Chapter Text
There was no colour at all left in Ena Shinonome’s life.
She was here, studying for a degree in art just as she’d dreamed, yet…
Even art couldn’t satiate her any longer. Her lack of motivation had sucked all life out of her. She was severely behind on coursework, but even now—with nothing else to do besides sit aimlessly in a dishevelled dorm room which didn’t even feel like her own—she couldn’t bring herself to move a muscle, let alone draw.
She let out a long sigh, leaning herself against the wall.
To be here in the first place she had practically estranged herself from her father. He’d told her as much when she’d mentioned being serious about pursuing art, said to her: “if you do, you know I’d never speak to you again,” or something of a similar effect. They barely even spoke to each other anyways at that point so Ena thought the threat one rather empty.
She wasn’t sure if he actually wanted to adhere to it once she’d made up her mind to defy him, but her father was nothing if not stubborn, and therefore practically incapable of going against his own words. It was a trait she had very much inherited, a parallel she found uncomfortable to properly acknowledge.
From outside her dorm room she could hear fragmented voices. The walls were, unfortunately, not very thick. It made silence an impossibility, even late at night.
It also served to only emphasise her constant, underlying feeling of loneliness.
Her mother called her sometimes, as did Akito—albeit rarely, and he always pretended not to be concerned about her—but their conversations were always rather vapid. Ena held no desire to divulge her feelings to them—out of a desire to not make them waste their time worrying about her or embarrassment that she had nothing to show, she wasn’t quite certain—so instead she just repeated the usual, dismissive: “I’m fine, yeah It’s going great, uni is fine, I’m on top of everything, I’m eating enough, I’ve met so many new people…” which seemed to work on them.
It was unfortunate her lies weren’t the truth. Ena thought herself really lucky when she had gotten into a school very close to Airi, but even Airi didn’t have much time for her anymore.
...Was that really true, or was Ena just being a negativist again?
Being around Airi filled her with an unjustified jealousy, a jealousy which had always been there but had now begun to sour every moment she was awake. Airi was always far better with people then Ena was, so Airi being popular wasn’t exactly shocking, but it was nonetheless another thing others had that Ena could not grasp. Her incompleteness was a sickening thing, a ghost consistently obfuscating her from the rest of humanity.
Even now, alone in her bedroom, a shadow of an invisible source hung over her. As well as being boringly monochromatic, the world was also dark and blurred. Even if, somehow, she could motivate herself enough to put pencil to paper and produce a drawing, there was no guarantee she’d be able to create something decent, let alone actually good.
Perhaps all this was simply a result of sleep deprivation. 3am fire alarms (truly, what were people even doing at three-am to warrant a fire alarm? Surely there were better times to burn a slice of toast…) had managed to interrupt most of her sleep this week, and she barely even slept without them. To say she was persistently tired was an understatement. Exhaustion sunk into her bones and began to define every feature of her face; looking in the mirror she had begun to notice her eye bags becoming even more visible than they usually were. She found it quite disgusting. She had to spend even longer editing her appearance before posting any selfies because of it.
If she was in fact simply sleep deprived, it would be far easier to shake off the decay inside of her. A few hours of sleep would nip the rotten flower at the bud and she’d be able to draw to her heart's content and she would not fail her degree and she would not prove her father right… only she was fully aware there was no fix to her rut as simple as that.
Her art had always been motivated by spite.
Spite is a cruel, fickle thing. Over time the spite dissipated into a far more eroding yet far more numbing bitterness, a disconcerting cloud which did nothing but force her into stagnancy. To gather back her motivation—to bring colour back into her life—Ena needed something far stronger than spite to carry her.
She needed to discover something brand new. Something finally beautiful.
——
It was mid afternoon when a notification popped up on Ena’s phone, a rare commodity nowadays.
She had to admit—and it was an extremely embarrassing thing to admit, in truth—that she was slightly disappointed to find the notification wasn’t a new like on her most recent instagram post but in fact a message.
AIRI: Hey!! You free tonight??
Ena couldn’t remember the last time she wasn’t. Her most frequent hobby was dissociating in her dorm room, which wasn’t a particularly productive way to spend her time.
ENA: i should be
ENA: why? 👀
AIRI: Nice!!!
