Vincent is my name for The Netherlands. This was a request by my friend lixaxil/purplewolfstar.
Vincent buys himself noise-canceling headphones for Christmas one year on a whim. He comes home and removes them from their packaging carefully, and places them over his ears for a little while, and realizes that the lack of noise bothers him. So he goes on a walk, orders a small sandwich in a hushed tone from a street vendor, and sits down on a park bench. He eats half and feeds the rest to the pigeons that gather around his feet.
He knows the birds recognize him. He doesn't understand exactly how, but they gather around him the moment he sits down, and the ones that are daring hop onto his head or shoulders or lap. Vincent thought once, "Ah, well perhaps it is because I am still, like a statue, and for them, that is comforting," but even if he moves, they still flock around him the moment he sits down.
Maybe it's because he's been feeding them for over fifty years now, and he sighs while sharing the bread with the birds.
He likes animals, simply because they rarely change. He's seen generation upon generation of pigeons and they all behave similarly. Pigeons one day don't wake up and decide that they hate you, they don't chide you for being too quiet, they don't judge your actions and your history. They simply enjoy you because you feed them, and that is the extent of their relationship with you.
He remembers, as a child, he liked staying in the barns, curled up with the sheep and cows. His sister got tired of playing hide and seek with him because he liked to choose the same spots, hiding in a chicken coop or underneath the belly of a horse.
Vincent sometimes wishes that the dogs he pets on the street or the cats that live in the alleyways could talk to him. But if they could understand one another, he fears that they would glance over him and instead seek out people like Antonio who charged the atmosphere and could attract people to him with little effort.
He likes the pigeons the way they are, if only because Antonio scares them all away and can't get a single one to eat from his hand.
One night, he puts the headphones on and gets high in front of his easel, in hopes that if he hears nothing, maybe he can express why he feels like something is missing deep inside of him.
He wakes up, covered in paint on the floor, and crawls across the other side of the room to pick up the painting he had knocked down in his daze. Gingerly, he holds it, staring until his hands start shaking, and he has to pull himself away to go sit in the shower.
Even if nobody else saw it, through the brilliant colors and amorphous blobs, he clearly saw Matthew on the canvas.
Vincent cries to himself as the water pours down onto him, and paint dissolves off of his body as it washes down the drain in a whirlpool of color.
(Years later, he finds the painting again and hands it to Matthew without a word, and after a few minutes Matthew asks him with a smile, "This is me, isn't it Vince?"
Vincent, then, nods, and tries not to cry all over again.)