being swept to his doom. I quite like it, I think. I don't know that it is worth going further, or that I should even plan what colours I would use if I were to think I might paint it, but it suits the dampness of the day. If I did paint it, I think, smiling a little, I would of course not give the victim features that were quite so much like my own.
"What are you grinning about?"
"Huh? Oh, nothing," I say quickly.
"You haven't said anything for hours," he says, inaccurate in his undoubted annoyance at being, as he sees it, ignored, "and now you're grinning like an idiot at your sketches. Show me." He stretches out an arm from the settee, imperious and demanding.
"It's nothing, Schuldig. I think we should finish for today," I say, closing the book.
His eyes narrow and he flings off the throw, rolling up and to his feet in one move. He is much faster than I expect for someone who has been lying so still for so long. We tussle briefly and in a wholly undignified manner for the sketchbook. It's utterly ridiculous, for it only serves to make it seem that there is something worth fighting for in its pages, so I let go, and he skips away with his prize. He looks at the sketch for what seems like a very long time before turning back to me, eyebrows raised.
"I thought I'd try drawing the kind of thing Miss Lin might," I say.
"Did you," he says archly. "I'm sure she'll be flattered."
The thought of him showing it to anyone is oddly unpleasant, and I fight to stay seated so I will not tear it from his hands. "It's just something silly," I mutter. "I probably won't do anything more with it."
He tosses the book into my lap and stalks towards me, his smile widening. "I thought you were getting boring, Bradley Crawford, I was thinking maybe I wouldn't bother coming to see you any more. But now I think maybe I will."
"Oh," I say, clutching the book, "good."
"I like it," he says, standing far too close to me. "Will you paint it?"
"If you keep posing for me," I say quickly.
"Don't you ever want to draw someone else?" he says, his head cocked to one side a if he's listening to something only he can hear.
No, I think. No. "You have an interesting face," I say, "And even if you swear like a sailor, you're not bad company. I'd like you to pose for me."
"You can stop telling me not to swear, too. Are you my fucking mother?"
He's not really annoyed, I think, or he wouldn't still be so close, leaning over me. Daringly then, for he has never said anything about his family, I ask, "And do you talk to your mother like that?"
He straightens up, a flicker of something in his eyes. The smile comes back, though. "Stop being so damn nosy and buy me dinner. Come on, let's go somewhere warm and noisy, Crawford. Up! Put your coat on and let's go."
He spins away and has his own coat on in a moment, his cap on his head and his hands hidden in his gloves. I follow suit, and he grabs my arm in a tight grasp and pulls me from the room, giving me scant seconds to lock the door, then down the stairs at break-neck speed. We pass one of the other tenants of the house who shakes her head saying something under her breath about the habits of artists but I am being pulled along too fast to hear and frankly don't much care as I rush with Schuldig down into the deepening shadows.
