Season 4 hiatus AU.


Paint

She watched him while he painted. The mural was huge, taking up a whole wall of the abandoned building, a hundred times larger than the paper sketch that she held in front of her. Every inch was done with such care, tracing the outlines first, then filling in the spaces, never once making a mistake.

She tried to do the same, using markers instead of paint. But she got distracted on the hair. Too many lines to trace, might as well just cover it all anyway. It'd be faster. By the time she noticed her mistake, half the collar was brown when it should have stayed white.

"Oh," she gasped. She looked up at him. "I, I'm so sorry."

He turned. For a moment, there was hopeful recognition in his eyes, as if she was worth something to him. But she wasn't. His shoulders seemed to slump, and his face relaxed into a gentle smile. He climbed down from his perch and came to sit beside Belle-not-Belle.

She held the paper out to him. "I messed up." She hid her face in her hands. "I'm terrible at this."

He looked at the picture, then handed it back. "No one is perfect, dearie. How would you fix it?"

The only solution she could think of was magic. Erase the brown stain as if it had never been there. But they weren't using magic. He had used magic to make her, a golem to keep him company, but the sketch in her hand and the mural on the wall had been done without magic, a testament to his love for her-who-was-not-her.

"Can you find me scissors and blank paper?" she asked, at last. "And some glue, or tape?"

He smiled and stroked her hair as he stood. She went back to coloring, around her mistake. When he came back with the supplies, she would cut around the white spaces and mount the rest on a fresh backing. And maybe by the time he finished the mural, they would both feel whole.