Summary: Vincent Van Gogh paints his final masterpiece, and loses the last of his mind.
Writer's Note: A quick one shot, written after I saw The Pandorica Opens. Perhaps the most moving instance in the entire episode, for me, at least, occurred within the first five minutes. MAJOR spoilers for the episodes "Vincent and the Doctor" and "The Pandorica Opens". Also, this is about Vincent Van Gogh, as portrayed by Cullen in the Doctor Who episode Vincent and the Doctor... does that mean it counts as RPF?
Opening.
By the time he comes to paint them, the sunflowers in the yard are half rotten and wilted in the sun.
He works from memory, fancying that since people call his paintings disgusting and deathlike anyway, there would be no sense in working while they were fresh. She never seems to age, though; her memory seeps into his dreams and he sees her, laughing at shadows and staggering in large, dark rooms. In his dreams, she speaks of red haired children and of the fables she would read to them.
Beautiful Amy with her bone deep sadness. And sunflowers. He can tolerate them for her.
In his sleep, he picks the fantasies-made-real from his mind as easily as if she were right here, telling him everything as they laugh over bottles of wine. They are real; he is as certain of this as he ever is about anything. But the sunflowers are his only reminder, and even they are rotting away into black and brown mud. He paints with their faces fading in his mind, and believes that they give him the strength to do so. The Doctor's thoughts, all scattered, beautiful impatience and crazy broken slabs of pavement, endless time tying him to a not-quite-reality, where the Doctor is the Madman and he, Van Gogh, is perfectly sane.
In the visions, he does not try to touch the Doctor's mind, because that feels like trying to touch the stars; but the man (old man, as old as the sun, as old as anything that has ever been) reaches out anyway, all open wounds that won't heal, and takes Vincent's hand in the darkness. He calls him by name, though he will never share his own. He can't. That way lays chaos and (greater) madness. There is a dark bloodiness there which echoes Van Gogh's own, in all the worst and most wonderful ways.
In the morning he tells himself that they were merely dreams without ever truly believing it, and he paints again.
He dreams of them once more the night before it happens. The dream has no beginning (or rather it has too many for him to count and no clues as to which, if any, is the real one, because they seem to keep slashing through one another and wiping each other out like thick, white filler on canvas), but it has an ending. It's a nightmare where Amy's hair is scattered in the breeze and the Doctor's bones are encased in stone. The monster Vincent killed in the church is back, angry and afraid and bleeding transparently. He reaches out to snatch his friends from the air, and fails to hang on. The galaxy implodes, the stars have vanished...
He starts working on the painting at the crack of dawn, still trembling so much that the first few splodges of colours seem utterly accidental. At first. But then they being to blur, merging, and he feels the painting coming together in spite of him. Cobalt blue, jaundice yellow and ugly, paste grey. He doesn't have enough of any of those colours after the sunflowers, and there's no money left for more, so he mixes what he has with water and struggles on.
He heard stories once (from Theo, probably) about the man who painted his perfect masterpiece and never touched a brush again in his life, but that man was a fool more mad than he is. This painting will not be like that at all, it won't be magnificent or wonderful or even beautiful, but it will be a masterpiece.
It's all happening inside of his mind, of course. Or so the Doctors (not his Doctor, never) tell him, as if that makes it any less real. Still, it's easier to pretend, to deny everything until the final stroke touches the canvas, and he knows without even having to look that it will be the last. Or at least the last that ever means anything.
Vincent shivers in the summer air, and feels as if the whole world is trembling with him. The air in the house is thick and silent.
When he finishes, he tells himself that he mustn't look, and that the painting must be burned before anyone else can lay eyes upon it. Except it mustn't, because it's probably the most important painting he has ever created. The stretched material and paintwork echo at him, the way cavernous church halls do during morning mass, but there is no comfort or godliness here. He tells himself that the madness in his brain has finally dripped out of him and into his paints, and that looking will probably make anybody else as insane as he is. He wonders if that would be so bad, and imagines having someone to share the madness with. He imagines the Doctor and Amy returning.
He looks at his masterpiece anyway, and realises in that moment that they will never return. The image is so bright it hurts to look, makes the bile rise thick in his throat. Then the white hessian splits, rippling and aging before his eyes; wooden bindings shatter and leak their cracks into the air and all around him, the house is buckling to the sound of piano wires screaming. The painting is all darkness and light and the end of all things, but Vincent looks straight through that to the hollowness within. He sees his friends crushed and dying in the centre of the maelstrom as all of time collapses inwards like a camera box. He sees the word "love" melting like glass.
The remaining, fragile tendrils of his world collapse in an implosion of storm blue. He screams.
.