Chapter Text
Why did you vanish
into the empty sky?
Even the fragile snow
when it falls,
falls in this world.
ーIzumi Shikibu, Untitled
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How long does it take for a star’s shine to wither out and die?
In the wake of his juvenile years his grandfather would go on to tell him something that he'd be tossing over in his mind ever since. He says, "There are only so much things you can think about all at once."
"It's the thing about feeling death creep up on you, you'll be forced to think your last thought and breathe your last share of breath eventually." He pauses, eyes and mouth crinkling at its corners. He puts a pointer atop his mouth and leans in close, like he's sharing an otherworldly secret. "But between you and me: it will always be that one person, and in your final moments you would think, to have been able to love them at some point, this is what it means to be happy."
He could only nod back then as his grandfather smiled knowingly, a bit taunting, like how old people do when they know something you don't. It was equal parts tantalizing and confusing. Love and death and the true meaning of happiness were a bit much to take in for a seven-year-old.
That much didn't stop Till from looking on with stars in his eyes. And so, he wonders.
He's lived a great life, that man. He is loved and well-respected by everyone around him. He is a star, as much a force of nature, charismatic without even trying. He is the closest thing to a role model that Till has, and everyone around him had a penchant for telling him that he would grow up to be just like him. He was a revered artist and a great painter at his core, a bothersome thinker at his worst.
It had been safe to say that Till took after his best qualities, lucky as he was. An art prodigy much like his hal-abeoji , he'd been called countless times.
If asked, he thinks he wouldn't mind taking on one of his bad traits if it would mean he gets to talk that way half the time. His grandfather is a mill of thoughts and flesh that can go from riveting to outrageous. To Till, he is as much the nonpareil of artistry and honorability as much as he is of eccentrism and wonder. He would credit most of his inquisitiveness to him now if given the chance.
He is a rockstar, in every sense of the word, and where Till looks ahead: he is there, standing.
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He finds himself thinking of his person more often than he does not. It always goes something like this: his grandfather would tell him something that will rattle his brains and he'd ponder on it for more time than he likes.
When it finally gets a bit too much for his little head to wrap around, he finally asks him about it one Sunday afternoon.
“When do you think I'll meet them?”
“Who?” He asks in turn, preoccupied with mixing something in his palette. Then, in a moment of realization, he adds, “Ah-ha,”
“Well. No one knows for certain, Till,” he starts. “Some people meet them in childhood. Some meet them when they're adults. Some people don't meet theirs at all,”
“O…Oh,” Till answers, dumbfounded. Not meeting his soulmate at all? That's scary.
“Aiya, I can hear the little cogs in your head turning. I didn't mean to scare you like that.” He consoles. “It's not that you won't meet your soulmate at all. You will, in due time,”
“...Due time?”
“It means the right time.” He laughs lightly. “You will meet them, and that's supposed to be the moment where your life finally feels complete. And you’ll be so happy you'll think you didn't know what happiness meant before.”
“But… I don't really feel that I'm not complete. I have Ma, Pa, and you, Gramps. I'm happy now. I know it. I know what happiness means, too.
“Ha ha! Really? What do you think happiness means, little Till?” He grins and ruffles Till's hair. “And that may be true for now, but you'll know when you're older.”
“I… I'm happy when I get to draw things I like. I'm happy when I eat Ma’s food. I'm happy right now talking to you, Gramps.”
“Mhm. That's quite interesting. You're a smarty little kid, aren'tcha?” The old man barks out a laugh. That makes Till laugh, too. They're consumed in a fit of giggles for a while.
This is what happiness means, for young Till. It'll stay that way for a while.
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You must have been lonely and confused; waiting, not knowing what for.
ーLuna. J, God Bless You Devil Kiss You
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When Till wakes up on his tenth birthday, there is an unfamiliar name written on the side of his neck. He doesn't see it until his mother points it out after waking him for breakfast. He scrambles to his bathroom and hurriedly cranes his neck in front of the mirror, excitement dousing his nerves. As he takes a look for himself, he doesn't feel much different save for the inexplicable wave of loneliness that settles on him upon seeing it.
