The pond below them did not move much. It caught things, clouds, light, the occasional bird passing overhead, and held them briefly and let them go, and Astra found herself watching it between brushstrokes the way she used to watch things when she was working, not staring, just resting her eyes on something while her hands figured out what came next.
Her hands were still figuring. The canvas in front of her was no longer white, which was something. She had put color down, cautiously at first and then less cautiously, and what was emerging was not anything she had planned, which had always been how her best work arrived, unannounced and slightly surprising, like running into someone you hadn't expected to see.
Beside her, Illia painted with the relaxed focus of someone for whom creation was as natural as breathing. Her canvas was already half-covered, something large and loosely geometric that Astra couldn't quite read from the angle but which had the feeling of a place, somewhere specific and imagined at once. They had not spoken much since arriving. That had been fine. It had been, in fact, exactly right.
ILA: What was he like.
She said it the way she said most things, without particular weight, not looking up from her canvas, her brush moving in a long confident stroke across the upper third. Astra was quiet for a moment.
AST: Loud, when he was happy. Quiet when he was thinking. You could always tell which one it was.
ILA: Mm.
AST: He smiled too much. Not in a false way. He just - it was his default. Even when things were bad.
ILA: That's a hard thing to be around sometimes.
AST: Yes. And also the best thing.
Illia made a small sound of understanding. She switched brushes without looking, her hand finding the right one from the row without needing to check.
ILA: How long did you know him.
AST: Apparently long enough that I stopped being able to remember what it was like before.
ILA: That's the good kind of knowing.
AST: Yes.
She put a line of color down that was not quite what she intended and was better for it. The almost-black green, the one she had never named, which had been in the row of paint waiting for her when they arrived, as if Illia had known.
AST: How long have you been up there. In the heavens.
ILA: Long time. Since after the war. The first one.
AST: Do you miss it. Down here.
Illia considered this with the genuine attention she gave to questions she found interesting, which was not all questions but was this one.
ILA: Sometimes. Mostly I miss the inconvenience of it. Up there everything is very smooth. Nothing is difficult in the way that things down here are difficult.
AST: That sounds nice.
ILA: It sounds nice. It gets boring. Difficulty is where everything interesting happens.
Astra looked at her canvas. The thing emerging from it was starting to have a shape she recognized. Not a place. A feeling rendered as color and line, the way she had always worked best, not representing something but being something.
AST: Blook. What is he like.
ILA: Tired. He's been tired for a long time. He watches everything and says nothing and carries all of it and calls that living.
She said it without judgment, just observation, the way you spoke about someone you knew well enough to see clearly.
ILA: He cares about you. All of you. More than he lets on, which is saying something because he lets on quite a bit if you know how to read him.
AST: Why didn't he come himself.
ILA: Because he knew you needed someone who could drag you out of the house. He is not, physically, a dragger. I am an excellent dragger.
Despite everything, Astra almost smiled. It arrived at the corner of her mouth and stayed there briefly and went, but it had been there.
ILA: Also I think he felt guilty. For watching and not - you know.
AST: He couldn't have done anything.
ILA: No. But guilt doesn't really care about that.
They painted for a while in the comfortable silence that had settled between them over the course of the morning, the kind of silence that was not empty but full, the kind that meant two people had found the particular frequency at which they could exist alongside each other without effort. The pond caught the sun and held it for longer than it had held anything else, a long gold stripe across its surface that moved slowly as the sun moved and did not rush.
AST: I couldn't paint. After. My hands went cold and the light left and I couldn't.
ILA: I know.
AST: I thought it was gone for good.
ILA: Is it?
Astra looked at her hands. The brush in her right hand. The paint on the bristles, the almost-black green that had gone onto the canvas in ways she had not planned and which were, she was beginning to see, exactly right. Her hands were warmer than they had been this morning. Not warm. Not the warmth that started in her palms and spread, that property of the thing rather than an effort of it. Not that yet. But warmer.
AST: I don't know.
ILA: That's a better answer than gone for good.
AST: It doesn't feel better.
ILA: No. But it is.
The long grass at the water's edge moved in a small wind that came from nowhere in particular and went back to nowhere in particular. The geometric something on Illia's canvas had resolved itself into what Astra now recognized as the heavens, or an impression of them, vast and strange and lit from within by a light that had no obvious source.
AST: It's beautiful.
Illia looked at it. Tilted her head.
ILA: It's lonely up close. Beautiful from far away. Most things are one or the other. The good ones manage both.
She looked at Astra's canvas then, the first time she had looked at it directly all morning. She did not say anything. She just looked at it for a moment with the particular attention of someone who understood what they were seeing, and then she looked back at her own work and picked up her brush again. It was the best review Astra had ever received.
They stayed on the cliff until the light began to change, the afternoon gold going softer, the pond below them shifting from mirror to something more like its own thing, its own color, independent of the sky. Astra's canvas was not finished. She had not expected it to be. Finishing was not what today was for. But it was something.
It was genuinely, unmistakably something, and her hands had made it, and they were warmer than they had been this morning, and the almost-black green was on the canvas in exactly the right place, and the pond below held the changing light and let it change and held it anyway.
ILA: Same time tomorrow?
AST: Yes.
She stood in front of what she had made and looked at it for a long time.