Brought on by that one post in my liveblog about Haruka thinking Michiru wants to draw her like one of her french girls, it’s a fic!
Laid Bare
~1800 words
A misunderstanding leads to surprising, quiet intimacy when Michiru asks to draw Haruka. Set durring S.
The apartment was quiet when Michiru got home. They were in a rare streak of quiet days, equal parts blessing and curse. She worried when Haruka was left with her thoughts too long.
“Michiru?” she called out as if on cue.
She sat in her usual perch by the window– she brooded like a butch but also like a bird, settling in where she could still touch the sky. The setting sun turned the whole city red behind her. Against that backdrop Haruka was bright and shadowy all at once.
“You know,” Michiru said without thinking, “I would still very much like to draw you sometime.”
Haruka looked up, torn from her cycle of thoughts by surprise. “Y-yeah?” She shifted, scratched her neck. “I thought that might have just been a ruse.”
To an extent, it had been, but not the way Haruka thought. She hadn’t wanted to talk her in or out of being a senshi. She’d wanted to enter that particular space of artist and model, where there could be no walls because if you blocked seeing one way you blocked it the other. She always went through art teachers quickly because of that. She didn’t need to keep anyone who saw in past her facade. Though if Haruka would agree, she’d like to keep her.
“I don’t know if I’d be a good model.” Haruka leaned back. Her movements became stiff. Michiru smiled. Haruka had grace until she knew someone was watching, and then she either overplayed or froze up. “I’ll probably move a lot, or sit wrong.”
“That’s okay.”
Michiru put on a smile and waited. She felt an old buzz in her hands, the one that made her pull on her clothes as a child. She’d since learned not to stress the fabric so, and, more importantly, not to show her weakness.
Haruka turned towards the window. “I mean, I guess if you really want to, it’s no trouble to me.”
“Let me get my pencils.”
She returned and Haruka stood. “You can stay in the window if you like.”
“Okay, this is just easier for…” She cleared her throat and adjusted her collar. “Are you sure about this?”
Michiru made sure to look her in the eye. Haruka didn’t always trust her without that. “Yes.”
“Okay.” Haruka undid her collar button. “Okay.”
She fumbled open a few more buttons. Michiru froze.
“Haruka,” she said, gently as she could. “What are you doing?”
Haruka cocked her head like it was a trick question. “I’m getting ready so you can draw me?”
“I assure you you don’t have to have your shirt quite so open.”
“Oh um, I can’t pull it over my head.”
“What?”
Haruka’s brow furrowed in her Is this another weird rich person thing? face. “It doesn’t come over my head. It’s fitted a certain way, I have to unbutton it.”
“You’re taking it off?”
“Yeah? You said you wanted to draw me.”
“Oh.” Michiru had had life drawing classes, her parents had paid enough to bypass age limits so that she would learn, but this was different. “I didn’t mean– not like that.” No wonder she had said no. Michiru felt all the accusations she hadn’t said. Creep. Monster. “I’m not like that, Haruka, I wouldn’t…”
“Oh.”
Haruka turned away. She wrestled her buttons back into place. “Let’s just forget this whole thing. I’ve been really stupid.”
“Wait–”
But Haruka fled to her room.
Michiru sank to the floor next to her door, marveling that a little thing like this could go so wrong. She rubbed her pencil back and forth on a page, mindlessly wasting the led. The shadows grew long and overtook the apartment.
Alone in the dark, she confessed– “I don’t want you to be scared of me.”
Something banged into the other side of the door. “What?”
Michiru jumped. She’d expected Haruka to be in bed, out of earshot. “I can’t promise I’m not a monster, but I don’t want to scare you.”
The knob rattled for a moment, but then Haruka seemed to think better of it. “I’m only scared of you seeing me, and of you not wanting to see me,” she whispered through the door. “I know your feelings were fleeting, but I want to be in your head as something beautiful.”
“They weren’t fleeting.” Her greatest sin. “I don’t want to get you hurt.”
Haruka’s fingertips appeared under the door. Michiru slid hers into the spaces between them.
“Would you have said yes that day, had you not thought…?”
“Not yes, exactly. I wanted you to think I didn’t care. But…You don’t scare me, but meeting the girl of– the girl from my dreams did. And when I thought you wanted… I couldn’t risk you seeing me, seeing how unworthy I am.”
“You’re not… You’re a lot more than I can express.” Michiru dared a squeeze of her hand. “You were going to let me see you now.”
“I just.” Haruka’s head thumped against the door. “I figured there’s no use hiding. You know my darkest sins. You might as well judge me for all that I am.”