It's strange. His grandfather would always talk of it as something romantic, having the other half of your soul find its home in someone else. There is the notion that you were made to love and be loved by someone in this world. This is what ballads are written of, what bards sing of. This is what the poets talk of when they talk about love.
It's nothing like that at all. He doesn't get why he has to wait for someone that's been chosen for him when he can choose for himself all on his own. Till knows next to nothing about his person. He doesn't get why he has to fall in love with the idea of someone alone.
If he thinks about it hard enough, he would say it's more sad than romantic. There is an open wound in his soul that has been yet to be stitched back. There is something especially grievous about wandering aimlessly in search for the mending of your empty half.
He runs a finger through and across the letters. His fingertips feel nothing but his own skin save for the thin bumps of the word. For a short while, his head runs a million a mile in a matter of seconds. He settles for the thought of wanting to ask his person some handful of questions.
It is quiet save for the occasional pitter pattering of the water in the sink.
“Who are you?”
When he looks upon the mirror, only his own clueless face stares back.
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As he shows his grandfather later that night, there is a mirth in his eyes that he can't bring himself to understand.
"Had a good birthday?" He asks him as he places a particularly bold stroke of blue across the canvas.
He busies himself with a discarded paintbrush and dips it in black. "It was fine."
Then he laughs in that kind, knowing, taunting way of his. Till has gotten used to it by now.
"It's nice, no? There's a missing piece of you somewhere out there."
"I'm not sure." He frowns, fiddling with the brush in his hand. "I think I'd rather not have any missing piece at all."
"Ha ha! The beauty of it lies in it being tricky," the old man goes on to explain. "It's no good if everything is as it is from the start. You have to find some things out on your own."
“You think so?”
“I don't think so, I know so,” he says in that airy, clued in voice of his. “I spent the better half of my days searching for your amma , and it was only when I found her that I knew what true happiness felt like. I told you before, right? Listen carefully, my little star;” he beckons him closer, and Till inadvertently thinks back to sometime when he did something similar. “You will know when it happens. And when the time comes, the world as you know it won't be the same.”
"Okay," he says in lieu of a better answer. Then after a beat of silence, he adds, "Ma said that the name reads Ivan."
His grandfather only smiles at him, gentle and unyielding.
"It sounds like a good name."
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When he comes to class the next day, his classmates gather around him during break, curiously asking and fussing around him to show them his mark. He is flustered under the weight of their collective gaze. He eventually relents with a defeated sigh, unbuttoning the first button of his uniform shirt as they all gasp in a unison of ooh's and ahh's .
"It's read as Ivan," he huffs out like a lord. "My gramps also said that it's a good name."
"That's so cool, Till!"
"Ivan, eh..."
"I want mine too..."
He's nothing short of thankful for when the bell rings and the tiny crowd around him dissipates. It is only a few minutes later that their art teacher, Mister Ha, ever the strange fellow, walks in with his eccentric pair of shoes and overalls. There is a chorus of greetings when he enters the classroom.
After he tells them to take out their materials, he asks them to draw themselves alongside the person that they love the most. At that, Till blanks out.
His mind flashes with pictures of someone he doesn't recognize. When he blinks his eyes open, he doesn't remember when they even closed.
"--ill, Till!" Someone from beside him calls out. "Till!"
"Ah, huh?" He snaps out of his reverie, mind reeling. "Did you say something?"
"Can I borrow a pencil?"
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The sun has nearly set when he gets home. He bolts straight to his room and nearly trips on the flight of stairs. He hears his mother's scolding voice from a distance. When he's inside, he shrugs off his backpack and gingerly takes out the piece of paper from today's art class.
He taps on the switch of his study lamp, plopping down on his armchair. He stares at it for a while, almost in a trance.
It's him with a boy with dark hair and a snaggletooth sticking out of his smile. They're standing side by side, attached to the hip. In the picture, Till is smiling widely, while the other boy is holding up a peace sign. His left eye is almost covered with his bangs. His grin is quite uncanny. It's endearing, too, Till supposes.
