veryroundbirdfics | Arknights | Still Life (Reply)

Rating: Piquant
Words: 1637
Characters: Kroos, Dusk
Relationships: Gen
Summary: Kroos has a very particular end in mind when she asks Dusk to teach her how to paint, but the process of learning leads her to question what she's actually trying to memorialize.
Notes: I came out to hurt people and I'm having a great time

"Go away," says the muffled voice on the other side of the door. "I'm not coming out."

"That's fine, mate," says Kroos, and leans against the doorframe. It's not like she didn't expect this. "I kinda wanted to come in, though. D'you do painting lessons?"

There's a pause. For a moment she thinks that the recluse of Rhodes Island is just going to ignore her or pretend to fall asleep.

And then the door slides open by just a fraction—a single red-gold eye visible through the crack.

"Hm? Little rabbit... I remember," the voice murmurs. "I remember."

And then she pulls the door open fully. "Come in," says the great painter Dusk, and practically pulls Kroos inside by the wrist. "It has been many years since I last taught. But we will see."

The thing is, Kroos had an image in mind that she wanted to try and capture in a painting. She remembered all the great paintings in that illusory, labyrinthine house on the mountain in Yen—but Dusk briskly informs her that first she must study.

Her teacher's long hair trails behind her in the empty storage compartment that she uses for personal quarters, as she arranges objects on a low table incongruous in style with the rest of the decor. Boxes, fruit pilfered from the kitchen, a crate of... Nian's godawful movies?

"This," says Dusk. "First, sketch this."

Kroos's first attempt is awful. It looks fine at first, when she lays out the lines, but adding the fine details makes it look clumsy, and by the time she adds in the shading, it's just a mess. Nothing looks like it occupies the same space.

She half-expects Dusk to castigate her, but she leans over Kroos's easel with a critical eye, clicking her tongue. "If you want to capture every detail, a photograph would be enough," she says, mildly. "But if you aim to capture the ineffable and the essential, you must first determine what those are to you, in what you see."

"What is—" Kroos looks up sharply, squinting up at Dusk through narrowed eyes. "I know what's important about what I want to paint. What's essential and—ineffable? about a pile of junk?"

Dusk just gives a minute shrug of her shoulders, sending her hair swaying. "If you can't answer that," she says, "I don't think you know what you want to paint, after all."

"You're full of shit," Kroos says, and before even thinking, slams her hand into the easel, toppling it, and knocking it into the carefully-arranged objects on the table.

She stares Dusk down, as if daring her to say anything. Getting no response but a noncommittal "Hm," she storms off, pulling the door closed behind her so hard it slams.

That night she tries to sketch on her own. After all, she's known what she wanted to paint for a while; it's haunted her in her dreams ever since that weird time on the mountain with Lava.

Like every time before, though, it just won't quite turn out. The image swims and blurs in her head, even though she should remember. The kindness of her smile, the way her reddish hair curled slightly to frame her face.

Ten sheets of paper wasted and none of them manage to quite look like her. Just some stranger with a passing similarity.

It takes her a few more days before she gets up the nerve to return to Dusk's room, and she knocks gingerly on the door and thinks about running away while she waits.

But she doesn't wait long. Dusk just opens the door, expressionless, and stands aside to let her in.

The objects are still laid out on the table; some of them are still tipped over in the way that she left them, and Kroos winces, standing next to her stool.

She can feel Dusk's eyes on her, her teacher having settled onto a perch atop a stack of crates. Dusk doesn't even look mad or expectant or anything, it's just—

Kroos sits down on the stool with a heavy fwhump. "Sorry," she says, quietly.

There's a pregnant pause, and then Dusk shrugs, tipping her head sideways. "It matters not to me," she says. "Feelings are ephemeral."

Something about that phrase makes the breath catch in Kroos's throat—an anxious tension that feels like it's going to strangle her for a hot second as her hand hovers over the easel—still on the floor—to set it upright.

And then her fingers curl around the wooden legs to pull it upright. She sets her pad of paper on the base, takes up her pencil, and starts sketching again.

