Work Text:
He is five, red cheeked and smiling, and his mother has just handed him a paintbrush for the first time.
Go on, she says, and her voice is as soft as summer rain. Her hand settles over his short fingers and he watches as the canvas blooms in crimson and gold.
Then bristles tickle his thumbs, and his hands are all red. And there is paint on his cheek and on his clothes and in his hair, and his mother’s laugh carries like a current through the air.
He is five, and he is happy.
.
He is nine and his mother is gone, and he is angry. His art is angry, too, big black slashes of ink choked out on ripped up sheets of paper.
Dust sits on his mother’s canvases. He takes her pots of paint outside and smashes them against the rocks, watches bits of color scatter over the gravel, dry and cracked.
He is nine, with grey dust on his shaking hands, and he has just learned that love can be painful, too.
.
Then he is sixteen, and art becomes less about feeling things and more about fixing things. He finds there are so, so many things that need to be fixed, and he pulls them apart and fits them back together with his big hands. It’s sort of the same, in his own way, he thinks.
Of course, he finds that some things aren’t as easily fixed as others.
He watches her slender fingers hand him a greasy bolt, and there is an ache in his heart he hasn’t felt in a long time.
Until one day, there’s a light breeze swelling through the curtains, and she’s rolling over onto her elbows from her spot on the couch. Cupping her chin in her palms, there’s a lopsided grin tilting her face.
He looks up from his notebook. Her brown hair is falling all over her face and into her mouth, and she’s got that same curious look in her eyes she always gets. Some days, he feels he knows the soft slopes of her face better than his own.
“I didn’t know you draw.”
His fingers work uncertainly around the pen, and the shapes are messy and rough-raw. “I don’t. Not usually.”
She strokes a finger over his bent knuckles. “Why now?”
He is sixteen, and he is learning how to put things back together again.