Blue, here. A leaning ribbon of slate, fading, catching the bristles, departing for canvas or holding fast to one another. Wait. Dry. Hang naked and chilly blue and still moist. The brush returned, sweeping with long white fingers, bringing blue to blush with the softest, pinkest red. The sound was quiet on quiet, cured horsehair on a prepared palm, stroking. Soubi was painting butterflies.
Seimei was over his shoulder suddenly, and the sun fled from them both. He cast the monarch in grays with his broad clavicle, bathed Soubi in the wake of the black tea that lingered on his exhalations. Soubi waited for some signal, some subtle movement to guide his intentions, but all that came to him were the low pulses of instinct, pure art leading his painting to life.
For all the moments that Seimei watched in silence, Soubi grew more meticulous. Something in Seimei's investigation of his work commanded greater articulation. Sweeping strokes became a gentle brushing, became a careful contour, became an eyespot on a flying insect.
"Why did you stop?"
Soubi began again automatically, the tone of his master's voice so faintly cast in darkness and provocation. The canvas became a great focal point, and he realized rather dully that the lenses of his glasses were muddying the colors.
"Well?"
"I paused to think. I don't always know how to go on next."
Soubi felt Seimei shift his position beside him, perhaps weighing the futility of his lie. Soubi would never pause to ponder a wing—these were repetitive and long learned subjects. Seimei knew this. The woven yarns of his thick sweater pressed against Soubi's cheek when he leaned to gesture at the canvas. The heat of his flesh seeped through the interlocking fibers, gently overwhelming Soubi's senses. It took him some time to understand Seimei's point of interest, a long digit extended and questioning some part of his work.
It was the backdrop. The seemingly indefinable colors and compositional scaffolding behind his butterflies. Something faded, something reminiscent… Soubi blinked, bewildered by his own soul unfolded before him.
"I understand the bugs," Seimei interrupted curtly, removing his closeness in an instant and assuming the air of remote observation, "But what about the rest?"
Soubi took a thoughtful breath. Painting did always serve to clear his mind, as if these secretly gruesome, fragile winged things were always multiplying behind his eyes, extracted through his brush. And the background, never laid first, or last, or at any particular time, but an automatic environment devoid of recognizable shape or substance. Except it became very clear that it depicted the soft tissues of his mind, of his most sensitive insides.
"Well?" Seimei's eyes were pushing against the side of his head, much colder than his chest had been. "Is it that meaningless that you can't think of anything?"
Soubi knew that Seimei's cruelty was feigned. His master was always sensitive to how vulnerable he allowed himself to sound, especially when seeking explanation for a thing he could potentially misunderstand.
"I guess… I just create the image as I go along." His brush began again, adding its soft buttercup tenor to his justification. "I clear my mind for this. I ask myself where the thoughts come from, and how I can represent that here."
Soubi did not turn to watch the expression over his shoulder. He conjured his imagination instead, which pictured Seimei's silence as some vaguely discernable interest, thought, arms folded guardedly over his working heart.
"Is that something all art students do?"
Soubi, mid-application of ocre, paused. The words came as softly spoken as translation of some wise embroidery. "I do believe that artists are simply expressing themselves. The means are varied, the reasons are varied, and so the results become the diversity of art that we have in our world. I cannot claim to know anyone's reasons, perhaps not even my own, but I have always been attracted to the way that I can speak here. To no one in particular, and yet..."
Seimei had taken up seat beside Soubi, his clean pressed slacks against the cold, paint-stained metal of a folding chair. He was a few inches Soubi's inferior now, and the Fighter started, moving to correct the situation.
"Unless there is some good reason for questioning me, don't."
Seimei didn't bother to look at Soubi when he addressed him, and spoke lowly so as not to break his concentration on the canvas. Soubi's heart leapt uncontrollably. His palms grew clammy in anticipation, his jaw tightened. On the outside, he appeared serene. He was unbreakable. He was perfect.
"I want to try," Seimei declared casually, finally turning to Soubi with eyes the aftermath of a forest fire, shrewd trunks once brown now charred black, speckled in burns. Soubi brought the brush to his lap, gripping it carefully to quell the trembling that threatened to settle over his thinnest parts.
"I will get you a canvas," Soubi managed.
"No."
Silence.
Seimei looked up at his Fighter, whose heart rampaged wildly against its ribcage at the mere prospect of gazing down at Seimei's face, Seimei's white and fragile and forbidden face, with eyes like smoldering coal that even now left a painful heat wherever they slipped. Perhaps Seimei understood that Soubi would never be comfortable this way. A test of some kind? A challenge? A mere few moments of hilarity when Soubi would stumble over himself and seem incapable of his own feelings?
"I want yours." Seimei's gaze seemed to soften, or to recede enough when he spoke to allow Soubi's sudden snap of attention on him. "And I want you to teach me."
