Work Text:
Shirabu twirled a paintbrush between his fingers. He was an experienced artist, but he still couldn't handle a brush or pen with any finesse worthy of party tricks, like spinning them around on his fingers. He idly waggled it back and forth while looking out the window.
"M'kay, I'm all ready." Tendou stood up with a backpack strapped to his arms. "Ready?"
"Yeah."
"What're you waiting for?" Tendou kicked his foot out to tap Shirabu's chair.
Shirabu followed behind him and simmered in aimless irritation. Word had reached Tendou about an old childhood friend appearing in a village within dubious walking distance, and he insisted on dragging Shirabu. The whole trip translated to a different purpose: visiting a famous shop known for desserts and candies. Tendou couldn't hide it.
"What's your friend's name?" Shirabu asked.
"Yamagata Hayato. I haven't seen Hayato-kun in ages. I wonder how he's been." Tendou brought his hands together in a soft clap, tapping his fingers at the tips. "What if he's a sword master now! Or a baker! He's gonna be thrilled to pieces."
"Your friend better be a dragon for all this trouble we're going through."
Tendou laughed in high spirits. "Last time I saw him, he was a human being."
"I don't care." Shirabu cracked his knuckles and stretched his hands out.
He only carried a small bag for necessities that required immediate access, such as food and medicine. As part of their agreement into this journey, Tendou had to carry almost all of their supplies on his own, including Shirabu's clothes and belongings. Tendou didn't complain, so Shirabu couldn't derive any pleasure from making him do all the work.
By the time they reached Yamagata's village, Shirabu had become stiff and sore, his legs alternated with awkward angles to avoid pain.
"You're carrying me back," Shirabu said.
"Okay. I'll sell everything in the backpack and stuff you in there." Tendou reached over his shoulder and patted it. "Hop in."
Shirabu turned away. "Do you know where Yamagata lives, exactly? Which house?"
"No."
"What he looks like?"
"I'll know him when I see him."
Shirabu breathed out a force of air so strong that it disturbed his bangs. They picked their way around the village and asked around for Yamagata. Shirabu barely kept up any real attention on where they were going, and when Yamagata invited them in, the first thing Shirabu did was shower and fall asleep.
"Kenjirou? Kenjirou. Hey. This is your wake up call. Get up, Kenjirou, it's almost noon."
Tendou pushed him past the line of a shove, and Shirabu rolled off his bed. He landed with a yell.
Shirabu shot to his knees and gripped the bed's edge. "Couldn't you have just shaken me awake?"
"That didn't work, though."
Shirabu gritted his teeth. He calmed at breakfast, to a large array of foods spread over a table.
"You're Satori's roommate? He told me a lot about you when you were asleep yesterday." Yamagata extended a hand. "Nice to meet you, Shirabu." He gave a wide honest grin that Shirabu could never relate to the early morning.
Shirabu shook his hand with a weak strength. "Nice to meet you," he said quietly.
"I can't believe you live in the same place, Satori. You're the person I'd least expect to stay put for a long time."
"I didn't stay! I moved around a lot. Kenjirou here's just some sort of lucky charm, huh? We ended up back in my old village."
Shirabu grabbed one last piece of melon bread. "I'm going for a walk."
"Uh? You want to walk in the morning?" Tendou asked.
"What's wrong with that?"
"Nothing, nothing." Tendou linked his hands together and leaned into them to address Yamagata. The smugness in his movement prompted Shirabu to leave.
Shirabu decided to buy something from the dessert shop. There weren't too many people at this hour, and being able to eat a dessert before Tendou filled him with satisfaction.
He climbed to a rock and opened his paper bag. He brought macarons, taiyaki, a few different types of mochi, and red bean buns. He sat and watched sky as he helped himself to a bun. Breakfast had only filled him enough to satiate his hunger. He didn't want to stick around and intrude on a reunion, so he left without eating all he could.
A mountain towered in the distance. By the perspective of its size, Shirabu judged it to be close, close enough to spend a day exploring. Despite his reaction to the trip, he didn't hate work and exercise; he'd be happy to do anything as long as he wanted to do it.
His body still ached from the trek, so he headed inside and spent the day napping and eating. He slept through the night.
Morning light pierced him awake. He fell off the bed and threw his hand up to clutch the bedsheets, dragging them with him.
"Morning, Kenjirou." Tendou flicked the paper bag on the night table. "You went and bought something without me! Could've at least waited."
"Go ahead and take one," Shirabu mumbled. He rubbed his eyes and shuffled to the bathroom to change and wash his face.
After a real breakfast, he stood outside with Yamagata and Tendou. Again the mountain presented itself, illuminated by the clear bright sun and framed with rings of mist, striking between ranges of weather, almost its own world. With his head cleared of his own fog, Shirabu couldn't ignore the mountain's presence.
"Nice, huh?" Yamagata asked. "Some people visit just for the mountain."
