Chapter Text
The platform greeted Agathe with a rush of steam as she stepped out of the carriage onto the now familiar platform at Levuen. It was her usual train when she returned home from stays in Paris; so the platform was not yet full of the commuter traffic from Brussels and the sun still hung just above the large metal arches that made up the station’s roof.
It still felt strange that she’d come to think of the atelier as ‘‘home". She couldn’t have imagine even feeling capable of having another jome after what happened with her family all those years ago. The thoughts drifted across her mind as she busied herself attracting the station attendant to help her with her collection of trunks, hat boxes and suitcases that formed a modest pile in front of her. As she weaved past the collection of newspaper boys hollering about the revolution in Mexico, she rolled her eyes and felt a pang in her heart as people discarded the arts section on Stavinsky’s new ballet that she had seen in Paris. She stepped out into the square and hailed a cab. Outside the station she was greeted by elegantly sculpted roofs of the four storey buildings that surrounded the square with gables like scallops. They gave every building an individual character about them that Agathe loved, and the whole scene was a chocolate box in contrast to Paris’ Haussmannised cookie cutter apartments.
A carriage pulled by a dusky bay horse was finally hailed and a gruff man spoke to her in Flemish. To her embarrassment she had never quite gotten the language and Agathe’s incomprehension must’ve shown on her face because he switched to French. There were two natures to everything in this town and country. Agathe ignored the immediate dark parallel she could draw with herself, her need to appear always on top of it despite never feeling comfortable with herself.
The cab, once loaded with her luggage, took her through Leven’s beautiful winding, crowded medieval streets. Weaving through the traffic of industrial carts, cabs, omnibusses, and ever more of those new fangled motorcars and lorries. The architecture changed through the window as Agathe let the exhaustion of travel wash over her: from rows of tall town apartments, to grander slices of suburbia beyond the old city limits – exercises in Flemish neo-gothic for the discerning bourgeois –, to the flat leafy, greenery of the Belgian countryside.
Leuven like every European city was growing, swallowing up the villages that surrounded it, but Agathe counted herself lucky as the cab crested a small rise the Belgians called a hill, that she had found her slice of home. The small cluster of buildings nestled in-between the large fields that looked like quilt patches could be easily mistaken for a set of farm houses, once upon a time maybe they were. Instead the grey brick chimneys told a story of modification, the chimneys held kilns, the long barn, Agathe knew, held tables for sculpting, rather than animals. The crane outside reinforced to lift large blocks of marble and wood, rather than piles of hay.
Since she had chosen her exile here from the kingdom of the Arlaum family, the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, she hadn’t thought it would be possible to feel whole again until she made her family regret it. Made them regret all their accusations of plagiarism, all their deliberate ignorance of her work simply because it wasn’t in pursuit of keeping the family business in the family. The Atelier had proved her wrong. On some days Agathe could feel whole in its picturesque embrace.
Still Agathe didn’t forget the humiliation she felt as she fled down the stone steps of her family’s library, past busts of great scholars and men of letters, tears burning her cheeks. Since the 1830s the Arklaum’s had turned the old palace of Cardinal Richelieu from a National library into their personal fief and whatever government in Paris hadn’t noticed, as the books for the people had become viewed by one family as theirs to oversee. The Arklaums were survivors; having lived through two republics and an empire and each head of the family always held the coveted position of ‘’Director’’. Her mother was the most recent appointmee and had held the position for thirty years.
Arklaums didn’t become artists. They didn’t become writers. They were those who discerned what counted as writing from on high.
So Agathe’s being published in the Feuillton of Le Figaro meant less than nothing to her mother. The accusations of plagiarism in her academic studies were merely the icing on a cake of disdain Agathe had started unknowingly baking long ago.
Agathe clenched her fist in her black satin skirts. She’d show them. She already had a minor position in the grand gothic library at the Catholic university of Leuven. One of the finest repositories of medieval manuscripts in Europe. She’d write and write in her spare time at the job, just like Rolland and countless other authors, unlike them it wouldn’t be some sinecure job to hone her craft she’d do both. She’d rise to the top of the literary arts and become the head librarian at Leueven. And then throwing those achievements in her mother’s face she’d get her books on the shelves of the Arklaum kingdom, those tombstones of wood and glass that she had grown up around. If only her latest work hadn’t –
The jolt from the cab stopping drew Agathe out of her ruminations on the past. What was done is done. Now all that was left is to do what she could. She could wait here to see the critical reception of her latest essays and finally tackle her book. She descended the cab on its thin metal steps that jutted out of the side, and smoothed the black satin of her dress untangling her necklace of peridot and jet with a meditative care, after all both were infuriating presents from the atelier’s other main lodger.
