Set in the "Den of the Snake" and "Bonds" timeline.
Papers and scrolls rustle as he fingers through them. Still, there is an empty space down there, right between the medium-sized inking brush and the scroll he uses to bring his imagination into reality. Empty.
Damn it.
A boy on the right—a mask tied to his wrist, inky tendrils that frame a blank face. He doesn't remember what he was going to put there.
He isn't quite sure how he is supposed to feel about that.
Like his brother… like his brother. What are the societal norms in a situation like that? What such emotions and facial expressions do they call for? He knows there is something down there; he can feel its nails twisting in his gut and its poisonous claws sinking deeply into his heart. He bares his throat and nearly chokes when he feels thick fangs grab him by the jugular.
How does one make a face to express that?
And on the left, an empty page. Paper-white fingers thrum idly against his knee. The candle burned out long ago, but suffocating darkness is nothing new to him—inside or out.
It is only in the morning when the shadows leave him alone.
A key clicks in the lock. The tumbler clanks.
"I assume you slept well?"
He tries to avoid eye contact for the most part. Idly, he wonders why. Surely it is just the light of the torches that casts those irises into that particular shade of thickened blackbluegreen. Surely it is just his imagination that he saw that particular shade many times before in the reflection of a faceless boy with black hair and white skin. A reflection he passes by numerous times a day.
Surely this isn't reality.
Years later, and he is proven wrong. It is, indeed, reality—the only space in which people can exist with any certainty.
And yet his delicate fingers shake as he hoists that heavyheavyheavy paintbrush and places it uncertainly on the paper before him. It sucks up the liquid with greed, and thickened tendrils of ink spread tiny capillaries throughout the fibres of the page. He pauses.
He wonders why he is doing this.
His hand sketches and draws of its own accord… the artist himself consents to nothing. He watches, half detached, half fascinated, as a form takes shape.
On the left—a boy-who-is-no-longer-a-boy with white hair and no definitive village allegiance. Rounded, bent-wire glasses perch on an elegant nose that seems uncomfortably familiar. Blackbluegreen eyes that analyze him shrewdly, and a smirking smile to match. Thin fingers outstretch, entangle at the apex of the page with (even more uncomfortably familiar) white ones.
He wonders for whom he is doing this.
On the right—a boy-who-was-alone-but-not-anymore stands with two small blackbluegreen ink blotches for eyes. A small nose. And…
He often wonders how he got this far.
…a smile.