AIRI: Was wondering if you wanted to go out clubbing with me and some friends :P
AIRI: Could be a bit of fun!!!!
AIRI: I feel like we haven’t seen each other in aaaaaages even though we literally live so close
AIRI: Miss you :(
ENA: miss you too </3
ENA: sounds good!!
ENA: do i know them?
Ena doubted it. She didn’t know any of Airi’s friends; none of them awfully well at the very least. She’d—perhaps—meet up with a few once or twice, but had never quite ‘clicked’ with any of them. Though she may have only believed as much due to her own insecurities. Either way, she had never spoken to anybody around here bar Airi more than once or twice.
AIRI: Would be surprised if you did considering I met them today
Not surprising.
Ena stared at the message for a few seconds, confused at how to respond. She was always bad at it. She’d probably consider herself a ‘dry texter’, as embarrassing as an admission was. She was never sure whether she wanted to end a conversation immediately or continue it for as long as humanly possible. No matter what she chose, she’d disdain the result.
ENA: …right!
ENA: see you tonight then?
ENA: what time?
AIRI: Idk maybe like 9:30
AIRI: PM, that is
AIRI: Uh. Obviously
AIRI: just come up to my flat :P
ENA: see you then!!!!
Turning her phone off, Ena stared in front of her, fixating on a minuscule dot in the corner of her eyesight. A small molecule of dust, perhaps. She knew already she cleaned her room nowhere near enough.
In truth her entire vision was one clouded by a constant, dull noise. It messed with her head most of the time. Even in moments when she should be happy she’d be confronted with the ugliness of the world, all the unharmonious pixels forming her vision and everything else in existence. If this world was a painting, it would be one even uglier than what she usually produced. And Ena more than anyone knew that was a hard feat.
——
The night came by both quickly and slowly—the seconds ticked at snails pace but on reflection the afternoon Ena spent waiting to meet up with Airi had been a strange, fuzzy haze she could not recall living through—and soon enough she was stood outside of Airi’s flat, a bottle of the cheapest vodka she could find in her bag.
The door opened before she even rapped on it twice.
“Ena!”
Airi ran over to Ena and hugged her. Ena fell into it. It was one of those gentle kinds of hugs in which, for a moment, she could lose herself in. She could remember, albeit briefly, that those who cared for her still existed. Her chest was filled with a softness so uncommon to her it was practically foreign, and a genuine—finally genuine—smile curled in the corners of her mouth.
As soon as it was over her persistent numbness returned. Perhaps it was selfish of her, but that numbness made her truly despise all forms of affection. Affection’s ephemeral nature simply meant it forced upon her a happiness she knew would soon vanish and leave her feeling even worse than usual.
Airi’s friends were nice people, but Ena felt no connection to any of them. She maintained semi-interesting conversation with all of them but it was no more or less different than how she acted normally. Nothing held any meaning. It grated on her—as all conversation seemed to nowadays—and eventually she was filled with a completely unjustified, underlying anger. Or it could be she’d simply drunk too much before they’d even gone out.
Probably the latter, for the next few hours went by in a blur.
Airi had met a girl when they were out—an ethereal looking girl with long, silky blue hair of whom Ena thought she might have recognised from somewhere (in truth she was rather jealous of Airi, even Ena found the girl pretty attractive)—and spent most of the night with her.
Ena never knew Airi was gay. In retrospect, it was really obvious, Ena just had a godawful gaydar.
In truth Ena had no clue of even her own sexuality. She had found people—women—attractive before, but never had she felt the all-encompassing, substantial feeling of love so many people had described to her. She always was deeply fascinated by the concept—throughout her secondary school years she had heard students talk of it as floating, distracting all other thoughts and feelings with something far stronger, like putting far too much alcohol ratio in with the mixer and feeling your soul exit your body after the first sip (a comparison she possibly only thought of due to its tangible relation to her current situation)—and became desperate to discover such a feeling for herself. Yet, it was an avenue still left undiscovered for her.
That night she had been flirted with by a random boy, and it made her feel so disgusted she came to the realisation she was probably fully gay.
Nonetheless, it made no difference as she was still left without any object of affection.
