title: mosa lisa
fandom: lost
character(s)/pairing(s): juliet/claire
rating: pg13
word count: 250
prompt: manganese for femslash100's periodic table challenge (progress 11/30)
spoilers: none; this doesn't really have a place in the show's timeline.

summary: she's never been an artist.

 

She’s never been an artist.

Claire dips her paint brush into the glop of umber paint, trapping her tongue between her teeth and stealing a look at her subject.

“Hold still,” she chides lightly.

Painting Juliet is starting to appear impossible.

Claire’s observed her studiously, cataloguing the purse of her lips over her coffee, her silhouette when the rustle of sheets against bare skin is the only sound and the glow of the moon is the only illumination.

But there’s always a certain something about the renderings that’s vacant, something she can’t quite put her paint-caked finger on.

Juliet fidgets minutely on the stool and Claire glares playfully, poking her sullied brush at her. The other woman smiles then: graceful, measured, enigmatic.

Then it hits her; it’s that smile. That’s what’s been so difficult to capture. She suddenly understands why da Vinci took so long to paint the Mona Lisa. It’s difficult to capture an essence of a quality that isn’t tactile, isn’t definable. Secrets without untruth.

Claire’s feet make a sticky sound like honey as she rounds the canvas, leaving little mud-colored prints on the yellowing sheets stretched across the living room.

She may not be able to transfer Juliet’s smile to canvas, or define what she loves about her in oils and pastels, but she could tell you exactly how her lips feel against her collarbone, how need tastes on her tongue, how she could never stand to be without her.

She’s never been a real artist anyway.