Work Text:
She had been challenged, by her own pupil nonetheless, to a comparison of skills. The foolish girl seemed to think that she no longer had need of her master, her teacher who had raised her up from just another talented student to the artist that she was now. Well, a challenge like that couldn’t be born, could it?
Minerva met her pupil in the studio apartment that the elder artist owned in order to start their competition. Both set up with a canvas and their own set of paints, carefully picked tools of their trade. As they began to paint, the silent tension in the room mounted, growing with each stroke as the two, master and apprentice, fought to prove their own points; the former wishing to prove that the latter had nothing to compare to her own skill, while the other merely strived to prove that she had outstripped her need for guidance.
The hours passed slowly, the air thick with unspoken words, the usual work-accompanying music halted for this task. As they finished, near in tandem, they stopped to look at each other, the younger boldly meeting her mentor’s eyes. As they revealed their pieces, Minerva was confident that she had, of course, painted the better of the two images. She turned her canvas around first to show it to her student.
The woman had painted a beautiful piece with focus on a large gray owl in flight. The bird’s piercing golden eyes held the viewer captive as it seemed to fly at them, and a mouse was clutched brutally in its talons. Underneath the bird lay a field full of carnations, with a single olive tree small and detailed in the background. The gray-eyed artist smirked, gesturing to see the girl’s own painting, which she felt was guaranteed to be of a lower quality.
Minerva’s face tightened into a scowl, her rage mounting as she viewed what the insolent young artist had created. She had formed the image of a mouse fleeing into a burrow, surrounded by brown grass in the foreground. The view was tilted slightly upward, showing the faint image of an owl fighting an eagle in the background of the sky. While the whole visage was in mute colors, the elder couldn’t find anything apparently wrong with it, inciting her vicious temper.
She seized her palette knife in one hand, launching forward towards her student who fell back with a cry of surprise. The younger’s painting lay knocked over as its artist struggled against her attacker, arms scratched and voice hoarse with fearful screams. All went silent as her master’s tool stabbed harshly through her eye and into her brain. The blood spurted up with the swift removal of the knife, splattering across the murderer’s smock and arms, gently speckling her once again smirking face. She reached out, straightening the fallen easel, and began to mark it with the red staining her hands.
A loud sound halted her near completion of the modifications, the police breaking down the door to her apartment after being alerted by a concerned neighbor. They paused in brief shock at the scene before them, the woman standing coated in blood and paint, the body of a young woman on the ground, eye gouged and blood pooled around her, knife lying nearby. The officers arrested the woman, who seemed far too calm for the circumstances she had found herself in. As one remained behind to secure the scene with the inbound backup, he took a look at the painting the woman had been working on when they came in. There, on top of a rather remarkable image centered on a mouse, was a spider painted in what he could only assume was blood.