Work Text:
Turpentine simply can not be a benign aroma.
It smells too much like gasoline or poison or radioactive crystal meth. Jace hates the smell of it. Wants to cut the remnants of it out from his throat every time he inhales a gulp of it. It makes his eyes itch and his throat swell, sometimes even makes his throat itch and his eyes swell. The shallow symptoms of alleged toxicity are endless.
Smells like shit, he always mumbles. Gags like it’s amusing. Never lets the scent sit on his clothes for too long after art class. Jace often replaces the scent with a variant of either a fresh shirt or the sticky smell of sex, sometimes cigarettes when he’s feeling frisky. Rikka doesn’t bother trying to differentiate the three.
Rikka sits in the art studio for hours after class. Defiling a mixing plate or caressing a canvas. She dictates time by bottles of paint devoured and canvases dampened. Every stroke is a second lived.
She often paints portraits of her brother. Rather, she only paints portraits of her brother. Sometimes realistically as the way he once lived, like group photos or childhood polaroids of him opening Christmas gifts. She paints every fold of wrapping paper and every dirty sock. Stares at cheeks and eyelids for hours to get the texture right. Perfects the bounce of light against glossed lips. But she prefers painting him like he lives in her mind. She paints the divots of his face and torso under a white sheet; sketches him through clouds of multicolored crystalline smoke; carves his liquid silhouette bathed in murky freshwater, eyelashes covered in cotton candy moss. Her art teacher doesn’t like the repetitiveness of her work.
“The technique is there but it’s like you’re regurgitating the same themes. Maybe water color could give you a different lens than oil? Why don’t you try it out?”
When she does try it out she misses the smell of the turpentine. There is no mixing plate to ruin. There are no tubes of paint to strangle. She paints a landscape this time. Sunflower upon sunflower upon sunflower. The meadow is broad and never-ending but the sky is painted the shade of pale pink that isn’t sure if it’s sun down or sun up.
“How did you like it?” Mrs. Roxas asks. Today she has her hair braided down one shoulder, opening up her kind face. Rikka avoids the warmth in her eyes. “I can’t layer it.” Rikka mumbles.
“The paper crumbles. Everything has to be planned or the whole composition is warped. It’s too honest.” Rikka runs her thumb over the same portion of her knuckles as she speaks. She stares at the landscape in front of her, indifferent.
“I like it. You finally painted something different.” Mrs. Roxas is kind, but not the kind of kind that Rikka needs. She forces a smile anyways. “If you really can’t commit to water color, then at least translate that honesty into your oil pieces. Your technique is impeccable. I can’t imagine how well you would do if you did.”
Jace doesn’t think the sunflowers are honest at all. He thinks the pink sky is undoubtedly romantic but not Rikka-like at all. He holds the bottom corners of the painting between his fingers during English class and stares at it like he’s waiting for it to catch on fire. Rikka sits beside him, rolling her pencil against the pad of her index finger. She wants to sketch on her notebook but can’t find it in herself to sew honesty into the strokes.
Thank fuck that it doesn’t smell like turpentine, Jace thinks as he moves his eyes from the sunflower stems to the almost non-existent clouds in the pink sky. “It’s beautiful,” He whispers to her, sliding it back with his left hand. “It’s just so empty.”
Rikka takes a moment to look at Jace and count his eyelashes. The strands are thick but short and brush against his cheeks in a manner that is suspiciously tender. When she turns back to the board, Jace can finally breathe again. He wonders if she can smell the bathroom sex on his collar. She does, but the pain is subdued. Jace holds her hand under the table and Rikka contemplates the mixture of orange and purple in a sunset. They both bask in their warmth, almost rivaling the sun that spills through the open window.
Today in class they discuss a poem called Silence. As someone reads a stanza a gush of wind storms through the window. It is warm at first, then cold. For Jace it smells like freshly cut grass. For Rikka it smells like a vanilla perfume. The word empty runs through both their minds. Jace hopes she knows how much he loves her, how he would feel without her. Rikka rips a canvas to shreds in the back of her head.
Rikka fantasizes of her and her brother pouring turpentine into wine glasses. They both make a toast, sip, and shovel paintbrushes full of pink paint into their mouths. The pink paint is savory but light, texture akin to a meringue. She tries the orange paint next and massages the rich flavor between her tongue and the top of her mouth. A gulp of turpentine washes it all down. Her brother retrieves the cloth napkin from his lap, dabs the corner of his lips, and smiles. Rikka uses her palette knife to spoon a portion of murky grey-blue paint into her mouth. She winces at the taste. It is aromatic, violently pungent to the point of it hurting her nostrils. The bell rings.
“Let’s have some lunch?” Jace asks as he shoves his pencil case into his bag and tosses her a grin. Once Jace stands, Rikka picks up the painting from off the desk and crumples it between her palms. She is already full but she walks with him anyways. She swears she can still feel the grey paint on the back of her tongue, punishing her lungs every time she takes a breath.
