For those who haven't noticed yet, I've usually chosen whatever pairing I'm writing next when I post the story previous. No matter how much you beg for a specific pairing next, I've probably already started drafting the next story and it's hard to just swap out characters in upcoming fics. If you've requested a pairing, it will definitely come up, but unless you're psychic, it most likely won't be the next story I'm working on.
Anyhow here's the story.
"your soulmate was an artist of centuries ago but you were there too, and you both were able to meet again in this lifetime. You don't remember anything but you'd be at the museum, looking at the picture that looks like you with curiosity until your soulmate (who remembers everything) comes by and asks you what you think of the painting." (silentpeaches on tumblr)
PAIRING: ALDINI TAKUMI x TADOKORO MEGUMI
One advantage to her post-graduate job at Shino's was that Paris was filled with a vibrant culture Megumi had never seen before, and whereas her fifteen-year-old self would have balked at throwing herself at the center of the city's life, she now wanted to experience everything to its fullest. Shinomiya seemed surprisingly okay with this, even going so far as to encourage her to go clubbing when she decided to stay at the restaurant late to prepare day pickles for use the following morning. While she didn't quite listen to his advice then (and she did know it wasn't really meant to be taken) she was much more willing to venture into the depths of the French cultural scene.
One of the other chefs at Shino's had taken a fatherly liking to Megumi despite their relatively small age gap (he was but twelve years her senior) and he had taken her to all of the tourist attractions in her first week in France through weak protests and halfhearted attempts to pull away. And yes, Megumi had loved the Louvre and the Tour Eiffel and all of the other wonderful things she got to see, but she was finding that what she loved to do more was roam the streets and wander into some of the strange pop-ups that occasionally emerged in empty lots and large festival halls.
It was a crisp autumn day, one of her first in Paris. Megumi had gotten herself a cup of tea and poured in a liberal amount of milk and sugar (she had only recently fallen in love with the silky concoction) and was sipping it as she walked down the sidewalk when out of the corner of her eye she spotted a handmade sign merely gesturing into an inviting doorway. She was curious enough to be intrigued and bored enough to decide to drop by on a whim. Shinomiya didn't need her in the restaurant until the dinner rush that day, and it was just cresting eleven in the morning.
Megumi began to climb the steep, narrow stairway awaiting her on the other side of the doorway, holding onto the railing to help balance so she didn't accidentally spill tea everywhere. Halfway up, she paused to take her scarf off and tuck it away in the handbag she happened to have today. By the time she made it to the top of the stairs, she wondered just how many floors she had gone up.
This pop-up was hosted in an apartment, which while not common wasn't exactly unusual. She must have been walking up the back stairway to the space because she walked directly into a large kitchen space, where she saw a couple plates of complimentary pastries, which in turn opened directly onto the main rooms of the apartment, which was barren but for the art pieces (sculptures and paintings and pencil sketches). The gallery space was somewhat full, which surprised Megumi a bit. A few couples were wandering around, and the occasional lonesome person strode through the space with some speed. There was a single mother holding a child, who was reaching a hand out towards one of the painted canvases and pouting when he was prevented from touching it. Megumi relaxed a bit and began to walk through the exhibit, gazing at the works she saw.
Most of the works seemed to be part of a collection; the styles differed too much to just be put down to one artist's experimentation, and so many of them seemed too old to be from this lifetime. After a cursory glance over the sculptures, Megumi turned her attention to the paintings specifically.
The collector of the works seemed very interested in a very specific motif: every painting was a sunset scene, portrait orientation, of a girl with braids standing on a grassy hill, wind whipping through her dark blue hair as she looked back at the artist.
It was a deceptively simple piece, one perhaps any artist could depict, but each of the portraits Megumi saw had a different energy. In one, an Impressionist work, the girl was reaching towards the artist, the implication of a smile on her face. The one right next to it, done in a much more Neoclassical style, showed the girl looking at something out of the left side of the frame, looking almost dazed as she stared unseeingly while loosely holding a bouquet of freshly picked daisies. Yet another on the same wall showed a much younger girl, perhaps one of seven or eight years of age, and this girl was dancing and laughing in the field, her eyes closed as she twirled in place. Some of the pieces felt much more alive than others, and Megumi found herself drawn to one in particular.
