Work Text:
Apollo became a muse on accident. He only signed up to be the a model because it was extra credit for his studio class, and he thought he might get a few numbers, and because he knew it’d piss off the Professor. The Professor didn’t like Apollo because he didn’t think tattoos or graffiti or nail polish or make up were art–so Apollo started painting murals on his fingernails, inking vines and barbed wire up both arms in the back of the classroom, with so much permanent marker he started to get a little high off the fumes.
He was tired of looking for the next Van Gogh, or Monet, or Degas, or Picasso. He wanted to find something different, and new, and exciting because it was the only one of its kind.
But he also wanted to pass his studio class, so he signed up as the model, out of equal parts spite and desperation, and stood naked for forty-five minutes while everyone began to draw. He did end up with fifteen phone numbers, by the end of it, so he considered it a job well done.
He thought that would be the end of it. He didn’t mean to become a muse; it just happened, as these things often do. So when he went to class the next morning, and saw masterpiece after masterpiece, impossibly finished and each better than the last, and every one based on his body–hanging up on the classroom walls, or leaning because they ran out of thumbtacks–Apollo was a little dumbstruck.
Artemis made fun of him for it, but that wasn’t unusual. Artemis made fun of him for most things, simply because he was the person she saw the most. For Artemis, mockery was art, and Apollo had to admit, there was a certain flourish to her taunts. She wasn’t just an asshole–she was an asshole with style.
But Apollo ignored her, as he often did, and signed up to model the next week too, and then the week after, and the week after that, until it just became common knowledge that he would be the figure drawing model, and that was that.
It wasn’t just paintings, though–there were pottery kids who would cart their whole wheels in, running their hands up and down the clay until it had his face, or legs, or stomach. Sometimes others used charcoal, or they melted crayon wax with a hairdryer plugged into the extension cord, or they glued together bits of scrap paper and plastic and aluminum can, until he was made out of labels for Pepsi.
And still others would show up with no supplies at all, they’d just sit in the folding chairs at the back of the room, and they’d watch, and for the next forty-five minutes, Apollo could tell they were each incandescently calm. Like their previous lives, filled with worry over exam grades and financial aid, and family problems, completely fell away until they could exist simply as Person A in the rusty tin folding chair.
Figure Drawing 130 quickly became the most attended class on campus, and Apollo knew at least half of the regulars who showed up didn’t even take the class, and some probably didn’t even go to the school. But it didn’t seem to matter. For all intents and purposes, from the moment he took off the bathrobe to when he put it back on, the classroom became a therapist session–what happened there, stayed.
“You’d better not get a big head about this,” Artemis sighed, when he told her about it. She already knew, of course; even though she was majoring in astronomy, nearly her whole course was talking about it.
“I won’t,” Apollo promised, and then held out his arm so she could see the Grecian sun he’d just inked on his wrist. “I was thinking you could get a moon, and we could be matching,” he suggested, and Artemis called him an idiot before leaving the room.
(She went with him to the parlor the next day, to get them done. But she made it very clear she wasn’t happy about it. She didn’t want him getting a big head about that, either, it seemed.)
Apollo bought an orange tabby from the local Pets Mart, to get back at her. A good third of anything he ever did seemed to be out of spite.
“What is that,” Artemis said darkly, when she came home to see him dangling a shoelace for the kitten to bat at.
“This is Margarine,” he said, and she threatened to bake Margarine into a cake if it so much as breathed on her.
(Margarine took to Artemis immediately, much to her dismay. She’d wake up with him curled up on her stomach in a warm little ball, and even Artemis could only be annoyed with him for so long. It’s very hard to have a blood feud with a kitten, as it turns out.)
When the semester comes to an end and Apollo goes to collect his final grade for studio, he’s surprised to find a capital A stamped on his card. The Professor isn’t in the room–he’d left the students’ cards in the box outside his door–which was just as well. Apollo’s never been very good at small talk, and anyway, a single A- isn’t really enough to make him forgive an entire semester of passive aggressive art war.
But he does take a few pictures of his favorite pieces based on him. He won’t show Artemis–she’ll just accuse him of narcissism and gag a lot–he probably won’t show anyone. They’ll be just for him.