Title: Portraits of the Self
Author: AaronR (Rachel)
Email: raaaron@mindspring.com

Rating: G
Summary: Rogue decides to have her picture painted
Category: Rogue/Logan
Disclaimer: They aren't mine. Oscar isn't either. Damn.
Archive: Lists, otherwise ask.
Feed back?: Enchante.
Dedication: To the AHtists
Author's Notes: Oscar Wilde is GOD. Dave Sim is the Holy Ghost.
(All quotes are from the preface of "The Picture Of Dorian Gray.")

Three years after Logan left, Rogue decided to have her picture painted.

"The artist is the creator of beautiful things.

To reveal art and conceal the artist is art's aim."

On the morning her twentieth birthday, she drove into the city looking for a gallery. She found one on 63rd Street. She almost missed the sign, wedged in-between the awnings of the fruit shops framing it. Then she almost didn't go in, almost. It was small, with red velvet curtains pulled back to reveal the paintings of several of New York's better starving artists. Drawn in, she pushed the door open with one gloved hand. The bells on the handle chimed musically when she entered, and she felt embarrassed at the sound. The store contained a sacred silence, years of life muted by the velvet and canvas on which the shop survived. A red womb of creation. Rogue closed the door carefully, silencing the misplaced artificiality of the bells, trying to soften her intrusion. Well placed spots hanging unobtrusively from the low ceiling highlighted the various stars of the current show in a soft white light.

On closer examination of the paintings, Rogue realized that they were all, in fact, the produce of one mind. There was no real similarity in the styles, no clues tying them together, even the signatures were different. There was, instead, a feel, an aura that reached out of the flat surface toward her, shaming the real world with its brilliance. She was marveling at the depiction of a cat and a spider when a voice interrupted her.

The voice was a slip of raw silk, both smooth and rough at once. Though musty with disuse, it filled her with joy. It was a second before she realized that the voice was broken into words.

"Excuse me?"

"I said," purred the voice "May I help you?"

Rogue turned around to face a man in his late fifties, weathered, but straight and gentlemanly. His clothes were well tailored and tasteful, his shoes were clean, shining with the soft light of well loved, well preserved leather. His hair was meticulous, each gray strand strictly in formation. It looked soft. He was understated and striking, Rogue immediately recognized him as the artist.

"Yes, I want you to paint my picture." Rogue paused, then flushed at her assumption. The man just chuckled and took her gloved hand in his own faintly paint stained one, bringing it within a breath of his lips.

"Actually," he said in his velvet voice, "I get that a lot. My work has that effect on people." He paused. "My name is Trevor."

Rogue smiled, "I'm Marie." Not even hesitating over the name she hadn't heard in three years. Somehow, this man was natural, he was a force of nature. He forced the truth. She felt herself unfolding as he led her to the small studio in the back room. She doubled and doubled again, letting out the shadows and the creases in her tightly wound self slowly under the pressure of Trevor's worn hand. He was unfolding her, smoothing her out. She opened and spread, and only when she was seated did she begin to realize how much of her there really was.

"You're a mutant." She said.

"Aren't we all?"

He held her up to the light, looked through her, arranged her, and began.

"Those who find ugly meanings in beautiful things are corrupt without being charming. This is a fault.

Those who find beautiful meanings in beautiful things are cultivated. For these there is hope.

They are the elect few to whom beauty means only Beauty."

"Do you want this painting to be displayed?"

"No, it's more of a private thing. For me."

"I see. Did you bring what you wanted to wear?"

"Yes."

(rustle)

"That looks lovely, are going to wear the tags?"

"............"

"No.......I'll leave them off."

"As you wish, Marie. Let's begin."

"The moral life of man forms part of the subject matter of the artist, but the morality of art consists in the perfect use of an imperfect medium. No artist desires to prove anything. Even things that are true can be proved.

No artist is ever morbid. The artist can express everything."

Marie never liked what she saw in the mirror, her reversal. She didn't want proof, she wanted truth. When she looked at Trevor's paintings in that first eternal five minutes, she saw the truth of life. She saw the beauty in that truth. She wanted that truth for herself, she wanted all her folds shown, not the smooth face she presented for inspection to the mirror every morning. Nothing that is true to its nature can be unworthy of eternity.

It took her twenty years to realize this.

"It is the spectator, and not life, that art really mirrors."

"What do you want to show in this painting?"

"Truth."

................

"All paintings are true."

"The truth I can't see. I want to look at it and understand. I want people who see it to understand truth. My truth."

....................

"You want him, if he were to see, to understand."

"He will."

..........................

"Truth is not often easy."

"Neither am I."

"Do you want to see it?"

"Yes."

"All art is at once surface and symbol.

Those who go beneath the surface do so at their peril.

Those who read the symbol do so at their peril."

When Marie left the shop it was dark. She climbed into her car, putting her bags on the passenger seat but keeping the canvas in her lap. The roads were empty on the way back to Westchester.

No one was awake when she slipped into her room. In the pre-dawn darkness, she unrolled the canvas again for the first time since leaving the shop. She stared at it for a long time, watching as the rising sunlight changed the colors on the paper, more real than real. Carefully, she began to construct the frame she had bought at the craft store earlier that evening. Pressing the picture flat against the glass, she hooked the back into place. Taking a nail, a hammer, and some wire out of her other bag, she hung the picture in the closet and shut the door. Then she went to breakfast.

It was a small step, but it was important, because it was the first. Her first step on the road to a brighter future where she would escape the prison in which she finds herself.

She looked at the picture everyday, and everyday she saw something different. Some days she slammed the closet door after five minutes. Other days it was all she could do not to touch the fiber surface just one more time. One thing was constant, everyday she saw herself. Everyday she felt herself unfolding, like on that first morning so long ago when she was surrounded by velvet and her own self loathing.

She never saw Trevor again.

Just before he died, Trevor Wilde received a package by courier. Inside was a solid gold box. Carefully, he opened the box with his stained hands. Inside was an eggshell broken into two halves, and carefully painted on the thin surface in an amateurish hand was a detail of the background of a painting he had done several years ago for a young lady. The egg rested on a pair of black silk gloves.

With delicate hands, he removed one of the gloves. Using his plate knife, he split it up the middle, smiling as the silk parted evenly under the edge. Carefully, he removed one half of the eggshell, and, wrapping it in the split glove, he placed it in his old metal paint box. Sealing the lock on the box, he gave it to the courier with orders to return it to the sender.

"The only excuse for making a useless thing is that one admires it intensely."

"Hey darlin', what's in the package?"

"Just a gift from a friend."

"Does this have anything to do with whatever's in that damn closet of yours?"

"Kind of."

"When are you going to let me in on the secret?"

"Soon, Logan. You'll understand when you see it."

"All art is quite useless."