When Ena had begun to sober up enough to fully retain her memories, she was nearly back to her dorm room, accompanied by Airi and the pretty blue haired girl Airi had met that night—Shizuku, as Airi had informed Ena later on.
When they got there, Ena informed them she was going to go straight to sleep.
She didn’t.
She stayed up for around twenty minutes—eyes adjusting enough to the dark to see the outlines of her dishevelled room—listening to music so loud it would probably make her deaf one day, before suddenly jolting upwards and deciding on a whim to go outside.
Perhaps it was a pull of fate—that stupid idea people propose of soulmates—and she was being tugged by a string to a predestined situation. Or perhaps it was the more simple, understandable idea of luck.
Either way, she was soon enough outside. Really she should have worn a coat. Club attire wasn’t great for the three-am weather, especially around this time of year. Luckily the alcohol still affecting her brain numbed her senses just enough for the cold to not be much of an affecting factor. It probably wouldn’t save her from catching something tomorrow, but she wasn’t thinking about the future right now—something both nice and rather rare.
While she was wandering around aimlessly, traversing the hills which made up a large part of her campus and were near-directly behind her dorm room, she saw a silhouette in the distance. Despite the features being blurry, she felt an inhuman force compel her to approach it.
It was the silhouette of a girl.
Despite being on the University campus, Ena was certain she’d never seen the girl before. When her features became discernible, she had a unique sort of beauty of which Ena had never witnessed the likes of. Her hair was a unique kind of light pink, and her face—when she heard Ena approach and twisted her head around, interlocking those similarly pinkish eyes with Ena’s own—possessed a softness Ena had never before seen reflected in another person’s face. The girl had a slight pinkish flush to her cheeks—perhaps a result of drinking—and her mouth was pursed shut, showing off glossy pinkish lips.
It was the first time Ena had felt truly enamoured by something.
The girl had a beauty which would fit perfectly on a canvas.
The thought overtook Ena immediately.
Something had been invented. An image of unknown source and origin began to blossom behind Ena’s irises. It washed over her like a wave, very near knocking her over completely. It could be argued that this was nothing special, simply foolishness due to the alcohol or something tantamount, but Ena knew it was both genuine and distinct.
Thus, she approached the girl almost like a specimen, a still life stature she could create a study out of.
The girl regarded Ena with a strange lack of emotion, not acknowledging her until Ena herself began to speak.
“What are you doing here?” Ena ignored the slight slur in her voice as she spoke.
“Huh? What a direct question!” The girl laughed, peering away from Ena as she spoke. For some reason, Ena found something inside of herself shrinking as she lost the girl’s direct attention. “What are you doing here?”
“Wandering…”
“I can tell. Are you not cold, though? In that…” She scanned Ena’s outfit, shifting her eyes up and down, examining the other girl’s figure. Ena didn’t know how to feel about such close examination.
“Wow, thanks.”
“...On the offensive immediately… I see… I have nothing against the outfit! Actually, I think it rather pretty. I just don’t want you to, I dunno, get a cold or die of pneumonia or anything…”
“I’m fine. And I’d argue you’re no better covered than me.”
The other girl—the pink girl, as Ena referred to her in her head before learning her actual name—was wearing a short skirt and rather thin looking shirt with ¾ sleeves. Despite this, she appeared not to be cold at all.
“…Right…” The pink girl responded slowly. As well as her physical appearance her voice was also very pretty, Ena noticed. “Nonetheless… This place is usually pretty lonely… so seeing another person comes as a shock to lil’ old me!”
“You sit down here often?”
“I have nothing better to do,” The pink girl laughed, though there was a lonely bitterness to it. Ena could understand her in that brief moment. Maybe. In all truth it could have been her mind—her stupid fucking mind—playing tricks on her, pretending understanding was something she could finally grasp instead of simply witness other’s possess.
It was maybe this, albeit superficial in its nature, connection which caused Ena to sit beside the pink girl, overcome with the desire to learn more about her.
The pink girl didn’t acknowledge her for a minute or so. Ena took this moment to examine her deeper—not as person to person but artist to muse. She imagined what her beauty could create on a canvas: a painting far more beautiful than Ena had ever managed to create, a brand new colour never seen before.
There was an ecstasy which came alongside this examination: the blooming of a new feeling inside her chest, the flowers overtaking the monochrome and the noise.
