Categories > Anime/Manga > Wild Adapter

canvas king

by Neo-rin 0 reviews

It's 4 AM and Tokitoh's an artist. [kubotatokitoh] [15hugs]

Category: Wild Adapter - Rating: PG - Genres: Romance - Characters: Kubota Makoto, Tokitoh Minoru - Published: 2005-07-10 - Updated: 2005-07-10 - 520 words - Complete

2Insightful
Author’s Notes: Theme #13, which is “masterpiece”. The hugging is more like spooning. But you love that. Otherwise, you wouldn’t be here.

“/Painting is silent poetry, and poetry is painting with the gift of speech.”/ -Simonides
canvas king
by Neo-rin

4 AM, the clock grins at him. 4 AM and the sky is stretched and fogged like navy wildflowers, sunless to his gaze. 4 AM and the bedsheets are twisted and the blankets are on the floor and there are no lights, except the moonlight that steals inside via the thin crevasses amidst the curtains, and the bedroom is darker than the night outside. 4 AM and the world sparkles, even when it does not.

Report cards yesterday. Tokitoh never quite fails but never quite excels; he just /is/, and Kubota more than likes the way that sounds. Tokitoh is. Tokitoh is. Tokitoh /is/. Tokitoh is—

—wrapped around him, ivy with a humming pulse and careful flesh and compacted muscle, hair sliding inklike through his long, curious fingers. Grumbling unconsciously about Gauss’s theorema egregium and serial homicide centered around mathematicians.

Beautiful.

There is a story that says there are too many people for there not to exist someone who is identical to you in mannerisms or appearances—that everyone happens and is/, but Kubota hates that story. No one /is like Tokitoh; no one else ever comes close enough to just touch him and unknowingly sink his or her fingers deep beneath Kubota’s skin and conduct the rate of his heartbeat, the spontaneity of his impulses, the existence of his impulses. Kubota is impossible and Tokitoh flies at night.

Sometimes, Kubota tutors Tokitoh—sometimes to truly tutor him, assist him in skirting around failure in certain classes (like the one that is currently being a combination of murmured and drooled into his collarbone) and sometimes to eventually metamorphose the manner of help proffered from educational to lewd. Tokitoh is not-quite-but-yes failing math. Tokitoh is not-quite-but-yes passing history.

Tokitoh is passing art.

Tokitoh specializes in drawing people—not necessarily possessing a knack for anatomy or the manner in which shirts crinkle and rumple atop flesh, but rather simply /people/, living people. The manifesting crinkles when they frown or grin, the lights undulating in open eyes—Vermeer’s fingers biting into the depths of his soul, accentuating even the curve of his elbow as he threw a punch—artistry beneath his wrists, like diamonds amidst the not-so-rough.

Kubota thinks, perhaps, he might have been another page in the coloring book of all the lives Tokitoh’s touched—and there are clusters of those, the stuck-together pages representative of Tokitoh’s fuzzy memory (Tokitoh never forgets faces, but rather names). He was black lines on dull paper, colorless and lifeless, but Tokitoh bundled colors in his fingertips and ran them atop Kubota’s pulse and bid it live. Bid him live.

So.

He does.

Lets Tokitoh’s hands drain the gray from his eyes, erode the image he /was/, and lead him away.
Sign up to rate and review this story