Work Text:
He piled a smattering of clay onto his disfigured project, rubbing it upwards cautiously, dimpled where his fingertips pressed too hard. Gold sat the whole hour watching him do this. Tuck the revolt of red hair behind his freckled ear, chew at a corner of his lip when revising the form from a different perspective, the substantial folds gathered about his mouth as he severed a smart bit of clay. He mused, whenever Silver pursed his lips, if he had been kissed, if a kiss could be stolen, or if he snatched the part of the thief. Sometimes all three at the same time, never while being productive. He didn’t know what the other would think of it, but from the precise trim of his frown lines he afforded only rejection; cold like the marble floor, resolute as his eyes. That mixture of feeling and thought was novel in his armory of innocently-ill intentions. Not like primary red, love. Or red with white, pink, infatuation - for a girl! It was the combination of red-pinkish and blue. But Silver wasn’t a role. He was a color Gold had never procured on his palette. His lips took their slow time to enunciate the name.
Silver always walked barefoot in the studio. Veins entwined along his pasty feet, had his hair restrained with a black band. Clay habitually soiling his hands, sometimes dry and cracked, often damp.
The way he kneaded the clay into an ambiguous mass felt so thorough to Gold (observer who knew nothing about modeling but play-do). He was a wary explorer acquainted with every tree, who remembered the feeling of moss, and stepped with the flow of the leaves. It felt like him and the land had undergone a transforming relationship, and the spherical jungle of the clay had confided its secrets to the pads of his fingers. He would smooth the grainy texture with his thumb and then blow on it, or even it out with odd-shaped utensils.
His eyelashes were sometimes robed in lonely hues.
Gold observed this reddish form enveloped in the studio’s clear sterility, aghast by the smell of oil and clay and basil and wet dirt. Specifically when shafts of light broke into the space, an entirely new planet found him, dusty and bright, where life was measured by Silver’s little sighs.
In the afternoons when Gold caught up with Crys, he could only summon nominal accounts of where the workshop was heading, what he was achieving, how it was going. Awful Crys, just awful - he wanted to say - he doesn’t even greet me, he isn’t even a girl. But his mouth bolted shut on the subject, one he wasn’t ready to explore, never mind expand.
He never achieved inspirational strokes on a surface until he got home. His fridge ticked, and the neighbor’s baby bawled. His heart had a trembling image of what he wanted to paint. Silver… Red colliding on a white canvas. And blue for the shadows that caressed Silver’s features in notions of intimacy. A sheet of white separating him from reality, like in the spotless studio.
Ah, but whatever. And he would set down his brushes without rinsing them. Would drink his coffee in front of the open window, where honks and shouts drifted to him intermittently.
At the same time the sunlight slanted in greeting, while Gold and Crys ate at a cheap locale, Silver added finishing touches to his form and underwent preparations for the kiln. He calculated a few days. The sun was noisy that day, splashing every angle of his face. Hands, such useful tools, stained… the clay knit so deeply into him, he felt its itch between his phalanges. He set them under the pouring water to rinse, despite the clay’s insistence in his life, his palms, the nook between his fingers, sleeping under his fingernails, remembering mere water couldn’t pacify its omnipresence. Water, primordial element of life, puddles, streams, oceans. The sky reflected. When he held them up, he watched miniature streams bifurcate down his wrists. A sigh.