A/N: All of these reviews make me want to shout something completely irrelevant like "Hi Ho Silver!" or "Hit The Road, Jack!" Here is Chapter 5 for your reading enjoyment (hopefully).
Thanks to Nicolle for betaing this! You were such a great help. How do I love thee? Let me count the ways…
Arianna555 – Thank you for your amazing review. It really made my day…week, rather, and I am so glad you like this story.
Everyone with sanity, please go read the above-mentioned reviewers/betaers/friends' stories. Pennames are Arianna555 and someone5.
Thank you all for your feedback. Please keep reviewing!
I do not own John Ruskin or Pablo Picasso, in that order.
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Sometimes when night rolls over day and the sky is velvet, she leans against the pillow and closes her eyes. Sometimes she sees white, like snow or cotton or something erased, and sometimes she sees a sleet shadow of what will never be anymore. It used to hurt, this sleet shadow, but now she has adjusted to its tall, sturdy form, the silvery glint of buttons on a uniform coat, the spiderweb outline of a hat. The shadow leans on the doorframe behind her eyelids and watches her as she slips her fingers underneath the quilts.
It is a lukewarm shadow and some nights, it stays longer. Meg knows she will never forget him, or his navy blue coat, stiff and fitted, and now so very gray because the blue is faded.
She is scared of forgetting him, but even more terrified of remembering. And on nights with velvet skies, she is never prepared for what she will see – the white nothingness of her eyelids, or the shadow of her brother, leaning ever so gently on the doorframe. And remembering makes it harder to sleep.
She will settle for in between, and for his lingering shadow in her dreams on dark nights.
…………
The day after Christmas is a leisurely one in a brown-and-white Philadelphia. His black rubber boots throw themselves with ferociously fresh finality into the frosting of snow on the sidewalks. There is bright red tinsel hanging over a lanky tree branch and his eyes catch it as he moves down the street, and it sways with the wind and he remembers that he watched her curtain on Christmas Eve.
The wind picks up and the tinsel twists into a round red curl.
He shoves his fingertips into his pocket for a cigarette and fumbles with the thin white cardboard. Winter is an opportune time to die, he thinks. The leaves have died and the grass has died and color has passed; all is a scale of ink and white canvas and five hundred thousand numb artists' hands shaking to steady the paintbrush. Virgin snow is the only thing pure here.
But as always, she is the purest. And without fail, she makes her way solemnly down the sidewalk, feet making a movement more akin to a drop than a throw, but with just as much finality. And her cheeks are a brilliant geranium, round flowery brightnesses, and her skin is the softest peach, and her blue woolen cap is pulled down tightly over her head and his throat is yearning again.
Fine art is that in which the hand, the head, and the heart of a man go together.
He stands, watching her boots drop lazily into the fresh flurrying snow and noticing how when she lifts up her knee, the flaps of her blue woolen coat slide open and he can see more of her legs.
She approaches him slowly, and notices that the space between his fingers is empty and the forceful smell of smoke is lingering, fading away. Chris seems cleaner today, but only to the eye because he is very far from clean.
They walk because the snow makes a nice sound under her feet and he is happy that something is cold but he can't feel it. The air is a sheet of frosted glass, a crumbling wall, and his head throbs. He isn't sure if it's from the cold, or from her knowing existence at his right, or from thinking too hard. Thinking that maybe he can walk through walls, real or not.
She stops underneath a big oak on the sidewalk and stands up on her tiptoes, and he takes note that when she does this and reaches her blue gloved hands up towards a branch, her coat moves farther up her legs.
Her legs look longer today and there is an uneasy feeling rolling around in the pit of his stomach, telling him that if she moves much more her feet will leave the ground.
Meg has already retrieved a piece of dull red tinsel from the branch and continues to walk farther down the sidewalk, her slender back and breezy golden curls asking him to keep walking with her. And even if he has his signals crossed, he keeps up, following her peachy legs and the blue woolen coat, eyes tracking missiles and throat yearning but mouth still a charcoal line.
The trees are bare and black and the snow is white and she is Technicolor wrapped in flaxen gold and powder blue and flushed red. Even as the icy purple wall of night air begins to fall, first lilac, then plum, then something like ink, it is no color like her.
…………
Caring scares him.
But he is Chris Pierce and he is fearless, so he pulls his numbed, white fingers from the rough brown material of his jacket pocket and puts it in the blue wool of her jacket pocket. He feels her breath hitch and his throat mimic it.
They pass the electronics store and the vinyl store and some more oaks,
And then the recruiting office. Gone is the lusty image of angular yellow flames, of smoky jet blue tips shooting billows of smoke into the sky, of crumbling black wood slowly falling, slowly falling the building away. Gone is the image of pride because she stands next to him, eyes wide china plates and lips just separated enough to let the air whistle through; gone is his desire to paint another peace sign.
