A/N: Always haunted by Neal's lost paintings.
Mozzie set fire to his paintings because there was greater art to save. Neal moves on. Chess doesn't stop because you grew too fond of a pawn.
But if he ever has time (not serving time, but real time—time to taste wine before he swallows it, time to pace alongside beaches, time to thank the people he should), he'll admit to himself that there are paintings he misses.
There was one of a sunset.
As if a painting of a sunset was anything to brag about. As though a thousand other artists and worse, painters, hadn't painted enough sunsets so that no one ought ever to speak of one again.
And yet he will. If he has time, he will go against the grain, repeat the words—he will say that this one is different. Because he didn't paint a horizon line in red and gold and red again to show that sunset.
He painted Kate.
Kate in a white dress burnt ochre by light. Kate with rose-gold shimmering on her skin. Kate with fire in her eyes. Kate is facing the sunset. And as always, he wants to know what she sees.
There was one of a park. He called it Still, life. Moz had laughed at that. But it was an old man and an old woman stretched out on a blanket, with a wheelchair tipped on its side next to them, as though it didn't matter, in the space of a sunlit afternoon.
He wasn't one for sketching like that, the starving artist on a bench. But he had been drawn to the scene, somehow—and anyway, he'd been young, then.
Younger.
There was one of a mirror. A self-portrait, maybe, but the shadowy figure in the silver-stroked glass didn't look anything like him.
A child with Kate's eyes—a dream that never came to be. Maybe it's best that that one burned, but he misses it anyway.
They are all gone, and he never forgets his paintings, but he will not try to recreate them. Ash has an art to it, especially when it is art that has burned.