“I’m not here to judge you, Haruka.” Michiru wished, just once, she could pull Haruka in and kiss her the way she deserved to be kissed. Michiru herself didn’t deserve that, with what they had to do, what she’d gotten Haruka into. But she wished. “It would be nice. Seeing you.”
“Yeah?”
“Yes, I never…” Never what? She’d drawn naked figures, naked women. But this was something else. “Would you want to, really?”
“I think so.” Haruka squeezed Michiru’s hand with her fingers. “It’s stupid, maybe, but I’d like it if you drew me like that.”
“Do… do you want to come out?”
“Or you could come in here. Maybe.”
“Okay.” She pulled the door open with a shaking hand. Haruka’s room was too big for her, spacious and sterile save for the area around the bed, when clothes and blankets formed heaps on the floor. A desk sat untouched against the wall.
Haruka stood, face pink. “Is this okay?”
Michiru nodded. “I could sit over here, if you wanted to be…” She gestured to the bed. “You should be comfortable, at least.”
Haruka let out a single laugh. “I’d have to trade bodies with someone for that.” She cracked her knuckles. “Do you turn around, or do I just–”
“I can turn.”
The room was warm, suddenly, knowing Haruka was undressing behind her. Fear ledged in her throat. She had to react right when she saw. Neutral. Or maybe not quite, too neutral and Haruka might take it badly. But Michiru wouldn’t want her to think–
“Okay.”
Michiru turned the little desk chair around before she looked, but there still wasn’t time to sort herself out. And then, there Haruka was, looking both incredibly human and entirely extraordinary. She sat cross-legged on the bed. She leaned with her hands on her ankles, her body folding forward with a crease at her stomach. The comforter poofed soft around the hard lines of her body. Even things Michiru saw everyday– the shape of her hands, the curve of her neck and the wave in her hair– took on a new beauty in their full context. She could not but stare for a long moment.
“Am I okay?”
Her breath left her all at once. “You’re… art. All on your own.”
Haruka flushed deep red. “You don’t have to go that far.”
“You’ll find,” Michiru said, finding the ground to right herself for a moment as she put pencil to paper, “That I’m in such a position that I rarely have to do anything.”
“What, are you going to buy me self-esteem?” Haruka rocked forward with a little smile, then faltered. “Am I moving too much?”
“You’re fine.” Their eyes met, and for once Michiru let them linger. “I’ve never drawn anyone I knew. Just models.”
“I probably don’t look anything like them.”
“Well, no, but they didn’t look like you think, either. Art class models are supposed to give a grasp of different sorts of bodies.” She focused on her sketchbook. “I like you better than any sort of model, though.”
“You too.” Haruka put her face in her hands. “I mean… You know.”
“Can you put your hands where they were? It’s alright.” Her own cheeks felt warm. “It’s hard to say things a lot of the time.”
“How can you say that? You’re always so…” She rose her hand again to shake as she found the word. “Eloquent.”
“That doesn’t mean I’m saying what I want.” Michiru let herself smile. “I couldn’t ask you for a ride in your car, could I?”
“And I can’t ask you to run away with me.”
Michiru paused. “If we could, where would we go?”
“I dunno. We could get anywhere with your money, and then I’d get some job to keep us there. I’m handy, maybe a mechanic.” She rocked again. “We could get a little place and let the whole destiny thing pass us by.”
“You wouldn’t be happy.”
“Not with that part. I want the right thing, just not the hard parts.”
“I don’t even want that.” Her hand moved in fast strokes for Haruka’s hair. “If we get through this, this whole mess, will you go somewhere with me? I don’t care where, just. Away.”
“Yeah.”
They sat with only the sound of pencil strokes for a long while. Haruka moved in little bits. Michiru ached, both with the heart of an artists and that of a lover, to see all the shapes her body could form. Every twitch gave her a new perspective she wanted time to explore. But this was all she had. Too soon she found herself shading the smallest details.
“I’m scared to show you.”
“All your work is brilliant, Michiru.”
“But this doesn’t capture you, not really.” And once she declared it done, the moment would pass, and things would go back to how they were. “You won’t see how you really look.”
Haruka didn’t push, so maybe she understood.
Michiru paused above the finished drawing. It was beautiful, the shadows played across the black and white Haruka in a way that drew the eye over all her angles and curves. It wasn’t like the real Haruka, but it was close.
“I won’t look if you don’t want.”
“You can.”
Haruka pulled the comforter around her body and padded over. She looked over Michiru’s shoulder, then sank to the floor. “You made me look handsome,” she whispered.
“That’s just what you look like.”
Haruka looked up, her eyes big and vulnerable. “Can we just… sit here awhile longer?”
“I’d like that.”
By morning, they’d be back in the same dance around each other, but for tonight, there was nothing left between them.
SittingOverHereDreaming 