#I could find no reference images for how whirlpools would look at this angle

[elairetexe]

“Acho I’m pulling you in- ACHO!”

Click for better quality, timelapse and me screaming about this moment under the read more

Timelapse:

OH MY GOD THIS MOMENT IS LITERALLY MY FAVOURITE THING EVER?? I HAVE REWATCHED THE STREAM SO MANY TIMES AHHDJDKSNSNSMS!! The way Owen was so quick to volunteer to dangle Acho in, they way she missed every opportunity to grab onto something?? The fucking way he yelled Acho’s name when falling into the whirlpool is just AUGH!! Also I will never forget how Owen said “if we weren’t still attached to eachother I would’ve drowned”. What do you mean by that why aren’t I seeing more angsty fics about it??

[dragonscanbeplantstoo]

Oil & Sky: echoes from the trash

The Price of Honey

Maeva drops her brush in water and turns away from her canvas. Her left hand is throbbing, and a dull ache lingers in her right, just in the tendons below the edge of her cast. She gives her fingers a light shake and turns back around. She scans her painting from a distance, checking the values and proportions. The surface undulates in greens and grays; bubbly, graceful, the shapes uncannily familiar without being obvious. But she knows. The uneven glazing of the focal points, the patchy blending between colors. She knows they are there, even if she can’t see them. Courtesy of left-handed painting. Solutions are percolating behind her eyes before she summons them. She is itching to throw them at her canvas.

But, the paint is wet, and her hands have lost their luster for now. Maeva relaxes her cheeks with a scoff. She checks her watch. It is time, above all things, for coffee. Caffeine will make her content again, and allow her to finish her finance homework before class. She does her best to dry the wet paint on her hands, soaking up the oil with a cloth, and picks her bag up off the sofa.

Outside, the early air is dim and cool-toned. The buttery sun tones are still hidden behind the Eastern halls. Maeva stops walking to blink upward. It reminds her of Paris in very early spring. The gray and silver and edges of the tower cutting into the blotted sky.

She takes an immediate seat on the cobblestones, next to a smudged chalk piece someone has done of Frida Kahlo, and slides her sketchbook from her bag. Squinting at the sky again, she begins dragging and scratching her pencil across the page. Catching the shapes and angles she’s thinking of, the different values of gray, building a sense of how a painting will come together. This is exactly how she thinks a piece of art should come into existence. The spark of seeing something pretty, tearing it down to its core and pulling out only the most beautiful pieces. There’s something so utterly pure in it, untainted by joy or bitterness or extraneous messages. When she has excised the basic shapes from brain to page, she closes the book, and sighs. She gets back to her feet and cuts across the grass to the café.

It’s another world inside, a Renoir world. Colors and bodies pushed together in an elegant sort of blur. Humid and loud with students packed all the way to the corners. Dancers tacky-skinned after AM classes, rehearsal-exhausted actors hunched over steaming cups of espresso, musicians barking at other musicians over jostled instrument cases. The congregation at the counter is thick and dark, hands going up wildly as they fight for the attention of baristas and flag down friends. Maeva steps around an old prop statue and a group of students seated on floor cushions. She glances through the crowd to see if there is an empty spot on the floor. Fate is not on her side.

“Maeva!”

She turns her head and finds Corin waving at her. Maeva steps over to him and stares down at the music he has spread in front of him.

“How did you get a table?”

As a rule, the tiny, rickety tables in the café are permanently occupied by the fourth-year theater students, who have their rehearsals well into the witching hours. In her two years here, she’s obtained a table exactly twice. Both times occurred because she was in the studio overnight, and because she got lucky.

He laughs at her. “I came to practice really early this morning. Do you want to sit with me?”

Maeva pretends she nods because it’s easier to do homework at a table. Not because his ankle bone propped against his knee is achingly pretty, and certainly not because her sternum is insisting on proximity to him.

“I’m going to get coffee first.” She glances at the empty cup by his English dictionary. “Do you want more tea?”

“I’d love some.” He slips his wallet out of his back pocket.

She shakes her head. “Put that away, it’s like two cents.”

“It’s ten, but thank you. Ginger tea with honey, please.”

Maeva slithers her way up to the counter and orders from the first-year with the lackluster French. She’s grown to prefer him though, because he’s fast. He produces her noisette and Corin’s tea in less time than it takes her to pull coins from her wallet. She has to hold the cups in close and work her way back with care—it’s always easier to get in the café than get out.

“You’re an angel, Maeva Leroux.” Corin says when he takes his cup from her.

Of course he’s referring to tea, but she can’t help but think back to his words in the park a few weeks ago. You’re the reason my heart is still beating. Maeva hides her face behind her own cup and wiggles her math book out of her bag. Corin scoots his music and dictionaries to the side to give her some space. She pops the book open and sighs immediately.

“Wow, I don’t think I’ve ever heard that much air escape your lungs.” Corin leans back with his tea.

