Lucia Flashback: Punishment

Sometimes Lucia hates painting.

It doesn’t make sense. It’s the only consistent thing she's ever had in her life. Before you, during you, after you…even when it felt like she’d lost it all, she still had a brush in her hand.

Staring at the canvas now only makes her regret, though. Your eyes stare back, the only clear thing she's managed to paint all week. The rest of your face is blurry, out of focus, incomplete; she saw you just last week, why can she not remember the details?

She could never forget your eyes, though. Even when she’s losing her mind, her memory fading, everything else lost to time or insanity, she’d still remember your eyes.

Forcing herself to set the brush down, she turns and takes a step away. This will never not haunt her; your gaze, the cold left in your absence, the heaviness in her heart. She fears she’ll carry it with her until she's dead.

Some days she thinks that might be sooner rather than later.

She sits on the floor of Cameron’s aunt’s attic, her little art studio until college finally rolls around. She crosses her legs and leans back, just staring up at your eyes painted in horrifically detailed acrylic. She’d made your gaze rather cold. Fitting, she supposes.

Lucia was no longer on the receiving end of your smiles, or your warm looks, or your wide eyed gaze when you were trying too hard not to laugh at something. She deserves your scorn. She deserves it so dearly that she forces it upon himself, even. Here she is, painting her worst nightmares with her own brush.

It’s not penance. It cannot be penance for there is no absolution of this sin.

No, this is karma. Karma that twists her gut and makes him want to lose her meager breakfast. she remembers you that day, the day you left her parent’s home with an emptiness in your eyes as you walked out. Years later, as she left through that very same door, she wondered if she felt a fraction of the pain you had.

It had been the second home you’d lost. How cruel of them, how cruel of her. Turning on you when you, of all people, needed love the most.

The scar on her back burns fiercely, no cream enough to ease the sting of holy fire, but freedom was worth it. She should have left with you when you’d been banished from the Rivera household, but she hadn’t known then what she does now. If she’d known the Orlovs would take you in as they did…

She wonders if they would have allowed a second child to move in. Surely they would’ve. Viktor’s mother had been nothing but kind when Lucia used to visit. Her hugs were the only time she’d felt a motsher’s touch and it hadn’t hurt.

Wondering was pointless, though. If she kept going down this path, she’d surely get lost. That’s what Cameron always says at least.

She stands, removing the painting from her easel. Your gaze damns her as she places it against the wall with the back facing out. Perhaps torturing herself would be more respectable, more in line with what she deserves, and she knows that. She just can’t stand it anymore tonight.