The desire has been gone since that night under the Christmas tree in her house, the edges of the window glass framed in frost and the buttery yellow light bouncing off of it. Did you do it?, she asked. No, he said. And that was that.
It only hit him with her standing there with china eyes and a piece of dull red tinsel hanging loosely between two fingers, that the desire and the pride and the image of angular yellow flames was a pile of ashes.
When he speaks, Meg is reminded of the dragging sound a Christmas tree makes when it is towed along the pavement of a driveway. Rough but lovely to smell, and little pine pricks scattered everywhere. "You know," he states evenly. It is a dull sound and she thinks his voice might have gone flat.
"Yeah," she replies. This too is even, but there are no pine pricks, only a languid pouring of a sharper note into the frozen air. He starts to feel some of the ice crack.
Her mouth opens, and he watches her bright red lips form a long shape, and she averts her eyes to the curling of a piece of holiday tinsel wrapped around a tree branch. She tries to sound casual.
"I'm sorry," she adds nonchalantly and begins to walk again, letting the piece of dull red tinsel slide from her gloved fingers and ride a sheet of icy air until it catches in a rain gutter.
He watches the piece of tinsel slip between two metal slats and disappear before walking with her again, and he decides not to protest this sudden apology because he knows she will only protest back. And he likes it when she walks with him and lets him put his hand in her pocket.
It is like walking with an oil painting, he decides.
He is only a little bit surprised when she crosses the street to the little white church, lonely and empty and echoing. Because after all, he is Chris Pierce and Chris Pierce is not only Fearless but also Prepared For Anything and A Little Bit All-Knowing.
…………
She is swathed with an old warm feeling that makes her nose sting and consequently, her eyes water, and once again she is burdened by the angering notion that only stinging and dingy air and bright white candles can make her cry for him.
He pulls his hand from her pocket and she turns to look at him, face unnervingly still and cheeks big flowers and eyes blue china platters. And eyelashes wet black silk and nose a rose from the cold.
"Please?" her mouth is begging him, and he wants to relent by capturing it gently but her blue woolen fingers are pawing at his raw, cold ones and he remembers and weaves their hands together.
They are standing in front of the cluster of votives now, most candles not yet lit but a scattered few (she counts them – three or four, maybe?) blazing triumphantly, small but optimistic little lights.
He watches her movements with painstaking fascination; she drops a quarter with a round panging noise into the collection box and retrieves a stubby, sorry-looking match and strikes it. A crackling noise ensues, small but still there, and he sees her reflection in the tiny flame – golden curls and deep blue eyes and bright cherry lips.
"Did I really blow them out?" she asks, match burning close to the tips of her fingers, eyes darting over the tiny firefly lights of the candles at the feet of Mother Mary. He swallows hard because all of this light and her soft voice and because everywhere is blue and red, and it is becoming harder to keep what yearns down inside.
We all know that art is not truth. Art is a lie that makes us realize the truth.
"No," he whispers hoarsely, trying to make his voice sound artful. But she can see yellow in his brown eyes and his cheekbones are twitching and she thinks of a rough charcoal sketch; the truth hurts, but nobody gained anything from a lie.
She can handle the truth. He knows she knows anyway.
Meg extends her hand with the match towards him but he simply holds her fingers in his own and brings her hand to an unlit votive at Mary's feet. The light is hot and close and he brings the match back once the fire catches the wick, and blows smoke out into the empty, dead air.
Meg inhales wax and a smoky something, and thinks that maybe air can be resuscitated.
…………
It takes all of her control not to kiss him in the church, but once the door closes and they throw/drop their feet back into the mounds of untouched snow (until now), she stops him.
It is the best-broken record ever, and she thinks that maybe she's the only person in the entire world that likes broken, skipping records. This time she kisses him, soundly, on his bottom lip, but it takes but a mere second for him to begin to capture her gently. She ties her blue woolen arms around his neck and runs her fingers through the curls at the nape of his neck, and his hands move from the small of her back to her shoulders, to her flower cheeks, and finally
begin to twist themselves through her flaxen ringlets.
Meg thinks she should hate him for setting that fire but realizes that she helped him set another (however small and holy). And he tells her the truth in an artful sort of way and he has strong shoulders that she likes to hold…and she likes that he makes her yearn.
They stand like that for a while, and he swallows her yearnings and she kisses up his and they both know that this strangled fondness is too fast yet wildly appropriate. So very appropriate that they should kiss while a new candle burns and while old memories linger and while he accepts her apology and she accepts his honesty.
It's an artful honesty, and she's never been one for always telling the truth. He lies, but art is always a lie.