Chapter Text
There isn’t much to do.
Yozo leans back on his chair. He’s twenty-seven this year, not that he’s actively keeping count. Only that the number is always present in the back of his head, like the act of breathing or blinking — done without thought, but annoying when he is reminded of its existence. He straightens up, stretching his shoulders and back. Twenty-seven, he thinks. It’s not a pretty number, twenty-seven. He doesn’t want to die at twenty-seven years of age, nor does he want to live until twenty-eight. What a dilemma he’s found himself in.
Just thinking about it makes him tired.
He doesn’t have much energy these days, despite his sleep getting longer and longer. Yesterday, he woke at sunset, despite having gone to sleep when the sun was still up the day before. It’s like he doesn’t even have the energy to wake up. Soon enough, he won’t have the energy to eat, or drink, or breath. He’s on his way to a sad death, but this is the only way he can kill himself. No commitment to doing it in a proper way, you see. Long gone is that cold sea with Tsuneko and the summer fireworks barely visible from underneath the waves, and that shred of courage. Remembering the event now makes him shiver, a biting cold travelling down his spine. Maybe it’s winter, but he hasn’t left the combined space of his bedroom and his study in a long time, so he wouldn’t know. Even the windows are shut tight, painting his existence in a perpetual, cadaverous grey broken only by the sliver of sunlight through a crack (his only way to track the time) and the lamp in his study. It’s on right now, a fluttering yellow-orange light illuminating the white papers.
Yozo is aware that he is sketching, though he isn’t sure what he is producing. He’s never sure, and he will never find out. Whenever he is done, he gathers all the papers together and piles them in front of the door where they will be cleared away when he’s asleep by his old servant. He doesn’t know what she does with them. Burn it, probably. Might as well make something useful out of his soul.
(Yoshiko wouldn’t want that, but Yoshiko isn’t here to stop him, is she?)
The sound of pencil against paper is calming, though. Despite flinching at canvases and yellow and red, he still can’t stop pursing art. It is, perhaps, the only thing that he can still stay true to. For as long as he can remember, he’s only said the things other people want to hear — or, at least, what he thinks other people want to hear. But on these slips of paper, this language without words, he can be honest with himself.
What he’s drawing doesn’t matter, really. Only that he is still drawing.
Yozo scoffs; how pretentious. Yozo laughs, quietly, to himself; how funny. His hand continues to move, blocking in only the shadows. He browses art books sometimes, mainly a well-worn collection of French Impressionism, a leftover love from his school day. Van Gogh, and his usage of blue and yellow. His sunflowers which bloom so brightly, it makes you want to shield your eyes. His starry nights, and the reflection of the stars.
The tip of the pencil breaks. He’s pressed down on it too hard, and is rewarded with a pencil that needs sharpening, and an angry black mark on the paper. Yozo stares at where it used to be pointy, then flips the pencil over to the other side and resume sketching. He always sharpens it at both end, despite never being short on money nor material for his art. Same with the paints that he waters down, and the small set of brushes that he still hasn’t replace since getting moved here.
Horiki poked fun at him for it, back in those art classes. Yozo thinks it’s only fitting that he limits himself in this way. No need to dress himself up; painting of trash should be made from trash. Not that he’s ever a follower of that cliché of a suffering artist, but the label is fitting nonetheless. Has he not suffered? Has his suffering not been a motivation for his art, which reflects his own ghostly, demonic nature right back at himself?
Did Van Gogh not suffer, as well?
He feels an oncoming headache. Van Gogh transformed his suffering into a celebration of the beauty of the world, a celebration of art itself. Yozo paints to sooth the worst of himself. No, he paints to affirm himself.
His hand continues to move, no longer a slave to his spiralling thought. It occupies itself with the sketch of a male figure, with sharp eyes and a sharper understanding of the world than Yozo could ever dream of ever possessing. Unlike Yozo, who fumbles with words, the man excels in writing. Yes, someone who can also put his soul into his craft, but unlike Yozo’s clumsy splattering of colours on the white canvas, what he writes on paper are worthwhile. A man who can write down the worst of humanities, yet find an audience for it. In another life, his work would have touched Yozo the same way Van Gogh did: with violence, hands ripping through his chest and ribcages to strangle his heart.
We’re one and the same, their art say.
You’re worthless, Yozo’s art reply. But maybe, just this once, you can do something with your worthlessness.
Yozo opens his eyes. Through the crack on the window, the first ray of yellow lights up the dust in that one small corner, giving the air a new weigh. On his desk, for the first time: a man with a black, billowing cloak. The blue of his undershirt is muted; in fact, the entire paper is washed in blue, his colour of choice for the underpainting. He wears a hat that casts a shadow over his eyes, leaving only a vicious grin visible on his face. The only splash of colour is his red scarf, haphazardly draped over his shoulder though doing little to protect his neck from the cold.
Yozo realises, belatedly, that he was bleeding. The blood from the tip of his finger has stopped flowing, but he remembers prickling himself with his pencil multiple time last night. What kind of maniac used his blood to draw? Has he fallen so low that he has to rely on such gimmick? Who cares?
The real important question, as Yozo inspects his sketch, is what to name his character.