Haven't proof read this since I finished it at 1 a.m. Oh well.
Title: Watercolour Stain
Fandom: Heroes
Pairing: Peter/Isaac
Challenge/Prompt: 30randomkisses, 015. Myth and fanfic100, 077. What?
Rating: PG-13
Genre: Slash
Copyright: Tori Amos, “Father Lucifer”
Summary: Isaac can’t stop drawing one particular image. [Ends up with episode 1x05 “Hiros”]
Author’s Notes: I picked my slash OTP by looking at a cast photo and picking the prettiest guys. I’m sure in time I’ll get other ones, but I’ve only seen 5 episodes, so I’m going on the aesthetic qualities here. I’m sure everyone in fandom has written one of these, it’s not the most inspired bunny, but I haven’t read any fic yet, because of spoiler-phobia. I’m trying to get a feel for the characters single-handedly at the moment.
That’s enough notes. On with my first attempt. Feedback, as always with brand spanking new fandoms, is greatly appreciated.
He says he reckons I’m a watercolour stain; he says I run and then I run from him and then I run.
Tori Amos
The first time he draws it, it’s a 4B pencil sketch on his telephone message pad. The “sorry you were out, but this person called and insists that you care about what they have to say” block of paper Simone stuck beside his phone forever ago, back when she still thought she could make him give a damn; and a blunted pencil left lying around. Not exactly the most artistic of mediums, but they’re enough.
Isaac is coming down off a high, everything’s still got this lovely buzzy edge to it, and Simone is on the other end of the line talking about something Isaac is sure ought to be important, but mostly he’s just concentrating on trying to sound as though he’s completely and utterly fine, and hasn’t spent most of the afternoon on the studio floor laughing at nothing. As a result, he’s barely listening to Simone, doodling on his unused message pad with the first thing to come to hand - a paint-spattered pencil, so worn down the lead is flat, not pointed, and it’s making a scratchy mess of the paper. His hands are trembling.
“You’re not listening to me,” Simone accuses, sounding wounded, and Isaac knows. She says injured words, and slams the phone down, adding another hairline crack to a relationship already coming apart at the seams. Isaac does care. Just… less than he should.
When he’s sighed, and rubbed a hand across his face, he looks down at his doodling. Normally, when he’s on the phone, he draws abstract shapes; spiderwebs and blocks and shaky swirls. But today, there’s definitely a picture there. More cross-hatching than actual design, but Isaac can still make out two people. They appear to be kissing, but he’s not sure. They’re barely more than stick figures anyway, and what the hell does it really matter.
He tears the paper off the pad, screws it up, and dumps it into a wastepaper basket already overflowing.
[]
The second time he draws it, Isaac is messing around with charcoal. He shouldn’t mess around with charcoal, because he hates the way it smudges everything around, crumbles at unexpected moments. It’s unreliable and makes pictures that smear themselves just as he’s got them to a point he’s happy with.
Still, it’s a Thursday afternoon, and he’s got nothing better to do. His comic book is finished for the month, Simone is busy visiting her father. He’s got nothing to do, there’s rain screaming against the windowpanes, and so Isaac winds up scrawling on a clean sheet of off-white paper with disintegrating sticks of charcoal. He sketches the city, skyscrapers and taxicabs; draws shapes that mean nothing, losing himself in the lines and the shadows. Black dust settles across his clothing, smears on his face as he pushes his hair out of his eyes. There’s one light on, his feet are bare on the cold floor. A charcoal stick snaps in his hand.
The sound jerks him out of the trance he always goes into when he’s drawing, a space that doesn’t seem to exist at any other time. He’s never peaceful, except when he’s working. Now, charcoal smashed in his palm, other things slide back into his head. He’s hungry, and stiff from sitting in one position for too long, and it’s dark in here.
By the single lamp he’s got lit, Isaac looks at his pictures. The final one is the clearest. People kissing again. The page is mostly shaded in black; the lines of the people are blurred with their background and with each other. It’s still not clear who they are, if they’re anyone at all; maybe they’re just people, pressed so close together that they’re almost one, need and want and desperation making all other things superfluous.
Isaac sighs, crumpling the images up and chucking them at the wall. He’s got other things he ought to be getting on with, he shouldn’t have been wasting the afternoon on this.
[]
The third time he draws it, it’s three days after the Red Umbrella Picture. Isaac has come to think of it as the Red Umbrella Picture, anyway, because it’s there in his sketchpad and it’s haunting him. The woman is Simone, it’s got to be, and he doesn’t recognise the man hiding the umbrella with her, kissing her, but Isaac knows that it isn’t him. Under other circumstances, he’d assume that it’s him letting out the fact that the relationship is destroying them both. Except that he drew a train crashing last week, and then, the next day… there was that news report. And the woman, who got run over outside his studio, he drew that too, the day before.