“I think it’s apparent how I feel about subjects unrelated to painting.” She says as she writes out the first problem.

“Apparent?” Corin raises an eyebrow. “You’re not as mild as you make yourself out to be, Maeva.”

She glances up at him. “Neither are you.”

He smiles and shrugs in agreement, then rests his tea on the English dictionary and resumes his work. Maeva rests her chin on her hand and works through her math. She realizes that she’s begun to find his presence oddly soothing. It feels like she has less to worry about when she can see him. It’s probably his stupidly pretty face. She gets a similar feeling when she has a Monet hanging over her head.

She taps her pencil against the second problem. It’s different. Of course it’s different. There’s no way she’s going to finish these before class.

“Something wrong?” Corin asks. He has stopped working to drink tea again.

Maeva follows his example and swallows her coffee, washing the irritation into her stomach to die. “I don’t know how to do this one. It looks different than the example.”

He leans forward to peer at the page. “Oh, there’s just an extra variable, so you do this step twice.”

She snaps her chin up, and his eyes are very close to hers, massive blue whirlpools. He blinks.

“What?”

“You’re good at maths.”

“Oh.” A smile breaks through the confusion on his face. “I mean, passably. Music is basically just maths with feelings. Are you having trouble with it?”

“My grade starts with a two.”

“Oh, fuck.” He sets his tea down. “Well let me help you then.”

She shakes her head. “No, no. You have your own work to do, it’s going to take too long for you to walk me through every single different problem.”

He narrows his eyes. “You…speak German, right?”

“Um, yes. Why?”

Corin snaps open his binder and pulls out a thick stack of music. “Translate these for me while I do your homework. I’ll walk you through what I did afterward. If you want.”

She stares at the music caught under his thumb.  She is torn briefly between her fear of further entanglement with him, and her desire to escape to graduate school. She picks graduate school. Corin laughs as she snatches the music from him.  

“You’ll have to tell your professor you realized writing neater made them easier to solve.” He says, dragging her mathematics book to his side. “You write like a parakeet.”

Maeva scoffs at his criticism and watches him breeze through an equation in neat, blocky handwriting. It doesn’t suit him at all. She turns her attention to his music. The words are written with lots of weird spacing and dashes beneath the notes, but it’s easy enough to parse out phrases. She writes the most literal French translation she can underneath, paging through an entire song in just a few minutes. She misses her German classes. It will be nice to start speaking it again once she gets to graduate school. Assuming she makes it there. She swishes a big swallow of coffee around her mouth and returns to the songs.  They’re all painfully pretty poems; she wishes she could sound out the music that they are set to. She finishes the last one—a Mozart—and puts the stack back in order. As she taps the edges into place, she checks on Corin, and finds him hunched down on his elbows over her book. He has his lower lip caught between his incisors, and two parallel creases between his eyebrows. His eyelashes cast a shadow on the page.

As a rule, Maeva never draws the same face twice. She remembers faces only for the expressions that cross them; her sketchbooks are full of acutely detailed vignettes of bitterness, fury, heartbreak, dejection, mischief. Shapes that haunt her perfect memory and refuse to leave until she immortalizes them.  

But looking at Corin now—the way his chin is tilted down, and his fingers are curved around the pencil, and that delicate puzzlement across his forehead—she wants to draw him twice. She knows she’s going to draw him twice. The image will live in her head and slowly gain weight until she does.

She might even draw him in color. Break out all of her golden and brown pencils. Find the right rosy color to mix in for his mouth, the right orange to capture his undertones. Experiment with blues until she picks out the perfect combinations to match his eyes.  

He flicks them up at her. “Oh, sorry, are you done? I’m almost there.”

Maeva shakes her head and picks up her coffee. “Don’t be sorry. You’re already getting through it in half the time I would.”

He shrugs. “I took this class two semesters ago, I have a leg up.”

Maeva rolls her eyes at his insistence on deflecting compliments. The crowd at the counter has thinned to look less like a wall, so she takes their cups to be refilled. While the slower barista meticulously measures the espresso grounds out, Maeva slips her phone from her pocket. She texts her mother back, confirming that she’ll swing by the boucherie for a chicken on the way home. Then she taps on an email from her photography professor.

Maeva,

You’ve still not submitted a proposal for your final project. I would like you to submit as soon as possible so we have a chance to review/make changes. If you’re still struggling to come up with an idea, I’d be happy to brainstorm with you during office hours.

Best,

Professor Cairn  

Maeva reads it twice, her lips pinching a little tighter each time. She hides her phone away again as two full cups are presented on the counter.

“Oh, thank you.” Corin says when she sets his back on his dictionary. He picks it up and takes a slow swallow. “I’m so scared I’m going to get a cat in my throat before finals.”

Maeva settles down across from, seeing that he has closed her textbook and set her finished homework neatly on top. And he called her an angel.  

She asks him, “are you excited though? About the scout and everything?”

