Chapter Text
Grantaire always liked art.
He admired finding the smallest aspects of life and enlarging and enhancing them beyond belief. He naturally was an overthinker, contemplating and picking at the little things and ignoring the big ones. It was comforting to have an outlet where that sort of mentality was praised, not scorned.
And that wasn’t even the half of it!
No, it wasn’t just the nitpicking - the focus needed to work with the agonizingly slow and stressful parts of art - that made him fall in love with it. It was the attention to beauty. Art stressed that being conventionally unattractive meant that you were unconventionally alluring. You had more beauty, more art locked up inside of you than anybody else. It was a source of strength in his life.
He could recognize beauty from anywhere. He wasn’t beautiful, not that it bothered him. But if he could create something so prepossessing that people couldn’t help but to stare at it in absolute awe, perhaps it meant that a bit of him wasn’t terrible. That little bit of him could become not only pretty, or beautiful, but extraordinary .
And doesn’t everyone strive for the extraordinary?
Art was one of the few things that brought him joy, really. Picking out what he thought was astonishing about life and reforming it to help others see it, too. So, naturally, he decided to go to school for it. He was rather good at it, so why not?
That, and he was absolutely worthless and anything and everything else. His father always got on him about mathematics. The thought of it made him laugh.
Plus, he was a proud drunk. All good painters seemed to be drunks. It was the only profession where you could spill wine on your work and have it be sold for more money than it would’ve been worth originally.
That made him laugh, too.
So, he got into a university that had an art program and went for it. It was hard work, sure, harder than he could’ve ever imagined, but he still loved it. It might have even been the happiest he’d ever been.
Scratch that.
He had never been better.
He finally had a strict schedule that he had to directly attend to, something to shift his sleep schedule back to more reasonable hours. He had a reason to get out of bed in the morning, which was strangely comforting. He found comfort in distraction, it meant that he could once again ignore the big picture.
So he adored the entire being of art. He was a soul so full of admiration for the world around him, yet so full of hate for himself that it only made sense for him to become an artist.
He had painted himself countless times.
Each time it was looking into a grotesque mirror. He hated self portraits because they required him to be brutally honest with himself about who he was (and if not already noted, it was the distraction part of art he liked). It only took him forever to realize that he didn’t need to draw or paint or sculpt himself .
It was a funny story.
The project for the finals that they’d been working on the entire year had one simple guideline: Remake Yourself.
For most of the first semester he’d taken those two words too literally. He should’ve known better, really. When a crooked art professor tells you to make something, it’s always metaphorical. It shouldn’t have taken him so long to realize that he was actually supposed to be creating something that represented himself, not his actual face or body.
Thank God.
Still, he couldn’t think up what to make (not that it was that important at the time, though). Almost every evening he’d walk through the university’s promenade, which was surrounded by trees that grew colorful in autumn and then bare in winter. He’d listen to the soft breeze, its rustling through him. He’d smell the sweet flowers that the gardener so fervently tended to. He’d watch the sun travel across the sky until it disappeared under the horizon.
It interested him, the sun. Its light still reflected off of the moon even after it set. It wasn’t there at the moment, but it was still burning. The light never burned out.
And the moon happily embraced it. The moon shone because of the sun. Without the sun, the moon would never beam as brightly as it did every single night.
But the promenade.
He would take a stroll through the promenade every evening with a sketchpad and sketch whatever he loved, hoping that something would give him some sense of inspiration, reminding him of himself.
Oh, he got inspiration alright. But nothing reminded him of him.
It had been a long day, once. He had gotten up early to finish an assignment, then was almost late to his first class. Nothing had gone particularly wrong over the course of the day, it was simply tiring.
That’s why it felt so nice to sketch while walking against the humming wind in the crisp Paris air. He could turn all of his undivided attention onto his work, closing out every other sensation and letting his body go on autopilot, simply enjoying the world around him.
Everything was closed away.
It was stupid, really, not to look where you were going while walking in public. It could make you look like a drunk, especially if you were so locked up in your own mind. Thankfully, Grantaire was a drunk. He had nothing to lose.
Except maybe his dwindling dignity.
He was hardly paying attention when it happened. The guy shuffling in front of him had just stopped . No warning. Nothing. He had either spotted someone or remembered that he had forgotten something, but honestly it really didn’t matter and Grantaire really didn’t care.
He was walking, and then he just stopped .
Grantaire, not wanting to run face first into him and embarrass the both of them, fell to the side on instinct. He had bad instincts.
Falling sideways, he ran straight into someone else, going in the opposite direction. Damnit . So much for not causing a dilemma.
But it really wasn’t a big deal. He was just overthinking it. He was an overthinker. That’s been established.
