Chapter Text
Every so often, he comes here with the intention of emptying his heart and leaves with the hopes of keeping it empty. Although, she knows he will always return with his heart bearing the burdens of life on the other side. Greed, grief, pain, human suffering of every kind. And she knows he bears the burden of hope, the heaviest of them all.
Or maybe hope is what lightens the burden, she thinks. She doesn’t know. She lives with the hope that he remains healthy and well and happy. It is as essential to her as food and water. But as the months and years pass by, she’s been feeling its weight on her aging shoulders. The cycle of farewells and reunions will continue, with her never knowing how and when it will end.
But for now, the painter sits with his back to the large glass window, an orange-pink sunset flooding into the study. He sits on a simple wooden stool, a paintbrush in one hand, a paint palette in the other. As he works the canvas, he catches himself staring at her a moment too long. When they meet eyes, he knows that her image is another one he will store in his artist’s mind, his gallery of beautiful portraits.
Her copper hair blazes in the yellow-tinted room, like a cardinal’s flight against the golden sky. Facing him, she sits with her chin in her palm. She sits across a velvet chair, one leg crossed over the other and her elbow resting on her knee. Her eyes glint with mischief and she smiles.
He swears his heart skips a beat. She always glows when her lips curve up sweetly like that.
“You’re moving too much,” the painter mumbles, looking down at the canvas. It’s hard for him to keep his deadpan look when her eyes are locked onto his moving paintbrush. She smiles wider at that, eyeing him like a songbird does to its little insect prey.
“And you are too good of a painter for that to be a problem,” she says. She’s right. He can capture perfect moments through any commotion, like when he commissioned the portrait of a family of fifteen, seven of them children who could not sit still for more than a minute.
“The sun, my lady, angles correctly only when you sit a certain way”, he quips.
She huffs and sulks further into the sofa. “And he said he would move the sun and stars for me.”
“I did not say that.” These are the moments he lives for, the hidden smiles and laughs simmering while he tolerates her antics.
“Oh, what was it then? The night we went stargazing when you couldn’t stop staring at me-”
He grumbles and hides further behind his canvas. “Could you please not talk about it like that?”
She sits up straighter and leans toward him as if enticed by his coyness. “And like the romantic you are, you proclaimed your love and said ‘I’d stitch the stars together to make a constellation of your goddamned face’.”
And that’s when he breaks into a smile, unable to uphold his demeanor. For once, he is gifted with the privilege of uncontained joy.