Perhaps a colourful life is one possible for me, the small idealistic sector of Ena’s mind which still remained argued. A life not defined by an overarching dullness but one which had the right to walk the earth and live the life of a normal human being without masquerading or hiding away due to a degenerate, inferiority-endured embarrassment.
Perhaps this pink girl was the key to Ena finally understanding the human condition, and therefore she would be able to replicate it to the best of her abilities—using her new, unique kind of understanding as the microscope in which she viewed it through—and create an art piece finally worthy of other’s eyes.
Her art teachers, her father—the horrible, twisted traits he had become defined by in her mind—her own self. Everyone would recognise her.
…Or perhaps Ena was assigning too much meaning to a person she barely knew.
The alcohol had eroded the rational part of her mind so this thought didn’t even travel through her head. In the current moment this pink girl she didn’t even know the name of would be the key to unlock her full artistic potential, and there was no question or delusion to it at all.
Ena could finally see something beautiful, and therefore she would finally create something beautiful.
“You’ve been staring at me for a while… I know i’m hot as fuck and all but— aha—“ the pink haired girl begun, holding the side of her head up with a hand.
Her laugh had a particularly attractive quality to it. Ena thought it similar to that of a marshmallow, as strange a comparison that may be, soft and sweet with a light colour and gentle texture.
Perhaps the comparison only came to her because she was hungry. Ena wouldn’t know, she was far too drunk to comprehend any of her needs properly. Even when she was stone cold sober she struggled.
After a few seconds of pausing, the pink girl reached beside her and picked up a rather big bottle of red wine. One of those cheap ones. Ena suspected it was the cheapest she could find.
“Want any?”
Ena wordlessly took it off her. “Thanks,” she certainly wanted more alcohol. It was nice to know she wasn’t spending a copious amount of money on a weak vodka cranberry like she had been earlier. God, she really didn’t want to look at her bank statements…
“I’m guessing you were out tonight, then,” the pink girl said as Ena drank.
The wine was probably really bad, but Ena couldn’t taste anything at that point so it tasted like any other liquid to her.
“Yeah…”
“Was it fun?”
Ena didn’t hear the question. She stopped drinking for a moment, taking a sharp breath which sounded scarily close to vomiting. “Huh?”
“I said, was it fun?”
“Who cares?”
“Nobody really. I’m just throwing small talk at ya, considering you just sat yourself next to me.”
“I dunno. I don’t care enough.”
“Right…” the pink girl continued in a sarcastic tone, “sure sounds fun. Are you the type to just drag yourself along to parties cause that’s what you’re expected to do?”
“No!” Ena’s answer came off as exceptionally defensive despite her attempted nonchalance, so she quickly retracted it and continued with a more neutral term: “…what a rude assumption…”
She wasn’t sure where her defensiveness came from. She wasn't particularly lying when she disagreed with the other girl; in theory, she enjoyed it. She quite liked being drunk with her friends (friend) and going out. It was a simple pleasure she could indulge in, and when she was a couple drinks down it was far easier for her to be ‘normal’. Yet, it never fulfilled her. Nothing quite did.
The pink girl didn’t respond to Ena’s comment, so Ena spoke instead: “what, are you deflecting?”
“Nah.” A part of Ena was annoyed at how the comment, with its intention of being somewhat demeaning, hadn’t succeeded in riling the other up. “I’ve never been invited to one.”
“Really?!” Ena couldn’t imagine why. The pink girl was the prettiest thing she’d ever laid her eyes on. Perhaps it was superficial to say, though frankly she couldn’t care less, but based on appearance alone Ena had presumed her to be a popular sort of person.
Ena’s reflection on the thought just a moment later caused her to blush in embarrassment.
Perhaps this was what those other kids had described to her in secondary school. Love at first sight was something stupid and disney-esque, she tried to tell herself, but any protestations were null to her beating heart.
God, this was embarrassing. She wanted to leave this already awkward and stilted drunkard conversation before it got worse.
Yet her heart (and by extension the bare easel in her room she hadn’t used in goodness knows how long,) lamented a desire to continue and to try and get to a point where it would be normal enough to ask the decisive question of: "will you let me draw you? Will you be my muse?”
