The title's a working one. I've been told this is a bit hard to understand, but go for it. I also never write romance, so it's not my best and is barely in the genre. Anyways, thanks for taking the time to read.
First, he breathed. In and out, in and out, stabbing his lungs with a spearhead until the blood was forced out of his mouth. His throat burned as he retched.
Tick. Tick. Tick. Tick. The timer only increased its pace, its old-fashioned hourglass broken so that the sand spilled onto the floor. It covered the dead bluebottle, burying it with the honour of art’s sacrifice. A little bit of his heart had leaked when he killed the bluebottle. It was buried in his morality.
Breathing was wasting time, and time he did not have. He ran a finger along the tabletop, and lifted it to see it coated in dust. In this place, dust strangled life until it crawled into the shadows with the rats, to hide under the bed. Monsters dwelt there now, and moths above, where once she would have slept. Dust had clogged the lenses, the channel to his heart.
No longer. He had cleared them until it was once again apparent that the angels were dancing on the head of the pin. There were two now, a mother and a babe in her arms, who had fallen asleep to the silent waltz. The mother smiled, content, as he took the plucked bluebottle hair from her side and dipped it in gold. He was to paint her eyes.
Training the microscope on her tiny figure, he brought a grimy sleeve up to his eye and wiped away the tear that twinkled there. She had always told him that he would be the one to comfort the baby when it cried, because he had always been the one to comfort her. He had always been the one to silence her – and he had silenced the bluebottle too.
His eye was sagging in the socket, but sharp, and it searched with glee for a focus where it could look into hers. In the poor light of dusk, filtering through a slit in ragged curtains, he struggled to find the clarity to see his creation. A caricature she was, Frankenstein’s mockery of a human being, but still he looked on and drew in a steady breath. Her eyes, round circles on ivory skin, were colourless.
Tick. Tick. Tick. Tick.
He could change that.
Tick. Tick. Tick. Tick.
His veined hands shook as he reached towards his model. This was his final task before the bluebottle lay buried in sand, entombed, its purpose served as he laid the makeshift paintbrush to rest.
This was it.
When he finished, she would be his again. Death could not take his creations away from him, but only he from his creations, and then he would meet the real angels and they would dance with him.
Tick.
He brought the hair, tinged with gold, closer.
Tick.
Paint flowed from her empty circles like the tears he had once wiped away, but to take them now would be to smudge her beautiful face, to lose every scrap of her existence to the fickle memory.
Tick.
Circles became eyes.
Tick.
Silence became music.
Tick.
Angels danced.
Tick.
And the hourglass ran out.