"I can tell why. It's pretty." Tendou turned. "So Kenjirou went and bought sweets without me, but we can still go. Kenjirou, you're on your own. No more unfairly stealing my thunder."
Shirabu hardly cared. He packed his small bag and decided to take a closer look at the mountain.
The top now rose unseen past layers of clouds. The sun didn't shine through, but the mountain still shined on its own merits, cloud-reflected light falling over parts and small peaks, leaving other sides in shadowy calm. The mist hung closer to the ground, natural but patternless. In a word: perfect. It was an ideal mountain, ideal in every angle, as if you couldn't remove any piece; Shirabu thought he could see all sides of it at once like a living folded panorama.
Shirabu avoided walking around the entire mountain base, and settled for chasing a portion of it. There were glimpses of small waterfalls tucked into crevices and around rocks. Shirabu caught them from flickers in the water, sparkles of radiance in consequences of the sun. Trees grew from the steep rocks and walls. Half the mountain was growing with green, not counting the clouds and slivers of streams.
Shirabu travelled back to Yamagata's house and returned with convenient scrolls of paper he could tie up and carry in his hands, alongside inks and brushes. Shirabu painted from the rock he sat on yesterday and embellished with his own memories to fill in the details he couldn't examine from far away.
When he lowered his hands to rest, Tendou applauded behind him.
"You've been sitting there for hours. You've been sitting there for so long that you looked like a rock. I thought I lost you." Tendou tilted his head to gauge Shirabu's stillness. "You'd make a perfect model for an artist."
"Ha, ha." Shirabu gingerly stood with his hands on the paper. "I'm going to leave this to dry in Yamagata's house. Do not touch it."
"I never do," Tendou said.
"I'm talking to Yamagata. You know how I am, but he doesn't." Shirabu truthfully appreciated Tendou's attention to detail; he never forgot a quirk or habit of Shirabu's. Some people called that ability to read people "intuition." Shirabu called it "experience," the culmination of learning about people and compressing it into quick judgments.
Tendou leaned in to Yamagata. "Sorry about Kenjirou. He gets angry easily. Blows like a volcano. Sometimes turns red too. See, just like that." Tendou pointed at Shirabu's head.
Shirabu set the paper on a table in the living room and relaxed with Yamagata's cooking. He didn't notice that lunch had slipped by during the time with the mountain.
"I'm exhausted." Shirabu pushed away from the table and collected his plates. "I'm going to bed."
"I'll catch ya tomorrow, Kenjirou," Tendou said.
Shirabu collapsed on the bed and dreamed about the mountain.
Shirabu took his supplies straight to the mountain after breakfast. He subscribed to metonymy, so he painted only a part of it this time, catching the likeness of the side available to him. He couldn't see the mountaintop this morning, either. Shirabu thought he had already forgotten what it looked like.
He made sure to join Yamagata and Tendou for lunch. Two more scrolls were already drying on the table, one of them the perspective painting from the bottom of the mountain, and the other full of different profile sketches.
"How many more are you gonna make?" Tendou asked. "You've already painted three."
"I don't know. Whenever I feel like stopping." Shirabu reached the bottom of his noodle-devoid bowl, and he raised it to his mouth to drink.
"Well, have fun out there. I know you're enjoying yourself in your own weird little ways." Tendou whispered to Yamagata, "He's like a friendly ghost. Creepy and untouchable, but harmless."
Shirabu wrapped up a sandwich to take with him, and he set out to the mountain again. Shirabu managed to find something different in every new painting, as if he could look into the layers of rocks and work them apart.
Shirabu stared into a large clump of trees inhabiting different degrees of rock face, all growing in a group. Shirabu felt very satisfied with the thought of a forest in the side of a mountain. Sunlight beamed through patches of cloudless sky, leaving him in a pleasant warmth he actually enjoyed. Normally he hated direct sunlight and heat.
"Aren't you going to get tired of painting it over and over?" Yamagata asked as he and Tendou watched Shirabu lay out more freshly painted scrolls. Shirabu rolled up the dry ones and carefully tied them closed.
"No," Shirabu said simply.
"You don't know his ways," Tendou added.
"You might be able to sell them as souvenirs, if you asked around," Yamagata said.
Shirabu sent him a glare. He barely had any paintings of the mountain as it was. He needed all of them to then paint derivatives of them if he wanted to back at their village.
The next morning, the first thing Shirabu noticed from a window was the clear view of a sunny peak. The sun floated behind the mountaintop and lit up the mountainside in full beauty. Mists and low clouds still drifted over the rock walls, and the contrast of them sweeping into the sloping forest grabbed Shirabu's paintbrush. The reality of the mountaintop fit better than a memory on paper now that he could pin it down.
Shirabu didn't even sit at the breakfast table. Tendou and Yamagata shrugged and gave in to host breakfast outside on Shirabu's favorite rock. They held quiet conversation next to him, careful not to disturb him unless Tendou waited to initiate when he knew Shirabu was resting.
Shirabu didn't think he could get tired of this.