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People who don't know Nel very well think that she must have been painting since her childhood. This is not true, but she's alright with it. She knows what she looks like, and she knows what she sounds like, too. It's hard to imagine a littler Nel with anything but an artistic spirit. Her colors are so bright now, but they weren't always. Hardly anybody knows that she made them that way herself.
People that know Nel a little better think that painting might have come home with her from therapy. This is also not true, and she's a little less alright with it — though her therapist's support in her nice, quiet hobby was much appreciated. Still is, now that she's decided to be very, very loud about it.
Nel's art isn't what anybody thinks it is. Nel's art isn't even what she thinks it is, most of the time, and she really likes that. She has to like it, because she likes doing it and she has no right to go ruining the things that she likes.
So, here's the thing about Nel and her paintings:
It hasn't been around forever. It's not even half as old as she is. But it is older than the bad thing that happened to her, and she's clung to it hard enough for that to matter. They just don't touch. Her paintings and the bad thing– They are not supposed to touch. Even when she sees her great big bad thing in everything, all day, everywhere, which doesn't even happen that often anymore, her paintings are still hers.
Hers, hers, hers. Her colors, even when they aren't so bright. Hers, seeded and sprouted from a very grown place in her that failed again and again to let go of a very childish dissatisfaction with the way that things are. Not from therapy. Not from the thing she's in therapy for. From her. Hers.
Her scar doesn't hurt but her head does a little. It's just a headache. Normal. Might be the smell of her paints getting to her.
"You know," she says suddenly, "I'm not sure these are actually skin-safe."
From under her, Grimmjow groans with half his face mashed into the pillow he's hugging.
Some things do come from her childhood. His too. She wiggles where she's perched on his butt. It's actually a very comfortable butt now. Used to be he was so bony, no cushion, so she would sit behind him instead of on him and write characters on his back with her finger. Make him guess what she was writing and lie if he got it right, because they had nothing better to do and she'd run out of fun new ways to torment him. It just never lost its shine.
He wouldn't have been very good to paint on, then. Topography of bones, spine and ribs and shoulder blades. But he's all meat now, soft and pliable when he's relaxed and pretty smooth. His scars are all on his front.
"I thought it was facepaint," he grumbles.
"It was facepaint but I didn't like it. It didn't blend right." She hunches back down with her brush dipped blue. "This is my other stuff."
"Your canvas stuff?"
"Yeah, well, you are–"
"Don't."
Nel squeezes him too tight with her knees and smiles big so he can hear it and says, "You are my most handsomest canvas."
The noise Grimmjow makes is disgusted and disgusting. He turns his face the rest of the way into the pillow and heaves a deep groany sigh, like a dog. Or like he wants to suffocate himself. Nel rolls her eyes. She lifts her brush and waits for his ribs to come back down.
She needs purple in this tree. Dark, for the lowlights. She hasn't done the sky yet, so the upper half of Grimmjow's back is still just skin. She paints from the bottom to the top; it took her a while to cover his tattoos, just to get started. She doesn't always. Sometimes she treats his two pretty panthers like pictures in a coloring book, tries to stay inside the lines. Then outside the lines to give them a nice, strange world to live in. Places to hide, prey to stalk. A bright sun or shimmery moon to lay under. For her lazier days, when all she'd like to do is join them.
But not today. Today, Grimmjow's panthers are hidden beneath a densely packed forest of pines and junipers, bent and pruned with the peculiar, twisty smallness of potted bonsai. She's left room for a path to wind over his spine. She sits up now and looks, chews her lip and tastes cola chapstick. Highlights in baby blue and lowlights in purple. The purple needs to be redder.
She dunks her brush and wipes it on the towel spread out under Grimmjow’s chest. Lots of towels, actually, because the floor is so hard beneath the rug and she’s made one too many colorful accidents. She mixes more red into her purple, palette by her knee. It's her newest and nicest one, from her last birthday. From Grimmjow but not his idea. Obviously. God forbid anyone find him sweet and thoughtful.
She checks the tint against her pale thigh and decides it's warm enough. Then she squints hard at the places where Grimmjow is still skin. A month into summer and he's already tanning. She is so envious. The blond hairs on his arms and legs are bleaching, too. If he freckles this year she might just kill him.
Nel bends back down to tuck shadows into her trees and asks, "Does Ichigo have freckles all over or just on his face?"
