Work Text:
John remembers Lisa drawing. He remembers the day she picked up a crayon at the orphanage, scrawling something across the paper. She took her time with it, pulling all different colors from the box—red, orange, blue, and green—and mixing them together across the page to create her scene. He sat next to her, watching. It was a free hour, and he had very little hobbies anyway, so he watched her work.
After a half hour she pushed herself up from where she was hunched over the paper with a grin. “Look, John!” She had said, shoving it towards him. John truthfully couldn’t tell what it was, couldn’t pick apart the sky from the ground—much less whatever the focal point of the piece was. He told her it was very pretty, anyway, because he was sure that it was. She took his shallow compliment, though, and vowed to draw every free hour for the rest of their lives. She did, too. Every moment she could, she sat down and drew, in one way or another. Even if it was with a stick in the mud when Sister Bell took them out into the corn fields, or in the margins of the Bible she was supposed to be reading out of instead. She started ripping out the pages she drew on. No one seemed to notice, if Corinthians II was a little shorter than it should’ve been, or if Genesis was almost gone from the book.
John liked watching her work. Liked how she hunched over and her brow furrowed in concentration. How she would bite her lip if she was particularly focused. More often than not he ended up watching her rather than paying attention to the piece she was working on. That part never mattered, whatever she would brandish towards him at the end. It did, because it was her work, but it was an extension of her and John would rather just focus on the way she would push her hair back if it fell in her eyes.
Even when the pictures became darker, a shadow in the cornfields, or red figures in the church. Even then, John liked watching Lisa draw.
He remembers her getting her first set of paints. The orphanage never had any, too expensive for the small town to want to donate. They would receive half used boxes of crayons and dried out markers, but never something as coveted as a paint set. It happened later, when they were in their late teens and not sure what they were going to do with their lives. She saved up all the allowance she had, and John provided the rest, and got a paint set and brushes. John still remembers the joy on her face as she took to it, pulling the brush across the canvas to and fro.
When they became adults and could reasonably afford to buy an easel, John pitched in again and bought her one. A nice one that she could stand at. She let him help her set it up, insomuch that his company was helping, and grinned the whole time. As she set her first canvas on it she looked at him and said, “John, I think I’m going to be an artist.”
He told her he thought she already was, and she laughed delightedly. It wasn’t much later he decided to pursue seminary school, and he thought there was something poetic in between those lines.
Lisa painted him a lot during that time. She painted him in his sweater, and she painted him in a cassock. She painted him reading and she painted him drinking coffee in the morning. She showed him all of them, of course, and even insisted he take some to his small accommodations and to hang up. She rarely did self portraits, though John always wished she would. She would brush him off and tell him he was a far prettier muse than she, that the blue of his eyes looked better painted than her brown ones. He disagreed. Privately, he thought if he was an artist, he didn’t think he would be able to paint anything other than her. She was already a painting, one that wouldn’t be out of place in the Vatican or Louvre. She had the nose of a goddess and her hair was the golden halo of an angel.
Even after he finished seminary school and became a priest, working his way to the bishop of a parish, she would still paint. She painted the Christmas cards she sent and his birthday ones. She moved from oil, to acrylic, to watercolour. He personally liked those the best, the washed out watercolors that looked like she had painted a dream. He kept all her cards in a scrapbook, placed up on his shelf next to a copy of the New Testament. He didn’t get to see as many of her normal paintings, busy as he was with the church and then eventually the failed exorcism of Amy Martin. Lisa painted his and Molly’s wedding. He didn’t like how it looked, how he looked in it. She was always too good at capturing his expressions and he didn’t like looking at the forced happiness he could overlook in the actual photos. Molly didn’t take it with her, either.