It was a collage-type work with painted details swirled on top—golden lines signified the wind blowing in the yellow grass, random strands of midnight blue paint interrupted the flush in the girl's cheeks. She was wearing a light-yellow dress with pink lines running across it that cut off just above her knees and she was looking back at the artist with a smile, half of a laugh still poised on her lips. She wasn't an effortless beauty; there was a weariness to the set of her eyes and the way her shoulders slumped a bit, and the smile on her face, while not forced, didn't feel altogether natural. Megumi wasn't sure exactly what it was about the painting that drew her in, but there was something about the way the girl's eyes stared at the viewer and in the way those carefully pigmented eyes seemed to dance with some emotion captured in the oils.
"I'm sorry, but could you please take one step back from the painting before you fall into it?"
Megumi jumped at the voice suddenly entering her thoughts, and she immediately realized all at once that she had walked so close to the painting that her nose was maybe a centimeter away from the surface. She began to mumble apologies as she quickly stepped backwards, turning towards the one who spoke to her.
The person in front of her had somewhat long straight hair the color of white gold. The hints of a sunburn touched his forehead and cheeks, but otherwise Megumi could see that his complexion was as pale as the pages of a book. He looked as though he just entered into adulthood or perhaps was just about to, and he stood with an uncertain grace Megumi recognized in herself. He didn't actually seem much older than her, which was a bit of a surprise, and she could recognize in the shape of his eyes some Japanese heritage. He was dressed rather plainly, with a short-sleeved button-up and a pair of dark-wash jeans speckled with colorful splatters. He held his hands behind his back as though concealing something from her.
"Sorry again," Megumi said, louder this time. The boy-almost-man's eyebrows raised in response to her accented French.
"Not to worry," he said, switching into Japanese that, while not perfect, was still better than Megumi's French. "It wasn't too big of a deal, and you didn't cause any lasting damage."
She assumed this was meant to be a joke. It still fell flat.
After a couple awkward seconds, the boy (for he was definitely more that than a man) flushed and immediately began to backtrack, stammering all the while. "I mean to say, no harm, no foul, as the Americans say, right?" he laughed a little bit too loudly, the nervous tremor in his voice audible. "A-anyhow. Can we try all of this again?"
Megumi held back an amused titter and merely nodded encouragingly. The boy's relief was practically palpable.
"Okay, so, uh. Aldini Takumi." He held his hand out to her. Megumi took a second to marvel at how similarly Takumi was acting to the best friend she had left in Japan. She then realized the additional second had just made everything awkwardly spaced out again.
"T-Tadokoro Megumi," she offered in response, quickly grabbing his hand and shaking it with some vigor. Takumi blinked back his relief and just nodded, eyeing the hand she was still holding onto in her anxiety. She paused before letting go of his hand and holding hers to her chest.
They stood in an awkward stalemate until Megumi clapped, simulating what Soma had done for her years before. Takumi jumped slightly and gave her a confused look. "It helps," she said halfheartedly.
"I see." Takumi thankfully didn't ask for more details. "You were looking at this painting?"
Megumi turned back to the painting she had nearly forgotten about. "Yeah. There's something about this one, though I'm not quite sure what."
Takumi looked at it carefully. "What is it about it?" he asked.
"Didn't I just say I'm not quite sure what?" After a pause, Megumi tried again. "Well, there's something about—about the way she's looking at me, at us, right? She seems so tired, but she's still making such an effort to look happy, or maybe someone did something that made her happy just for a split second, and that's the second we're experiencing in the moment."
Takumi nodded, still looking to the painting. "I've been doing some research into this. The entire collection being shown here is based on the description of a painting lost to time. All that really exists of this is a sketch and many written retellings of it. All of the paintings are other artists' interpretations of that sketch and those retellings. Though, I think this is the most accurate."
"What makes you think that?"