Grimmjow shakes his head in the depths of the pillow and refuses to come up for air. But she needs him to breathe so he can answer her question, so she flips her paintbrush around and jabs him in the kidney.
He jolts but she's not going anywhere. "What the fuck, Nel, ow!"
"Tell me about his freckles."
"No! Who gives a shit about his freckles?"
"I do, or else I wouldn't have asked."
His head comes up, elbows under him, and it makes the muscles in his back turn rigid. Nel puts her hand on the back of his head and shoves him back down.
"You wanna know so bad, why don’t you jump him yourself," he mumbles. Right back where he started with half his face buried.
"He won't let me," Nel sighs. Her forlorn disappointment is only a little bit real. She knows better, mostly. What's hers is hers and what's his is... Well, that's also hers but she doesn't have to step on his toes about it.
"Tough shit."
"It is tough. I've never even seen him shirtless. Can you imagine? I'm missing out and all you have to do is show up."
"I do a little more than just that."
"I’m sure you do." She can start laying a path down now. "Whore."
"Bitch."
"You can have the PlayStation back if you tell me. You can hook it back up out here."
Grimmjow looks across the room to their TV, dead and quiet, without lifting his head. From below, Nel’s GameCube stares back with its four empty eyes. "And the good controller."
"No. You use the one you broke or get yourself a new one."
"Hnnn." He shifts beneath her, squirms and settles, turns his head the other way with a sigh. "Fine."
Nel waits. She's patient because she knows he won't back out on her. He's not capable of it. She'd like to put some grasses in around the path, some moss and small stones.
Grimmjow's feet kick against the floor behind her. He thumps the couch and then goes limp. He could throw his heels up and nail her in the back if he wanted to. He's flexible enough for it, and it'd hurt pretty bad. Knock the wind out of her if it didn't at least break some ribs. But then she'd have to put him in a headlock and that would ruin all of her hard work. He doesn't want to do it, though. She bets he's not even thinking about it.
"He has them on his face," Grimmjow says eventually, "but they're on his shoulders, too. Just a couple. They're light. And up the... the back of his neck a little."
Very good. Nel slots these details (they're light, oh my) into her collection of mental images of Kurosaki Ichigo. Small things, like many notes slid into a drawer. Napkins and post-its and torn parchment paper and stickers. Everybody Nel knows has a drawer, decorated appropriately; every drawer full of parts with no sum. She used to think in wholes and completes. She doesn't anymore.
The back of Grimmjow's neck isn't any pinker than it always is. It would be if he knew what he sounded like, talking like that. She slots that thought, too, into her Grimmjow drawer. It's the biggest one.
"That's cute," she says. Doesn't matter who she's talking about. She sits up and walks her eyes down her path, from far back in the bonsai woods to the cliff of Grimmjow's hip, right above the band of his sweats. A big, fat tree here to the left. "I want to put a little door in this tree." She prods it with the handle of her brush so he can feel it. "This one."
"'Kay," Grimmjow mumbles. He sounds bored, like he might go to sleep. "Not like you need my permission."
That's right, she doesn't. It's her tree and it'll be her door.
A little twinge in her headache, like a pinch on the inside of her skull. Her hand twitches halfway to her head, the scar on her forehead, but she drops it before she can touch. All touching does is pull her attention and make the throbbing worse, sometimes makes it itch.
Door. Door door door. What color? Tree-colored, obviously. She can hide the seams in the bark, so long as she doesn't hide them too well.
She works in the silence for a while. Listens to Grimmjow's breathing. She does better in the quiet than he does, usually, but he hasn't asked her to turn on the TV or get him his music or let him play Pikmin or anything. He's being very still and cooperative, all things considered.
She could be suspicious of that. It wouldn't take much. But her Grimmjow drawer is her biggest one. Her Grimmjow drawer is so big she can fold herself down inside of it.
And her headache is getting worse. It's not from the smell of her paints. It's been brewing since mid-morning, at work, when she–
"I found a caterpillar today."
Grimmjow doesn't twitch or tense or do anything like that. With his head turned sideways into the pillow, Nel can see just that one narrow eye slicing back to her. "A caterpillar," he repeats. Doesn't ask. Hard to get him to ask for much.
"Yep!" She goes for darker colors. She can't decide if she wants to talk about it or not. "Just... Just a caterpillar."