When Gary plunged the syringe into his neck and he lost himself to noise and visions, he remembers it looking like her paintings. He saw flashes of his life, of hounds tearing apart carcasses, of dead birds and of Miriam Bell, and it all looked like the paintings he had always hung up. Like he could only focus on them he would see the looping LP that was Lisa’s signature at the bottom. The colors shifted and spread in the way Lisa’s paintbrush did when she got frustrated with a piece. He could almost hear her commentary on them as they fluttered and breathed.
But, then he woke up, covered in the blood of thralls, and suddenly her paintings were far, far from his mind.
He didn’t think of them for a long time, as bad as he feels about it. Between the Crucible, then taking Lisa’s hand after it all, her paintings ended up pushed from his mind. He didn’t spare a thought until they were standing in her old apartment, salvaging anything she had left. Most of it was ruined; what wasn’t torn apart by blood and thralls had been looted. She managed to save sets of clothes, and it was while she was sorting through what remained of her closet that he found her easel and supplies. Her paints and brushes had been carefully put away in its storage box, and the easel pushed up against the wall. He couldn’t find any paintings, though.
“John, I don’t think there’s a lot here I can even save.”
John jumps at the sound of Lisa’s voice and nearly drops the paint box he’s holding. He fumbles for a moment with it, thankful that it had been latched shut.
“O-oh, uh, I have clothes at my house you can wear until you get more,” he offers.
Lisa tosses her duffle bag on the ground with a shake of her head. “Not just clothes, but I appreciate it.” She peers over at the box in his hands. “Oh! My paints were saved! I was certain they’d be collateral at this point.”
She takes the box and pops it open, doing a quick inventory check. She looks past him at her easel. “My easel, too! They looted my bookshelf, but the easel was too big, I guess.”
Lisa hands the paints to John and heaves the easel off the wall. “I’m going to grab this, do you think you can get my clothes?”
John shifts the box in his hands and grabs her duffle bag. It’s way lighter than it should be; she couldn’t have more than a few days of clothes left. He makes a mental note to go shopping with her, preferably in the next town over.
They drag the stuff down to his car, taking the stairs all the way because hell if either of them were going to take a step into that elevator. John has to lay down his back seat to make room for the easel in his little sedan, but they make it work. He helps her set up her painting station in his living room—maybe the spare room can be her studio, if he ever brings himself to open that door again.
Lisa doesn’t actually touch her paints for weeks, though. She’d look at the easel, curled up in the corner of the couch. Her fingers trace swirling designs into the suede, but she never moves further than that. John wants to ask her about it, ask why she dragged the thing down 5 flights of stairs only to watch it with a haunted longing, but he doesn’t. She doesn’t push him to open the spare room door, even when she helps him take down the crosses, so he doesn’t ask. He buys her canvases a couple times, though, and leaves them propped up on the wall where they had pushed the table aside.
It isn’t until one morning he comes downstairs, honestly so late it was nearly afternoon, to find her standing at her easel, a palette in her hand. She’s pulling the paint across the canvas in broad angry strokes, the brush pushed so hard against the material he became worried it would puncture through. She’s still in her pajamas, her hair down and wild around her shoulders, the brush clenched knuckle-white in her hand. She doesn’t hear him approach her, lost in whatever she was doing. John doesn’t know if he should even interrupt her, as she throws paint stroke upon paint stroke on the canvas in a frenzy. Back and forth then back and forth her brush moves. He can’t even make out what the painting is . It’s all reds and blues that mix into sickly purples. Jagged and sharp shapes that cut across each other and the canvas.
He opens his mouth to—he doesn’t know, call her name maybe, but she screams and throws the palette at the canvas with enough force the easel teeters and falls backwards, crashing horribly against the floor. Lisa stands there, panting, running paint stained hands through her hair and tugging.
John reaches out, and gently touches her shoulder. She spins on her heel, rearing back. John’s hands fly up, palms outward. He tries to make a placating sound, maybe even her name. He manages a half-formed shh sound, and Lisa’s focus snaps on him.