When he snaps out of his stupor, he realizes there might be something more to the drawing than he lets on.
("Beautifully drawn, as always! Mind telling us about the person in your work, Till?")
He keeps the drawing stashed around. Some years later, he would come to find that all of his sketchbooks have been filled with the same face, and there will exist an entire room filled with paintings of the same muse.
("I…. I don't know. I don't remember,")
Weird.
For now, Till doesn't know who the other boy is. He doesn't try to find out who, either.
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in a world
full of
temporary things
you are
a perpetual feeling.
ーSanober Khan
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Another year passes by like the wind.
It wouldn't be the last time that Till draws the boy. Everything about it feels freakish. Like if he stays on the idea of it too long the hairs on his neck would start to go up one by one. One moment he'd be sitting in his room, sketching away on a piece of paper, or at the atelier painting alone or with his grandfather. And then, by some strange driving force, he would rapidly go on to draw out the face of that same person. Over and over again. He's going to feel confused after every attempt, he knows. His grandfather laughs good-naturedly at him for it and he calls him Till’s muse. Till wouldn't know how to feel about it even if he tried.
“It's so weird,” Till laments one spring afternoon. “It's like I know him from somewhere. But I really, really don't know who this is.”
His grandfather chortles. “Maybe it's your soulmate? Evan, was it,”
“It's Ivan ,” he corrects him. “And how would I know? Is this a thing that happens with soulmates too?”
“Hmm. I wouldn't know either. I haven't heard anything quite like it.” He hums thoughtfully. “If you think nicely enough, maybe it's a friend, or a lover from your previous life,” the old man says, “how do you feel whenever you draw or paint him out?”
“It’s like I have a little computer inside me that's been programmed to know every nook and crevice of this guy's face. When I pick up my pencil, or a brush, my hands just get a life of its own. It moves like it's second nature. I don't even think, I just do. Like–like I wouldn't even have to think and I’d just know . Then I would finish and I'd stare at my own work like I didn't make the thing myself. It's madness.” Till sighs. “Maybe I’m just crazy,”
“ Aiya, don’t be too hard on yourself,” he gets a pat on the back and a toussle of the hair. “I’m sure you will find out in due time.” There he goes with that stuff again. In due time. The right time. Be patient, Till.
“You think so?” he says after a beat of silence.
“I don't think so, I know so,” Till rolls his eyes at that. “These kinds of things happen for a reason. They're meant to confuse you at first, but when you find out, it's supposed to be the moment where your life is changed forever.”
“How would you even know that?”
“Old man instincts?” He winks. “I just know.”
“You know, maybe it's time I stop trusting you, Gramps,”
“Ha! You couldn't, even if you tried your darnest. What's they say? Grandpa knows best.”
“I think it's supposed to be mother knows best,” He playfully retorts. He knows he doesn't mean it. He knows, too, that he couldn't stop trusting the old man even if he did try. “You're making things up again.”
“You’ll see when it does happen. You'll know I was right all along,” he sing-songs.
“Yes, yes. I'll let you know when it happens.”
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Who has seen the wind?
Neither I nor you:
But when the leaves hang trembling,
the wind is passing through.
—Christina Rossetti, Who Has Seen The Wind?
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It's sudden when it happens.
Till had narrowly just turned twelve when he is asked to carry the ashes of his grandfather.
The urn, Till loosely thinks, it's heavy.
It's a strangely mundane affair. He wakes up to the sound of his mother crying. When he walks down the hallway and peeks inside the door to the left, there's the old man laid out on his bed. He looks like he's sleeping well.
"Is Gramps alright?"
"He's gone, Till," his mother says.
(How long does it take for a star's shine to wither out and die?
As it turns out, while some go on to live to the billions, this one right here could only go up to seventy-nine.)
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His mother had named him after the seconds that trickle by, the minutes that walk, and the hours that seem to fall away like leaves. There are the two hands that travel around a timepiece. "Life is about catching up to the things that are waiting to happen. We are all racing until a certain point in time," she told him once.
