Work Text:
By the time the wax on the young man with countless tattoos and purple hair is starting to set, Vincent is already back upstairs in his bedroom, illuminated by candlelight and sketching out the elaborate setting for his most recent creation. A game of billiards, with a well-dressed gentleman leaning his hip against the table, cue in one hand and a cigarette in the other, shirt sleeves rolled up to the elbows.
Bo doesn’t bother knocking, he just barges in and throws a bag in the vague direction of where Vincent is seated at his desk. It’s the traveler’s belongings, or what’s left of them after Bo sorted through everything useful and decided to indulge Vincent’s habit of picking through what’s left, looking for small treasures.
There’s not much left in the bag, old receipts and gum wrappers, a few safety pins and a spool of black thread. But what catches Vincent’s attention is a magazine, crumpled but mostly intact, and a flat, rectangular box the size of his sketchbook. He retrieves the box and places it on his desk, the lid lifted up to reveal rows of pans filled with shades of blood red and bruise purple, some chalk-soft, some littered with specks of glitter dancing in the candlelight. It looks like makeup, it must be, that much he is sure of, but he doesn’t know why anyone would put theses colors on their face.
Why make the living look like the dead, when he tries so hard to reverse that process with his soft paintbrushes and pigments of warm pinks and barely-there browns, and endless wax.
He tries searching for answers in the magazine. There, he finds pictures of women, thin and pale, with long dark hair not too dissimilar to his own, dresses with lace sleeves and tight corsets making them look like porcelain dolls headed to a funeral, mourning their broken sister. There aren’t any girls like that amongst the hitchhikers and unexpected visitors that have taken up permanent residence in their little town. They’re eerie and ghost-like, and more beautiful than even the most precise of his carvings.
What stands out to him the most though is not the intricate dresses or tall boots that make their legs look deer-thin, but their faces. They all have makeup on, heavy makeup in all black and red and purple, making their eyes look big and star-bright, powder-white skin smoother than even the finest wax.
His gaze turns to the small mirror on his desk, the one he uses to fix his face when he gets lost in his work and his fingers absent-mindedly go to scratch an itch in the skin that was never there. He’s worn this face for a while now, his older ones gathering dust on a shelf. It’s nothing like the faces Mama made for him, expertly crafted and skin-soft, but it’s good nevertheless. Well-fitted and just the right texture between firm and flexible, comfortable enough to wear even when he’s on his own in his studio.
Mama never wore much makeup. She was – is - beautiful, even now, ancient and covered in a thin layer of cobwebs like a lace veil over her delicate skin, the parish priest forever praying for angels to watch over her. He wants nothing more than to meet her again someday, and have her tell him that she’s proud of how he kept her. His finest work.
Her once radiant skin is now grayed and littered with wrinkles, time having carved away at her like she did at wax. But when she was younger, Vincent would sometimes see her with darkened lashes and blush like apricots high up on her cheeks, bright red lips reserved for those rare days when Bo wasn’t wreaking havoc and Father wasn’t a flurry of screams and smacks and for fuck’s sake, Trudy, you said you were going to keep the wax out of the kitchen. She looked so gorgeous then, the colors highlighting her features without obscuring any of her natural beauty. She smiled, and the ruby red on her lips made her teeth shine like pearls.
She was perfect, and he always wanted to be like her, asked her not to cut his hair despite his Father’s grumbling of that one’s a nutcase, this one’s a pansy. No wonder Father wanted Lester so bad.
He got caught, once, small hands exploring a drawer in her dressing table like a chest of treasure, face taken off and red smeared like overripe strawberries all over his scarred lips. He was expecting a telling-off, but she only smiled as she untied her wax-covered apron and sat on the ottoman, patting her knee for him to climb up on her lap.
She wiped his mouth with a clean corner of the apron, muttering how such a pretty face doesn’t need all this. She reached into the drawer and took out a big, round compact and a tube. Her skin felt like warm wax when she gently gripped his chin with one hand and swirled the index finger of the other in the powder, apricot staining her fingertip as she placed it on his cheek with a delicate tap-tap-tap. She painted his jagged mouth with a barely-there pink, and pointed to the mirror, look, look what a gorgeous boy you are.
