Author's Note: Clearing out a bit of the backlog. This was originally a birthday fic for my good friend Euphro.
Art
Tina Cohen-Chang was not an artist.
Sure, she liked to draw well enough. When she was bored enough in class, she'd spend hours drawing in the margins of her brightly-colored notebooks. Prickly dragons, elegant phoenixes, slippery snakes, even the occasional skull or ten. But liking to draw wasn't the same as being an artist. So Tina never called herself one.
And singing? The singing was just something fun she did in Glee, with her friends. It was nice to have friends, someone to talk to and sing songs with and just generally pal around with after school. They didn't mind her stutter when she was still faking it, and they didn't mind it when she gave up the pretenses. Tina knew that she'd found good friends. But liking to sing didn't make Tina an artist, either.
Her dance skills left much to be desired. Sure, she liked to move to the music, but she wasn't nearly as flexible as Mike or Brittany or even Santana. Nope, dancing was fun, but that didn't make Tina an artist. She'd never be a dancer, and she was actually perfectly okay with that.
Somehow she didn't think her snazzy fashion choices, or her ability to glue gold glitter on stars for a school dance made her an artist either. They made her creative, definitely, a lot weird, and maybe even a little bit crafty, but an artist? Well, that wasn't her.
She appreciated art. Art was her very favorite class of the day, aside from Glee, but Tina knew she wasn't good enough to make a living as an artist. This really didn't bother her all that much, especially when her mother pointed out that she was clever and smart and could do nearly anything she wanted. Tina was content with that. She could appreciate art all she wanted, and still have good enough grades to get in and figure out what else she wanted to do at whatever college she'd so desire. Tina thought it wasn't a bad deal.
Tina Cohen-Chang never really considered herself an artist.
Until Artie broke up with her. If you wanted to get technical, they'd only had one sort of a date and one kind of kiss, but that was the farthest Tina had ever gone with any other boy before in her life, so she was pretty convinced that it was some kind of relationship. At a loss as he rolled down the hallway, tears streaming down her face, Tina just watched him go. Her makeup had streaked terribly and made her whole face look black. Her white shirt had been covered in tears and smudged eyeliner.
Mrs. Cohen-Chang had taken one look at her daughter, realized things had most definitely not gone well, and sent the heartbroken teenager up to bed with a hug and tea. Tina sipped listlessly at the tea and paced around the room, her throat dry from crying and her mind too muddled to sleep. Normally sewing or drawing or even singing calmed her, kept her steady, and kept her brain in gear.
But tonight, none of those techniques her working for her. They all reminded her of Artie, just a little bit. Artie had let her doodle on his notebooks when she was bored in class. Artie had complimented the arm warmers she'd sewn together herself. Artie had smiled and said she had a nice singing voice and should join Glee. Artie, Artie, Artie...
That alone was enough to set a fresh wave of tears going. Dabbing her eyes with a tissue and struggling not to wake her parents up, as it was past midnight, Tina sighed, sniffled, and flopped to the floor. A medium-sized plastic storage box was poking out of her bed, and Tina eyed it curiously. Sitting up, she stopped crying and started pulling out the box. Covered in a layer of dust, Tina opened the container to reveal oil pants and a few small canvases.
She hadn't used these since she was twelve. Tina laughed, a soft hollow one, and sneezed as she wiped dust off of the box. She had been sure her mother had thrown this out when they'd moved from Dayton to Lima when Tina was in middle school. After the stutter, after the streaks, after the therapist...
Her old art therapy supplies. Tina cocked her head to the side and thought about it. It had worked then, kind of. She hadn't been very good at it at the time, but being able make a mess and put her emotions on the canvas had been sort of fun. But then they'd moved, for her mother's new job and her grandmother's health and Tina had been unable to continue the sessions.
But the supplies were there, right there, and Tina knew she wasn't going to sleep anytime soon. Taking out the paints that looked the least dried out and still usable, Tina set up a canvas and set to work, unsure of what would appear on the stretch of white that lay before her. She hoped it would help.
