ficpost: "Sunripe, Moonrot" (Nina/Faith)
Title: Sunripe, Moonrot
Fandom: Buffyverse
Pairing: Faith/Nina
Rating: R.
Spoilers/Timeline: If you've met both characters, you're set.
Notes: For lafemmedarla in the Faith II round of femslash_minis. She requested mangoes, dancing, and leather.
Summary: Not painting, nor sculpture, nor pottery will conform to the artwork of Faith's movement.
Wordcount: 681



Sunripe, Moonrot

Faith's dancing is unpaintable, but gorgeous. Her mouth, colored with stolen lipstick and always rounded for kissing, her nose, which wrinkles with desire when she laughs, her eyes, large and fearful and almost liquid with promise, are all curves, luscious, like Saturday evenings, tango lessons, the freshness of exotic fruit, the juice of a pomegranate or the stickiness of papaya dripped onto her skin. Faith's face, from far away, is unreal and bright, and at this angle, Nina, watching, can imagine the spill of Faith's hair is an invitation, Gauguin's Women with Mango Blossoms, bare-breasted and open. She could paint this, with broad brush strokes, capture the willingness, the smoothness of Faith's features, the exuberance of her expression. Faith loves to dance.

But her dancing is angular, her legs confined by stiff leather and her upper body almost jagged as she thrusts her breasts forward, her hips back, seeking contact with any other creature. Like the wolf, she is indiscriminate, and like the wolf, she exists as broken lines in Nina's mind, drawn with expensive, heady ink, then colored with smudgy charcoal to hide the bleakness of the lines, the emptiness of the desire they enclose. The wolf is a cavern howling at the center of Nina's heart, raw, unfulfillable longing to chase and kill and mate, and it's a bloodlust like the predatory swing of Faith's body when she attacks a dance floor or a vampire, her whole body tense and suspicious and fearlessly alert for signs of danger or desire. Nina could not draw this any more than she could draw the moon that, even at waning crescent, fills her with a bubbling sob that begins in her gut and rises to her brain, daring her to ignore it, let the wave break, drown in the howl.

Faith is like that, and worse: tempting when she's close and terrifying at a distance, sometimes intimate with belly laughter at the peculiarities of Los Angeles nightlife, then immediately a hissing, freakish example of same, stripping quickly to strapless bra and leather pants, pouncing with a strength that Nina can't match in human form and a clarity of purpose that she doesn't understand in either shape, kissing with teeth and tongue and something close to tenderness, clicking, probing, groping, tasting fiercely in Nina's mouth.

It's not the oddness of faux leather that makes Faith hard to draw, shiny and beset with shifting wrinkles that crinkle when she kicks or spins or tucks her legs under Nina's to establish harder friction. Those a sculptor could capture in bronze, and if Nina thought it would help she'd bring clay to clubs and start preliminary models right now. But it wouldn't help; Faith can't be described in any medium that Nina knows, except perhaps pottery being made. But once the pot was thrown and the clay baked, the vessel would not hold Faith, and its shape would not be the trembling emptiness of Faith's body when she's still for a second, long enough for Nina to swallow her, smiling lips around swelling labia.

The luxury of art is the reification of ideals, and nothing's higher concept than faith, clinging to things that can only be dreamed of. The meaning of art is the static depiction of the nebulous, and nothing is more so, more skyward and mysterious and shifting, than Faith, but Nina makes the excuses, defends the limits of art, because clumsy, guilty, she won't admit it's she who can't understand Faith, not Faith who refuses to be understood. Faith, who flings herself at every man and woman dumb enough to come to LA to get laid, Faith, whose credo is three words and who operates in three modes -- sleep, fuck, kill -- Faith is not the mystery this year.

Faith is not a found object or an object at all, but a subjectivity that fills the house with clattering, hungry honesty when she spends the night, that clutters Nina's consciousness with rippling red streaks of want, brighter than the wolf's and more persistent, pillars of blood in a cave of smoke.