A series by November

Chapter 63: See into My Eyes

“How can you see into my eyes, like open doors?
Leading you down into my core
Where I've become so numb?
Without a soul,
My spirit sleeping somewhere cold,
Until you find it there and lead it back home...”
--Evanescence

The next weekend Xavier took Maggie and Gillian into the city. Marie needed to go to the library in town so she dropped Logan off at his studio and went to do her work. When she came back, several hours later, he was shirtless and painting a futuristic cage fight melee in shades of red and blue.

"Hello, half-naked man," she said, eyebrows rising. Her cheeks were rosy with cold.

He smiled. "Hello, gorgeous woman."

"Can I peek?"

"Sure."

She came around to look at the canvas. "Wow."

"It's not finished."

"I know. You have an amazing sense of motion." She hadn't been to the studio since New Year's Eve and she walked around, looking at his new work. He watched her. "You've graduated to oils."

"Yeah. Better quality."

"Every time I come here it amazes me how good you are."

"Thanks."

"Oh, I didn't know you were done with the one of the pink dress! Wow!" She stood rooted in front of the image of herself and stared.

He smiled around the handle of a paintbrush as he searched for a tube of paint. "You like, darlin'?"

"I love." She couldn't take her eyes off of her image in the painting. She laid on the honey-colored floor, pink dress pooling around her body. Her fingers were threaded casually through a necklace of crystals, which caught and agitated the bright winter sunlight.

The crystals were a gaudy thing one of the students had made Maggie, using her mutation to synthesize them from thin air, and strung together with plain white string. On a whim she'd grabbed them that morning. He'd protested when she put them on and shook out her hair, but in the light they had become exquisite, perfect, tiny worlds into themselves, and when she laid down in the light in her pink dress and silver shoes he just gawked, and gulped, and shut up and started painting.

"Damn," she said. "You make me way too sexy for my shirt."

His hands were in her hair, pulling her back firmly. "I make you nothin'. You are, Marie." The edge in his voice aroused her instantly, but she couldn't take her eyes off of her image.

"I mean, the way you use light in general is brilliant, let alone how incredibly cool those crystals look. As a whole it’s just compositionally brilliant. These lines here, the way you have all this space next to me, the shadow. And the tension in the arms and hands is perfect. It’s so goddamn real. I can’t believe you can do this.” She traced the white streak of hair in the portrait. "I can't believe that's me," she said in a quieter tone.

"Believe it." He pulled her hat off, pulled her hair aside, hands moving everywhere on her and he gently bit her earlobe. She moaned and her eyes fluttered and she forgot the painting.

She was naked and on his lap, rocking back and forth with him inside her, when she noticed the painting in the darkest corner.

"Stop."

"Hmm? Whasswrong?"

She stood up with surprising grace and moved to the canvas. He watched her naked body walk and his own screamed for her to come back. "Marie?"

But she ignored him. The painting in the corner broke her heart.

It was painted in shades of silver, black, and white, with parts that looked like blood. Logan’s eye clearly looked out at her, right through her, from the canvas.

Three dark silvery lines divided each sector of the painting. From far away they made a long sprawling W shape.

The central part of the painting was very realistic, a regular portrait, a swath of his face in light and shadow one eye that saw straight into her. But on a silver line the reality shifted, fragmented. It was like looking at a cubist painting, except that instead of being fractured into many different planes and surfaces, there were four. Like looking at a face in shards of mirror.

Gingerly, reverently, she picked up the picture and held it into the light. She recognized bits of newsprint, ash, actual bits of silvery mirror embedded in it. The fine print was from a proposed draft of the mutant registration act. Other print was taken from a newspaper article about the Hoboken incident. Upon closer inspection she could see that the paint was actually scored, as was the canvas under it. She realized that he had actually used his claws. More than once. The painting was kinetic, alive, crawling with energy, but at the same time the sliver of portrait in the center was still and immutable. A riot of chaotic ugliness surrounding a beautiful face.

Logan was waiting for her to comment on it. He tucked himself back into his jeans but he still felt naked. For some reason his face was red and his heart was pounding and he wanted to pop his claws and smoke a cigarette and scream all at once. He wished she would turn around. He wished she would face him.

Tears were streaming down her face. He could smell them before he heard them in her voice.

“Is this how you see yourself?”

He shrugged. He had come to the conclusion that if he were to do this, he couldn’t think about it or talk about it. He just did it, painted without much conscious thought.

He closed the space between him with a few quick steps. “Why are you crying, darlin’?”

“Because I see so much beauty but so much pain and chaos and self-loathing. I see stabbing and blood and guilt and... in the middle of all of it, there’s this portrait, and it‘s you, just you.”

“That doesn’t explain why you’re cryin’.”

“Because it hurts me to think that you might see yourself this way. It’s a wonderful painting. God, Logan, you’re so good. So goddamn good.” She set the canvas down. She went to him, and held him, quietly. He let her. She watched his face, and traced his lips, and pushed his hair back from his face. “God, I love you. I’m so proud of you.”

The look in his eyes was like something waking up. He kissed her very seriously, very tenderly, all the while looking in her eyes.