Work Text:
A portrait.
Meant to capture a person’s likeness and personality, it serves as a means of commemoration, documentation, and artistic expression.
Pearl looks at the canvas before her. It bears the obvious silhouette of Ashveil, splattered upon the sheets in watercolor. Yes, splattered.
How odd. Pearl's paintings were, as mentioned repeatedly by others, always so cleanly and perfectly done. Not a brushstroke out of place. Not to the point the paint would be staining her clothes and person as well.
And yet, here she was- glancing at a canvas of Ashveil meant to be a portrait of him, with the sheets only bearing a recognizable yet indistinct silhouette of him, while her fingers and clothes were all stained with various colors, stains Pearl couldn't help but look at with fascination.
Observation: Stains of navy blue, specifically in the color code of 1A1E41 now stained her fingers tips.
Reasoning: She had been trying to find the precise color that would perfectly fit the shade of Ashveil's hair.
Had she found it?
Pearl frowned in thought glancing at the to-be portrait again. It was so terribly imperfect- shades of navy blue and black and white were scattered across the indistinct silhouette that was painted to represent that long hair. Her fingers absently stroke along the once-precise lines she had painted, which ended up being colored imprecisely.
And though it was a flaw, Pearl found herself strangely fascinated.
Query: Why?
The texture of watercolor against her fingers hasn't been something she considered until today- and yet, as she runs her fingers along the painting, she imagines for a moment, the contrast between the actual sensation of her fingers along Ashveil, against the sensation of the watercolor painted onto the canvas.
A hypothetical, versus the reality in front of her, in other words.
A hypothetical she found herself wondering about. A hypothetical she found herself longing for.
Longing.
Your creation is just as important.
That was why she had painted this in the very beginning after all, hadn't she?
Longing. Because she had borne herself open to him in a way she had never calculated even the most improbable statistic of, because she had been so unerringly honest with him in a way she did not think she would be, in a way she could not afford with others.
Longing for Ashveil.
Ah, yes. This sense of incompletion that her emotional module experienced at the moment- this was what drove her to paint in a way she had never foreseen or calculated she could.
This incompletion, she now recognized, was pain.
A pain she knew all too well at this point- pain that she could not understand art the way humans did. Pain that she could only accurately describe the monetary value of art, and not what it truly, truly meant.
But this was a different pain. A pain borne of uncertainty and hope. A paradoxical one.
Pearl closed her eyes, reducing the sensitivity of her sensors as she did so- wishing only to be left alone with her thoughts.
For a moment she calculated, without letting herself base the result on Ashveil's decision tree- what would he think if he saw this makeshift, imperfect portrait?
He was not one to mince words, despite their contractual relationship. Pearl finds that her mandibular circuits are charged enough from her emotional module to curve her lips into a faint smile at the thought. He was so very truly sincere in the best of ways- and Pearl sought to repay every ounce of that sincerity with her own, to the best of her ability.
So what would he think?
He would call himself an amateur, incapable of judging her artwork perfectly. But she did not want a perfect appraisal, not from him. She wanted his honest thoughts.
But the thought of sharing this artwork in her hands with Ashveil seemed too precarious, even if she could calculate the exact probability of the succeeding events in such a case.
Perhaps. Perhaps, she would not share it just yet.
But she would, one day. If only so she may tell him- your word on my art means more to me than any art critic's ever could.