On colliding with the other person, he dropped the pencil he was using to sketch out of surprise. He cringed, because then he would have to lean down to get it and it would be a mess of awkwardness. He felt terrible. He hated awkwardness.
The guy who had stopped dead in his tracks was suddenly running towards someone on the other side of the promenade (so he was noticing someone!). That left one less person to face. But one more…
He turned around, probably a bit too quickly, to apologize to the guy he had ran into. He had to be polite at the least, he had practically body slammed the poor dude for Christ’s sake. So, holding up a hand, he said, “My bad.”
He was about to grab the pencil and move on, in fact he was a split second from doing so, but then the guy turned to look at him.
And oh good God.
Grantaire always liked art because he liked beauty. He loved beauty and had a keen eye for it as well. It was a talent. He could spot it anywhere, and everytime it took his breath away.
And there, right in front of him, was the epitome of beauty.
The young man, obviously a student, seemed to be carved out of pure marble. His features were put together so delicately that it was hard not to think that he owned two souls: His own and the one of whatever artist sculpted him. Grantaire could just tell . He held double the depth of one person in his eyes. In fact, it was almost as if the entire Pacific was poured into them. They were a deep blue, fitting well with his perfect complexion. He was without a blemish.
He was hardly human. He had to have been an angel of some sort.
He had to have been crafted.
Grantaire had to restrain himself from reaching out and touching the guy. He was so unbelievably convinced that his skin would be as chilled as the marble slab he was once carved out of. It was so believable.
It took him a moment to realize that the guy hadn’t responded to him. Maybe he hadn’t heard him?
“I apologize,” he repeated himself.
He once again didn’t accept his apology. His jaw simply tightened in annoyance as he grabbed the pencil that Grantaire had dropped and handed it to him. He met his eyes with a cold stare and nodded at him, then turned back around and continued off.
Grantaire watched him go.
Then, realizing he was standing in the middle of the walk, pivoted on his heels and hurried home.
The entire encounter must have only taken up five seconds at the most, but he felt like a mini eternity had passed in those five seconds. Something deep inside of him had clicked at this sudden discovery. He had found the Holy Grail of art: a person born to be reinvented over and over again.
He had heard about people like that, people who walk around resembling beauty. Some say that those people are born because God observed the Artists at work and was determined to remind them that He would always be the “master creator” (whatever that meant).
Grantaire didn’t really believe in “God”, because what sort of creator would get so jealous of his creations that he was so set on one-uping them at everything that they did? Why would he be so afraid of his own work that he felt the need to put it in its place?
But nevermind that.
As soon as he arrived at his home (a small, cheap apartment that was appropriately horrible), he threw the sketchbook he was previously carrying to the side and grabbed the newest one he had bought. He hadn’t even opened it yet.
He was going to draw the young man.
And if he was going to draw him, he was going to do it right.
So, quickly, before he could forget a single detail, he began dragging his pencil along the first page, recreating the perfect bone structure he had seen just minutes before. He let his hand do all the work, copying from memory every single excruciating feature he could.
The eyes, the jaw, the hair.
His hair was curled behind his ear, that was one thing. It looked softer than silk.
Pure perfection. An artist’s dream.
So, bent over his desk, he spent hours drawing him. Whenever he finished, he started over again and attacked the portrait with corrections. It was unbelievably hard to get down the absolute beauty he had witnessed in those mere five seconds .
But it didn’t matter.
He drew. He continued drawing even when his wrist cramped up so bad he wanted to cry. He simply lit a candle once the sun went down. He took a sip of whiskey to keep himself awake whenever he started feeling a bit drowsy.
All night long, he recreated the face of someone who had glared him down with the very pencil he had held. It seemed important, and he didn’t know why. It seemed imperative that he didn’t stop no matter what.
People used to say that he was crazy for becoming so obsessed with things that he’d end up drawing or painting them until he physically could not stay awake any longer. Maybe he was crazy. He was apathetic towards the idea.
He was apathetic towards a lot of things.
But, he was not apathetic towards inspiration.
And this man, this guy he saw for a split second was suddenly the most inspiring thing he ever laid eyes on.
It wasn’t until three in the morning that he could not work any longer and was forced to blow out the candle and go to bed. He really did not want to do so, but he was afraid of passing out and ruining the art by shifting in his sleep. It was a constant fear of his. Stupid, really.
So, a strange new obsession being claimed by his proud, addictive personality, he wrung out his wrist and collapsed onto his bed. Satisfied with finishing the recreation and tired beyond belief, he was out before his head even hit the pillow.
The implications of his obsession did not matter.
He pretended that they never would.