Work Text:
It was on the last day of school, the heels of graduating this God forsaken high school, when Xiao realized that his sketchbook wasn't firmly planted within his hands.
The ceremony had just finished, with high-school sweethearts kissing, and friends gathering around in circles and just talking about their plans for the future, where they'll work, who they'll be, how they'll contribute to society, how they will live out their normal lives.
And yet Xiao stood in a corner, just now noticing his hands were oddly empty, as he stared at them for what seemed like hours on end, trying to parse out his thoughts and everything currently collecting itself within his head, turning itself into an inner turmoil that was going to explode quickly enough if he didn't find his sketchbook, his own escape from reality.
He couldn't focus on anything anymore, as the edges of his eyesight quickly became blurry and everything started shifting into different colours, with people suddenly looking like blobs of sludge on an unfinished painting.
Everything soon followed, as he began running to allthe places he could remember being at during the ceremony, as his eyes slowly warped every scene around him.
The grass started morphing itself from edged out lines into choopy brushstrokes, while the sky slowly changed shades, almost like a re-paint of a shade the artist didn't find satisfying.
He looked at the place where the ceremony took place, no sign of it at all, he tried searching for it backstage, with no such luck.
It was bad enough as it is that he had to sit infront of a stage and give out a half-assed speech out to a hundred or so people who couldn't care less about what he of all people had to say, but now he was downright rolling down into an anxious breakdown out of not having anything to fiddle with his hands.
It felt strange, odd, empty, as he found his hands grasping for a pencil that wasn't there, and holding a sketchbook that was simply thin air to anybody who spent a second looking at him and maybe even thinking that he was downright deranged.
But they wouldn't understand, they simply couldn't.
They would never understand how it felt to have a blank canvas as his friend, drawing doodles and drawing of every feeling he's ever wanted to express so badly, yet never had anybody to express it with.
They could never fathom the idea of living in their loneliness for years on end, where they'd crave touch and interaction so badly, yet never find the right words to express it, always leaving them in a state of looking like an absolute fool, with their never ending mumbling about something, while never being able to understand what it ever meant.
They'd never understand how a drawing would lighten his day and make him feel slightly less useless then he already was, how it could make him feel satisfied with his self consciousness about doing something that he could be proud of, as teachers praised him for his abilities.
Yet, recently, his doodles were filled with nothing but a certain person.
A certain person with frilly hair, curled up into twin braids, as they curled around the person's chubbye cheeks and just served to illuminate his eyes, striking as they were, always managing to pin him in place without so much as an effort put into a glare or a side-eyed stare, always with a white flower of some variety sticker into his hair.
He would draw the face countless of times over the passing days, his sketchbook filled with nothing but colours of steeled-white, aqua and often a mix of royal blue and sage green for the hair.
He could never get enough of drawing the man's face, almost as if the boy was a portrait to be painted on every white square possible, school tables, window stills, white-boards (and greenbacks if there were colored chalk), actual canvases, simple A4 papers or anything of the sort.
Yet he came to resent the face when he finally saw him for the first time since the graduation, holding the very same sketchbook that Xiao was searching for, simply wafting through the pages with Hu Tao plastered by his side, her mouth covered by her hand as she hid her giggles.
He couldn't be more horrified if he tried, as reality settled deep into his gut.
Venti was looking through a sketchbook with his face all but being the only thing in it, drawn with pen, paper, paintbrushes, carved out or in different ways as well, sticked into the sketchbook with a sticky note, or taped to it if he ever had to take pictures of his drawings whenever he drawer on a chalkboard.
"That's mine." A voice that he belatedly realized was his cut through the silence, dry from Xiao simply never using his voice (besides the speech he simply mumbled through), and an aborted hand that was currently outstretching itself to swipe his sketchbook from the other boy's hands.
"Ah, I'm so sorry! I just found it here and found the front page quite adorable." His honest to God crush, had said, scratching his head abashedly, handing Xiao the sketchbook back without complaint, even if Hu Tao's pout was anything to go by.
Immediately grabbing it and clutching it to his chest, he simply stared at Venti's face again, before realizing his face felt like it was literally melting off his face.
"Uhm, I'm... going to leave, goodbye."
"Alright, uhm, yeah. Goodbye." The other boy said, not knowing how else to react, as he held a pen in one hand, and grasping for thin air where Xiao's sketchbook used to be.
And he looked so pathetically handsome, that he had to physically fight the urge to just crack his notebook open and start drawing like his hands were on fire.
But instead, he took the cowards way out, nodding furiously before running lime a criminal feeling out of a crime scene, sweat stuck onto their forehead and palms sticky with nothing but sweat, once again.
Now he just hoped that his current rapidly changing view of the world would stop resembling an art piece, so that he could have any hope in hell of finding his car and jumping straight into it, even as he heard Hu Tao's sharp and bubbly burst of laughter ring throughout the place, even as he ran.
- - -
Later on in the day, when Xiao would finally open his sketchbook to find a doodle of Venti he had drawn randomly, he'd notice the unfamiliar penwork of a heart and a,
'Super cute!!' -Venti'
He'd simply stare at the paper, gobsmacked as is, his eyes wildly scanning it while his hands came up to cover the aborted shocked noise that his throat was about squeak out.
If this was how this teenage fangirls felt whenever their favourite boy celebrity signed... literally any item of theirs, Xiao might have a bit more in common with them then he had actually ever imagined.