Work Text:
Shannon mentions it first in passing. She's standing in the dying rays of sun in the corner of her room, just in front of the window, books pushed aside so that she can perch her battered travel easel on top of the narrow table. Her palette lies unfolded beside it; oil paints doled out in little hillocks around the edge. She wields a palette knife in her right hand as she flips a divinium blade in her left. Mary sprawls on the bed watching her watch the glint of the blade in the sunlight, the way it casts flickers of light over the walls. Her boots are kicked up on the bedspread, legs crossed at the ankle, a well-worn novel lying face down beside her, spread open to mark her spot.
"It's like a hole," she says, and Mary hums in acknowledgement. It's hard to focus on Shannon's words when she's stripped down to a tank top, the contraction of her muscles stark, the scarred circle picked out in light and shadow. "It's like a hole," she repeats, "in the colour wheel." Mary's not sure whether she's talking to her or to herself. She's so often found Shannon nestled in an alcove with a travel palette balanced on her knee, murmuring under her breath as she picks up more colour on her brush, as she scrubs masking fluid away from a patch left unmarred by paint. "You can try your best to approximate the cyan of divinium glow with phthalo blues, can add phthalo greens, lighten with whites, but I've never been able to get the hue quite as sharp, quite as saturated, as the reality."
She turns and raises the knives for Mary's examination. The smear of paint seems similar to that eerie divinium blue, at least to Mary's eyes, but she can kind of see what Shannon's trying to get at. The paint seems dull by comparison, the way Beatrice's knives go stagnant when Shannon moves further into an uncleared hallway and the divinium settles in her wake.
"Genuine manganese blue has been out of production since the 90s," Shannon continues, turning back to her easel. Despite her dissatisfaction with the colour, she still picks it up on her brush. She doesn't move, presses the butt end of the brush to her lips. There's a smear of red across her cheek already, and Mary doesn't doubt the blue will shortly join it. "From pieces I've seen painted with it, it's maybe the only pigment that can fill that true cyan hole."
Mary snickers, and Shannon sets the knife on the tabletop so she can flip her the bird. "Why'd it go out of production? Was it like the whole Tyrian purple thing? The snail snot?"
"Snail mucus," Shannon corrects, but the corner of her mouth pulls up towards a smile. "It was a cost issue too, but more the prohibitive cost of production within stringent environmental regulations than the cost of scraping mucus out of a million snails."
"You've never painted with it, then?"
Shannon shakes her head. "Pigment stocks mostly ran dry in the mid 2000s, and before that I didn't exactly have the free rein or pocket change to go hunting for any."
"That's too bad," Mary murmurs half to herself. "Can't get any off eBay or something?"
"That's not the point, Mary." Shannon turns and gestures at her with the paint brush. "It's– Never mind. That's just not what I want." She takes a deep breath, exhales hard, shakes her head. "That's not what I want." She turns back to the easel. Mary pushes herself up to a seated position, to get a better view of the canvas, finds a lone streak of dull blue arcing across the piece, dwarfed by a red and black maelstrom.
It's the way she words it that sticks with Mary, that resonates through her head on stake-outs, bent over frying pans, in the quiet moments between one fight and the next. What I want. Shannon's never been one to easily express her wants, her desires, and for her to have laid this one bare between them is a marvel. A woman who has vowed to want for so little, who has had difficulty taking what she desires when it's been presented to her, longing for this one piece of history that sits just out of her reach.
The cobblestone streets along the canals are illuminated by streetlights casting gold down upon the passersby. Shannon's missed a curl of blood behind her ear again, despite their having a hotel room to retreat to after their success of a mission. The water pressure had been abominable, true, but really. Mary licks her thumb and reaches out to scrub it away.
"Gross," Shannon mutters, but she lets her, catches her hand after she's wiped her thumb dry on her jeans. Mary relaxes into the contact, laces their fingers together. It's not often they get this luxury anymore. She can't remember the last time they had the opportunity to just exist like this, in public, removed from the weight of habits and iconography. As much as they can be, when so much rides heavy between Shannon's shoulder blades.
Mary's eyes cross the window of a shop, then pull back. The kunst painted on the glass tugs at her, and she leads Shannon towards the storefront and into a dusty shop.
Shannon halts as she takes in the cramped aisles of art supplies, but Mary pulls her onwards towards the back wall and its cubbyholes of paint tubes.
"Mary–"
"PB33, right?" she clarifies, sliding her hand free of Shannon's so she can use both to sift through the shelves.
Shannon sighs, pinches the soft folds of sweater at her elbow and tugs. "They're not going to have any, Mary," she says softly. "Let's not waste what free time we have looking."
Mary's hands freeze on tubes of phthalo blue, PB15 screaming at her again and again. "Shannon, it's not a waste if it's for you."
Their search comes up empty in the shop in Amsterdam. So too in Budapest, in Riga, in every store they stop in on the heels of a mission. Mary, ribs aching from a blow with a rifle butt, starts with surprise and excitement in the rear of a small shop in Vienna, waving Shannon over from where she's slouched against the counter deep in conversation with the shop owner, but it's a false alarm. Shannon takes the tube from her, scrapes at the edge of the price tag with a fingernail, and peels it back to reveal it to be a mixture, PB15 and PW4.
"I told you," Shannon says, more withdrawn with every repetition, "let's not waste what time we have left."
Shannon falls and the halo is pulled from her back, lancing gold across Mary's upturned face. The brilliance of it is almost blinding, and when Mary turns back to Shannon the divinium in her chest is already fading, dulling with the distance as the surgeon flees with the halo, turning back to darkness in the ruin of Shannon's chest, the unlit sheen of phthalo blue fresh from the tube. Mary closes Shannon's eyes with an unsteady hand as they too go dim, as she too fades.
Mary fights for her memory, and fights for her family, and in the aftermath of the war she finds herself still in the habit of wandering unfamiliar cities. Still looking, always looking, for that missing piece. She walks cement sidewalks and cobblestone streets, always, always alone, her eyes roving across signs in search of variations on artista and pictor and kunst.
They're on the way home from a mission. Ava keeps saying they shouldn't call them that anymore but it's a habit now, as most things are. The sun sinks low on the horizon, winking back at them in the rearview mirror. Beatrice is behind the wheel as they pass through a village on the south coast of France when Mary spots a paintbrush on a wind-worn sign, when she trips over herself asking her to pull over. The shop is dusty and, on a passing glance, clearly over-priced, and the man behind the counter glares at her when she responds to his amicable greeting in broken French. He still directs her towards a wobbly table at the side of the shop, though, where paint tubes lie in messy piles, sorted only by hue. She filters through the blues swiftly, casting a glance over her shoulder to where Lilith's come into her peripheral vision, tapping on her watch face and gesturing towards the van. She fumbles to speed up, reaching the bottom of the pile and sending a tube spinning towards the edge of the table in her haste.
She snags it before it can make a bid for the freedom of the floor. Her eyes catch on the label and her breath catches in her throat. The thin paper is worn and tattered, but the text is still legible. She takes a second to read closer, to be certain.
PB33. No qualifiers. No mixes. Pure.
She reads the label again and again through eyes brimming with tears. The bell above the front door clangs as it opens, a second time as it closes, and the tang of seawater cuts through the musty air, but she can't give it any mind. Not when she's found Shannon in this tube, in this shop, on this mission. When she's found Shannon again in a colour that she'll never get to use.