It’s the first and the last time in his life that he ever felt beautiful.
Bo is sprawled in the ancient, oversized recliner littered with beer stains and cigarette burns. He’s snoring quietly, late-night infomercials on the TV casting a faint blue glow across his soft features. Vincent wishes he’d practiced painting more, the tediousness of his medium of choice unsuitable for those fleeting moments he desperately wants to capture and keep safe in a drawer alongside their childhood memories.
His bare feet make no sound on the carpet as he crosses over to where Bo is napping. He leans down and nuzzles the right side of his face into Bo’s nape, right where it was always meant to be, muscle memory stronger than missing skin and dead flesh.
Bo’s hair smells like grease and gasoline.
Vincent isn’t sure why his brother still bothers with running the gas station. It’s not like there’s anyone left who could be interested in buying the endless cars he fixes up in the garage, all eventually rusting away in the empty shell of the old sugar mill. Maybe it’s just the need to be doing something, anything not to go a little bit crazy like Mama did in her final years, when her illness prevented her from sculpting. Even though they’re all so different – Lester, Bo, and Vincent himself – that’s something they all inherited from her: the need to be working on something, to keep the hands busy with making, even though there’s been so much decay around them lately. So Vincent works on wax, Lester works on his animal parts, and Bo works on cars, day and night, even though there’s no one left to drive them and nowhere to go.
Bo eventually wakes up with a frown and a grumbled “Wha’ do you want?”, hands swatting at Vincent, pushing him away.
Vincent moves closer to the TV, so that the pale light catches his face a bit more. He tucks his hair behind his one ear, and waits. He tugs the sleeves of his sweater over his hands, preparing for Bo to lash out. He’s always irritable when woken up from a nap.
Bo squints, not sure what he’s supposed to be looking at, mind hazy with sleep and cheap beer. Vincent points to his face.
It's the same face he always wears, but now there’s black around his eyes, making his eyelids look heavy, his single blue iris standing out against the rich color like a full moon. The black fades to purple and then red, red like rubies and strawberries and raw skin on thin ankles bound to a high chair. He still doesn’t have any eyebrows, but he figured out it was alright – neither did some of the girls in the magazine. His lips are sticky like fresh blood, painted with his mother’s red lipstick, the long dried out tube kept in his desk drawer brought to life with a few droplets of warm wax. Finally, there’s a thin silver ring he found at the bottom of the traveler’s bag and pushed through the wax septum. It’s delicate, a barely-there glint of metal he could easily snap with his fingers, but it makes him feel strange and ethereal, and maybe the tiniest bit scandalous.
Thumb to the chin, fingers across the face, careful not to smear the makeup, all coming together at the bottom of his face. Then index finger curling rapidly. Pretty?
Bo beckons him to come closer. Vincent crosses the short distance of the carpet, suddenly all too aware of his too-big body and his heavy, wax-stained clothes, his face completely mismatched. He perches on the arm of the recliner, shuffling close enough for the tips of his hair to trail along Bo’s shoulder.
Bo takes his chin in his hand, still smeared with engine grease he never bothers washing off too thoroughly. He tilts it this way and that, like he does to Lester's dog when that damn mutt ends up gnawing on deer antlers too hard and its mouth bleeds, and Lester comes crying to his big brother for help, or at least a reassurance that the dog is not losing any more chompers anytime soon. Vincent tenses, ready for Bo to sneer or spit or slap him, like he always does when he’s unsure whether he likes what he sees or not.
But then, a smile appears on Bo’s face. “Get dolled up like that more often and we might just have to put you in Mama’s museum,” Bo mutters, with that roguish smirk of his he saves only for the pretty hitchhikers with long brown hair and small breasts.
In the parlor or the dining room?, Vincent signs. He thinks he would enjoy the company of the older ladies in their flapper dresses, their stories of speakeasies and dancing the Charleston back in the day, smoke curling from their cigarette holders.
Bo’s smile turns from sleazy sweet to wolfish. “I was thinking the upstairs bedroom.”
Vincent blushes so hard he swears Bo can see it through the wax.