Work Text:
This has to be perfect.
Her brush lies still upon the canvas, a shackle like ruin preventing her from progressing. One stroke, stop. Two strokes, stop. In a small, dingy art studio Mira makes her home a world of bright colors and wavering lines, recreating a likeness that blurs at the edges of her memories.
Hers is a will that burns fervent, a candle with a single-minded determination to light and illuminate and reveal. Stiff as a board, she stands tall and static, possibilities endless at the tip of her brush.
And yet, she desires only to create one thing. Two things: a wisp of purple, a smattering of freckles, two shades of brown that she swore housed the stars.
Once upon a time, Mira fell in love.
She is careful as she lays the first coat. She is careful as she plans, abstracts in her mind taking shape under the scratch of pencil and paper she now hoards in crevices asunder.
Daughter of an esteemed house, her parents had many desires for her. Behave. Don’t speak out of line. Be the daughter they needed—be ready to be wed.
She mixes paints like they cost a lifetime, works her eyes—now bespectacled, as the years pass, as she gets older—refining each shade, tone, hue to reflect that which dwells within a world only known to her.
Naturally—a rebel, a firecracker from a young age who questioned the world, who broke the tides to swim against them, who wanted more than superfluous riches at her fingers—she denied their ambitions.
Her first attempts are laughable: guileless shapes, muddied colors, layers crooked and wrong as paint overlaps, yet in the innocence of fresh starts they bring joy to beginners. Frustration at not memorializing her vision, yes, but also twinkles in the two stars who lead her ever onward in the night.
She ran away and she met Rumi, a woman who spun gold with her words and voice, who turned heads with her beauty, who laughed a melodious bell when Mira said something particularly witty and turned dogged and scorned when Mira made her sad.
Purple camelias, peonies, tulips; rare, everlasting, eternal and rich.
She ran away and she met Zoey, a woman who wrote hymns with her pen, who spit facts and truth with acid against those larger than her, who lit worlds up when she spoke, filling space in silence Mira had never noticed existed, would never want quiet again.
Blue azaleas, sunflowers, roses; things that shouldn’t exist made real, all for a smile.
She ran away and she learned what it meant to fall slowly, to fall quickly, to build a hearth inside a home and lay by it every night. She learned to play with fire, learned how it burned, learned how gentle hands could be when they soothed her; learned how steady and careful they could tend to her; learned how generous, how imaginative, how powerful hands could be when they were guided by love and not cruel punishment.
Flowers, because they are the most readily available. Then skies, and trees; then places, and animals, and true abstractions as if she could reach into the ocean of her feelings and make it concrete.
Once upon a time Mira fell in love, and in spite of her fears she plucked bone-wrung courage out the ground and out her heart and made her feelings known. Once upon a time, Mira fell in love, and Mira was loved so graciously by two souls, her other halves, soulmates interwoven a tale together as old as time.
But never them. Not until she’s ready. Not until she could breathe life into strangers. Not until her art turns heads. Not until her praises are sung throughout the country, until her pieces adorn even the richest of manors, are sought over by the most uptight nobles.
Once upon a time, Mira fell in love.
Rumi and Zoey deserve no less. Rumi and Zoey deserve to be immortalized. Rumi and Zoey deserve to live in the memory of all living beings, to be cherished and loved and to have others look upon them and think: who are they, to be so loved?
Once upon a time, that love was ripped from her, hands cold and bleeding and desperate: hands she could never hold again.
Mira will breathe life into this canvas.
This has to be perfect.
Her hand is steady. Her hand is a miracle worker. Her hand is a slave to her mind, ever working, ever pursuing, ever diligent. She forgoes food as she takes her tongue between her teeth and needles it. She forgoes sleep as the sun sets and rises, as she paints as if it’s all she knows, because without them it is. Her sun, her stars; only a moon with nothing to reflect remains in the vast echoes of what once was.
Delicately, she selects a small brush, hairs fine and unbroken, well taken care of, and dips it to pigment. A face unfinished smiles back at her, relaxed, engaged, the way Zoey would look at her and Rumi when she thought they didn’t notice; the way Zoey would let herself relax in the sunlight, in the gardens when Rumi went to town and Mira set to fish, when she thought nobody was looking but Mira always, always would. She remembers, once, how the light had caught her hair, how her eyes had creased, how she had grinned and glowed in the wash of water upon a beach where they’d found, in the sand, an assortment of eggs. How she’d spoken at length about them, of how she’d read in a book what they were: turtle eggs, nested, younglings who would head to sea to grow and become giant beasts of the water.
Mira had said, with Rumi at her side, that one day they would see them together.
She hadn’t meant to make herself a liar.
Her brush smooths an outline before touching stardust to the rich of Zoey’s cheeks. Across her cheeks, across her nose, down onto her shoulders and low, across her body, across places Mira would paint for her eye alone, never to be seen by others. She starts with her face, positions constellations that have never disappeared from her memory—steps back to look at it with fresher eyes.