Isaac has no idea what the fuck is going on with him, but the Red Umbrella Picture is a warning, or an omen, or a plain statement of fact. Simone is going to kiss someone in the rain, someone who isn’t him, and it’s going to make her happy. Isaac knows that he makes Simone all kinds of things, but happy isn’t one of them.
He wanted to tear the image out of the sketchbook, but in the end, left it there. Instead, he scribbled the date in the corner, and left it be.
Now, three days later, he is sketching again, trying to work out a new painting to get on with. He’s too busy dwelling on other things, like his dwindling supply of heroin, like the images that show events that then happen, like the way Simone is falling through his fingers. He isn’t concentrating, and when he looks down, he feels like he already knows what he’ll see. Except that suddenly, he’s drawn it far more accurately.
The lines are strong, certain, like he knows what he’s doing now. Isaac supposes that on some level, he does. For the first time, he can see what the picture really is.
He recognises himself, now, curly dark hair, recognises the torn jeans clinging to the figure’s legs because he’s wearing them now. He can see himself with his hands fisted in a long-sleeved t-shirt, pushing what appears to be - no, what definitely is - another man up against a wall. Isaac has no problem with that, it wouldn’t be the first time, anyway, but there’s something strangely familiar about the guy. He can’t see too well, the angle of the kiss makes it hard to pick out features, but there’s still something about the man pressed compliantly against Isaac’s image.
Flicking back through the book, Isaac finds the Red Umbrella Picture again. It takes a second for it all to click, and then he realises that the dark-haired man with his mouth against Simone’s is exactly the same one kissing Isaac five pages later.
“This is fucking sick, man,” he murmurs, but he doesn’t tear the picture out either.
[]
The fourth time, he paints it.
Simone has given up on Isaac, walked out in a cloud of wet tears. He presumes that she’s gone to kiss other men under red umbrellas. He has a name now. Peter Petrelli. The man stealing Simone (though technically Isaac had let her go months ago, he can’t blame that useless prettyboy nurse for picking up the slack). Now, he’s a wreck, running low on drugs and surrounded by paintings of disasters and people overpowered by shadows. He’s going mad, piece by piece, with every press of brush to canvas. He doesn’t even remember painting them. Just shoots up, and comes down to the paint drying on yet another image that makes no sense.
This time, Isaac blinks, getting his eyes focused again. He’s splashed with congealing paint, and breathing ridiculously heavily, every breath catching hard in his chest. It’s cold in the studio, his bare feet are half-frozen on the floor, but his skin is burning. It takes another moment or five for Isaac to come back into himself, and when he’s got self- awareness again, when he’s something more than fire and paintbrushes, he can feel that he’s so aroused that it hurts.
When he focuses on the painting, this seems to make some kind of sense. There’s no room for misinterpretation here. It’s bizarre; he’s never drawn himself before, never felt the need for a self-portrait; it seemed arrogant and selfish.
This probably doesn’t count as a self-portrait though. Isaac has Peter Petrelli pushed against a wall, hands fisted determinedly in his long-sleeved t-shirt. The t-shirt is pushed up slightly, a strip of pale skin revealed above the waistband of Peter’s jeans. Isaac’s jeans are torn and covered in paint, one leg pushed between Peter’s thighs. The want, the sheer, blinding need, burns straight from the painting. Peter’s head is tilted up, eyes closed, the lashes casting dark shadows over his pale cheekbones. Isaac himself is pressed tight against the thin line of Peter’s body, dark hair concealing most of his face, but his knuckles are white where they’re clenched in Peter’s t-shirt.
This is madness.
Isaac stumbles back, looking around for something he can destroy the picture with. Slash it into tiny pieces, burn it, it doesn’t matter how. He can’t keep this painting, himself and Peter Petrelli. It cannot be the future because Isaac won’t let it be. But even as he finds a Stanley knife, blade sharp and so very perfect for the job in mind, Isaac falters. Something in him is stopping himself from ripping the canvas into tiny pieces. He throws the knife away, where it clatters dejectedly on the floor.
Immortalised in drying paint, Peter leans back in willing submission under Isaac’s determination. Want and lust in every damn brushstroke on the canvas.
The real Isaac shoves the painting into a dark corner of the studio, drapes a sheet over it, and pretends that it doesn’t exist.