"It just looks the most genuine, I guess. Or feels the most genuine? It feels like it has the most attention to how the artist intended the original painting to look. Many of the other artists strove for some sort of perfection of form—of the innocence of a young woman, in happiness, in this blissful utopic countryside, but that wasn't it, right? This was meant to be a portrait of the artist's most precious person, and he didn't just think of her as a perfect, untouchable ideal, but as a human being with bad days and good days and emotions and flaws. And this shows all of those—because you're right in that she doesn't seem like she's having a great day here, but she's still trying for that person she loves. Maybe she was trying to sell something for her husband—a piece of pottery—and froze up when challenged by the buyer and is still working through that, and even still, he thought her beautiful."
Megumi blinked. "You seem to have done a lot of research on this.'
Takumi froze next to her, and his eyes darted left before he said, "I'm very interested in this work." Megumi just decided to let it slide.
"Do you know the significance of the grassy hill?"
Takumi perked up at the question. "From what I know—from my research—it was where he proposed to her. It had been spring, and you could see the ocean, and there were flowers all around the field, but here it's closer to late summer and the grass started to dry out. Compositionally, it brings her—her eyes further into the foreground. It makes them glow."
Megumi hummed as she noticed the details Takumi pointed out.
"W-well, I've been doing a lot of talking; how do you think of the work?" Takumi's question sounded nervous.
"Uh…" Megumi stilled, suddenly overwhelmed. She wasn't sure what she could contribute to this conversation—what could she say that hadn't already been said? But something about Takumi's eager gaze made her feel like nothing she could ever say would sound stupid or trite, and that gave her some confidence. "Well, I think she feels like the kind of person who would easily forgive. She doesn't seem the type to want to disappoint someone she loves, and I think she'd do whatever she could to make another person happy, even faking her own happiness in the moment. Maybe her—her loved one, her husband, her whichever—knows, and she knows they know, but she doesn't care because she still values their happiness over all else. She feels like the kind of person who would give and give and give and never ask for anything else in return but love."
Takumi was quiet for a few seconds, contemplating the piece in front of him. "What kind of person do you think she would love?" he asked finally.
Megumi looked at the painted girl's face again—at the wistfulness, at the exhaustion, at the simple happiness of the moment. "Someone who would hang the moon for her, but someone who would accept it when she took it down and gave it back," she said.
He gave a laugh—it was a startled sound, one that spoke to his surprise at her answer. "Perhaps," he said. "Or maybe he was a silly boy who knew nothing but that he loved her, and was uncertain about anything else."
"I don't think she needs anything else," Megumi responded. "She seems like the type who only wants to love and be loved. Maybe that sounds simple, but I think she'd be able to get through anything else if she knew those two things."
Takumi hummed. They gazed at the painting for a little while longer.
"I'd love to see how that field looks now," Megumi commented. "I'm sure there's been work done on it and that it's nothing as pristine as it looks now, but I'd still love to see."
"I think it's just outside of Nice," Takumi said. "I'd love to take you there. Only if you want to go with me though; if not, I can tell you where it is and you can bring someone else."
Megumi laughed a little at Takumi's sudden backtracking. "You're the expert," she said, "so it seems only fair to go with you." She quickly glanced at her watch and sighed. "It seems as though I have to go get ready for work now, though."
"May I walk you to where you have to go?" Takumi asked, already offering his arm to her. Megumi smiled and immediately walked over to him to put her hand in the crook of his arm, and they walked back out of the impromptu gallery and down the winding road to Shino's.
When he left, Takumi didn't give a good-bye but merely leaned down to kiss her cheek and promise to pick her up when her shift ended to walk her home as well, and when he continued down the road, Megumi just looked after him, her cheeks flushed and her heart fluttering like a butterfly. It was only when Shinomiya ran into her standing by the entrance, still dazed, and snapped her out of her trance that she could go into the restaurant and start working.
I should write for more established couples so I can actually, y'know, write romance and not just chemistry/tension pieces.
Hint for next time: Okay, time to go back to basics; it's always good to remember the classics. I haven't quite written for these two yet, though, which will probably make it very obvious who's up next.