Work Text:
I needed a jar and… and a plastic tubing. I siphoned gas before. I knew how it was done. I stuck the tube in a vein and sucked on it until blood filled my mouth then put the tube in a jar and it just kept coming. The taste of copper haunted me the entire night. Why didn’t I think of a syringe?!
“No, that’s no good.”
His murmur broke the silence that had settled over the house for the evening. He believed his wife had gone to bed at some point; he vaguely recalled her sticking her head into his workshop and telling him good night but he couldn’t remember how long ago that had been. Or how long he’d been sitting on the stool staring at the canvas ahead of him. To the untrained eye, the painting he had been working on would most definitely appear complete, but to him it was no good. It needed something else -- a finishing touch, a spark of life. There was something missing.
Telling himself he knew exactly what would help him solve this problem, his eyes turned to a bottle that sat on the table to his right. He could see the amber liquid inside and knew, as he watched it sparkle in the moonlight, that it would give him the answers he sought. It would help him along. It would inspire him. His inspiration usually came from his wife or the melodious way she ran her fingers over the keys of the piano upstairs, but when she wasn’t present, the bottle had to do. And it did quite often.
Leaning around the canvas and the easel it stood on, he narrowed his eyes, attempting to see the grandfather clock out in the main area of the house. 11:54 pm. With a tired sigh, he figured he should go get a glass. He didn’t usually drink straight from the bottle unless he was painting in the dead of night and too far into his work to leave the room. Just a taste to get him to the kitchen wouldn’t hurt though. He stood from the stool and stretched, taking a swig from the bottle before heading to retrieve a glass.
To his mild shock, he exited the workshop to find a soft light spilling out of the kitchen and that feeling only grew when he glanced in and saw his wife standing at the counter along the middle of the room. There was a plate half full of apple slices ahead of her and another three whole apples next to it. One was almost cut in half and a knife sat beside it, the blade spotted red. Her eyes were glazed over and the fingers of her left hand were covered in blood.
“Honey?”
He seemed to startle her out of whatever she had been lost in and her gaze followed him as he entered the kitchen and moved to the other side of the counter across from her.
“Don’t worry, I’m fine.” Her voice was quiet and after assuring him of this she peered back down to her hands, which hovered between her face and the countertop. The porcelain skin of the right hand contrasted sharply with the red that covered and slowly dripped from the left. Somewhere in his mind he could hear one of the songs she always played on the piano and he could hear it coming to an abrupt halt. Her words somehow grew even quieter. “I’m fine.”
“Really?” The tone in his voice was slightly sarcastic in the playful way they occasionally acted towards each other. “You don’t look fine.” Leaning down and over the counter, he moved under the pots and pans that hung between them. “I mean, you are fine. But, your finger…”
He was relieved to see her lips curl into a small smile. It was the one she wore when she was ready to tease him back. “What about it? Maybe what we should be talking about is your face.”
“What’s wrong with my face?” He shifted quickly, trying to make sense of her words and hit his head on a pot above him. Once the clanging stopped and he recovered, he realized that her good hand was holding the bottom of a pan towards him. The reflection was cloudy and muddled, but it was visible enough to see a smear of black paint across his cheekbone, some gold paint near his hairline and a few crooked cream-colored dots and dashes along his jaw. “Oh.”
“Go back to your workshop, love. I’ll be fine.”
He watched her turn towards one of the cupboards behind her and reach up to open it. She was too short to see inside of it, but that didn’t stop her from standing on her toes and searching blindly inside with her uninjured hand. He almost instantly went to help her, but found himself unable to move, frozen in place at the image ahead of him. He stared at the way locks of her dark hair fell out of their place in the messy pile pinned atop her head and brushed against the stark white of her blouse. Then down to the way the blouse neatly tucked into the deep hunter green skirt she wore and finally to the pale skin below when her bare feet were visible as she attempted to push herself further up on her toes. Another color blossomed and spread while he lost himself visually taking her in – a bright red flower against her left side as the cut on her finger met with the fabric of her blouse.
Suddenly reaching above him, he opened the cupboard closest to his left and saw the exact glass he had originally come to the kitchen to retrieve. The intricate designs carved into the glass reminded him of the whiskey back in his workshop – he could almost feel it sliding down his throat, but his hand moved past it and grabbed a small glass saucer instead.
