Work Text:
The grey lines faded to black more often than they did to white and the creases of the page obscured a strong jawline. Blue eyes were sketched without colour with the steady charcoal from Christenson's messy hands. Joe Liebgott didn't like it one bit. He hadn't liked it when he first found the drawing and he didn't like it, still. It was a half-finished bit of a thing, like all those unfinished masterpieces Web kept going on about, about Da Vinci on his deathbed and conversing with a king or Michelangelo's last Pieta. Liebgott had shut him up about the art with a snide "No one gives a fuck about your fancy artists, Web," and that'd been the last time he heard facts about Raphael and Caravaggio.
Christenson wasn't that kind of artist, the kind who revolutionized the art world or whatever got Web all happy in his pants. He kept a sketchbook of places they'd gone. There were half-finished sketches of signposts with a dozen different directions on them (and none of them home) and full caricatures of Easy Company ranging from Winters to Luz and all the way around to Liebgott himself (giving some Able Company man a mohawk way back when, before they had ever jumped out of planes and their hearts learned to soar). Those were caricatures, though, the hint of comedy to their lines and shadows and hidden in the depths of chiaroscuro (that word had sounded right from Webster's lips, like all fancy words did, long words and words rife with varied meanings). The picture that Liebgott had yanked from Christenson's hands was something out of a sketchbook that belonged to a husband who had been affectionately drawing a wife, of lovers who felt they had to immortalize each other somehow.
"What the hell is this?" Liebgott found himself drawing words from some unknown reserve, angry for god knew what reason, confused as to why, in a sea of sketches, this one was serious. Why was this one the way it was, this half-finished jawline of David Kenyon Webster that refused to predispose itself to comedic interpretation.
Christenson seemed unaffected by it all, from Joe yanking away the thick parchment he'd picked up in Germany to Joe's furious demand. All he did was tuck the pencil behind his ear the way Liebgott would do with a cigarette. He leaned back against the fence, staring out to the sun-dappled lake that was just one of a thousand ways the Austrian countryside was idyllic and beautiful and all those other synonyms Web had pulled out when they'd arrived.
The sketch crumpled slightly under the firm fingertips that Liebgott pushed against it, causing creases that would never get ironed out. Even in the nicest of their temporary stays, no one’s pressing their shirts anymore and making sure they’ve got warm grub in their bellies.
“He said I could draw him,” Christenson replied easily, leaning forward just enough to grab hold of the sketch, disentangling Liebgott’s frozen fingers from it and tucking it back in with the rest. Webster had been let to join Easy Company once again, albeit in the form of paper and charcoal. “So I did.”
“But not like the rest of us,” Liebgott was more focused on that little aspect. “No fucking caricature for David Webster, that it? He better than us?”
“It’s a fucking sketch, Liebgott,” Christenson retorted breezily, and maybe the fact that Liebgott couldn’t get under his skin was the part that bothered him the most. That he wasn’t getting any answer and Christenson was calm as a spring day while Liebgott raged a wicked hurricane of confusion and wreaked havoc on a landscape. “Leave it alone, okay?”
Leave it alone
, Liebgott thought and watched Christenson go.
Leave it alone
probably didn’t dictate the right for Liebgott to sneak into his borrowed room in Zell am See, pry open that sketchbook and steal that crumpled drawing that won’t ever get finished now. He didn’t even know why, but after hearing all about the unfinished masterpieces of the European world from Webster (and the occasional tidbit from Buck), it struck Liebgott as
just
.
Smoothing the creases, he tucked it in the first drawer in the room that they’d commandeered, him and Webster when they’d first arrived, Webster trailing along after Liebgott and doing whatever he said.
Maybe the drawing would make it back to the States. Maybe it’d just end up a souvenir for the family this house belonged to. Either way, Liebgott just knew that there’d be another, but there were four version of the Pieta (fucking art, he never thought he’d have cause to learn this much about fucking
art
) and so why can’t there be two versions of David Kenyon Webster, immortalized by a man who was never going to be that famous.
When Webster returned from the lake, the moon hung high in the sky and Liebgott was caught in the lazy spell of a half-finished cigarette, splayed on the bed with his hand brushing back and forth against his stomach.
It was three in the morning and tomorrow would bring with it unknowns and new beauties, but the exhausted space between the two of them would only exist for that night – for that moment.
“Tell me about one of those artists you’re so fucking in love with.”
“Good evening to you, too, Joe,” Webster mildly replied, though Liebgott can hear fond amusement in his voice (he didn’t even have to look his way to know that). “What brought this on?”
“Unfinished business” was Liebgott’s grunt of a reply, taking a long pull of his cigarette and watching how it became a firefly in their darkened room. “Just do it, alright?”
And maybe they won’t ever talk about the sketch in the drawer.
Liebgott turned his head just enough to watch Webster recline on the bed and fold his palms over his chest. His profile was illuminated solely by the moonlight and the orange-glow of Liebgott’s cigarette and he didn’t have an artistic bone in his body, but his memory could commit this as good as any pencil could.
“…The Sistine Chapel was probably one of Michelangelo’s most hated projects…” Webster droned on and this would be the tune to which Liebgott fell asleep. In the morning, Liebgott will ask why he let Christenson draw him like that and say that if he was opening doors to the gateways of intimacy, then Liebgott ought to be first in line.
That was tomorrow.
“…He hated painting. He loved sculpting, but he branched out in order to expand his work and to get paid and… Joe? Are you still awake?”
Tomorrow, he’d ask. Tomorrow, they’d open the drawer.
THE END