Her eyes are wide. They flicker between looking at him and past him, at his hands and his face. Her mouth gapes and closes, like she’s trying to figure out how to form words. Her fingers grasp at her sleeves and her hair, tugging and pulling. John reaches out, slowly, letting her watch his movements. He takes her hands in his, squeezing gently. She squeezes back, hard enough that his fingers begin to ache. She clutches him like a lifeline, searching his face frantically. He pulls her close, slowly, slowly, till he can wrap his arms around her. She immediately falls into his embrace, squeezing him as tightly as she did his hands. She smells like dry shampoo and paint. John holds her there, rocking gently. He listens as her breathing slows down, waits till her embrace loosens just enough that he stops worrying about a rib breaking.
He still doesn’t say anything, just rocks her back and forth. Holds her like she holds him when he gets like this, caught between memory and reality. Her hands move up and down his back, feeling and searching. Remembering she’s safe, she’s held not in the throes of a demonic possession but in the embrace of someone she loves.
He waits till she stops rocking with him, till her hands stop moving and just curl up between his shoulder blades. She breathes with John, matching their inhales and exhales. They stand there for anywhere between a few minutes and an hour, just the two of them.
“Thank you,” she murmurs, soft but so loud in the silence around them.
“Of course,” he says, “Are you…okay?”
It's kind of a lame question, but Lisa’s soft huff is good enough for him. “Could be better. Would be better if that damn cult never existed.”
“Yeah,” he agrees and nuzzles his face into her hair. He doesn’t ask what he wants to, too afraid to push her too far.
Lisa knows what he’s thinking, though, always has: “I missed painting. I haven’t painted since—honestly since you got married to Molly. I tried when I moved into that apartment, but it was never right . Something was always wrong about whatever I was painting. The eyes were wrong, the smile was too big…I don’t know. I think I had been waiting for a cathartic release, maybe.”
Lisa sniffles wetly into John’s sleep shirt. John takes in a breath, thinking. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.” It was woefully underwhelming, and he knew it. He had never been good with words, not the way Lisa was. She knew that though, like she knew the exact things to say to ground him when he needed it.
“Thanks,” Lisa pushes back from John a little, “I’ll be okay. It’s easier, I think, having you here. Not being alone helps me from reliving what happened there.”
She lets go of him completely. The paint on her hands have dried but the smears on her shirt and in her hair still glisten slightly, wet.
“Anyway I-”
“Go shower-”
They both speak at the same time, and shut up just as quickly. John gestures for Lisa to continue, but she waves him on in return. There’s a quick back and forth of gesturing before John caves.
“Go shower, I’ll pick up your easel.”
Lisa frowns at that, but gently tugs on a drying glob of red paint in her hair and decides an argument isn’t worth it. “Okay.”
As Lisa disappears up the stairs John goes to pick up the fallen canvas. It honestly isn’t a bad piece; it was abstract and conveyed a desperation and rage John is deeply familiar with. He sets it aside to let Lisa decide if she wanted to keep it. He straightens the easel and picks up the palette, grimacing as he looks at the paint left on the ground. Thankfully it was on the kitchen tile, not the wood flooring, but it would still take scrubbing where it had dried.
If she can’t paint, John muses, maybe she could pick up another medium.
__
John goes out a few days later, early in the morning. He makes the drive into New Haven, and early as it is he makes it there in decent time. As he wanders the aisles of the art shop he can’t help but feel slightly overwhelmed. He knew of mediums in the vaguest sense, in which ones Lisa had played around with or not. The clerk had eventually wandered by and offered to help, and soon enough John was walking out with a fairly expensive box of oil pastels and a sketchbook.
Lisa is still asleep when he gets back, so he sets about making them coffee and breakfast. Nothing particularly fancy, just quick-make pancakes, but it’ll do. The coffee pot just finished brewing when he feels two arms wrap around his middle. The tired groan against his back tells him Lisa had finally managed to drag herself out of bed.
“Why are you dressed?” She mumbles into his shirt.