He lets that go for a second. Then, when she only paints and keeps her mouth shut, Grimmjow says: "Nothing's ever just anything for you, Nel."
"Well, it could be."
"But it isn't."
"Well then it should be."
"But it still isn't."
Nel blows a raspberry at the naked place between his shoulder blades and he bucks her for it, jostles her hard. She saves herself a mess but only barely. Recovers fast and smacks him on the back of the head. Makes her hand sting but makes him grunt, too. He hugs the pillow tighter and buries himself back down in there.
Muffled in cotton, he only ever gets deeper and growlier the longer he's spread out on his stomach like this. "Tell me about your bullshit caterpillar, Nel."
"Not bullshit. And not my caterpillar," she says, thinking about a tiny door knob and little wooden hinges and trying to make them real, "Not my anything. Nothing even happened. It was on the rug by the backdoor, just a little ways inside. I almost stepped on it. I don't know how I saw it in time, because it wasn't very pretty. Just... kind of brown. Some of them are so bright, y'know?"
"I know."
"Like green and yellow and orange, sometimes?"
"Yeah."
"Well, it was just brown. And it was there on the rug, and I was kind of in the middle of something but I stopped and looked at it because... because bugs go outside, and this one was inside. And it was just lying there straight and not moving or anything. I think I thought maybe it was dead."
A glimmer on the tiny door knob, like a polished stone. This door is a creaky one. It wants windows.
"Was it?" Grimmjow asks.
"Was it what?" Nel asks back.
"Dead."
"Oh. No. I touched it and it curled up. It was really cold... Are they supposed to be cold?"
"Dunno."
"I wanted to put it outside. It was gonna die. No green stuff to eat, whatever, I don't know. It just felt bad that it was so cold and curled up and that close to the door. So I picked it up." Darker colors. Not much green in her bonsai forest, either. Could it live here? Maybe not. Darker, darker. "And then I put it outside."
Grimmjow breathes. She glances up and sees him blink his pretty eyelashes. He's not looking at her anymore, but he's listening. Hearing her and listening. She can always tell. Sees it in the muscle-twitch of his jaw.
"And then that's it," she whispers to him, "Nothing happened."
Nothing at all.
Stupid. She doesn't know what she was expecting. She knew it wasn't going to burst into a butterfly and flutter away. She should have expected nothing. She should have expected it to stay small and brown and ugly. To roll out of her hand onto the sun-warmed pavement and stay there. It didn't uncurl. It didn't wriggle away. It just laid there. Tiny in her big shadow, right next to the weeds that grow tight against the wall of the building.
Maybe then it was dead. Maybe then, between her touching it and letting it go, it sighed and died. She doesn't know. She didn't touch it again. She went back inside.
Her head pulses and her scar feels caved in — feels like it's digging a trench into her skull into her brain. She stops her brush and closes her eyes. In the black of her eyelids she can see the little door in the big twisty tree. The shiny knob, the hinges, the seams in the bark, the windows. Something else. Something else.
She opens her eyes and looks down at what she’s painted.
The door is cracked open.
The door in the tree, her magical door in her improbable tree, easing open with that creak that only she can hear, the black wedge of space within. Darker colors, darker. She thought she was... She didn't know she was–
She looks at her brush. The paint clogging the bristles is bone white. Then she looks back at the door and sees the–
Hand. The hand. The long, skeletal fingers wrapped around the little door’s edge, four of them and an approximate thumb, sharp like insect legs and grabbing. Reaching and grabbing and pushing and p–
No. Nel sucks air fast through her teeth and squeezes her eyes so tightly shut that they hurt in their sockets. Absolutely not.
"Nel," Grimmjow is saying from under her, sharp and sudden, "Nelliel."
She blindly thrusts her paintbrush out where he can see it. "What color is this?"
"It’s white. Nel–"
"Okay." He’s rigid and so is she, but she can still hear him breathing, feel it between her knees even as her head clangs with pain. "Ohhh-kay."
She feels for the towel and sets her brush down. Eyes still closed — she's safe if she can't see it. There is no terrible white hand in the thick black cushion of her mind.
Grimmjow squirms, but not to get anywhere. She realizes then that she's constricted around his ribs and hasn't let go. The muscles in her legs are so tight they're shaking a little. She doesn't like that. A big breath out and she can make herself soft again. Her hands find his shoulders and the rough tangle of his dyed hair, and she folds herself down over his back, lays her cheek on his paintless skin. She'll get paint on her shirt where the forest and its path are still wet. She doesn't care.