The noise of her arrival drew out from the atelier a shock of white hair, like the fresh paper that tormented her for her lack of creativity. The tall man with blue eyes made his way forward on a cane with a practised ease whilst Agathe thanked and paid the cabby. Professor Qifrey had given her so much, more than rooms at his atelier, more than the job at the university library, he had given her friends and stability for the first time since her bitter exile when she was only eighteen.
It was only natural she’d let the mask slip a little and greet him with a bone crushing hug.
“Professor...”
“Welcome home Agathe.” He said prying her off his waist. “How was Paris?”
“Hopeless.” She admitted. “I learned so much, talked to friends and editors, got into a screaming match with one of those so-called “futurists”,” Agathe angrily stabbed the air, “about the “proper” place of women in society.” She sighed.
“I’d had a bit too much absinthe.” She sheepishly admitted to the professor.
Qifrey laughed “remind me to hide my more refined liqueurs then”. His one eye glinted.
“But every night I’d come home and stare at a blank page.” Agathe groaned in frustration, screwing her fists against her forehead.
Qifrey hummed, his paint stained hands told Agathe how he had been called away from his work by her arrival. She couldn’t wait to see his latest work. He always had a flair for the esoteric.
“Inspiration is hard my dear student.” He ruffled her choppy short hair. “You can go out deliberately trying to find it but that doesn’t mean you will. Sometimes you need to process what you’ve got.”
It was good advice and Agathe hated that deep down she already had a nasty sinking certainty on how she should get inspiration.
“I know” she sighed. “I just need to get this novella out, it’s testing a lot of ideas my publisher thinks I should be able to work into a full novel. I’m just struggling with the protagonist. What does he feel? What makes him tick?”
Qifrey pondered the question, wandering idly over to the luggage pile. “I suppose the question becomes what makes anyone tick? Why do my worst paintings get glowing reviews and yet my best work is only appreciated by Olruggio at the university?”
He drew circles with symbols in them in the dirt of the yard with the toe of his shoe and cane. “Why in a world in which man has finally conquered the seas and air can we not see the potential of fairy tales and legends again? Have we killed them? Why can we not see the deeper truth beneath it all. That all are brothers and sisters bound by fate?”
Agathe sighed internally. Qifrey was in a philosophical mood today. She’d have to run the plot over him carefully at dinner step by step. When she first arrived five years ago his musings and teachings that she had sought out slash stalked from a dusty corner of the Salon d’automne all the way to this corner of sleepy Belgium had seemed as though untouchable wisdom. Each a gem to be cherished. Age had made her wiser and more confident in her art form and ideas, and had revealed that not every gem from Qifrey was a polished final piece. She suspected that Olruggio hasn’t visted in the past few days.
Agathe tucked her hat box under one arm and dragged her trunk to the porch. “I’m not sure that’ll work for a story about a lovesick, broken-down, millworker at the turn of the last century professor.” She opened the door with her hip. The satisfying squeal of hinges welcoming her home.
“Ah if it’s love then my adorable student has all the inspiration she needs.” His blue eyes sparkled with affection at the sculptor’s workshop.
Agathe wasn’t too sure what she could get out of Qifrey’s open secret relationship with a professor of thermodynamics, but she didn’t say anything more about it. Besides the problem she had was making him more complex than just love. She did however begrudgingly know that her inspiration was in that workshop. She always was.
The sculptor’s workshop was improperly named and Agathe’s least favourite room in the Atelier. The kitchen was warm and cosy, the dining room and parlour comfortable. Workshop implied some kind of small cozy space. Instead it was an entire converted barn as big as the atelier’s main building again. It compared especially unfavourably in her opinion with her own lone wide sweeping desk hewn from a tree older than Belgium itself covered in varnish without even shaping it. If her writing desk was wonderfully organic the sculptor’s workshop was too cluttered, too conflicted; all metallic and full of curving lines and the smell of linseed paint. The room was filled with in progress pieces, rough carved spectral figures of women and animals a floor covered in dust and shavings, half the room was covered with toys to be sold. It was also too bright.
Though that could be put down to its inhabitant.
