Archive of Our Own ^beta

1. Foeslayer

Whiteout didn’t often paint her Mother alone, but this time around she was not interested in doing a family portrait. She selected a tube of green paint and squirted some onto her palette, mixing it delicately with the black and blue to make a very NightWing color, as close to the shade of the night sky as possible. Then, with a thick brush, she applied it to her sketch of Mother on the canvas. She went in later with a thinner brush dipped in pure emerald green, edging slightly in between scales and adding highlights to the eyes.

Mother was not a complicated dragon, unlike most of the NightWings Whiteout was constantly struggling to understand. She needed no fancy background or particularly complex shading, just warm eyes, dark green scales, and a heart full of love for her family. The best way to paint Mother was to make it as clean, open, and honest as possible. And maybe there was a shadow of fear inside her, fear of the rotten spots in Father’s soul, but Whiteout would never dare take that to brush.

Darkstalker came by later to see what she painting, as he usually liked to do when she’d been holed up in her room for too long. He smiled when he saw it, expression softening when his eyes caught on Mother’s. “That’s beautiful, Whiteout.”

“Thank you,” she replied. “But I need to touch it up a bit more. There’s not enough snow."

“While you’re at it, make her mouth a lot larger than that," Darkstalker said, looking at her with an impossibly huge grin. "She’s usually yelling at Father.”

Whiteout paused and pulled back, examining Mother’s mouth with a worried frown. Darkstalker waited for a moment, expectant. Eventually he nudged her gently with his shoulder. “That was a joke, Whiteout. You can laugh.”

“Oh,” Whiteout said. She forced a laugh, because Darkstalker was always telling her you were supposed to do that when someone told a joke, even if it wasn't funny.

“You clown,” her brother said affectionately. “Well, I look forward to seeing the finished product.”

2. Clearsight

Clearsight, on the other hand, was a dragon who could only properly be represented in an abstract painting. She had spent her whole life in a fog of the future, tracing the timelines together, never truly present even when she was standing right in front of you. Whiteout got a headache imagining spending that much time in Clearsight's head.

It was different for her. Whiteout found her own mind a very interesting place, filled with pretty colors and shapes and pathways, flitting between vague ideas of the future but sticking to the present for the most part. But Clearsight’s mind was nothing like Whiteout’s. It was full of bunched-up tangles of worry and snags you had to be careful to walk around. Whiteout was pretty sure she would trip and fall into a crevasse if she spent more than a couple minutes in there, and with the thick black tar drowning the bottom of every pit, she wouldn't be able to fly out.

Of course, this terrifying mindscape was no trouble to a dragon like Clearsight. She navigated the whole place with skilled expertise, minding the gaps when she had to, knitting together parts that were broken until they worked the way she wanted them, keeping her careful focus on the many branching timelines in her mind. She might be near-permanently stuck in her own head, but she was care and keeper of this realm, and she knew how to survive it.

Clearsight was a watercolor, obviously. Whiteout splashed her canvas with blue first, the kind of deeply calming and honest blue that filled Clearsight’s head. She traced darker blue webs through the cloudiness of the portrait, colored the edges with the clinging shadow of fear that would never really truly leave Clearsight, and left a budding, flower-shaped storm on the horizon, a hint of what might be to come. She painted fractures of Clearsight into every nook and cranny of the painting— here a worried twist of a talon, there a deeply dark blue eye. It was the kind of thing you could only notice if you were looking for it. Whiteout loved sprinkling in little details like that.

After washing up her brushes and cleaning her talons off, Whiteout set the painting out to dry. Once it was done and she had finished reading a rather interesting scroll about the moon, she selected a pretty bow (blue, of course) and tied it around the painting. She would leave it out for Darkstalker, she decided. Her brother didn’t always understand her or her paintings, but he was trying to. Besides, Whiteout thought it must be impossible for even a casual onlooker to not see etches of Clearsight in every corner of the azure blue, even if you didn’t catch the actual dragon-fragments themselves. Darkstalker would understand what she was giving him.

(Later, after he found out what the painting actually was, Darkstalker would show her his own painting of Clearsight. It was very different from Whiteout’s and yet so unbelievably Darkstalker's, a little wobbly and untrained, but shining through with his love for Clearsight’s and Clearsight’s love for him in turn. Whiteout tried many times to replicate it, but she could never quite capture the look Darkstalker put in Clearsight's eyes.)

