Work Text:
A darkened room.
The young teen huddles himself, drifting slowly, back to the ceiling, in the corner.
The hum of pipes and condensers is punctuated only by the sound of a pencil sketching, amateurishly, and the grating of teeth against what had been previously perfectly manicured nails.
“No… No, that’s not it…”
He crumples the paper into a ball and tosses it to join its brethren floating in a cloud of debris in front of him. It increased the chances someone might find him but for now he didn’t care. He just needed to get this done.
Breaking yet another nail, he moves on to the rapidly dwindling pad of forms he’d swiped stowing away on the ship and puts pencil to paper yet again.
He steals a glance at the open red notebook floating above him, just out of reach, and lets out a strangled growl. Why? She had made it look so easy when she did it, even sketching on the go as she’d bumped into him in the hallway. But now even supporting the paper against his thighs as she’d done for weeks in that room together, the pencil never seemed to go how she wanted it to in his mind, the lines crooked where they should be straight, and straight where they should curve. He’d intended to get a few practice sketches in as not to sully her notebook before a final perfect one, but this was taking far longer than he’d expected.
Skrrch skrrch… SNAP!
It was no use. No matter how he tried, he could not even manage a single smooth line, let alone capture details like the smoothness of her cheek, the fineness of her hair as it fell in soft curls around her face, or how the unnatural harsh fluorescent lights had reflected off her eyes.
And despite him trying to imagine a smile, he’d resolved to capture her as he’d known her most, with that permanent scowl on her face as she’d perched there, brooding atop her stack of crates at him.
Wiping a sleeve to his face, he takes out his penknife and starts to slowly carve at the wood of the pencil, hoping to get another tip for drawing.
Chiselling away, his thoughts only spiral more. Even if she had run away with him, where would they go? She’d already stained her hands with so much blood at that point, there was no way they could have escaped. Peil would have been after him too. Could he have stopped her before she boarded her Gundam? Needled her less during those two weeks, maybe let her open herself up more? Even before that, if he had cared less about himself and more for others back when they first met, at the school festival, could he have stopped that too?
If only… if only if only if only…
The tears blur his vision and the knife slips, drawing a welt of blood from under the skin. Crying out, he frantically blots it with the paper, before realising his mistake and trying to tie his cravat around it instead.
Staring at the red streaks across his crude approximation of her face, he mars the sketch further with dark blobs that stain the thin paper.
Clutching himself tightly, three thoughts cross his mind.
He would get through this.
He was a survivor after all.
He had the whole rest of his life to learn how to draw.