I've been doing "OC fic sketches" to try to practice writing more, mostly taking old unpublished Western AU/Gilded Age AU comic scripts that I wrote a month ago and turning them into prose.. This one got long-ish so I put it under a cut.
"Hold still, Rafi, and let me rub it in properly, or it'll just look like I gave you a split lip." Rafa dabbed at her brother's mouth with her fingertip, painting it rose-petal red.
Rafi studied the face across from him that was almost the spitting image of his own—same large, brown eyes, dark brows, full lips—but softer and more finely featured. He allowed himself to pretend, not for the first time, that he was simply viewing his own reflection. Would the application of his sister's makeup hide their subtle differences, or serve to bring his squarer jaw and broader nose into sharper contrast with her own, he wondered. They had both been surprised by the way one of her spare flower-print gowns, scaffolded by corset and chest padding, had sculpted his lanky body into a convincingly girlish figure.
"All this time I didn't know I had a sister," Rafa had laughed, sounding pleased, while Rafi twirled the lace-trimmed skirts around his slim calves. But he remembered there had been a time—he was sure this was a real memory—when they were still quite small, before he'd been torn away from her to be given a new sister and new father, when they would sneak away to swap clothes and see how long it would take their mother to notice. Sometimes she would go the whole day without noticing.
Now, as Rafa swiped her thumb across the coin-sized tin of wax lip color, concern furrowed her brow. She pressed her thumb onto his bottom lip, then paused.
"Are you sure you want to do this?" she asked. "If you don't, I can tell Papadakis to go to hell."
She leaned in close to hear his voice, which never rose above a whisper now. When he parted his mouth to answer, he felt the waxy tip of her thumb slide past his lips slightly and tap against his front teeth.
Any answer he may have given was interrupted by a voice from the door.
"How often he gave his lips in vain to the deceptive pool…"
They both jerked away from each other in surprise, and the sudden turn of Rafi's face toward the door caused his sister's thumb to smear a vivid streak of color from his crimson mouth to nearly his earlobe.
"Oh no, did I come in too soon? Am I interrupting a private moment? I should have knocked." Mr. Papadakis leaned against the door frame, arms crossed, peering down his nose at them through his glasses. He looked like he was trying not to laugh.
Rafa sighed and snapped the lid onto her tin of lipstick. "I was just trying to get him all dolled up for the camera, like you asked."
When Mr. Papadakis had proposed the idea of the photoshoot, she'd initially refused to have anything to do with the project and had declined on Rafi's behalf as well. "What, are you worried the wrong person will recognize your face if it's printed on some under-the-counter postcard? They'll be too busy looking at your tits, sweetheart," Mr. Papadakis had scoffed. But he assured her he had no intention of distributing the photographs, and that the project was "merely a visual panegyric to love, in the vein of Aristophanes," destined only for his "private collection".
"I know my reputation's not exactly sterling, but I don't need any trouble with the law," he'd said. "They're throwing obscenity charges at any artist they don't like these days. Why paint a target on myself, eh?"
Now he pulled a handkerchief from his back pocket, shaking his head chidingly, like parent who's caught his child trying on her mother's cosmetics. He took Rafi's chin in his hand, and Rafi turned his head obediently and let the smudged lip color be wiped from his cheek.
"She's made a real mess of your face there, Rafael. You look like someone spilled some extra paint on a Toulouse-Lautrec."
He tilted the young man's chin up to meet his gaze and winked. "Or is this Rafa? Even harder to tell you two apart now. I'd think you were honest-to-god identical twins if I didn't know what you've got hiding under those skirts of yours."
Rafi's face reddened to match his tinted lips. Rafa rolled her eyes.
"Actually, now, this isn't a bad look on you," Mr. Papadakis murmured once he'd finished wiping Rafi's cheek. "Maybe after you're done modelling, you and I can pick up where we left off the other day—"
Rafa stepped between the two and glared up at Mr. Papadakis, who would have sworn she was standing on the balls of her feet in an attempt to make up for their nearly half-foot height difference.
"Rafi, you don't have to do anything with him."
Mr. Papadakis laughed. "How rude of me! Apologies, Rafi."
He bowed his head slightly at Rafa. "I should have consulted Rafi's pimp first, of course. How much for a private appointment with this one, madam?"
Rafa's mouth fell open. "I'm not—"
"Actually, hold on." He grinned. "How much extra would it cost to have you stay and join us?"
Rafa raised her hand to slap Mr. Papadakis across the face, but he caught her arm by the wrist.
"Whoa, easy girl. Clearly I've touched a nerve." He looked between the two, eyebrows raised. "Or several."
He turned to Rafi, still holding Rafa's wrist. She tried to yank her arm out of his grasp, but his grip was like steel.
"What do you think, Rafi?" he said pleasantly. "Are you going to defend your sister? Or do you think she should be punished for trying to lay a hand on the man who has so generously plucked her out of the brothel and loaned her a room in his house? Well? Speak, boy."
Rafi opened his neatly painted mouth, then closed it. His teeth tasted like beeswax and tallow. He stared at a spot in the distance beyond their faces and said nothing, just shook his head.
Rafa jerked her arm back again, finally freeing it. "Don't tease him," she hissed. "You know he doesn't like to talk."
"Your mother only saw fit to give you one name, and God only saw fit to give you one voice." Mr. Papadakis put a hand on each of the twin's heads and ruffled their hair fondly. "How sweet that you two are so willing to share everything."
—
Notes:
"How often he gave his lips in vain to the deceptive pool" — Felix is quoting a line from Ovid's Metamorphoses about the Greek mythical figure Narcissus, an unfortunate young man who falls in love with his own reflection in a pool.
"some under-the-counter postcard" — Not referring to actual postcards sent in the mail, these were more like the precursors to porno magazine pin-ups.
"a visual panegyric to love, in the vein of Aristophanes" — Refers to a speech given in Plato's Symposium, about a Greek myth that imagined that each human was born joined to another until the god Zeus severed them in two.
"They're throwing obscenity charges at any artist" — This AU takes place around the time when Oscar Wilde was fighting charges of sodomy and gross indecency in the courts.
"like someone spilled some extra paint on a Toulouse-Lautrec" — Artist of the era known for painting scenes of can-can dancers and bordello workers.
Kitkat once tried to explain to me (Jewish. Raised Jewish. By Jews) that acceptably Christian media did in fact have Christian heaven and hell or whatever even if it’s not set within our world, while we were discussing warrior cats spirituality and how Christian it was to me. I kept being like ‘but what about stories set in universes other than ours where there was never Jesus or anything??? Surely that is okay? Because they’re not choosing something else, it just doesn’t exist?’ And Kitkat kept being like no. No they have to have Jesus anyway. And I was like WHAT!! HOW! And they were like there is a whole genre of this. And I was like WHY!!!! Anyway that’s my story
i did in fact teach rafi about the christian fantasy genre. their life has been worse for this.