Coco shone like the sun. A humble tailor’s daughter who was clearly so talented that Agathe was amazed one of the many salons in Paris hadn’t scouted her personally yet. And yet she wasted it! She made toys for local children, a project for a local town hall here, a fine chair for a poor widow there, and above all her tinkering. Coco’s workshop was full of limbs, complex mechanisms made in an effort to simulate the movements of muscles, none quite worked yet but that never seemed to stop Coco. Sat in the middle of the workshop was a squat cylinder made of copper sheets and tubes that hadn’t been there when she left. Its position showed it was Coco’s prize piece, papers and articles scattered around it spoke of air pressure studies and suggested this was more than a sculpture. It was a solution-in-waiting as Coco liked to call them.
Agathe had always resented her for that effortless talent. Her capacity for invention that she used only sparingly. And it was a deep burning resentment too. One that gripped her heart and wouldn’t go away, no matter how many men she talked too, how many blonde women she stared at. None of them had that slight hint of green in their hair the way Coco did. The way it reminded her of seafoam, the very same stuff that Aphrodite had been sculpted from.
Of course Agathe hated it and she hated how Coco’s eyes beheld the world with such unabashed wonder. How they caught the light just right to change from verdant fields to leaves budding in the spring to sunflowers. All of it was profoundly hateful. For what other emotion could be this intense?
It must be hate. For Agathe’s mother had taught her that love was never this unconditional.
Most of all Agathe hated how she instantly opened up her notebook at the sight she beheld when she peered around the great copper coffin like contraption that Coco had in the centre of her workshop.
There she was, her face the picture of concentration, slowly picking away at a piece of wood, transforming it before her eyes into the soft lines of the stomach muscles of Christ. It was a crucifix, the top half was broken on a desk just behind Coco. His outstretched arms free of their eternal crucified agony framed Coco as she carved out a repair with an awl that was as fine as a blade of grass. Hair-like strips of wood came away from the developing sculpture. Her other hand came in with some sandpaper rubbing furiously and then with increasing gentleness.
Her expression throughout was the same, one of perfect, focussed, serenity.
Coco stood, placing the awl on the desk, she pulled a rag out of the pocket of her sea green apron, and grabbed a battered metal bottle of some kind of oil. She put the rag over the lid and tilted the bottle over once, before lovingly applying the oil to the saviour’s abdomen.
Agathe sat on the workbench, a space always kept clear no matter how cluttered the rest of the room got, as though Coco always expected her. The mere thought made Agathe’s stomach turn. She scribbled in her notebook seeking to capture Coco’s drive.
Only now as she rubbed oil into her work did Coco snap out of it and notice her. The instant smile she developed was blinding. Agathe had to look away.
See the workshop was too bright.
“Agathe! You’re back!” She tucked the rag into her apron.
“Hello Coco” Agathe’s voice was consciously even.
Coco wiped her hands on her front, wincing slightly at a splinter, that she picked out with her finely trimmed nails. She vaulted over a workbench arms outstretched to embrace her friend.
“Oh my goodness! I can’t believe it’s been a month. How have you been? How was the journey? Oh I missed you so much!”
The sun-kissed breeze disturbed the wood shavings that littered the floor.
“I missed you too Coco.” A traitorous part of her admitted. All part of the necessary act to hide the depths of her hatred from Coco.
“What’re you writing about?” such an innocent question but like that they were back to the old routine Coco had established when she barged into the Atelier a year after Agathe’s arrival.
Agathe explained her issues and time passed. The sun set and yet Coco never took her eyes off of Agathe silently lighting a candle for the two of them to continue their talk about everything and nothing. They only went indoors because the bite of night became apparent.
And so it was summer passed lazily and Agathe flitted between her desk and the workshop. She vented her hatred every morning into her pillow, and every evening to Coco’s face imploring her to quit it with the toys. Coco brushed her off politely but firmly.
“Toys can be art too Agathe...Just a little bit of magic in prople’s lives”
Agathe wrote. She wrote like she was alive with words. They poured out of her fingertips into the ink of her pen. She wrote in the atelier’s small orchard, the kitchen every waking moment.
When she didn’t write she was arguing with Coco. She found out that the copper coffin thing was indeed one of Coco’s attempts to right the world’s wrongs on her own, by herself without any help or input. Her mother’s polio had gotten worse. The doctors had said her lungs would fail eventually and that was it. There was no cure. But Coco ever the optimist had resolved to simply make her mother a pair of lungs in a barn. “If we could cure things like rabies now, why not polio eventually?” she would tell Agathe.