She still turns out a lot of crap, if she's being honest. What is essential—it feels like some kind of puzzle that she's just not smart enough to work out. Like, it should look like the thing itself, shouldn't it?

Halfway through a session, her gaze travels over to a stack of Dusk's ink paintings, set to the side. They don't look like... anything, really. There's no fine detail to them, just bold shapes, but there's an energy to them that causes her to linger on them. A sense of anticipation, maybe.

Essential—

What is she trying to capture here that she doesn't have in hundreds of candids and group selfies and award photos from the last few years? Why can't she be satisfied with them?

The next week she gets sent on a long patrol to deliver a message to a mobile city in Rim Billiton, not far from where she was born. After the job's done, she has a few hours to kill before heading back; for fun, she climbs a building by the fire escape and sits on the edge of the roof, watching the sun rise.

It's ugly. Rim Billiton buildings are all industrial, skimping on comfort and elegance for the sake of cost-cutting. She barely remembers what it was like, anymore—just a kid's faded impressions and the fact that she fucking hated it here.

But as the sky brightens with pinks and yellows, there's a sort of... strange yearning that leaps in her chest.

On the way back, she sketches skyline after skyline.

When she next returns to Dusk's studio, she sits without hesitation to start, and something true starts to take shape. The lurid covers of Nian's movies, the wobbly shape of the apple, the frustrating way none of the boxes are quite put together right—the shapes she makes really feel more like gestures, but it looks more like what she sees in front of her.

"You're satisfied," says Dusk, leaning over her shoulder. It's not a question.

"Not exactly," says Kroos, idly twirling her pencil between her fingers. "But I'm thinking this is better, right?"

She thinks she sees Dusk's mouth twitch slightly, seeing how she drew Nian's movies. "It's nothing like anything I would create," Dusk says. "Only you could make this."

Kroos isn't sure if it's a compliment—but the next day, Dusk gets out the paints.

Every time she thinks she's learned a lot, Kroos finds she has yet another major thing she doesn't know.

She tries not to get frustrated. (She still gets frustrated.) It never feels like she has enough time—like if she waits too long, some detail will escape her, or her own time will just... run out. Kroos knows she exists, to an extent, on borrowed time.

In her own quarters, she tears up canvas after splattered canvas.

One day, in the middle of her work time, she turns to Dusk and asks her, abruptly, "What do you do if you forget something important for your art?"

Dusk raises an eyebrow, though she stays gazing up at the ceiling from atop her throne of crates. "What could I forget? As long as I can remember how to work a brush, I have all that I need," she says.

Kroos frowns. "No, like—details about people, or places, or..." She pauses, and shifts in her seat, a little uncomfortable in the thick silence. "Or, like—how you felt about something. Or someone."

"Ah. Then, I would consider if such a thing was really so important, after all."

"Of course it's—" Kroos snaps, and then cuts herself off, gripping her brush tightly. More quietly: "It's important."

"Perhaps," says Dusk. "But feelings and lives are ephemeral. What matters is what remains."

What remains is—

What remains is that she will, forever, hate—

No. That she'll never forgive—

No.

She sets her brush down. "I need to stop for the day."

Dusk doesn't respond, but she's just like that; she won't stop her or push or pry, ever, which is both frustrating and a good quality.

So Kroos goes back to her quarters. She thinks about getting into bed and just turning in for the night; instead, she gets out her little personal computer, and opens a folder she hasn't looked at for a long time.

She thinks about the Rim Billiton skyline. And then she gets out her own personal set of paints, and a canvas, and starts to work.

She doesn't show the painting to Dusk, but somehow she knows. "I am no longer your instructor," she says.

"Yeah," says Kroos, and thinks about the painting shoved under her bed. She thought about hanging it up, but it seemed like... too much, still—to look at both of them as she once knew them, even if in the end, she couldn't hold on to her anger. It's just that neither of them looked right without the other. "But can I still hang out and paint?"

"Hm?" Dusk glances down from the second level of the studio's catwalk, which Kroos could have sworn didn't exist before. "Must you ask?"

"Same time tomorrow, then," Kroos says.

Arknights | Still Life

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