"It's-"
"Possible, I'd imagine, for someone like you and someone like me."
Somewhere in the back of Soubi's mind, he was remembering the soft bristles in his grasp. He leaned by Seimei's clean-shined shoe to wipe the paint away in a small basin of water and turpentine, lest it stain the tool forever. Seimei watched him with the force of a great storm, unraveling his intentions, probing more deeply than necessary to understand the action.
"Is the floor too hard for you, Seimei?"
The Sacrifice lingered in silence for some time, either calculating his response or imagining what possibilities the question insinuated. His large hands were folded in his lap, inert, starkly contrasted with their black sleeves. The sharp chin was set defiantly in thought. Finally, with careful annunciation so that Soubi would not ask such a hopeless thing again, "Is it too hard for you? Don't treat me like a child, Soubi."
A parting of lips was Soubi's reply, caught in quiet wonder that roiled in the darkness of his mouth. It seemed a dream that Seimei would ask to learn an art he had no interest in. And what was more, to expose himself to the potential toxicity of oil paint, to rest his knees on the studio floor where so much time had tested its surface, was a peculiar, unlikely thought.
Somewhere within himself Soubi found the strength to rise and take his canvas from its easel. The scent of paint was strong and wet, and followed him onto the floor where he placed it. The wraith came down on his hands and knees wordlessly, and in the silence his bones popped gently around one another. Soubi suppressed a shiver at the communication from within. His Seimei was leaning over the canvas now, resting his weight on the back of his legs and lingering, perhaps for instruction.
There had never been the opportunity to teach another. There had never been the desire. Soubi understood the underlying mechanics of oil painting well, and yet was sure that Seimei had no interest in the technique. Rather, Soubi speculated, Seimei desired some self expression. He had recognized Soubi's painting as a representation of his state of mind. He wanted to affect that, physically. Though his presence was clear already in the composition, though his every breath commanded the steadiness of Soubi's hand, his master could not see it. Could not tangibly sense himself as a prominent part of Soubi's work. And so he would yield himself to an alien world to better understand and dominate it. Soubi knew that Seimei could never hope to possess all that this world contained, but his attempt was as endearing as a child's. He fought not to show his knowledgeable appreciation through his features, and instead only his admiration.
Soubi offered one of his finest brushes. A palate had already been set, though devoid of the sinister colors he rarely experimented with. Anticipating Seimei's preferences, he began to diversify the selection, squeezing fat tubes of navy, heavy green, and black
Seimei continued to contemplate the canvas, raising his hand blindly before Soubi in expectation of that brush. It was not until the sanded wooden hilt touched him that he focused on it, closed his fingers and hooked Soubi's index under his. He shook him loose.
The Fighter positioned himself behind his apprentice. Being so similarly sized, it was difficult to lean over Seimei without touching him. He was so incredibly warm and still, his spine curving up and away and beckoning, the fierce warning of his eyes thoroughly masked by chestnut curls. Soubi's torso was long and supportive of the other's back as he came up against it. Seimei only stiffened for a moment, all the closet muscles pulling and contracting in tumult with their neighbors. He allowed the gentlest of breaths to fan the beast's nape, to lull him into unsuspecting complacency. The idea of it all was unfathomable, disobedient, and working. Seimei's shoulders lost some of their painful sharpness when far more experienced fingers, like marble pillars of some elegant celestial cathedral, closed over the back of his hand and sought to guide him. Seimei's will knelt and prayed at that soft white alter, asked for wisdom and strength. He was still too stiff, unwilling to submit to the vision of his Muse, struggling weakly at the tethers of another's skill.
It was somewhat like Fighting, or at least somatically so—Soubi was focused on his partner and their goal, Seimei's goal, his goal. The light from a high window hung on Seimei's lower lip, stroking it pink, asking him to admit it entrance. His mouth fell faintly agape, voiceless and moist, and Soubi faltered. As soon as they had appeared the teeth rebounded in a snap, and Soubi was being shaken loose again by an agitated other half.
"What is this?" Seimei accused. "I wouldn't be surprised if this is how you learned."
"No, not this way," he heard himself rebound quickly, and he withdrew all of his tendrils of affection as Seimei's, full of blame, charged his senses. He could only observe him from within two flawed and head bound marbles, smoky with some sorry haze.
"Anyway, I think I get it." Seimei was dabbing the brush recklessly in the inky black. Soubi could hear the bristles gasping, but he could not soothe them now. Seimei's intent was clearly malicious, now that the smallest upward curling began at the corner of his mouth. He raised the brush like some blunt weapon, already blackened with his victim's drying blood, before bringing monster down, obscuring the painstaking scales of the butterfly wings, the fibers of delicate, un-caged flight. He weighed them down with blackest night, thickly, texturing the landscape with dark mud. Infected their antennae into blindness, their legs torn and lost within that gaping gloom. Soubi swallowed half way before paralysis, before he could only stare and wonder and forgive Seimei immediately for destroying his homework.
