[A oneshot about alphasession!Dave when he was a kid]

You watch the young boy stand in front of the blank canvas, his left arm tucked neatly into a cast and slung across his chest. From the side, you can see his eyes, a dark color, his gaze just as blank as the canvas. He observes it with an unwavering stare, not even seeming to think.

You feel unsettled. This is the first time you had a special ed kid in your class, and here he is now, standing unmoving in front of one of the canvases while the rest of the kids play and scream around.

You walk up to him. He doesn't move.

"David?" you ask quietly. "Would you like to paint something?"

Here he blinks, and he turns his head toward you so that his eyes are covered by his sunglasses. You still don't understand why a kindergartener should be allowed to wear sunglasses, but he absolutely refused to take them off before. When asked why, though, he gave no explanation.

Again, here he is now, not saying a single word. He just stares at you.

You carefully take a paintbrush from the art supply table and slip it into his hand. "Here," you say. "There are bottles of paint over there. You can put different colors on the white paper there with this paintbrush. Maybe you'll like it?"

He doesn't say anything. The silence goes on for one minute, then five. You reach out a hand, maybe to pat him on the head or the arm, but then you withdraw it and walk away.

Not ten minutes later, though, the kid is squirting red paint into a plastic cup and is smearing it on the white paper.

He is still painting when the lessons start, and doesn't respond to your calls. You tell the rest of the class that he is working on a 'special project' and they accept it after a moment's bewilderment.

The bell rings, and he is the last one picked up by the orphanage worker, his hands crusted with red paint. While cleaning up the room, you pass by his painting and look at it.

Red, red everywhere. Red smeared in different shades that he got by god knows where, red splattered, red flooding the bottom in a great sea with red clouds above, warning a storm. Red mist and red plants, red red red. Red everywhere.

The paint's still wet. You tear the paper off and dispose of it, washing your hands thoroughly afterward.

The next day you are hesitant, but there is he again, staring at the blank canvas. Again, you slip a paintbrush into his hand. Again, by the end of the day, the paper is covered in red.

The boy silently refuses to do anything else. You offer him legos, to sit and watch movies, to even have a go at the computer. The last seems to interest him somewhat, but after a few seconds of hesitation he simply turns and walks back to stare at the canvas.

He never starts painting until you give him permission. You don't know why, but you always do.

One day, when you are cleaning up, you notice that the canvas isn't covered in red.

In the upper center instead, are two circles of the same color. You hesitantly touch one of the thick blobs. It's thick with paint. The boy must have been working on the same two dots for hours.

The paintings evolve as the days pass. Often they will suddenly degrade back to a typhoon of red, but now they are mostly the same two circles, over and over again. You have to buy more bottles of red acrylic.

Three months have passed and he still paints. There are piles of paper in the back of the classroom that belong to him. You suddenly realize that his paintings are making a shape.

"What are you drawing, David?" you ask the boy, squatting down to his level.

He doesn't reply, just stops and looks up at his painting. You look up too and see two malevolent red eyes glaring down at you.

You take it down afterward and put it in the pile. He doesn't complain when he sees the blank canvas the next day, just allows you to put the paintbrush in his hand and starts on a new set of eyes.

It's unsettling how well he can paint. You have become so used to seeing him paint that you didn't just realize that you have an artistic genius in your classroom.

The eyes he paints are becoming more and more realistic as the days pass. They begin to have shape, emotion. Some days they are sad, some days they are as blank as his expressions. But most of the time those red eyes are burning with a wicked anger, glowering down at the boy in such a way that you are surprised he doesn't go up into flames.

"David," you try hesitantly. He has taken up a habit of taping up his paintings on the wall five minutes before the bell rings, and now one side of your classroom is plastered with red eyes. It scares the other kids. "Maybe you can try painting in a different color?"

He stares at you through those dark shades of his. You hesitantly pour some blue paint into a cup, rinsing his paintbrush from the red and handing it to him. "Try it?"

By the end of the day, bright blue eyes are staring at you, the edges of them crinkled with a smile.

The day after that, he paints green eyes, even happier than the blue ones, then cool lavender ones. The next day he paints red eyes again, and you are afraid that he has went back to his old habits, but the day after he paints blue again. And it goes in a cycle.

You look at his painting in surprise. "Trying a new color, David?" you ask him. The orange eyes are deep, and you can't help but to feel that they can pierce any soul they look at.

He stares up at the painting, then suddenly grabs it and, before you can say anything, tears it up into pieces.

After that, he begins to only paint red eyes again.

The red eyes are becoming more feral. The pupils are slits, eyelids stretched wide in what can only be hatred, and you cannot even begin to imagine why the whites are now yellow.

"Maybe you can draw their faces, David?" you hesitantly suggest one day. You watch as he slowly grabs a bottle of gray paint. By the end of the day, a gray-faced monster is glaring at you from the wall, sharp fangs poking out from its upper lip. Orange horns stick out of the mess of its black hair.

As beautiful as it is, you take it down. It makes your skin prickle.

The next day he paints the same blue eyes as before, but again he adds a face. You can't help but to be relieved when it has the pinkish skin tone of a human.

Hours later, he tapes the painting up on the wall with your help. A bucktoothed boy with glasses smiles down at you both, and though his face remains impassive, you can't help but to think that he smiles back.

A girl, one with the same teeth as the blue-eyed boy but with bright green eyes instead, joins the wall, then a thin girl with the same color hair as David but deep purple eyes.

The next day you feel dread when you see that he paints red eyes again, but the person he paints is not the monster from before. It is him, an older version of him, with a set, straight mouth but horribly sad eyes.

He covers them with black shades and posts it up on the wall, next to the blue-eyed boy.

He doesn't paint again for an entire week. He instead stares at the blank canvas, paintbrush in hand. You encourage him a few times, but he doesn't respond. Once or twice you notice him staring instead at the table of art supplies. Once, his hands grabs the orange paint, but then leaves it.

You fill a cup with orange paint by yourself and leave it there.

He hesitates for what must be a hour before he starts painting.

By the end of the day, a tall man stares down at you and him, and you again feel like his eyes pierce through you. Behind their hardness is a softness, though, that seems to be for David alone. You look at him, and you see a frown on his face.

"Who are they, David?" you ask quietly, sitting down next to him on the floor.

He doesn't respond as usual, and you are just getting up when you hear,

"m' not David. I'm Dave."

His voice is soft, just as emotionless as his face. He doesn't look at you, but is looking at his paintings, the paintings on his wall. "That's John," he says, pointing at the blue-eyed boy. "That's Jade," he says, now pointing at the green-eyed girl. "And that's Rose."

"The.." You try not to say monster. "… Person from before?"

"That was you," Dave replies without an explanation.

Your hesitation grows, but you know you have to ask. "And who is this man?" you ask, looking at the painting.

He grows silent again, staring at the painting, too. His mouth opens a fraction, then closes as he stares at it.

"That's," he begins, faltering. He swallows, then continues with a trembling voice. "That's my bro."

And suddenly his face falls and you can see the misery even behind his shades. Fat tears roll down his face, and now you have a howling boy, sobbing into the shoulder of your shirt as you shoosh and pap him, but he won't quiet and you are forced to take him out of the staring classroom until, hours later, he is able to calm.