Tina's mother didn't make her go to school the next day. Seeing her daughter hard at work hunched over an easel, at six o'clock in the morning with no clear indication that she'd slept at all the night before, even Mrs. Cohen-Chang didn't have the heart to force the girl to go to school. So instead, she'd slipped a cup of coffee on her daughter's nightstand before quietly heading off to work.
Her father, who was working at home for the day, came in to check on her every hour. Tina never noticed, having decided that at seven o'clock, she'd needed music. Loud, deeply personal music, from a playlist she'd always tinkered with for months but never truly had the need to play. Superboy and the Invisible Girl (Next to Normal) flowed from her ipod, resting carefully on its dock, followed by Sleepwalker (Adam Lambert), and her brush hit the canvas even more fiercely than before as the playlist switched to Even Angels Fall (Jessica Riddle).
With a sigh, her father left her toast and more tea at ten o'clock, hoping Tina would pull herself out of her frenzied state long enough to eat. He'd taken away the untouched coffee, now stone cold.
Around noon, the haze lifted. Tina's painting wasn't anything phenomenal, but there it was, an abstract mess of blue and black and red. Red dominated the piece, swirled by angry slashes of black and drops of blue. With a sigh, she nibbled on the cold toast, ignored the tea, and fell into bed, hoping for a dreamless sleep. Her ipod played on, now filling the room with Dead is the New Alive (Emilie Autumn).
Kurt and Mercedes, worried about their friend, tried to visit her after school, but Mr. Cohen-Chang gently turned them away, telling them that Tina was sleeping and she needed her rest.
Tina awoke to Missing (Evanescence), and with a jerk, she slammed off the music and let her room fill with haunting silence and the headache-inducing smell of paint fumes. With a groan, Tina turned on the ceiling fan, cracked open a window, and went down the hall for dinner.
She knew she was going to be all right.
She still paints now and again during their awkward not really friends, but not really mad at each other either period. Her painting is not nearly as frenzied as the night afterward, but now and again, the urge hits her. Like for instance, that one time when he didn't meet her eyes in Spanish class, and another time, when he asked someone else to be his lab partner in Chemistry. Those are the days when Tina creeps up to her room after school and paints through dinner.
The paintings aren't as violent as the first one, with its deep red paint dripping from every corner. But they can hardly be called happy either, as they're still a swirling mess of black and blue and gray. Her parents worry, but let her be, because they know their daughter has a hard time expressing herself. Any kind of outlet is good enough for the Cohen-Changs, because they don't want to know what happens when there are no outlets.
The red paint comes out again a few months later, when the object of her affections reveals himself to be a full-blooded teenage boy, complete with the usual thoughtless teenage boy moments. Tina takes out the largest canvas she can find and covers it with so many different shades of red that it makes her eyes hurt and her head spin.
The next day, after delivering a blistering rant to the boy she still cares about, still lets mean enough to her to hurt her, she puts the painting away. She hides that one in the darkest depths of her closet, unsure that she wants to see it again, but too fond of it to throw it away. The clashing mix of red hues gave her more than she'd ever really know.
Tina Cohen-Chang might have a few artistic qualities in her after all.
Things are finally resolved with a belated apology and awkward piano playing, sealed with a sweet kiss that makes Tina smile all the way down to her toes. The day after the reconciliation in the choir room, Tina packs up her paint set. The pictures, thirteen in all, are stowed back in the corner of her closet again, lined up neatly by their canvas size, with the clashing red one tucked last. She's content to go back to her sketching and her craft projects.
Her fingers twitch a few weeks later, when dating the aforementioned boy causes them both pain when she's forced to chose a new dance partner. It's new ground for them both, and there are bound to be missteps along the way. But instead of hiding behind an easel this time, she drags the boy to her room the day after the botched dance.
"Artie," she says, her voice confident and clear, "I want to draw you. I've never drawn anyone I know before, but I hope you'll let me. Come on, Artie, be my model."
Tina Cohen-Chang can deny it all she wants, but to one Artie Abrams, she is very much an artist. He'll get her to believe it one day.