The Perfect Picture


Prompt: Gou has a hobby of drawing muscley men, and she uses Iwatobi's Swim Club as practice. When she firsts draws Nagisa, she discovers he's her favorite to draw.


Her fingers glide over the paper, smudging the sharp lines she'd drawn moments ago. She lets out a frustrated sigh because no, it's not good enough.

Maybe she's being too hard on herself. In fact, she is being too hard on herself, but she refuses to admit it.

She flips to the next page in her sketchpad, glancing upwards. Her eyes land on the pool, where the four boys are currently training. She likes watching them. She likes to watch their muscles and the way they flex depending on their swimming styles and how the water moves around them as a result. She likes it because she can practice not only drawing them out of water at a standstill, but in the water while in action.

She first started with drawing Makoto about a month back. She'd then moved to Rei, and then to Haruka. Drawing him was challenging. Not at a standstill, but when he's in the water and moving. She isn't sure how to capture his grace and the way the water practically parts for him as he glides through, and she's still not sure. She's played around with it a few times, even trying to change the style of her own drawing.

Then she started drawing Nagisa. She wouldn't go so far as to call it an obsession. She wasn't obsessed with him (or maybe she was?), but there was something so enticing about his body movements. (Or there was something so enticing about him?)

She's completely forgotten about Haruka and her struggles to draw him, but is now focused on her struggles to capture Nagisa.

What am I missing?

It's driving her crazy. She's drawn him over and over for the past two weeks, but there's something off each time. Everything down to the locks of his hair are perfect, yet there's something that doesn't radiate from the picture that she gets from him in reality.

Watching him and the others in the pool makes something snap inside of her and she suddenly understands why she can't draw the stupid boy splashing around in front of her.

It's his personality that's missing. And she can't even begin to imagine how to draw that. His personality is more complex than the way Haruka swims. A simple picture can't capture it, let alone radiate it for the world to see.

He looks over at her, a smile plastered on his face. The same smile she's been trying to master drawing for two weeks now. The smile that's causing her to lose sleep. The smile that's causing her grades to slowly slip away as she doodles aimlessly on her homework, itching to get to practice and try and draw him again.

When their eyes meet, she knows she'll never properly draw him. But her gaze pulls away from his, back down to the blank sheet of paper. Even though she can't, she really loves drawing him.

The pencil hits the sheet of paper in a frenzy, and Gou knows she's going to keep on trying.


In the end, she never really figures out how to draw him, but Nagisa thinks everything she draws looks perfect.