The Muse at Lughnasa
by DebbieB



Challenge: Klimt's The Girlfriends
Notes: Written for the Brushstrokes and Broomsticks Ficathon. Not sure why the work brought my mind to Lughnasa, but it did. First harvest, end of summer. The beauty of the mature sun in its descent into autumn. Color me poetic, okay?


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She's tired. The light is hot and her neck crackles like a young fire proving itself on a summer night. The cloak hangs heavy and damp on her bare skin, turban wound tightly around her head, and she wants nothing more than a cool shower and a hearty meal.

All around her are the trappings of art, of brilliance and genius and tormented faith in the power of brush and pigment. She should be more eloquent, more studied in her silent agonies, no pain on the face, never the face or in the carriage of the body.

The model is an ideal. Ideals are not meant for sore backs or hot, sweaty skin. The moment is in the colors of the cape, the curve of the breast, the pink tint of the cheek. The eternity is in the brush stroke and the understanding and the vision made manifest by hands caught to eyes and heart spoken with movement.

No place for hunger gnawing at her stomach. Stomach is flat, with the slightest curve, lovely but never pretty. Pretty is uninteresting, but lovely works. Lovely works in a good way.

There is a bird in profile at her right arm, with wild colors and eyes too bold. She thinks it's silly, but doesn't complain. Her lips are rouged, more than she wears in her every day life, and she feels a bit scarlet with it on. Her skin, normally tanned from so many days out of doors, is pale from the winter, but that's how her artist, her lover, wants it, how it works in the frame of the picture, how it offsets the bold colors against black fabric.

She wants to stretch out, to pull out of this pose she's held for so long. She wants to lounge in an unattractive position, a vulgar pose, completely unsuitable for anything but comfort. She wants to yawn and squint her eyes against the damned light.

She wants to lay her head on her lover's shoulder, to bring her into the images she dissects with those brooding eyes, to pull the artist onto the canvas with her muse.

She wears red, her beautiful genius, her lover with the pigments. She has done her own hair up, turbaned and efficient, wanting no distractions from the magic she conjures, the ritual mixing and dabbing of paints on canvas.

There is an urge to disobedience, to outright rebellion. The model is drawn to this defiance by gravity more insistent than that of the sun for its satellite planets. She fights the urge to sprawl, legs splayed in an outrageous way, hands probing downward to toy with her own body.

Would she notice? Would she come down from that odd, distant perch in her mind, where everything is seen in panorama? Would she be angry? Disappointed?

Would she frown, her secret artist, to find that her muse has desires? Wants?

Can a muse want? Should she? It doesn't matter, because want she does, and no amount of shoulds or cans will change that want.

She wants a cool bath, with rose oil and peppermint. She wants a massage, and sweet white grapes. She wants to be more in her lover's eyes than shapes and planes and colors and light. She wants to howl, flying her broom skyward and casting wanton silhouettes against the full moon.

But she holds herself tightly, loving the person on the other side of that canvas enough to wait. Loving her enough to bear the pain, the boredom, the hunger pangs and bleary eyed exhaustion. And when her artist looks up, she sees with her heart instead of her aching body.

Sees the frustration.

Sees the desire in those eyes.

She wants to make beauty. She wants to take what her eyes and heart and soul see, and translate it into color and shape. She wants to illustrate that animal reality inside of her, the feline part of her that sees more than men see, smells and tastes and feels more than mere humans can ever understand. She wants to share herself.

When she looks at her artist, so different in this studio than the woman she is to the rest of the world, she sees love. Unshielded, unashamed love for her muse and her world.

There are no schedules here. No rules or Houses or duties to constrict the artist inside that she hides so well. And it's worth the discomfort to give her these scant hours of release from the burden she shoulders silently, unfailing, as right hand to the greatest Headmaster Hogwarts has ever known. And it's worth the discomfort to see the light of inspiration in those eyes, normally so staid and respectable behind her square-rimmed spectacles. To know she is the inspiration for that look of utter and abandoned artistic fervor.

A few dabs of paint, varying brush strokes, hot lights, aching muscles.

What a small price to pay to see her Minerva really smile.

And when it's done, she'll fuss over it, say it's no good, try to paint over it, hoping for perfection in the next try, always the next try.

And the painting will go safely to Madam Hooch's rooms to be hung with all the others Minerva has painted over the years, the imperfect tributes of love she paints for her Xiomara, in her red cloak and turbaned hair, far from the staggering burden of Professor McGonagall.

And it will be beautiful.

The End


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