As many times as I blink, I'll think of you tonight.
It was funny just how fast Demyx seemed to worm his way into the slate haired scholar's heart. He seemed to hurdle over the emotional walls that Zexion had constructed with ease, like how imaginary sheep would jump over imaginary picket fences that people would count when they had a hard time sleeping.
I mean, it took years to build the walls and shut everyone but himself and a few friends away (setting a few cleverly placed land mines and mouse traps along the trail), so of course it would take a lot of effort to bring the walls crumbling down, right?
Not exactly. Demyx didn't count the minutes or seconds it took to get Zexion to open up to him, but he knew it hadn't taken very long. Small talks, big smiles, and a few brave, daring hugs and friendly touches was all it took to get the slate haired man to hand over the metaphorical keys to his heart.
That being said, Demyx was never good with locks and keys (something about how his younger cousin, Sora, used to hit him with plastic teething rings shaped like keys when they were babies), so he hadn't exactly entered Zexion's heart yet. More or less, he was just standing awkwardly outside the door of Zexion's heart, keys in hand, whistling to himself.
All of that was a metaphor, though. In reality, it was late afternoon, and Demyx was sitting on a green patch of grass on one of the hills behind the park where he used to play sitar for passersby in hope for spare change in high school. Standing next to him was Zexion, frowning at his painting of a disproportionate sunset on a canvas he had purchased yesterday for 'purely research' ("One of my books said that it was a calming activity," the slate haired man had muttered defensively, "I wouldn't have done this otherwise." … But Demyx thought that Zexion was just trying to cover up the fact that he had interest in something other than reading or studying medical science.)
"Something's missing." The slate haired man said aloud, looking down at his companion who was staring into the brown and orange and pink and still-somewhat-blue sky.
Demyx's brain snapped out of the day-dream like state he had been in at the sound of Zexion's voice and titled his head sideways. "Uh, sorry. What did you say?"
"I said," Zexion sighed, rolling his violet blue eyes, "Something is missing."
The blond stood up and dusted off his pants, turning his body to look at Zexion's painting. To be quite honest, it wasn't that good. Demyx thought it kinda looked like someone had eaten tuna and diet coke and then thrown it up all over the off-white canvas on accident, but he didn't tell Zexion that. A lot of things are missing, Demyx chuckled to himself, but he closed one of his eyes and shrugged.
"It needs to look more vanilla-y." Demyx said, examining the picture. His sister, Namine, was an artist, so he fancied himself as someone who knew a thing or two about art (even though he completely didn't.)
"Vanilla-y?" Zexion repeated, raising an eyebrow. He took a look at the actual sunset behind his painting and then looked back at Demyx. "There's not a single speck of white in that sunset, Demyx."
"Well yeah," Demyx mumbled, like it were the most obvious thing in the world, "Vanilla isn't white. It's brown. So white is kind of not-so-vanilla-y, but brown is. Like the extract, you know?"
"Of course I know," Zexion eventually scoffs, and Demyx laughs at the sky as he finishes Zexion's sentence in his mind with 'Of course I know; I'm Zexion. I know everything.'
"Well?" The blonde man said in an amused tone, "Get to making it more vanilla-y."
Zexion's hand twitched slightly in annoyance, hovering above the brown colored paint on his palette. Demyx could almost hear Zexion's internal thoughts exclaiming haughtily 'What does he know? He's a musician, not an artist.'
Demyx took back his previous seat on the ground, landing with a slight plop as he ran his fingers through the soft grass. He wondered why things weren't always beautiful like this; with Zexion's determined face focused on a canvas while his steady hands, albeit covered in paint, added a 'vanilla-y' color to the tuna-and-diet-coke-regurgitated color scheme; with the sound of nothing but a few trees branches rustling in the wind, and the soft strokes of a paint brush coupled with Zexion's labored breathing. He smiled up at his kind-of-but-not-really-lover, and then leaned flat on his back to observe the painting.
The vanilla-y color definitely helped even out the mess of colors that littered the canvas. He noticed a smudge of dirty-blond at the edge of the page though, attached to a stick-figure person that appeared to be on a small section of a green hill, and Demyx couldn't help but wonder-
"Is that supposed to be me?"
Zexion's back stiffened. He continued to paint without answering Demyx's question.
"I said," Demyx repeated, a little louder this time, "Is that supposed to be me?"
"Is what supposed to be you?" Zexion answered nonchalantly, continuing to apply the brown color that Demyx had suggested.
The blond, although he was tired and didn't want to, got up from where he was sitting once again and held his finger a few inches away from the wet paint and pointed at the stick person. "That."
"This?" Zexion muttered, "This is simply a mistake. I meant to put the blondish-brown color by the sun, but it dripped."
Demyx skeptically raised his eyebrows. "Oh really? And I'm guessing that the paint just fell in a way that copied my awesome Mohawk-y hair?"
Zexion's violet eyes widened a little, "Well, it's not that improbable, really. If you think about it, the statistical chance of it landing like that is only one in about a hundred thous-"
"Yeah. Okay. And the chance of you feeding me bullshit right now is about one hundred percent."
The slate haired man rolled his eyes and snorted, "Alright, fine. What if it is you, hmm?"
Demyx smiled and wrapped his hands around the shorter man's waist. He chuckled into the soft slate hair that he had buried his face in before whispering into Zexion's ear:
"Well, in that case, I love it."
And that was that.
Upon returning home to the apartment that he and Demyx had recently begun to share (as it used to be Zexion and Roxas's apartment, but Roxas had moved in with his boyfriend-soon-to-be-husband, Axel.), Zexion scowled at the painting.
"Why didn't you tell me that it was absolutely dreadful?"
"I don't think it's that bad." Demyx shrugged.
"It's horrendous." Zexion muttered, tossing the now dried canvas on the couch. "I suppose this further proves that my mind is more of one comprised for facts and knowledge rather than art and abstract thinking."
With that said, the slate haired man bit his lip and turned into his bedroom, probably returning to the warm, comforting pages of the books that he loved so dearly.
The blond man frowned and walked to the couch, picking the canvas back up. He looked at it for a while, and then came to a consensus. While, yes, it was pretty bad (along the same lines of a kindergartener's finger painting), Demyx looked at it and smiled. It reminded him of vanilla and Zexion's determined face and rustling of leaves in the background and soft grass tickling against his neck as he laid down to watch Zexion paint. The picture was beautiful in its own right.
He hung it up in the living room behind the couch and smiled. The next morning, when both Demyx and Zexion were awake, the slate haired man stared in slight confusion at the painting hanging above the couch and then looked over at Demyx, opening his mouth to say something, but then closing it again without uttering a word.
Unspoken as it was, they both thought that the vanilla-y browns of the painting looked good with the not-so-vanilla-y whites of the walls.
~Fin~