Her Last Gift

xox

"This isn't working."

Marinette knew that he wasn't talking about his painting software or his drawing tablet this time.

""You're right, it isn't."

"Finally you agree with me." There was a touch of bitterness, but mostly it was a sigh of resignation. She wondered if she would be allowed to pat his red hair or put a hand on his.

"Two years isn't bad." She refrained from touching him.

"Two years isn't bad," he echoed, nodding.

Two wonderful years, for the most part, he thought.

"Thank you, Nath." He had to look up then, and blue met blue—sky and sea. He couldn't help it, her beauty always left him breathless and in awe. He smiled in spite of himself, the timid smile that reminded her of their days at the collège back when he could barely form a coherent sentence to ask her out, the kind of smile that made her realize that she had fallen in love.

"It-it's been wonderful, Mari."

"Maybe, in another life, we could have been the best of friends." She could see him agree by the way his eyes darkened just a shade, and she knew him well enough that she could tell where his mind was going now—wondering if, had he not introduced romance to their friendship, they would have still remained fast friends and partners in crime. She decided not to arrest these thoughts.

"Perhaps," he said. "But we just had to both be artists—unable to resist some drama and tragedy in our lives." He tucked his fringe behind an ear as he grinned.

"You more than me," she retorted with a mirroring grin. "Should I pose for one more nude to please your melodramatic, masochistic side?"

"Should I take that offer seriously?" There was a playful twinkle in his eye. "Because I will accept, you know how much I adore your naked form."

"I was teasing, but now that I think about it, why not? Just please don't try to be Picasso again."

"Don't worry," he said with a chuckle. Marinette watched his slender legs walk to his art supplies closet. "If there's anything I learned about that one time, it's that he combination of you fidgeting and me trying to pull off cubism is bound to drive me crazy."

"Dad?"

He was roused from his thoughts by the young and too-loud-for-a-museum voice of the raven haired teenager by his side. The boy watched him snap out of it, then ran his green eyes over the painting his father had been gazing at.

"Aren't you too old to be looking at paintings of naked ladies?"

"It's art!" his blonde father protested. "And by a pretty popular artist, too!"

"'Her Last Gift'," his son read aloud. "Nathanaël Kurtzberg. Huh. Isn't this guy about your age, Dad? This seems to be one he did when he was still young and unknown though."

His father said nothing, and the boy read on. "'I tried to paint you as I see you, as I have seen you for the past two years, but this canvas can only hold the you as I saw you that day. Thank you for everything.' So much drama. Probably his ex-girlfriend."

He typed a short phrase onto his notepad app. "Well, the good thing about M'sieur Kurtzberg is that he's very much alive, so I might be able to get something out of him for my report. I wonder if he replies to emails from fans? Or maybe I should just be honest and tell him I'm a student at François-Dupont..."

His voice trailed off as he walked further into the gallery. His father took one more wistful look at the girl in the painting, her hair as black and her smile as disarming as his son's own, sighed, and followed the boy.

xox

I should be doing other things but Papapillon just released everybody's full names and eehhhh I wanted to use Nath's because I'm trash

Thanks for reading!