Work Text:
Stroke upon stroke of various colours of paints were laid upon the canvas as Kaveh worked. His brush rubbed against the canvas and wisps of grey followed its path, drying slowly into the shape of something.
It was wrong. It was all wrong. The hair had far too little volume. And where was the part in his bangs on one side of his face?
A few strokes of his brush to fix these things hardly satiated Kaveh. No, he needed it to be perfect. Something was missing from the grey hair ruffled atop dark skin. It was still wrong.
Perhaps it would be better with eyes. Yes, that was it. But as Kaveh reached up to draw the curve of the upper eyelid, he hesitated.
He no longer remembered the shape of his eyes. They never appeared in his memories, although Kaveh could have sworn they used to. But not anymore. Now, all he remembered was the locks of grey hair that he had enjoyed running his fingers through so much. All he remembered was the earphones that sat atop the grey, although the exact shape continuously eluded him.
Nothing else seemed to come up. Kaveh knew the basics. He knew that his eyes had been green and his skin dark. Kaveh had pulled his subject’s old outfits from his closet and examined them thoroughly, searching for any clue as to his looks.
He still remembered his muscly arms, the way they filled out his clothes perfectly. He still remembered his tall frame and the cryptic way he spoke solely to annoy Kaveh. Hell, he remembered everything he did. But his face had eroded with time without Kaveh’s realising until it had become unrecognisable in all his memories. His eyes disappeared, the structure of his nose blurred, and his hair now appeared as nothing more than a blob of grey.
But Kaveh had to remember. If Kaveh forgot—
What if Kaveh was in the desert one day and came across some ancient ruins? And then he entered and discovered researchers trapped inside, dehydrated and all too thin from starvation. What if he was one of them, yet Kaveh’s memory had faded too much for him to recognise?
What if the memories they had made together faded after his face, disappearing one by one and falling victim to time?
Kaveh felt nauseous when he thought of this. He tried desperately to force those thoughts from his brain and let them disappear, too. But they were there to stay, ever-present in the back of his mind ever since the missing person notice had come out.
So here he was, seated at his easel as he had been for the past three days, painting a canvas with grey and brown and green.
He never got past the face. Sometimes the eyes would turn out fine but the nose would look all crooked, but sometimes the nose would turn out fine and the eyes became the crooked ones. And when Kaveh tried combining different parts of each painting, he was met with disaster every time.
A flick of his wrist as his paintbrush rested its bristles upon the canvas created a line that Kaveh hoped would turn into part of an accurate depiction of his eyes.
Somehow, each and every stroke still seemed so wrong, no matter how many times he painted over it and retried. For a moment, Kaveh tossed around the idea that it would never feel right.
But then he came to his senses. That was absurd. He would get his portrait right eventually. He just had to keep trying.
So Kaveh blended his browns and reds over the stroke until it disappeared behind them and tried again. He had to. Otherwise, he would never remember. And he had to remember.
It was a shame, really. Kaveh would never remember. He would never come home.
It was such a shame to Kaveh, yet he had already forgotten the grand scribe’s name.