[]
The real Peter Petrelli sorted through the paintings, muttering about a cheerleader in a way that sounded faintly schizo to Isaac, but then Isaac himself is falling into an entertainingly dark pit of withdrawal, so he’s not in a position to judge.
He’s glad, now, that he hid that one particular painting. He can’t imagine what Peter would say when faced with the image (“Is that you? And me? What the fuck?”), and it’s not going to help Peter’s little God-complex quest anyway.
But Isaac is worried nonetheless, watching Peter paint frantically, finishing the image Isaac couldn’t, suddenly-pale eyes staring into nothingness, a strange little smirk on his face. He’s not confident with the brushes, it’s not as aesthetically pleasing as when Isaac does it, but it’s not half bad. And Peter claims that, sometimes, he can draw the future.
One image has been haunting Isaac for months, drawing itself out in as many mediums as it could manage, as though utterly determined to break through and imprint itself on the future.
Isaac can’t see Peter’s sudden ability escaping it.
This cannot end well.
Fandom: Heroes
Pairing: Peter/Isaac
Challenge/Prompt: 30randomkisses, 015. Myth and fanfic100, 077. What?
Rating: PG-13
Genre: Slash
Copyright: Tori Amos, “Father Lucifer”
Summary: Isaac can’t stop drawing one particular image. [Ends up with episode 1x05 “Hiros”]
Author’s Notes: I picked my slash OTP by looking at a cast photo and picking the prettiest guys. I’m sure in time I’ll get other ones, but I’ve only seen 5 episodes, so I’m going on the aesthetic qualities here. I’m sure everyone in fandom has written one of these, it’s not the most inspired bunny, but I haven’t read any fic yet, because of spoiler-phobia. I’m trying to get a feel for the characters single-handedly at the moment.
That’s enough notes. On with my first attempt. Feedback, as always with brand spanking new fandoms, is greatly appreciated.
He says he reckons I’m a watercolour stain; he says I run and then I run from him and then I run.
Tori Amos
The first time he draws it, it’s a 4B pencil sketch on his telephone message pad. The “sorry you were out, but this person called and insists that you care about what they have to say” block of paper Simone stuck beside his phone forever ago, back when she still thought she could make him give a damn; and a blunted pencil left lying around. Not exactly the most artistic of mediums, but they’re enough.
Isaac is coming down off a high, everything’s still got this lovely buzzy edge to it, and Simone is on the other end of the line talking about something Isaac is sure ought to be important, but mostly he’s just concentrating on trying to sound as though he’s completely and utterly fine, and hasn’t spent most of the afternoon on the studio floor laughing at nothing. As a result, he’s barely listening to Simone, doodling on his unused message pad with the first thing to come to hand - a paint-spattered pencil, so worn down the lead is flat, not pointed, and it’s making a scratchy mess of the paper. His hands are trembling.
“You’re not listening to me,” Simone accuses, sounding wounded, and Isaac knows. She says injured words, and slams the phone down, adding another hairline crack to a relationship already coming apart at the seams. Isaac does care. Just… less than he should.
When he’s sighed, and rubbed a hand across his face, he looks down at his doodling. Normally, when he’s on the phone, he draws abstract shapes; spiderwebs and blocks and shaky swirls. But today, there’s definitely a picture there. More cross-hatching than actual design, but Isaac can still make out two people. They appear to be kissing, but he’s not sure. They’re barely more than stick figures anyway, and what the hell does it really matter.
He tears the paper off the pad, screws it up, and dumps it into a wastepaper basket already overflowing.
[]
The second time he draws it, Isaac is messing around with charcoal. He shouldn’t mess around with charcoal, because he hates the way it smudges everything around, crumbles at unexpected moments. It’s unreliable and makes pictures that smear themselves just as he’s got them to a point he’s happy with.
Still, it’s a Thursday afternoon, and he’s got nothing better to do. His comic book is finished for the month, Simone is busy visiting her father. He’s got nothing to do, there’s rain screaming against the windowpanes, and so Isaac winds up scrawling on a clean sheet of off-white paper with disintegrating sticks of charcoal. He sketches the city, skyscrapers and taxicabs; draws shapes that mean nothing, losing himself in the lines and the shadows. Black dust settles across his clothing, smears on his face as he pushes his hair out of his eyes. There’s one light on, his feet are bare on the cold floor. A charcoal stick snaps in his hand.
The sound jerks him out of the trance he always goes into when he’s drawing, a space that doesn’t seem to exist at any other time. He’s never peaceful, except when he’s working. Now, charcoal smashed in his palm, other things slide back into his head. He’s hungry, and stiff from sitting in one position for too long, and it’s dark in here.