“Yeah…” The pink girl responded in a tone Ena struggled to pinpoint.
Whatever it was, Ena wasn’t too keen on it, so she blurted out the first half-baked statement she could think of, “...I mean, your outfit’s pretty party-ish right now, I’d say.”
“Oh,” the pink girl looked down at her attire before looking up again, “this is just… what I normally wear.”
The disappointment in her voice made Ena feel bad. She tried to remedy her previous statement, but for the most part it was to no avail.
“It’s very pretty.”
“You just said it was party attire. I made it myself, you know… I’m kinda offended…”
“Is party attire so bad? You did say my ‘party attire’ was rather pretty a little bit ago and— I mean, like, It’s a bit mean to just discredit all party attire like that—” Ena bit her tongue and internally berated herself. Couldn’t she just let this go? Whatever she was saying right now, and honestly she barely had a clue herself, was completely pointless. “I just— I— fuck! Sorry my head isn’t working, and when my head isn’t working I just pour out insult after insult after— not that it was an insult or anything— your outfit is insanely good, you’ve gotta have proper talent to make something that good and—“
Despite the rushed and irrational nature of Ena’s words, what she was saying wasn’t untrue by any means. The pink girl’s outfit was retail level, at the very least, though unique in a way retail could never truly replicate. Ena immediately believed the pink girl must have had made it herself; the creativity was another faucet of the her beauty, another puzzle piece creating the full picture still forming of Ena’s head of a classical, endearingly beautiful painting, created by her own two hands and—
The pink girl’s expression softened and her demeanour changed completely. “It’s fine, really— I’m just fucking with ya honestly!”
Ena could only give a small “tch” in reply until she eventually mustered up the words to add: "It's mean to make fun of a drunk girl, you know…”
“I’m drunk too! It’s drunk on drunk violence!” She laughed, and Ena found the annoyance inside her completely evaporated.
“I’d take it as a compliment if I were you…” the pink girl continued, “I’d probably just ignore ya if I hated you!”
Ena felt the strange, alien emotions further overtake her due to the trite admission. It made no sense to her while also simultaneously making complete sense… Weird…
‘How very frustrating…’ her thoughts muttered to themselves, ‘the first instance of ‘love’, and it’s this…”
‘Love?’ another more skeptical thought responded, ‘who are you to even know what that means?’
Ena quickly snapped her gaze to look out at the night—or, at this point, the early hours of the morning—sky, her eyes unable to fixate on any of the stars or the half-crescent moon but very much attempting to. Besides her, the pink girl did the same thing.
Ena spoke first “...So, you come out here on your own often?”
“Yup! It's nice. Tranquil…” the pink girl paused and jabbed Ena lightly in the shoulder, “well, usually.”
Ena acknowledged the comment with a small grunt.
The pink girl began to speak again: “they’re pretty, aren’t they?”
“Hm?”
“The stars, I’m talking about! It would be nice to be a little star in the sky don’t ya think?”
Personally Ena thought otherwise. The stars—in their plentiful amount—were practically indistinguishable from each other. To be a star was to be completely invisible, and therefore nothing individualistic at all.
Ena didn’t want to fade away into the background. She couldn’t. She could not do what normal people did to become a full person—she was far too fundamentally inferior to hope for such pipe dreams to come true—but she had to try, at the very least, to become defined, else her life would be completely and utterly pointless.
Ena didn’t know how to word such thoughts. She opted for simplicity. “...Not really. They’re too same-ie.”
“They’re way cooler than humans are!” The pink girl pointed upwards, her gaze following where she was pointing. Ena took this moment to stare at her once again, letting the pink girl’s facial features become further defined in her mind as something she could transfer to canvas.
…Was this feeling in fact just jealousy? Of her beauty. Everything could be categorised as jealousy in Ena’s mind; she was nothing if not envious. Even with it she was barely anything at all.
“I mean— look at em! If we stayed as humans we’d never be able to shine that brightly!”
Ena had to admit, the pink girl’s use of we—no matter how flippant it may have been—caused her to flush a little.
We, as if they already had some sort of connection, some fated entangling…
…How stupidly pathetic her own thoughts were.
It was then Ena unequivocally decided no, this feeling could not be described as jealousy. Ena felt none of the usual envy while being around the pink girl. It was quite a gentle feeling in her heart she evoked, one which didn’t feel close to drowning.
