Paint, a sandman fanfic

What is it, comes the voice again, only not a voice; no more than a shadow in the air, that you want?

Destruction—because that is his name, now, if only now, and if only in his figment of a mind—exhaled, and didn't blink. That is an unfair question if ever he's heard one. What he wants was nothing that he can take into his hands, nothing, really, that he can pursue. It is ever-changing and unkind, like a dream. Not like a nightmare, because to wake from a dream brings no relief, no silent momentary escape from the fear. After dreams, there is only night.

He wants absolution, or a bitter mirror of it. He wants to seek out life and make it crumble, wanted to hurt and to heal. He wants ale, of the thick and smoldering variety. He wants to sleep.

"Go away," he says, but it doesn't.

.X.

He wonders if his footsteps will ever wear a path in the earth. He doubts it.

He hums as he walks. The tune is low and mournful, but he doesn't care for it any more than he would a melody more upbeat. He hasn't any real feelings toward music, although it does seem to be present everywhere he goes, despite being a human creation. Destruction tries to distinguish the difference between naturally occurring events; he tries to view the world and wonder how different it would look of the hand of man had never touched it. All things in relation to one another. He can't bring himself to think of the trees or the earth without a desperate grasping hold choking at their roots; the blind, faulted need of living things to dominate all that they touch.

The sea would not be the sea without man to love and fear it, any more than it would be the sea without salt in the waves or silent beasts in its depths.

Destruction forces himself to feel, at the same time welcoming his own disgust as to the pointlessness.

Standing there, in a quiet place as the last weary rays of the sun paint the ocean, he finds himself considering beauty. A vulgar word despite pretention, altogether worthless when compared to the sheer magnitude of meanings it attempted to convey. Things are beautiful by proxy, beautiful by intention, but rarely beautiful simply by being.

Destruction is beautiful, as is the sunset over the sea; but one is more beautiful than the other, and no less terrifying. He wonders which it is.

.X.

"You're back," says the dog, barely lifting his head from his paw, but his tail thumps predictably in the dust.

"Yeah," says Destruction. The giant log crashes as he lets it topple from his shoulders, creating a cloud of red clay that settles slowly back into place. Barnabas looks at it skeptically, raising the equivalent of an eyebrow, and yawns.

"What, if I dare ask, do you intend to do with that?"

Destruction kicks at it with one boot; it's a great redwood, thicker around than he is. It'd still been standing in the forest, but its leaves were already beginning to brown and fade away. He'd stopped to look at it, for a long time; already taken by death, but unwilling to surrender its magnificence. Soon it would fall, tumbling to the earth, and become less a tree than a memory. So he'd taken it with him.

"Not sure yet. I thought maybe I'd make a boat; we could go up the river. Pretend we know how to fish." He smiles, easy and careless. He's not alone, after all, not a wavering shadow of a former title. He is alive.

It's night at last, and the stars are out as far as they'll ever come, solitary creatures that they are. Barnabas glances at them, following his friend's gaze, and flops over in the dust. "You have no idea how to build a boat."

"Neither do you," Destruction argues graciously, bypassing the point. He leaves the tree where it is for the moment, stepping through the open door of his tiny cottage, wishing he'd thought to stop into town and get groceries. There isn't much in his kitchen other than bread and cheese, a few apples and the more pathetic half of a bottle of whiskey. He takes them all in his hands, a balancing act, and rejoins Barnabas on the porch. "Want some?" He says as a courtesy, offering a sliver of mangled pepper jack cheese, and the dog looks positively offended.

.X.

.x.

.X.

It isn't, on second thought, that he doesn't understand things like hatred or love; in an arbitrary kind of fashion, he knows that to create is an act of love, and to uncreate is… well, something else.

But that isn't true, of course. Not the part about creation, or the part where he understands. Destruction loves, or he thinks he does, practically everything he lays eyes on; he loves the ocean, for its shimmer and for its danger, and he loves the stars and the dirt and the birds and the stinging insects. He loves the tree he felled, and he loves the place where it no longer stands, because something else will soon stand in its place. He loves his grumpy old dog. He loves things because he can, because he has the right to, and he doesn't feel sorry when they're no longer there for the same reason.

He laughs about something, or possibly about nothing, and tries to hatchet the powerful old redwood into something that could even passably float, and fails magnificently. Barnabas quips at him, and he sets the boat-tree wreck at an angle against the house and leaves it there. He'll try again someday, he says, and maybe he will.

He laughs, incidentally, because he's not sure what would happen if he tries to do anything else. He liked the boat idea, though. Perhaps his next attempt will be sturdy enough to take on the sea.

What do you want?

"Does it matter?" He says aloud, and Barnabas looks at him strangely. Destruction gives a shrug, considers going to forage in the trees for some fruit to eat, knowing there's not a fruit tree for miles.

He'll know when he finds it, anyway, or maybe he won't.