Jace is halfway through his roast beef sandwich when Rikka’s eyes come back into focus. “Jace,” She begins, smoothing out the mean folds of the painting she’d just crumpled. She runs her fingers over the indents of her rash frustration and smooths it over with her forearm. It looks more honest now, she thinks. “What do you mean by empty?”
Jace stops mid-bite and glances at the ruined pink sky. “It just…” Looks fake, he wants to say. Looks like you want to prove something so fantastic and unattainable that the whole illusion collapses on itself due to a lack of structural integrity and morphs into a sheet of two dimensional illustrations of what the fantasy wanted to be. “Your paintings usually make me feel something. Make me feel miserable or elated, I don’t know. This just doesn’t.”
Rikka smooths out the painting one last time and takes out some cruddy #2 pencil. She sketches what she’d wanted to add when she’d been painting. What she had known would be another regurgitation of the same themes. Here, he is about to turn away but the glint in his eyes catches the light and the pink in his cheeks matches the sky. Of course, the shine is impossible to manifest using the pencil but she tries her best. She reaches into the depth of her memories and pulls out the details feature by feature. Wraps her fingers around the bloody images and the feral bubbles of nostalgia. Jace notices tears in her eyes. She can’t remember the color of his shirt and the length of his hair.
With his delectable roast beef sandwich devoured, his hands are now free, albeit covered in grease. He pulls the pencil coddled between her fingers and breaks the thing in two with a moderate amount of effort. He tosses it into his bag and cracks his knuckles. Licking his lips and looking away is all he can manage to do when he’s reminded of how much she misses him. There is no protest or argument; only silence, a roughly shaded shirt, and hair that was in the midst of being crafted.
Jace wonders if her paintings are empty when he isn’t in them because Rikka is just filled with him. If he were to stab her in the torso, rather than blood, the sound of his voice and the balls of his fists would find their way through the wound. Pink paint would cover the three of them and Rikka would finally smile. No crying, only the intoxicating sound of her brother’s laughter. What if all this time, she had only been a roll of flesh cocooning her brother’s dead corpse. What if.
Looking at his half-finished body, Rikka finally remembers the faded cherry red shirt. The holes near the bottom and the way he would fold the sleeves over themselves. Now, in her fantasy, they sit at the dining table and he is wearing the shirt. She can taste the grey paint in her mouth again, more pungent now than it had been earlier. He is smiling like he had been in the sunflower field. When he takes another sip of turpentine it makes his eyes shine like diamonds. His hair is as faded and half-done as he had been in the drawing, figure now as transparent as her water color sky. She realizes he is fading. Rikka scrambles to paint him again with the paint on her plate. She shovels the brick red oil paint down his throat. Violently stabs her palette knife into the patches of him that are disappearing. Paints the pigment back into his face with her fingers like a desperate child. The grey paint is now suffocating her but he can’t smell it. She is yelling now and when she does the grey-blue splatters onto his face like rain.
“It’s gonna rain tonight, huh?” He says to her with a now full smile. Rikka is fourteen again, he is nineteen, tall and sturdy. A now distant mark of home. “Make sure you close the windows, alright, dummy?” Rikka rolls her eyes against her will. She has so much to tell him but all she does is grunt and turn away. Turn back, it burns the back of her throat. Look at him, please please please just look.
“I’m gonna go to work.” His voice is fading, now all she can hear is his footsteps against the hardwood. Rikka waits for the patter of rain but it doesn’t come. She waits and waits for the grey paint to drown her for real this time, for the liquid to enter her nostrils and fill her lungs until she becomes one with it. Suddenly she is warm, she turns and when she does he is on the verge of turning away. “Stay safe, little sister.” Rikka doesn’t say anything but now the rain does start pouring but instead of drowning her it leaks out from her. Covers her chest and cheeks, no matter how much she wipes the stains won’t go away. Come back, please. The liquid is too warm and gentle. She wants it to consume her but it won’t. The door closes then opens again for a split second. Words pour through then she is alone again.
“I love you.” Jace mumbles, not looking at her. Not needing to. Rikka takes a breath and it no longer smells like the grey paint. It smells like sun. “I know it doesn’t mean much,” He continues, hoping to God she is listening. She is. Somewhat. Enough. “But I do.”
In her fantasy, Rikka tapes her eyes over with duct tape to stop him from leaking out. She plasters layer upon layer but she can still see the sun seeping through, feel the paint running out from the cracks. Jace knows she will not reply.
Rikka looks at the painting, now muddled with a messy sketch and slides it over to Jace with a quick glance. “I want you to have it.” She says softly. Jace feels like she is yelling. Rikka rips off the duct tape and allows the grey paint to pour like waterfalls from her eyes. The door is still closed. She looks at the clock and deduces it will be 3 hours until he dies. Three hours until the waterfalls run dry. “It’s you.” She lies, referring to the haphazard lead on her painting.
Jace looks at her distant eyes and knows she is lying but smiles anyways. He looks at the bright eyes and brighter smile. Runs his thumb over the creases and thanks her. Now, the painting makes him feel something. Something numb yet excruciating. He looks at her, then the painting and hopes one day it will be.