It went on this way for some time, the only sounds the twisting of Seimei's working limb within his sweater, the bristles suffocating the canvas and themselves. He covered every inch, sparing nothing, taking prudent care at all of the corners with unexpected tenderness. Soubi was free to study him this way, perhaps expected to. There was spite in his master's fingers, an artless negligence in the way he moved. He took the canvas onto his lap with hardly concealed hostility, his thumb slipped into the paint but he did not wane. So it was with some shock that Soubi finally met his expression. There Seimei sat distant, lost, heartbreaking. His eyes glittered with unshed emotion, the lashes catching each other wetly, blinking now and then and unveiling eyes so much younger than they were. His face had gone bloodless, loveless, his lips parted as before but catching no light, no sound. His ears had wilted, his curls had framed him like the softest burial shroud. His heart was breaking.
"Hand," Seimei murmured.
Soubi was sitting with his attention dilated and unusual, unable to respond. Seimei had stunned him into muteness, and even the brush clattering from a grasp gave him no start. It was only the eyes, two black agates as preciously helpless as a child's and centered hard on his own stare that ignited his obedience. Hearing him now, he lifted his fingers to Seimei's, which were waiting some inches away to take him to his work and press his palm on the cool, slick paint.
Soubi gasped faintly, the oils cold and greasy, clumped and sticking. Seimei wielded him by the wrist, smudging his graceful, sallow digits in it all. The sound was vaguely illicit, and Soubi colored high in his cheeks where Seimei did not focus. He continued to seize him firmly, purposely, finally doing enough to expose strips of color underneath the black overlay, illuminating the light of Soubi's original and half-dry image.
Seimei stopped.
Soubi's hand fell away from the painting automatically, unquestioningly. The paint infringed on his fingerprints, tingled and traveled through tiny folds and rivulets of flesh. He dared not flex his fingers, but looked instead at the painting.
It was dark. It was black lace over a simmering blue, a wasted, waterlogged garment floating in the shallows and caught up in dead, black weeds. It was years of neglect and abuse and Soubi, Soubi was there too in the most diffused pinks and he was being conquered by that darkness, or if he could only challenge the message and say that he was recovering Seimei's innocence he would say so. It was hard, all of it. It was animalistic and cunning, and so very sad. Soubi fought his emotions back lest they leak from his face or his mouth or his hands, which longed to touch and comfort his master.
"Do you like it?" Seimei was sarcastic. He was winded. He had betrayed the weakness in his heart and his voice, and so he stood up immediately after having spoken, ready to leave.
"Seimei…"
He had managed only to sully a thumb, and he inspected it now with the highest disgust. And then the other hand. Soubi flinched. It was not the paint but the hands that were sickening him. He wanted to comfort him, to remind him that there was nothing to detest in such a heart, nothing to fear from skill and ambition.
"Go ahead, say it. I'm a terrible artist."
Soubi's heart flopped confusedly in his chest. Seimei's sentiments were fleeting and discordant, hardly logical, his anger an alarming possibility and his compassion a frightening truth. His nonchalance was contrived, the weak grin he shot so insincere it stung. But the art was stunning, it was beautiful, he had done something so profound.
"It's not.."
"He'd hate it."
"He'd-?"
"Forget it. I'm leaving."
Soubi rose to intercept him, ignorant of his place. He half expected the blow but did not see it coming the way that it did, expected it to hurt, and instead it pounded passionless against his breast, the side of an uncommitted fist balled in more misery than anger. Seimei's cheek fell overheated and powerless against the side of Soubi's throat, the dark hair of incredible softness, of immaculate scent. Instead of succumbing to his shock and worry he pressed the clean underside of his left hand against the back of Seimei's skull, not bold enough to stroke, only to steady. Soubi knew that his master was unendingly pitiless, that it was impossible to hold this particular man while he was trembling and unsteady, that he would be crushed for it. Yet there was nothing that could overcome Soubi's empathy or his kindness.
Seimei remained with his face buried in Soubi's collar, where the Name prickled and itched, possibly oozed. He did not yield to the comfort, nor ask for it, rather it was some unspoken necessity that his Fighter embrace him now, while some part of him was bound and sightless.
I am here, he wanted to say, but his hand spoke for him as it weaved timidly into Seimei's hair, risked a gentle scratching on the back of his feline ears. He could not believe his own audacity. I am yours. I will protect you. Be still. Be calm. I love you. I love you. I love you. Seimei jerked, as if he'd heard. Then, with a slow and calculating breath he untangled himself from Soubi's hold, fatigued but haughty, limp but sharpened cold.
"I can see why you're so depressed all the time. Your art is like a disease."
"Yes."
"And you're an idiot."
Yes.