Work Text:
Green. That royal colour o so bright. Shining in the colour palette waiting to be spread.
Purple. The deep amethyst hue against the rest, that made all the difference.
Then, they were put together. On one canvas.
They complemented each other beautifully. Purple filled in the spots of darkness and shadow, while green made the highlights shine all so bright. They worked together in a way that no other colours can.
But then it became too much. The two wanted more from the canvas. From the space within them. They wanted to blanket everything in their shade.
The colours clashed hard.
Unforgiving.
The green and purple fighting for space on the tiny canvas. The white spaces desperately gasping for the space left. The paint violently seeps into each other as they find every available surface. They strategically envelop the pale white, maybe, perhaps, too intelligent for their own good.
The green believes the only thing that matters is others and trying to give oneself for what they think is best. To sacrifice oneself so the future is a little bit brighter. But maybe in the end, the only person who dies is not Green. No, it’s the neighbouring colours that went close to green.
The purple, on the other hand, thinks otherwise. Maybe a bit more realistically. Purple believes that being a little bit selfish isn't that bad. Because to live in this world, you have to be a little bit selfish to get what you want.
They both had beliefs.
They both thought they were right.
And sometimes that helped. They balanced each other.
But in this timeline?
It became their demise.
Trying to fill it with what they believe is right. Struggling to tell each other what they saw. Struggling to see what they both thought. The paint that once complemented each other… they muddled into a dull colour instead. Blue gray.
Right in the middle.
Seeing this, they slowed down. Looking at the thin line they broke, they stopped. Pretended it never happened. Ignored the small boundary they destroyed. But something deep down in both of them snapped. Broken beyond repair.
Green and purple knew… that they went too far.
So they slowed down. The thin, ugly line of blue-gray sat dissonant between the vibrant opposing colors. Over time, the paint dried. Wounds healed. The colors dulled to a peaceful resolution.
Then maybe the universe pitied them, missing the old bright hues.
A mistake.
Because that meant that the clash began again. One accident and the wounds reopened. This time it was brutal. No space to breathe. The canvas groaned under the weight of the fresh, wet onslaught.
Green bled outward like a desperate vine, choking the edges, convinced that drowning itself to save the piece was the only noble path.
Purple slashed upward, a sharp, unyielding streak of amethyst, hoarding the light because survival demanded greed.
They did not mix this time.
They collided.
Long before the fracture, they had rested side by side on the very same palette, drawn from a single, unbroken line of pigment. They were meant to build together. To complement. But a dark obsession had re-engineered the canvas.
The purple strokes had grown desperate, mapping out every boundary, studying every angle of the green, constructing a beautiful, terrifying cage disguised as a masterpiece. A miniature world where the green could never bleed out. Never get hurt.
Paragon. The perfect prison, built purely out of a twisted, protective love.
This was not a battle of light against darkness. It was the crushing weight of two different suns trying to light the same sky. Emerald fought for the collective, a beautiful, tragic martyrdom. Violet fought to wall them both in, a fierce, suffocating attempt to keep his favorite color safe from the world outside.
Both lines were painted with good intentions.
Both strokes were driven by love.
But on this tiny canvas, perspective was a luxury they could not afford. The tragedy wasn't that one was wrong. The tragedy was that they were both, undeniably, right. And where two absolute truths meet, there is no room for compromise. Only friction. The white background vanished entirely, swallowed by the noise of their conviction.
They were beautiful.
They were horrific.
And as the last drop of open space suffocated beneath the heavy layers, the pressure plate clicked. The illusion shattered. The two colors realized the ultimate tragedy of their design. In trying to paint the perfect world, they had left no room to live in it.
From the thick heart of the green, a dense, metallic stroke emerged—the heavy silhouette of a brass spyglass, carved cleanly through the wet oil layer using the back of a palette knife. A final, sharp reminder of the trust they used to share. The gloss of the heavy violet pigment trembled, its surface tension cracking as it registered the shape. The calculated, crisp edges of the purple began to bleed out of control, fracturing into a desperate, watery panic as it tried to engulf the brass shape before it ruined the canvas. The green paint pooled quietly, yielding, thinning its viscosity and letting go of the struggle. It did not fight back. It simply let the brass shape slide down the linen, dropping it directly into the wet, raw fault line before draining away toward the margins in an act of total surrender.
Purple surged inward to catch it—a frantic, heavy smear of wet violet crossing its own rigid, geometric boundaries just to touch the last tangible memory of his best friend.
And that was the final mistake.
The remaining green paint, pushed far into the outer margins of the frame, slowly began to settle. It didn't flow smoothly anymore. It curdled. It thickened, freezing in jagged, panicked ripples right at the edge of the scorch marks, as if still trying to recoil from the blinding white flash that had just consumed the center. The emerald pigment had surrendered to save the canvas. It had pulled back so its best friend wouldn’t get hurt.
But the canvas was ruined anyway.
From its isolated corner, the green paint could only look inward at the hollow, blackened crater where the vibrant violet used to be. There was no more friction. No more fighting for space. The boundary they had destroyed was gone, replaced by a gaping, empty void.
Over time, the wet sheen began to evaporate. The green dulled, turning a brittle, sickly olive as it dried in the quiet room. It didn't feel like a peaceful resolution anymore. It felt like a stain.
And right there in the ash, glaring back at the lone green stroke, was the spyglass. It sat cold and unmoving, forever trapped beneath that light, flaky layer of dead purple paint. A permanent scar disguised as a monument.
The universe had gone quiet. The timeline moved on. But the remaining paint on the canvas remained fractured, dried into an eternal, suffocating shockwave.
Green had survived. Green was the only one left.
…
Far away, tucked into the dark corners of the studio, the shadow of the palette knife laughed. The Director picked up his brush, wholly indifferent to the blackened, hollow center of the cloth. To him, it was never about protecting the colors. It was just an experiment in mixing them. And as the sickly, dried emerald flaked under the weight of its own isolation, it realized the ultimate cruelty of the studio: they had been forced to destroy each other using a palette they never even asked to share.