“I’m so excited.” He sighs, his eyes making a dreamy trip to the ceiling. “I’ve been waiting for this for so long. I mean, there’s no guarantee I’ll get in, of course. But it isn’t even about that. It’s like…” he bites his lip. “The moment I’ve been working toward isn’t the acceptance, it’s being good enough to stand on a stage in front of them.”

Maeva lifts her eyebrow. “Your debutante moment?”

He laughs. “Something like that. What about you? Is the moment you unveil your portfolio going to be exhilarating, or terrifying?”

Maeva thinks that those are very strong words. She’s only ever been terrified once in her life, the night she found him, and she is still healing from the havoc that word wrecked inside her body. She does not want to imagine what the other side of that coin is.

She says, instead, “my professors can already see my pieces coming together. I doubt it will be as dramatic as all that.”

He prods her shoe with his. “Are you nervous about anything?”

She gives him a dull look, because he has seen her nervous more times than anyone except her mother. That’s a very full spectrum of nerves—the emotions closing in around her, graduating, the constant threat of a headache, her nightmares. His smile disappearing forever. Corin raises his eyebrow, like he still wants an answer.  

“I mean, I’m almost ready to throw in the sponge on my photography class.”

“What? But I thought you were hell-bent on getting out this year.”  

She rests a finger against her temple. “Please don’t remind me.”

“Sorry.” Corin winces. “Can I ask what the problem is?”

Maeva snorts. “Yes, that’s easy. My professor doesn’t like my photographs, he thinks they lack artistry or something.”

He tilts his head. “Well, do they? Something tells me you have a low opinion of photography.”

That angle under these lights bathes his cheekbone in a color like goldenrods. Someone this pretty should not be allowed to be this perceptive. It is thoroughly unfair and Maeva dislikes it immensely.

“I think photography has it’s uses.” She picks her cup up. “Just…not for me. I don’t need a photo of something to remember it.”

“Yeah that’s true.” Corin takes another sip of his tea. “But I can’t imagine you’re bad at it. What does he want from you?”

“I don’t know.” Maeva waves her non-coffee-containing hand. “He wants something more, something that ‘showcases my eye for color and light’.”

“Huh.” Corin frowns that over. “You should just take pictures of a concert then, that would be a great place to play with color and light. Literally.”

“I don’t think it’s that simple.”

“Or are you just making it too complicated?”

She rolls her eyes. “I’m not, that would just be boring! Why would I take pictures of a concert when I could draw it in rainbow colors and make it so much more than it already is.”

He laughs outright at her. “But concerts do that inherently. When you put music with beautiful visuals and have people listen to it together, it becomes transcendent. That’s why opera has stuck around so long.” Corin leans his chin into his hands. “There’s nothing boring about capturing that moment.”

Maeva narrows her eyes at him. “You just want me to take pictures of you.”

He grins right back. “Well don’t you want to take pictures of me?”

Maeva sucks a furious breath in through her nose. Her teeth clamp down, then her lips, thinner and tighter and thinner and tighter. Corin’s smile is a wall of effervescence.

She is saved from having to snipe back by Corin’s pleasantly sepia friend sidling up to the table. Corin turns away from her so they can kiss each other’s cheeks.

“Maeva, you’ve met Sacha, right?”

“Briefly.” Maeva says, remembering the red around his dusty eyes. They look fine today. “You look like you’re feeling better.”

“Much. It’s been a good few weeks. And you?”

“You know, the usual finals season.” Maeva murmurs. “I smell turpentine in my dreams.”

“Oh my god, yes.” Sacha tosses his head. “Except, rosin, obviously.”

Corin snorts. “I smell rosin in my dreams by now.”

Sacha tugs one of the curls on top of Corin’s head. “Then you don’t practice enough.”  

“Who was up at three to practice today?” Corin sneers. “Not you.”

While they bicker about what singing would even smell like, Maeva settles in to finish her coffee. Then, Sacha rests his taupe knuckles on one of Corin’s dictionaries, and she sees the face of his watch.

“Oh my god, it’s almost ten.” They frown as her as she bolts from her chair. She says, “I’m late for class. I have to go. Thanks, Corin.”

As soon as she gets her bag in her hands, she is shoving her way out the door. She blinks against the sunlight and steps off the path toward the Ack building.

Behind her, someone sings in a sweet, silvery tone: “Maaaaaeva, stop walking!”

She stops, and turns. Corin raises an eyebrow and waves her math book at her. She strides back to him.

“Oh, thank you.” She hugs it to her chest. “I mean, thank you for your help too. I would never have gotten it done otherwise.”

“Thank you for doing my translations.” Corin says. “You should get going. Call me if you need help again.”

She nods, thinking she can’t afford not to, and tears her eyes off of him. As she speed-walks down the path, she glances over her shoulder and sees him walking back toward the café. It unnerves her, how deeply she wants to follow him.