Work Text:
In the corner of a dusty apartment ten too many floors off the ground a blonde haired woman sits with her back pressed up against the length of another woman's spine. There is a canvas, once pure white and now stained by blues, reds, blacks, and greens, spread across her lap and a paintbrush balanced in the loose grip of her fingers. Her companion mirrors her position but instead of a canvas a thick pad of lined papers sits on her knees and a pen rests between her fingers in the place of a paintbrush.
The dark haired woman scratches words out onto her paper with her right hand, and her elbow knocks against the other woman's left arm jerking her hand forward across her canvas. Yet, neither mind when their strokes are interrupted by the touch of one another's arm. Instead, they exchange short laughs at the smeared lines strewn across the artist's canvas, and quiet snorts at the mangled forms of letters dotted upon the author's papers.
Together, in the cramped corners of their apartment, they ply their art in shared silence, preferring the knocking of their elbows and the soft puffs of their breaths to the silence of being alone.
The writer constructs artful passages describing one's inner demons and the fight to slay the beasts that lay prey to all heroes in their minds whilst the artist renders a depiction of the cacophony of silence and the binding effect of despair on the mind. They compare and contract one another, and their works come together to form the contradiction of life, in much the same way as the artist and the writer themselves came together in the years previous.
When the sun finally disappears over the edge of the horizon and the last of the light disappears from the apartment the two women place their tools on the ground, discarded for the rest of the day, and stand to ease the aches of their labours. The dark haired woman curls her fingers around the artist's wrists, tugging on them to bring her into the circle of her arms, while dipping her head the two or so inches to press their mouths together. The kiss is soft, pathetic, and tender. It flows from one mouth, to the other, and back again in a seamless dance perfected over many months and years of practise.
Then, once each of their lungs beg for breath they pull away, twin smiles lighting their mouths and slip away into the depths of the apartment to find their dinner.
Their fingers remain interlocked the entire time. One soul filling the gaps in the other in an endless pattern of reciprocation. That is their art form. The give and take of their work which can only be understood when the two pieces are side by side.