There is a certain sadness that comes with leaving behind the years of being a kid. Till thinks he might miss having his mother wake him up every morning or having his grandfather wait for him at the gates after school. Nighttime is specially pensive when he no longer has his gramps to talk to about his day.
Till is thirteen when he completes his first mural. It's of the same boy with dark hair and a single tooth peeking out of its smile. This time, he is holding a bunch of red flowers to his chest. He is neither grinning nor smiling in this one, too.
“Who are you?”
He looks lonely, Till thinks. Although he still doesn't know who it is, the tears come unceremoniously.
He kind of wishes he could've shown his grandfather this.
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Till is always searching.
Every so often now when he wakes up in the morning, he would find himself crying. He can never remember the dream he must have had. But the sensation that he'd lost something lingers for a long time after he wakes up.
It’s different this time. It's a surprise that he's woken up in the middle of night. It never happens, not like this. There is a lonely breeze in the air and the only sounds he can hear are his own sharp breaths and the cicadas out his window.
He heaves out a choked laugh. “What the heck…?”
It's not anything unheard of. Tearing up from something you've seen in your sleep isn't the groundbreaking thing he's making this out as. It's just that, a part of him, somewhere, perhaps the back of his mind, feels that there's a pendent question in his life that has yet to be answered, and there's a gaping rupture in his heart that he hadn't been able to fill. His grandfather might have told him something long ago that the worst thing about having a hole in your boat is not knowing where it is. He thinks he knows what it means now.
There's a missing part of himself and he doesn't know what he's lost. How can you go looking for something you haven’t a single clue what is?
When he looks up at his ceiling, he finds that it doesn't have any answers for him at all.
He thinks of going to the atelier to seek some for himself. It's a moment where he forgets, briefly, that the old man is gone. He lets it sink in. Lets it hover above his person like a hurricane waiting to strike and fall.
For a second, he feels delirious enough to consider if resurrection is any possible at all. It's weird. How strange. It's not like him to be so unreasonable. Maybe it's the grief over his grandfather’s death catching up to him. Maybe it's grief for something else entirely. He doesn't know. He doesn't know anything. He wipes at his tears and he feels new ones come along.
(Somewhere at the back of his mind, he thinks of a boy with eyes as black and a gaze as heavy as the evening sky. But if only for a night—) Till thinks of the atelier and how empty it is now, and he cries until he doesn't feel like he can anymore.
There's nowhere else Till could go.
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Maybe I’m the sun and the tides, and you’re the moon and the stars; but all that means to me is that you are light in the dark. You’re every wish in my night sky, and I’ll follow you wherever you go.
ーSarah A. Bailey, The Soulmate Theory
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This is the only dream that Till has, when he does dream at all:
There is a boy— no . A man that vaguely looks like Till. He has the same hair and the same teal eyes. Who the hell is that? Is that supposed to be me? He also can't talk. Like he's only meant to watch things happen. He can think, have thoughts, but save from that, he can't do much else.
The guy looks quite old to be him. Is this a dream?
He's standing by the ocean. A beach? He's alone for a long while, deep in thought. He sits. Till is startled when the man's shoulders start occasionally shaking, and then he sees him frantically wipe at his eyes. Oh. He's crying.
He watches him intently, because there is nothing else to do in this weird dream, but also partly because he finds himself oddly entranced by the person. He feels strangely connected, attached to the man. He has no clue who this person is. He wants to ask, but then he remembers that he can't speak. What am I supposed to do? I can't talk to him.
From his peripheral vision, a man in white comes into view. For a moment, Till's breath is stolen from his lungs. The first thought that occurs to him is: Woah, he looks out of this world. And the next: Is that God?
When he comes to his senses after being briefly enchanted by the person’s… presence, he observes him try to approach the man from before. He sits next to him on the sand, by the water. The other guy doesn't notice him just yet. Do they know each other?
Before he could see what happens next, he feels the dream ending. He reaches out to the two people, tries to yell, but his efforts are futile. Then; there was darkness.
It's a dreamless sleep for the remainder of the night.