“I went shopping,” John says simply, already scooching over to pour her a cup. He manages to pry off her koala grasp by pushing the steaming mug into her hands. She mumbles a thanks and shuffles to sit at the table. He soon pushes a plate of pancakes in front of her, which earns him a smile.
John is too wired with nerves to eat. The pastels are still in the bag from the store, tucked safely away in a cabinet. Lisa must notice his fidgeting, though, because her fork pauses between the plate and her mouth. She raises an eyebrow at him, a hint of a smile on her lips. “What?”
He tries to shrug demurely, coy even, but Lisa’s known him too long and knows when to push. “What is it, John?” She’s grinning now, leaning forward.
She tries to keep a straight face, he really does, but the excitement is getting to him. He mirrors her grin as he says, “I got you something.”
He stands up and retrieves the bag from under the sink. Lisa pushes away her plate to make room for the bag in front of her. She looks as giddy as John feels, and he thinks that maybe they needed something like this, just a place to be happy without condition. Lisa is already opening the bag as John sits down and he’s treated to a delighted gasp.
“Oh, John!” Lisa pulls out the sketchbook and pastels, setting the bag on the ground beside her. She’s turning the pastel box in her hands, inspecting every part of it. “These are nice ones, too!”
“Yeah, I- uh, thought maybe you could use another medium? As an outlet?”
Lisa looks up at him with bright eyes, misty tears threatening to fall. She places the box down so, so gently, and stands up. She wraps her arms around his shoulders, and leans down to place a wet kiss to his cheek. He chuckles in amusement as she does it twice more. She moves back and cups his face in her hands, to which he immediately leans into the touch. “John, you silly man, you treat me too well.”
“I don’t think that’s possible, Lisa,” he says. She gives him one more loud kiss on his forehead and pulls back. She picks up her pastels once more, weighing them in her hands, thinking. John moves to clean up breakfast while she thinks, scraping the rest of her plate into the trash and runs it under the sink. There’s a warmth bubbling in his chest, threatening to flow through his veins with a happiness he hasn’t felt recently.
“John?”
“Hm?”
“Would you let me draw you?”
John blinks. He turns to look at Lisa and sees her staring firmly down at her box, with a slight look of apprehension ghosting her features. Her figures are clenched around it, a slight tremor. John can’t tell what she’s thinking, but he answers without hesitation.
“Yeah, sure, of course. I don’t look good right now, though,” he warns, running his hands through his overgrown hair to prove his point. Lisa’s face relaxes, if only slightly. Her hands loosen around her pastel box.
“I don’t need a playboy model, John. I want to draw you as you are.”
John’s heart does a little flip at that, in the same way it always had when she asked to draw him. He sits on the couch, sat straight in his best model pose. Lisa’s face softens into a smile, grabbing her sketchbook and joining him.
She looks at him only to get a vague outline of his face, though he’s sure she could draw him perfectly from memory. He waits until she curls up against the arm of the couch, sketchbook across her lap. She doesn’t say anything when he leans up against her or when he rests his head against her shoulder. It’s a position both are used to, curled up against each other as they work. He watches and she fills in the lines of his face and nose, shaping out his hair. She works quickly, mostly off of muscle memory. She clicks her tongue when she accidentally smears her hand across his ear, but is otherwise silent. He watches her hand scratch across the page until his eyes feel heavy and sluggish. He briefly considers fighting the feeling, but honestly he rarely sleeps, these days, and Lisa is busy anyway. So, he lets his eyes drift close.
He lets the scratch of the pastel on the paper and the sound of Lisa’s breaths wash over him. They pull him towards sleep, a temptation of sweet memory. He’ll just take a quick nap, and Lisa will wake him when she’s done, and show him her piece. He’ll hang it…maybe above his TV, if she lets him. He’d fill the house with her paintings, if she’d let him.
He’s on the vestiges of sleep when he murmurs: “Love you, Lisa.”
Lisa gently taps her head to John’s. “Love you too, John.”