The color is wrong.
Her hand stills. Her breath hitches.
The color is wrong.
What shade were her freckles again?
She doesn’t know.
She can’t remember. The answer lies over a precipice she can’t cross over. The answer lies in the brown-tan-not-right on her palette. The answer lies in images that fade with time, belied by her urgency.
The answer lies in her mind’s response: the color is wrong, the color is wrong, what color was it? What shade? Lighter? Darker? What did she mix? How could she fix this?
She can’t. She sets her palette down with shaky fingers. She levels the brush on a small, disorganized table beside it. She grips the canvas with a fervor known only to those bleeding and mad, disregarding the new paint entirely. The edges are dry. She won’t taint it. She could never smudge, never break, never ruin the beauty she impresses into the canvas. She could never, never, and yet as she stares her hands tremble and the incessant voice that’s been growing louder in her mind since their passing whispers subtle cruelties; unchanging truths.
It’s not right. It’s not right.
It’s wrong. It’s the wrong color.
You’ve fucked it up again. Another attempt, another failure; you besmirch their memory again and again and again.
Wrong. Wrong. It’s wrong.
It doesn’t look right. Zoey’s smile is off center. Her eyes are asymmetric. Her freckles are off. The portrait is wrong. The strands of hair are wrong. The buns are wrong. Her nose is too strong, too much like Rumi’s, her ears aren’t the right shape—were they too big or too small? Mira can’t tell—it's wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong.
“ARGH!”
In a fit of frustration she throws the canvas to the ground. Woven cloth snaps, the sickly breaking of a bone at the unprecedented amount of force applied. Onto the hardwood, stained, it clatters, and Mira heaves her anguish in shuddering breaths as heat clouds her face.
The anger is gone just as quickly, spirited away as a stone settles in her stomach.
“No, no, no—” she whispers to herself, to the dwindling light that marks another day gone. She drops to her knees, collecting pieces of her heart broken in two. “I’m sorry—Zoey, I’m sorry, fuck.”
She could find some way to put it together but the damage has been done. Incorrect freckles smear up and down Zoey’s face like Mira’s thumbprints and she can paint over it, she could, but it still looks wrong. The paint runs, smears more, and speckles of water catch against her glasses as tears dribble down her chin. Onto the canvas. Onto Zoey.
“I’m sorry,” she says again and thinks I can fix this, I can fix this, I’ll fix you right up Zoey, I’ll—
She can’t.
There is noise in the studio of a once-home made quiet. Mira sobs, clutching the unfinished portrait to her chest, uncaring for the way the paint smudges her apron. She’d care only for the way it smudges her, smudges Zoey, but the knot of grief unravels until she’s left gasping for relief that will never come.
She remembers how Rumi would hold her. She remembers how Zoey would fetch her water. She remembers how easy it is to fall into anger, to grasp an emotion and deflect; remembers how her other halves learned that Mira is always first to bite, always first to snarl and attack only so she wouldn’t be the first to cry of them.
A lover’s heart, Rumi had told her. A warrior’s body, Zoey had teased too, and Mira had laughed between them far later because they didn’t mind that she was fine china turned sharp and jaded; all they cared about was that she was there. All they cared about was that at the end of the day, they could still make her smile.
She isn’t smiling now. She hasn’t smiled in years. She hasn’t smiled since the earth by their house—Rumi’s house, Rumi’s old home, left to her by her mother and Celine before they’d passed away, memories of first meetings carefully carded in nooks and crannies, of getting to know each other and Rumi taking her from the village and saying “this is where you’ll be staying,” of Zoey joining them soon after—had been disturbed once, twice; two graves and a residence of ghosts left in its waking.
Only ghosts would haunt this house. Mira walks among them like the dead.
Sometimes, when she lies still at night, passed out on the floor she no longer bothers to clean, she wishes she could join them.
But she can’t.
Not yet.
Not until Rumi and Zoey are remembered by the world forever.
She tucks the snapped canvas under her arms. She rises, counting the steps to the spare room despondent and forlorn. She draws inside with a prayer and lays the unfinished portrait by its likeness: another, and another, Zoey and Rumi, blues and purples and browns and greens and yellows and all other colors over again and again and again. Rumi in the garden. Zoey by the river. Rumi in the village. Zoey in the forest, determined to hunt. Rumi on stage, siren’s song luring even the most stalwart of bystanders. Zoey with black-stained hands, an inkwell beside her.
Attempt after attempt. Try after try. Recreation after recreation.
None of them are right.
Failures, over and over again.
Mira sits in the room of ghosts until time has meaning again.
When she stands, prepares for bed, sets up a blank canvas, she decides:
Tomorrow, she will paint Rumi.
Like clockwork, she deludes herself into believing:
Tomorrow, she will succeed.