Now would be the time for Grimmjow to say something — her name again, maybe — but he doesn't. This is the part he's no good at. Just terrible, actually. But his silence is familiar and she pulls it over her head like a blanket, like sliding his drawer shut with herself tucked inside, letting it carry her into the quiet and the dark with all the little scrap-things she's gathered.
Here's a tiny one: two of the knuckles on his right hand are sunken flat. They get stiff in the cold.
Here's something bigger: he was the only person in her hospital room when she woke up.
She stays curled there on top of him for a long while and he lets her. Her head still pounds, persistent and crunching. She turns her forehead against him, presses her scar and eyelids and nose into his warm back. She can blink here and still be safe. Her eyelashes drag against his skin.
"Oh," she mumbles, "I'm sorry, cute boy. I'm alright."
He hums at her but she can hear the frown in it, the snarly curl of his lip. Unhappy. She reaches up and ruffles his hair. Then she just kind of pets it.
"I'm gonna sit up in a second. And then, can you do something for me? Go shower and wash this off, and just... Just don't look at it, okay?"
Silence for too long. She eases her heavy head up and looks at his face, finds him squinting back at her. The set of his mouth is severe. She leans forward and kisses him on the cheek.
"Please?" she tries again, starting to push herself up and being very careful with her eyes, "Say okay."
"Okay," Grimmjow says, barely any sound at all.
When she gives him enough space to move, he turns himself onto his back and hides her painting from her aching eyes.
———
More than pain, Nel remembers her face being wet. The wet was warm, and there seemed to be a lot of it. It crept into her hair, trickled over her ears and down her neck. It felt a little bit like tears, but she wasn't crying. Crying would come later.
Sounds came down to her, then. Down, because she was on the ground. The pavement was gritty. She didn't know how she'd gotten there. She was standing, walking, and then there was a cold touch of fear up the back of her neck, and then... What? And then her face was wet and she was on the ground.
The sounds. Fast talking close to her and shouting from far away. She didn't recognize the voices.
She recognized the laughter. From deeper between buildings, giddy at first and then burbling. She recognized the yelling that answered it, too. The vicious snarling, screaming. It sounded hurt. It sounded angrier than anything she'd ever heard before.
An urgency around her. It was so dark. Movement and sounds. She was in her body but her body did not move, did not see, did not speak. The sounds of meat. Wet smacking, endless. It didn't stop. The laughter did.
Sirens.
———
She feels better after dinner and a shower and two-and-a-half episodes of trash TV. Not quite in that order. And not all the way better, either. Her head still throbs. It's moved away from her scar, settled into a pool of hurt towards the base of her skull. Manageable. She's done what she can: taken her pills, had her water. All she has to do now is sleep.
So she's in bed, in the dark, wrapped up in the nighttime sounds of the building and too many pillows and one soft fleecy blanket, and instead of sleeping she's stuck thinking about the little brown caterpillar at work, and it's frustrating, because she knows it's not really about the caterpillar at all.
It's about her. It's about that hand creeping into her painting.
That isn't supposed to happen.
It'd be easier if it scared her — if all it did was raise the hairs on her arms, climb into her throat, urge her to run. Running's not so complicated. And it does scare her a little bit, but not enough, and not in any way that makes sense. The feeling in her now doesn't live in her throat. It lives above, behind her eyes, nestled with the headache and a special, lancing kind of anger that bristles and cuts. And below, in the pit of her stomach, twisting and turning with the dirtiest word she knows.
Pity.
Nel sighs and flops onto her back. Blinks up at the glowing star stickers on her ceiling. The apartment is quiet and has been for a while. Grimmjow must be asleep. She probably wouldn't hear him much if he wasn't, but he's smart. He has work tomorrow. Nel doesn't. She might tag along. Harribel's self-defense classes always have a good turnout, and it's fun watching Grimmjow play test dummy. The ladies will all ogle him, and then Harribel will teach them how to get him in a choke or put him on his back, and then some of them will get to try it themselves, and then they will all come back next week. As business models go, it's sort of genius.
Nel would attend herself if she had anything new to learn. Besides, she can bully Grimmjow for free. Maybe she should invite Ichigo...