3. Fathom

Fathom, Whiteout knew from observation, was a dragon who was dominated by fear. She made that clear in the painting— in the shaky strokes of glossy yellow and sickly green, in the overcast eyes, in the long shadows. But there was also a little kernel of red-yellow strength somewhere deep inside, tiny but radiant. One day soon, Whiteout knew, it would shine through for everyone else to see.

Whiteout was never very good at foreseeing the specifics, but leaning into Fathom’s yellow warmth, she could see a future painted with the light of his strength, bright and glorious. There would be no succumbing to fear. There would be no snow, not for Fathom, just strength and light. She edged his splashes of fear with warmth and lime-green joy, and put just a dash of blue-purple on his chest, over the heart that had always belonged to Indigo.

“Oh, nice,” Darkstalker commented as he poked his head into her room. “It’s very... green. I’m gonna guess it's Fathom?”

Whiteout nodded and set her brush down, smoothing out the last few strokes with her talons. She was trying to capture the soft, worried light in Fathom’s eyes without blurring the colors too much.

“I didn’t know you knew him all that well. Like, enough to paint him, I mean,” Darkstalker said, stepping forward and twining his tail around Whiteout’s.

“I don’t know him at all, silly. That’s exactly why I’m painting him.”

Darkstalker slid his tail back and wrinkled his snout in an expression Whiteout was starting to learn meant amusement. “Well, it’s very pretty. I like the whole ombré thing in the background. But I think you might’ve gotten some of the paint from your family portraits on his chest by accident. It’s like, blue or something.”

Whiteout nodded absently. As her brother left the room and passed into the hallway, she raised a claw and gently traced the edges of Fathom’s still-wet indigo heart.

4. Arctic

No portrait of Father could ever be complete without including everything he wasn’t. A good parent, a caring dragon, the kind of person who loved Whiteout for who she was instead of who he wanted her to be— these colored his figure every time she tried to paint him. But it was a cold, glassy replica of the real thing, ready to crack open at a moment’s notice if you paid too close attention to the harsh edges. Even at the height of her wishful thinking period, she never could quite buy that the ice-blue dragon on the canvas was a dragon who genuinely loved his family and felt like he belonged. Or if she did, that dragon was not Father.

Sometimes she tried to break the façade of happiness and delve a bit deeper, paint her Father as he actually was. He was one dragon she never could quite understand no matter how much she tried to. His deep love for Mother, his cold hatred for the rest of the Night Kingdom, how desperately he seemed to miss the snow and ranks and clear instructions of the Ice Kingdom… It all seemed as insincere on the canvas as Whiteout’s happy little family portraits. There was something deeper inside Father, something Whiteout had yet to crack, and it had to do with Queen Diamond and Father's own rotten soul. At any rate, Whiteout much preferred her happy, fabricated little family if the alternative was a painful truth she couldn't understand.

But no matter. They were all a little broken, Whiteout's family, their souls just teetering on the edge of a blizzard. But they were together, and that was what mattered. They would always be together. And he wasn't like there was any real pressure to finish her paintings of Father. After all, Whiteout had all the time in the world to figure him out.

5. Darkstalker

Whiteout often painted her brother. He was the dragon she spent most of her time with, the dragon who always looked after her, the dragon who had never abandoned her. He had been warm and kind and the epitome of night-blue, looking outward with loving eyes and just the smallest hint of a shadow of the future behind him, always creeping behind but never taking center stage. The strength and love was what was in the spotlight.

But now, the shadow was full-force and dominating. Darkstalker’s portrait was a raging storm, eyes full of fire, claws stained blue with IceWing blood. Everything was blue, in fact, but not the lovely night-blue he had once been; it was all dark and gloomy and edged with red underneath. The painting hurt to look at. Just as the real Darkstalker no longer made sense to her, the perfect Darkstalker on the canvas was surrounded by a jumble of colors and shapes and anger.

