Work Text:
"What time is it?"
Kira jumps and spins around on her stool, nearly knocking over her easel in the process. Her foot catches the chipped mug containing her used paintbrushes, which tips over and floods her already stained drop cloth with murky grey water.
"Just after nine, I think. I wasn't expecting you to get up this early," she responds, crouching down to pick up the brushes. Before Malia replies, she buries a yawn into her shoulder. She's only wearing a thin sheet wrapped underneath her arms and her short hair is a mess of tangled bedhead, flopping in front of her eyes and sticking out in all directions.
"Me neither," she says once she's done yawning. "But the sun woke me up."
"Sorry," Kira says sheepishly. Her and Malia first got together nearly a year ago and Kira has spent that whole time promising to put up curtains in her bedroom, so that both of them can sleep in once in awhile.
Somehow, that promise keeps taking a back seat to everything else.
"It's fine," Malia says with a shrug. "I'll just take a nap later." She readjusts her sheet before padding across the room, carefully stepping over the wet spots on the drop cloth.
"So, where are you going to hide it this time?"
"I'm not sure yet," Kira murmurs, turning back to face her canvas. Right now, it's still just a few streaks of bright colors, reds and oranges and purples, waiting to be blended into a sunset. But she can already see the completed image in her head, waiting to be translated through her brush. There's going to be a campfire in the foreground and she's already sketched out the curves of the flames in pencil. The middle ground is going to be the ocean, illuminated by the setting sun, waves gently lapping at the sand.
The only thing she doesn't know about what the final image will look like is where she's going to sneak in their soulmate mark.
She first started doing it six months ago, on a whim. She'd been working on a commission for a client, using a reference photo of their young daughter lying on her back in the grass, looking up at the sky and smiling widely. When Kira had finished with it, there'd been a patch of grass that just looked off, lacking some kind of texture. Re-doing the whole section would probably have just made it look worse so, impulsively, she dipped her paintbrush into a dark green and added in a quick series of lines the approximate shape of a fox head.
It'd been the perfect finishing touch.
After that, she'd tried to fit it into all of her paintings. Even if no one ever noticed it, it felt like she was truly putting a piece of herself into each work, something far more personal than her initials jotted into the bottom corner.
"What about in the fire?" Malia asks, propping her chin on Kira's shoulder and sliding her arms around Kira's waist. Somehow, her sheet manages to stay up. "Or in the waves?"
"Maybe," Kira says, closing her eyes momentarily to fully envision the picture. It might be easier to hide the fox in the curves of the waves, but at this point in the process, it's still hard to tell. When she opens her eyes, she glances down at where Malia's arms are wrapped around her. She can just see Malia's soulmate mark, the one that matches hers in all respects, peering up from Malia's wrist, surrounded by blue veins and tan skin. She gently brushes her thumb over it and Malia sighs contently as she twists her face to press against Kira's neck.
"Wherever it is, it's going to be a beautiful painting," she says, sounding so sure and certain that it quells some of Kira's lingering doubts. Her own mark, normally hidden underneath her hair at the base of her neck, throbs ever so slightly and Malia ducks between Kira's loose braids to kiss it softly.
"Do we still have pizza from last night?" she murmurs. Kira can't help but giggle; she was wondering when Malia would ask her about food.
"Bottom shelf in the fridge," she replies, twisting her head until she manages to brush Malia's cheek with her lips. "It's all yours." Malia makes a pleased sound, almost like a growl, and kisses Kira's neck again before padding off into the kitchen. While leftover pizza sounds delicious, Kira wants to get a little bit more painting done, so she grabs one of her clean brushes and leans forward on her stool, staring at the canvas.
The mark will definitely fit somewhere. She just has to finish the rest of the painting first.