Agathe tried to ignore the pain she knew Coco hid when she worked on the machine.
That determination. Either grim or hopeful, It powered everything Coco did. It made Agathe unable to wrench her eyes away. It suffused Coco’s art. It poured off of her. Agathe truly hated how it made her own determination pale in comparison. Like comparing the Matterhorn to Everest, Coco was simply on a different scale. Agathe wished she could just borrow some for even a brief moment.
Her writers block was gone, and yet simultaneously worse. If she didn’t spend any time around the object of her hatred in the day, then her page at the end of the day would be as pristine as Qifrey’s nightgown.
So naturally that meant a summer spent in the workshop, lounging in the orchard, giggling on the way to market every Wednesday, returning with arms full of whatever fruit has been plucked from summer’s fresh green embrace.
And with each passing day her hatred grew.
She loathed every moment, she loathed how she couldn’t stop teasing Coco, it was unladylike of her to behave like a teenage girl! To put out a constant stream of needling that Coco always repaid with her brightest smiles. She loathed her art, how even the simplest toys could rival even a fresh work from Rodin in his prime. She loathed how whenever Coco called her name her feelings boiled and roiled in her chest until it felt like the only escape they had was for Agathe to grab Coco by the scruff of her neck and –
This was becoming dangerous.
She was at the point of wishing violence on her fellow pupil. On her roommate.
Agathe was certain it was violence she wished at the very least.
She told Tetia as much when she came for one of her and Riché’s frequent visits. They had been at the atelier for some years but moved out late last year into their own workshop in Antwerp.
“What do I do Tetia?” Agathe pleaded in a hushed tone as she returned a silent wave Coco gave her across the dining room from the open kitchen door. She and Riché were discussing how to use Riché’s glasswork in Coco’s latest sculpture, and maybe her invention for her mother too. “I don’t know if I can control myself around her she just drives me up the wall! I want to keep the peace for professor Qifrey’s sake. But I fear I might hit her one day!”
“And you’re sure you hate her? Why not stay away then? Get rooms elsewhere.” Tetia propped her head up on the coffee table with her elbow.
“i can’t write when I’m apart from her. I’m nearly done with this book and ohhh Tetia you wouldn’t believe...” Agathe’s eyes lit up, two amethyst beacons of enthusiasm, “This one is my magnum opus! It’s combining Zola’s realism with a focus on the absurd like that Austrian Kafka! Qifrey and Coco both said it’s like reading a dream. My publisher is rapturous about it.” The fire dimmed though.
“But I just can’t stick the middle down. How to get the millworker from his wedding to his anniversary slaughter without making the Homeric connections too obvious.”
Agathe gestured in the air reaching for words beyond her reach.
“It needs a dramatic moment. Some kind of realisation where the protagonist is irrevocably changed.”
Tetia drummed her hands on Agathe’s sleeve. “I’m not sure if it’s quite the same realisation as what you’re looking for but recently this book was translated into French from English. It’s certainly got some realisations in there.”
Tetia rummaged around in embroidered bag she had brought, a red leather tome emerged.
“Carmilla?” Agathe asked cautiously. She skimmed the foreword.
“What’s a book about vampire women got to do with journeys of self discovery Tetia?”
Tetia gave her a cryptic smile. “I’m sure the solution to at least some of your problems are in there my dear Agate.”
Agathe cringed at the nickname of which she well understood the subtext, a stone only beautiful when polished and observed from the inside. “Stooop. Stop!” she physically fought off the assault of Tetia’s affection.
“Fine I’ll read your book. But it had better be useful to me!” She acquiesced.
Tetia smiled, her eyes flashed in triumph and she ruffled Agathe’s hair. “Agatta girl! I guarantee it’ll be more than useful to you if you read it closely enough.”
A week later and Agathe had decided that Tetia was full of it. Curled up in bed and the only realisation she had had from reading that book was that women could have romantic feelings for one another. Or at least a vampire could corrupt someone into falling in love with her.
To give Tetia her credit this was a quite large realisation that Agathe supposed counted as a journey of self discovery. But it wasn’t quite what she needed for her book.
Yet the realisation say on her heavy and dominant like a toad beside a pond. It refused to leave her mind. The more she ruminated the more the realisation slowly unlocked for her.
She just hadn’t really thought about liking women that way. She always just assumed everyone appreciated the female form. That every girl found their gaze wandering from time to time. Wasn’t that what all of the western artistic canon was about? Was she special for liking girls? Did she like them in that way? It did explain why it was so easy to deny having a crush on Tartah when she was younger.
