Work Text:
Paint. Nothing but paint.
"[$#*%]!" Spamton wound up and kicked the nearest tower of buckets as hard as he could. "[funny cat video]! [Seating arrangements]! [Premium Deal]! YOU CANNOT BE [[Serious Business]]!!"
A whole week of scouting, and when he finally spots a chance to sneak in through this perfectly Spamton-sized side window, it leads to a locked storage room full of paint bucket tools, without so much as an air vent to squeeze through. Dead end. That typical high-quality Spamton G. Spamton luck at work. Plastic fingers raked through his plastic hair, getting black strands tangled around the white ball joints, ripping them out by the roots.
The tower barely moved. Spamton glared, kicked it again, then shoved with all the spite in his bedraggled little body. It creaked, swayed, and finally collapsed. A horrible symphony of clatters rang out as the neatly stacked buckets cascaded across the floor. Spamton was already climbing back up to the window, abandoning his mess before the Swatchlings could arrive to clean it up.
He dragged several random colours with him as he left. Maybe they would sell, but honestly, he just didn't want to leave empty-handed.
Bright primary colours. A dark, crumbling brick wall.
Why not? The shop should look good for the customers. It might boost his sales.
What to paint? Heaven, obviously. Something to motivate him, help him get up in the morning. A little preview of his final destination.
Spamton shoved his makeshift cardboard counter back towards the door, and rolled up his frayed black sleeves. He didn't have any brushes, but he was nothing if not resourceful.
First, the base. The blue he'd taken was nice and light. He grabbed the bucket by the edge and the base, and swung it at the wall.
There was only enough paint to cover the first three quarters of the back in uneven splashes of sky. Spamton's arms burned, and his short, unstable legs shook with effort to keep him upright. Not a bad start. Looking at it didn't make his eyes hurt, at least not any more than they usually did. That was fine. He was doing impressionism here. Heaven wasn't something he could paint realistically. Not until he got his hands on some eyes that wouldn't burn in the process, anyway.
He'd do the clouds next. They didn't need precision, so he could work his way up to the more detailed parts. Spamton scooped up handfuls of white paint and smeared them onto the mural in rounded, abstract shapes. Clouds were always shifting. He couldn't make these ones move. This would have to be a frozen snapshot of heaven. A postcard he could look at before his flight to the real place.
Now for the difficult part. Spamton knew vaguely what heaven looked like, a blurred glimpse caught through the searing pain in his eyes. The sun, the source of all that burning light, was a hole in his retinas. He couldn't just leave it out - he'd kept the least crumbled part of the wall aside for it, and it was obviously the most important part of the sky - but how was he supposed to paint something he couldn't see?
Spamton considered the problem as he wiped his hands on a piece of old tarp. "[$(&%] IT." Think about heaven, summon the emotions, and paint what feels right.
Yellow. That was the right colour. Sunflowers, soft lights, a feeling of radiating warmth. Painting the clouds had almost made his hands look clean; flecks of sunshine would be stuck in his joints for weeks after this.
What shape was light? Spamton drew a circle of beams radiating out from a central point, like looking into a spotlight. It wasn't enough. It looked more like a yellow spider clinging to the wall than something dazzling and sacred.
More lines, thicker ones. They started to bleed into each other, but Spamton kept the idea of heaven in his head, and that started to look right. He didn't have anything to stand on, couldn't reach high enough to extend the uppermost parts, and the shape slowly turned lopsided, but that looked right, too. Warm. Comforting. He started to lose himself in the action, not even looking at what he was painting anymore. Static filled his eyes. Spamton lost track of time.
It was his body failing him that snapped him out of it. The trance didn't fix his stiff joints, or make his plastic limbs any stronger. The next thing Spamton knew, he was slipping in one of the multicoloured puddles on the ground, too distracted to break the fall. His nose hit the ground and bent, twisting the momentum until the side of his head smacked onto the concrete.
Spamton was only dazed for a moment. A puppet's empty head couldn't get a concussion. It throbbed badly, but pain didn't mean much to him anymore.
He clumsily pulled himself up onto his knees, grabbing his nose and straightening it back out with a crack. He squinted at the blurred, darkened floor until he spotted a flash of pink, and retrieved his glasses. Unbroken. Lucky, for once. Slipping them back on made the world come back into relative focus, the colours brightening again.
There was a smear of red on his nose.
What? His first thought was that it looked like blood, but Spamton didn't bleed. Another glance down solved the mystery. Droplets of bright red paint dotted the ground, and a pair of red handprints lay in front of him. His hands were covered in it.
When had he opened the red? It was all a haze. He'd definitely been trying to paint the sun at first, but at some point...
Spamton looked at the mural and instantly recoiled. A screech of static tore out of his jaw. He scrambled backwards until he hit the counter, his metal heart clattering loudly against his plastic ribs.
His image of the sun was a patch of painted light in a rounded, uneven rectangle. It was still bright yellow at the edges, but he'd mixed in a splash of white at the centre. Below it was a cascade of red, descending until it reached the floor, bringing patches of more yellow and white with it. At first glance, it looked like the sun was wounded, bleeding into the earth from a fatal gash.
At second glance, the red shape started to look like a person.
Spamton clapped his hands over his mouth, stopping whatever sound threatened to come out. He remembered the paint on his hands a fraction of a second too late. Red splattered across his face. The colour of blood. Keep thinking of it like that. Blood, fire, death, anger, anger. Stay angry. Don't forget what he did to you.
Don't think about nice suits. Don't think about plush carpets. Don't think about a ridiculous cartoon blush on a nervous smile. Don't think about warm flower petals, or the smell of fresh pollen, or soft laughter, or -
He'd lurched forward at some point, collapsing into the wall. The tips of his fingers were pressed hard against the red smear, trying to claw at it with nails he didn't have, digging into the paint like he could pull it into reality if he could just try hard enough.
Paint. He was out of every colour except yellow. No more blue or white to cover it with. Spamton pushed a pile of unsold junk in front of the image, tossing the paint-covered tarp over it, covering up the thing that wasn't the sun. There was a good space between a few of the clouds that he could reach if he stretched. He drew a rough yellow circle, and a few beams radiating out from it.
It didn't look anything like the sun, but nothing here was heaven. It was all fake, all pointless. Just a distraction.
Spamton was going to reach the real heaven. He didn't need a fake one.