He moved to his wife’s side and reached above her, grabbing a napkin and shutting the cupboard with the back of his hand. When she held her hand out for the off-white and embroidered square of fabric, he shook his head and set the napkin on his shoulder.
“Wait,” he said.
When he saw that spreading stain on the side of her shirt something had lit up in his mind. It was that something he needed. Placing the saucer that he was still holding in his left hand on the countertop close to the plate of apples, he gently took his wife’s injured hand and held it over the shallow curve of glass. He squeezed her pointer finger the slightest bit and felt her flinch, but he waited until a thick drop of her blood hit the saucer before he stopped and looked up, his gaze quizzical. He wasn’t quite sure if he was silently asking if she was alright or asking if he could continue but her voice broke his drifting train of thought.
“What are you doing?”
“Don’t worry. You’ll be the first to see.”
Without him having to put pressure on a second time, another crimson drop fell into the glass on the countertop. Letting go of her fingers, he used the napkin on his shoulder to wipe his own hands before picking up the saucer with his left and placing his right on the small of his wife’s back. He began to guide her out of the kitchen, steering her towards the bathroom and setting the saucer down on a haphazard stack of papers strewn across the dining room table on the way. When they reached the entrance, he shifted past her and twisted the two knobs at the head of the bathtub before grabbing an overly decorated bottle from the windowsill and dumping some of the contents in the pool of water that had begun to form in the tub. The scent of lavender filled the bathroom instantly.
“You need to get that cleaned up,” he said, motioning with his eyes to the hand she held cradled to her chest.
“And I need to take a whole bath to do it?”
Quickly closing the distance between the bathtub and where she stood by the door, he leaned down slightly and planted a kiss on his wife’s temple. “No, you need to take a bath to relax. Cleaning up your hand can be done at the same time.”
She peered over his shoulder, her gaze instantly catching the steam rolling off of the water that slowly filled the tub. It appeared inviting, there was no denying that. A sigh escaped her lips as she looked back up to him. “I just wanted to come downstairs to make sure you had something to eat before you came to bed. And…” She drifted off. Her head shook slowly after she flinched once more from the pain in her finger – as if her body wanted to punctuate her mistake.
“Shhh, no worries.” Reaching between them, he slipped his hands under hers and slowly lifted them to his face, placing a delicate kiss on her pointer finger close to the cut. He stepped aside after that and exaggeratedly motioned to the bathtub. A smile graced her features and she ran the fingers of her uninjured hand down his cheek (and across the streak of black paint that still traced his cheekbone) and planted a kiss on the corner of his lips before turning back towards the tub. He watched her for a moment before exiting the bathroom and trying to suppress a shudder at the cool air that suddenly enveloped him and drew him across the living area towards his almost finished work of art.
He reflexively licked his lips as he eyed the back of the canvas in the room ahead of him and felt the strong taste of copper creeping into his mouth. In one swift motion, he scooped the saucer up off of the dining room table, rushed through the threshold of his workroom and moved around to the front of the canvas. Setting it beside the palette on the small table next to the easel, his eyes absently widened at the sight of the few drops of blood that had begun to coat the center of the saucer. He could still taste the kiss he had left on her fingers – the fingers that always danced over the keys of the piano upstairs. “This is it,” he hissed to the empty room, licking his lips again.
For a moment, he leaned to the right, peeking around the canvas to the open door of the bathroom. Narrowing his eyes slightly and waiting for them to adjust, he caught sight of the green of his wife’s skirt and the white of her blouse in a crumpled heap on the ground. With a smile, he felt content to finish what he had started. He didn’t need the booze or the music or a sudden flash of inspiration right now. He had what he needed.
Taking a brush from the small table, he gingerly rubbed the bristles in a circular motion against the glass of the saucer, marveling at the way the liquid stuck to them. He picked up the palette with his other hand and dipped the red of the blood into the pale pink of the paint that sat near the edge of the wooden surface. The pink grew a tinge deeper due to his addition and he moved the brush to the canvas, carefully tracing the curves of a pair of lips.
He could still taste copper. The same taste that he was fairly sure permeated the paint he used the last of for the finishing touches of this portrait. Tonight, it tasted like victory. Tonight, in his workshop, with the taste of his wife on his lips, the ghost of her touch on his face, the sound and faint lavender scent of her bathwater, and the sight of her in the portrait ahead of him – he was victorious.
“Yes, that’s it.” His voice was barely a whisper, but it echoed endlessly in his mind for the rest of his life. “The Lady in Black.”