First she has to sleep. She hates laying here waiting for something to happen. Brain whirling, eyes hot, gut tight. She really feels terrible. Levity isn't helping.
That hand. The hand that hurt her, transplanted from her memory to invade her painted forest. Nel raises her own hands in the dark and looks at the silhouette of her fingers against the green glowing stars. Rotates her wrists so the faint light ripples. Playing with shadows.
If she sleeps now, is she going to dream? She hasn't had a nightmare in a little while. Maybe she's due. If she wakes up with her face wet, it will be from tears, but she won't know that at first.
She just wants to sleep.
Her blanket falls away and she's up. She's blind in the dark, but she doesn't need to see to get where she's going. To the door, through it, down the hall, moving quiet and sure. A light left on in the kitchen, the one above the stove, throwing her shape tall up the wall.
She wonders briefly if Grimmjow did as he was told. He showered, sure, but he could have turned his back to the mirror and peeked. She'd never know it if he did. He didn't say a word about it when he came out.
The big drawer in Nel's head rattles hard. Reminds her that he said okay. She made him say okay so that she wouldn't have to wonder.
Right. He didn't look. He did exactly as she told him. The hand is a watery swirl of pale colors down the shower drain. Nel swallows against the burn behind her eyes and the flop in her gut. Her skull feels fragile like an eggshell.
Into Grimmjow's room lit by slats of streetlight-orange from his window. Nel sneaks to the bed and kneels on the edge, leans over the boy-shaped lump. He doesn't do anything but breathe and she listens to that for a few long moments. Deep and even. He's never been a snorer.
He's on his side. Scowling like always, even in his sleep. Nel finds his shoulder and runs her hand up and down his arm.
"Hey," she whispers, "Grimmjow. Griiiimmjow."
A snuffle that he turns into his pillow. Nel gives him a little bit of a shake and he groans one of his most pathetic noises.
"Poor baby, I'm sorry," Nel coos. She's not, really. She tosses his blankets down and pulls at his shoulder, his arm. "You don't have to wake up, it's okay, just get on your feet for me. Come on, sleepyhead, come on."
Another haul at his dead weight before he groans again and rolls over. He doesn't sit up and stand so much as slide to the floor and happen to land on his feet, straightens up with a drunken sway. Definitely not awake. It's good enough for Nel. She puts her hand on the back of his neck, the other on his shoulder, and pushes him ahead of her. He goes. She's pretty sure his eyes aren't open.
She zombie-walks him out of his room and back down the hall like that. Kind of special, the way he just lets her. He always just lets her.
Her room again, safe under the fake stars. She points Grimmjow towards her bed and he drops as soon as he feels the mattress against his knees. Collapses in a heap, makes the whole bed shake. Big, big sigh, and then he turns automatically to face the door.
"Good boy," Nel mumbles. She crawls up the bed and slips behind him, pulls the blanket with her to cover them both.
He's sleep-warm and just as still. Too tall to be the perfect little spoon, but his hips are narrow enough. She snuggles up close, tosses her leg over him and tucks her nose into the back of his neck. Folds one arm against his back and hugs his waist with the other. Better. Solid. Good. She tried body pillows, but they never worked — not even when she tried to trick herself by putting them in his clothes. Not even when she put herself in his clothes. They weren't him.
She sighs now, too. Closes her eyes. The dark shudders with the pulse of her headache, but it's getting better. Slowly, slowly. With her arm over him she feels for his hands, finds the left one, then the right. She slips her fingers around it and rubs his knuckles with her thumb.
Two flattened, two tall, thick skin over all four.
She squeezes and feels the wiry tendons, the bones. Tries to remember which of them he broke — or the few that he didn't. He's no help. He's limp in her grasp, as deeply asleep as she found him. Probably drooling into her pillow.
That's fine, as long as she can keep this hand.
A good hand. A better hand. To replace the one that tried to ruin her.
Tried and failed. And failed, and failed. It's out of her painting; her painting is hers again.
In the nighttime quiet with Grimmjow breathing against her, Nel's eyes stop burning. Her stomach untwists. She mourns the bonsai forest, but it's nothing she can't recreate. It lives in her head, lush, with the caterpillar safe and warm in the grass and moss and leaves and things, layered thick over Grimmjow's black panthers. Maybe tomorrow she will give it color again.
All she does now is hold Grimmjow’s big, messed-up hand and wait with her headache for sleep.