She pulled the sheets around herself tighter in spite of the Indian summer September had brought with it.
So, maybe her admiration of female sculptures and attendances at the dancing halls of Paris in hindsight had other motives, she had never felt the need to act on those feelings before. Why should this realisation change anything?
It wouldn’t and it shouldn’t Agathe decided quite firmly to herself. This didn’t need to change her relationship to art, the only truly beautiful female sculptures were those sculpted by Coco. Maybe she could talk with Coco about this tomorrow? It was a Saturday and they were thinking of going for a picnic together. Despite her hatred for the girl squandering her talents and that art she drew it was oh so easy to talk to her. Coco was a locked box into which you could put secrets without any fear of judgement.
Agathe’s mind traitorously called forward how bright Coco’s art was.
Tears welled up in her eyes at the mere thought of how blinding she was. How Coco was going to change the world. Agathe desperately secretly hoped to be there when it happened to be a part in the story of the shooting star crossing the night sky that Coco would be.
Her art was so beautiful.
Coco was so beautiful.
God she hated her.
Birdsong accompanied Agathe as she laid on the picnic blanket listening to Coco continue another argument from last week.
“You just have such a tendency to write self sacrificing heroes though Agathe” Coco said, weaving a bunch of daisies into a garland of flowers. Her deft hands working without the use of her eyes, navigating by feel alone. Coco’s eyes were focussed squarely on the sprawled form of Agathe on the blanket.
“You!” Agathe caught herself. How many times has they been over this this summer? “How many times Coco the story needs conflict!” Agathe kicked her laced boots into the air and folded her arms into a pillow behind her head.
“The protagonist has to leave at this point in order to develop as a person and character.”
“I know but does he have to do so to make himself miserable? Can’t he be battling forces outside of his control? I feel like that’ll resonate with the audience just as much. Especially these days... ” The babbling of the brook perfectly complimented Coco’s cadence.
She harmonised with everything.
Agathe covered the sunbeams filtering through the trees. They couldn’t compete with Coco’s hair.
“That won’t fit with the themes of nationalism and belonging Coco and you know it.”
“Ugh!” Coco kicked her feet petulantly and threw some surplus flowers into the river. “Not everything has to be like Joyce you know”
That stung Agathe’s ego. “So you’re saying I don’t get the feeling of being adrift in a new place searching for meaning?”
Coco’s eyes softened instantly. “I’m not saying you don’t understand that. It’s just that not everything has to be about finding belonging in a community. What about a single person or a place.”
Agathe desperately tried not to think the words Like I found you.
Coco laid down next to Agathe. Closer than she would normally. Her head nestled on Agathe’s chest. It fit perfectly, not too heavy, not too light. Close. Intimate.
“I just think you should let your heroes be happy mid story sometimes. Give them a break.”
Agathe laid there savouring the gentle feel of Coco’s breath on her skin. She looked down to see Coco staring at her through her long eyelashes.
A deep rooted part of Agathe sighed with relief and unwound. She sighed out loud, contented, they were good.
It felt right.
It felt right.
It felt right!
It felt right in a way that soothed her very her soul.
Oh god.
Ohgodohgodohgod! Agathe leapt up letting Coco crash onto the river bank.
“Hey what was that for-“ Coco’s protests died out quickly as she saw Agathe standing stock still.
She was blushing red from the tips of her finger to the very follicles of her hair. All caused by one soul shattering realisation.
She liked Coco.
She loved Coco.
She was in love with Coco. She had been for years. It was never hatred. How could it be when Coco shone so?
Oh. This was not good. Not good at all. She had tormented her, bullied her when they were younger. And someone as bright as Coco?
No. Never in a million years.
Coco had others. She had to have. She was Coco of course she had others. Agathe knew the way Tartah looked at her when delivering her sculpture supplies, or how they looked at each other when they were working on an engineering problem.
Agathe sat down next to Coco again. Coco’s hands folded around her own, those wonderful, beautiful – god it felt so good to finally admit that she was perfection given form – eyes filled with concern for her.
Quietly Agathe came to a decision that was necessary but soul destroying. She couldn’t ruin the woman she loved because of something as trivial as her feelings.
“I’m fine Coco. There was just a wasp buzzing around”
Coco squealed and jumped up too. “Where? Where?? whereeeee!?”
Agathe giggled, and as she chased Coco around the glade she killed her inner self. She quietly made plans to run.