She had locked herself in her room after watching their own father slice open his stomach and bleed his heart out for the whole Night Kingdom to see, after watching the snowstorm that had been brewing for seven years finally overtake Darkstalker and cloud his senses until he couldn’t tell right from wrong. She didn’t want to see anyone. Dipping her shaking paintbrush into the ink, Whiteout selected more blood-blue and splattered the rest of her father’s insides across the canvas. The color washed over the floors, stained the walls, and spilt over Darkstalker’s pristine black scales. Blue covered his body, drowning him. Flecks of the blood reached as far up as his face, adding a sharp contrast to eyes as red as NightWing fire.

Aside from the storm around him, this Darkstalker was beautifully flawless, nothing like the dorky older brother she had once loved to paint. He was as deep black as any NightWing could be, no chinks in his scales, no blemishes, nothing marring his body beside the blood and gore of his Father. His posture was flawless, a twisted crown placed perfectly atop his head and his skull the perfect shape to fit it. Even the evilly red glint in his eyes was symmetrical. It was the most painstaking attention to detail she had given any painting before, and it was all to match the mask of king and murderer Darkstalker had draped over himself.

The background, on the other talon, was all over the place, navy blue layered over red with a slightly lighter blood-blue splattering over the bottom and mixing with black. When the chaos edged over and overtook Darkstalker, it made a mess of color and anger. Whiteout hated it. Whiteout hated the whole thing. She took one look at her brother’s cold red eyes and lit the painting on fire.

Thoughtful found her two hours later, sobbing in a heap in her bedroom.

6. Thoughtful

Her portraits over the next couple years were shaky and slow. Painting was much more difficult. Every brushstroke reminded her of Mother and Father and Brother, gone and never coming back, drowned in the endless drifts of snow. She wanted to keep the raging snowstorm that clouded and choked her senses from getting anywhere near the things she loved the most— her paintings.

But she got better. Slowly, with many bumps and bruises and occasional blizzards along the way, she got better. She picked her brushes again, returned to painting, and slowly, Thoughtful wormed her way onto her canvas.

She hadn’t meant for him to. She started painting again slowly, with small, meaningless things. Pretty flowers, the slumbering volcano, the new and different constellations she could see from the island. It was all very basic and with no real emotion behind it. But somehow, no painting of the sunrise was complete without Thoughtful, glassy gray and edged with warm yellow light, and every bland landscape seemed to be missing his kind eyes and his small, round spectacles.

And it helped. Whiteout learned how to paint again. She learned how to love and trust someone again. She learned how to paint a dragon with the same care and adoration her brother had once painted Clearsight with, and Thoughtful smiled back at her from her canvases with the same eyes as Clearsight once had, a shade browner but just as loving.

Whiteout drew him in the margins of her class notes, framed his lovely shape with bright orange sunrises, covered all her canvases with his face. He was her most interesting subject yet. A dragon who understood her, really truly understood her, not like her brother had always tried to. A dragon who was just as quirky and eccentric and artistic as she was. A dragon she could paint with and talk to and who no matter what, she’d always be on the same page with. And as often as she could, she communicated this to him.

“It’s pretty, but I’m not sure it’s me,” Thoughtful said, looking up from his sculpture to examine Whiteout’s latest painting with a handsome wrinkly frown. “I think I’m more swirly and dark than that.”

“Don’t be silly,” Whiteout laughed. “You have a very orange soul.”

“You might be carrying too much of the fire from Cascade of Dreams over to your paintings.”

“It’s not a fiery orange,” Whiteout insisted, grabbing his talons. “It’s a sunrise orange. That’s you, okay? You’re the sunrise after everything’s been dark. You’re the thing that snuffs out the sad, lonely moon and gives the ocean its charm and makes all the plants look up and whisper, ‘Wow’ as they shake in the breeze. That's the orange you are.”

There was silence for a moment. “Wow, you are teaching me clarity, just like you said you would,” Thoughtful murmured with a smile as he adjusted his spectacles.

“Then you better hurry up with those glassblowing lessons,” Whiteout said, letting go of his talons and nudging his shoulder. “This is quiet art time now, Thoughtful. We’re not supposed to give each other suggestions until we’re both done."

Thoughtful nodded and Whiteout turned to her painting. But when he was looking away, craned over his sculpture, Whiteout added a small, swirly dark blue mark to the painted Thoughtful's chest, barely visible over his own dark gray scales. She sat back for a moment and thought to herself, It's perfect.