“Sure we can. We can shine individually, without becoming a weird same-ey amalgamation of light.”
The pink girl looked at her, eyes slightly narrowed. She sighed before saying, “so you're one of those people then?”
“And what do you mean by that?” Ena immediately retorted, a slight indignance to her tone. The pink girl, despite being quite clearly drunk, was still masterful at getting on her nerves. Yet, Ena found she didn’t mind all too much.
“An individualist type. Creative,” the pink girl sounded softer now and Ena thought the tone suited her well.
“Uh… I guess. Is that a bad thing?”
“Nope! It’s kinda cute,” the response—said in the matter-of-fact way it was—made Ena blush more than she already had been. The girl seemed to notice as her eyes widened and she slightly lifted her eyebrows before she carried on, “let me guess… you take… uhmmm… drama?”
Ena shook her head, “do I look like a drama kid to you?”
“You have a pretty face. I’d wanna see you in like— a movie or something.”
Ena felt as though she was being toyed with now. It didn’t really annoy her, though. Fuck…
Ena shook her head in disagreement.
“Okayyyy… uhhh… musician?”
“Nope.”
“I think you’d be a good trumpet player. Or something more sophisticated, like a harp.”
…What did that even mean? Was it a compliment or an insult? Ena couldn’t tell, and she’d never know because she didn’t comment on it before the pink girl moved on.
“Uh… I’m still guessing something creative… maybe…”
“Hot.”
“What?!”
“Like the game. You’re close. You’re hot. You know?”
“Bit heavy handed with the flirting…”
Ena jumped at the realisation of how strange her words sounded in isolation, but quickly calmed down, determined not to fall for the teasing. “...Fuck off…” she uttered under her breath.
“Okay… So it is creative… artist, then.”
“Ding ding!”
“That’s a yes..?”
“Yup! Now It’s my turn.”
The pink girl stared directly at her with a widened expression. It made her eyes look slightly glossed over like a 40-year-old porcelain doll in the window display of an old antique shop. The exact tone her eyes were was similar to the light pink of her hair and shone despite the darkness of the night (...or morning, though Ena didn’t really count it as that until after she’d slept.) A unique type of beauty glittered behind them.
As Ena stressed before, this specific type of pink—perhaps not simply the tone of it, the brightness or intensity or softness, but something else—was a colour she had never seen before. It was far too endearing to loosen her grip on.
Ena had gotten so distracted by it—by her—she had very nearly forgotten what she was doing.
Ah, yes… Guessing her degree…
A part of Ena—the least rational part of her mind that was pretty much short-circuiting at the sight of the pink girl—wanted to say model and see how she’d react.
But that was far too upfront.
And awkward.
So instead Ena guessed genuinely. If this pink girl had made her own clothes—and they looked market-level—then perhaps it was something pertaining to that?...
“Fashion design.”
“Woah! First try… you haven’t been stalking me or anything, have ya?”
For some reason, despite being objectively untrue, Ena felt like she was being seen through. Was it that her actions, her thoughts, her already-strong desire to know this girl more than she already did, felt far too invasive? Did it make her feel guilty? Like she was perverse for simply having such feelings, for wanting to paint somebody she’d never met— god forbid, for developing some weird unexplained crush on this pink girl, this other girl, this girl she found far prettier than anybody she’d ever met before?
It was different with Airi, and it was different when she was simply speculating.
Maybe.
…Or maybe she was overthinking—trying to paint her feelings as dissolute so she could ignore them instead of trying to indulge and being let down.
She wasn’t quite sure in truth, but nonetheless it bled through the rest of her interactions with the other for the rest of the night. Even Ena’s non-sober brain couldn’t restrain from finding new knives to jab herself with. There was no way to escape from the debilitating shame and disgust at her own being when she was the one actively creating new reasons for it to exist.
It was because of this that when—in response to Ena guessing her degree correctly—the other told her, “as a reward, you get one question. Nothing more. Take it as a privilege—I don’t like sharing a lot of things!”, instead of asking what she desperately wanted to—”can I paint you? Will you be my muse?”—Ena asked for something far more trite.
“What’s your name?”
“Amia.”