By the single lamp he’s got lit, Isaac looks at his pictures. The final one is the clearest. People kissing again. The page is mostly shaded in black; the lines of the people are blurred with their background and with each other. It’s still not clear who they are, if they’re anyone at all; maybe they’re just people, pressed so close together that they’re almost one, need and want and desperation making all other things superfluous.
Isaac sighs, crumpling the images up and chucking them at the wall. He’s got other things he ought to be getting on with, he shouldn’t have been wasting the afternoon on this.
[]
The third time he draws it, it’s three days after the Red Umbrella Picture. Isaac has come to think of it as the Red Umbrella Picture, anyway, because it’s there in his sketchpad and it’s haunting him. The woman is Simone, it’s got to be, and he doesn’t recognise the man hiding the umbrella with her, kissing her, but Isaac knows that it isn’t him. Under other circumstances, he’d assume that it’s him letting out the fact that the relationship is destroying them both. Except that he drew a train crashing last week, and then, the next day… there was that news report. And the woman, who got run over outside his studio, he drew that too, the day before.
Isaac has no idea what the fuck is going on with him, but the Red Umbrella Picture is a warning, or an omen, or a plain statement of fact. Simone is going to kiss someone in the rain, someone who isn’t him, and it’s going to make her happy. Isaac knows that he makes Simone all kinds of things, but happy isn’t one of them.
He wanted to tear the image out of the sketchbook, but in the end, left it there. Instead, he scribbled the date in the corner, and left it be.
Now, three days later, he is sketching again, trying to work out a new painting to get on with. He’s too busy dwelling on other things, like his dwindling supply of heroin, like the images that show events that then happen, like the way Simone is falling through his fingers. He isn’t concentrating, and when he looks down, he feels like he already knows what he’ll see. Except that suddenly, he’s drawn it far more accurately.
The lines are strong, certain, like he knows what he’s doing now. Isaac supposes that on some level, he does. For the first time, he can see what the picture really is.
He recognises himself, now, curly dark hair, recognises the torn jeans clinging to the figure’s legs because he’s wearing them now. He can see himself with his hands fisted in a long-sleeved t-shirt, pushing what appears to be - no, what definitely is - another man up against a wall. Isaac has no problem with that, it wouldn’t be the first time, anyway, but there’s something strangely familiar about the guy. He can’t see too well, the angle of the kiss makes it hard to pick out features, but there’s still something about the man pressed compliantly against Isaac’s image.
Flicking back through the book, Isaac finds the Red Umbrella Picture again. It takes a second for it all to click, and then he realises that the dark-haired man with his mouth against Simone’s is exactly the same one kissing Isaac five pages later.
“This is fucking sick, man,” he murmurs, but he doesn’t tear the picture out either.
[]
The fourth time, he paints it.
Simone has given up on Isaac, walked out in a cloud of wet tears. He presumes that she’s gone to kiss other men under red umbrellas. He has a name now. Peter Petrelli. The man stealing Simone (though technically Isaac had let her go months ago, he can’t blame that useless prettyboy nurse for picking up the slack). Now, he’s a wreck, running low on drugs and surrounded by paintings of disasters and people overpowered by shadows. He’s going mad, piece by piece, with every press of brush to canvas. He doesn’t even remember painting them. Just shoots up, and comes down to the paint drying on yet another image that makes no sense.
This time, Isaac blinks, getting his eyes focused again. He’s splashed with congealing paint, and breathing ridiculously heavily, every breath catching hard in his chest. It’s cold in the studio, his bare feet are half-frozen on the floor, but his skin is burning. It takes another moment or five for Isaac to come back into himself, and when he’s got self- awareness again, when he’s something more than fire and paintbrushes, he can feel that he’s so aroused that it hurts.
When he focuses on the painting, this seems to make some kind of sense. There’s no room for misinterpretation here. It’s bizarre; he’s never drawn himself before, never felt the need for a self-portrait; it seemed arrogant and selfish.
This probably doesn’t count as a self-portrait though. Isaac has Peter Petrelli pushed against a wall, hands fisted determinedly in his long-sleeved t-shirt. The t-shirt is pushed up slightly, a strip of pale skin revealed above the waistband of Peter’s jeans. Isaac’s jeans are torn and covered in paint, one leg pushed between Peter’s thighs. The want, the sheer, blinding need, burns straight from the painting. Peter’s head is tilted up, eyes closed, the lashes casting dark shadows over his pale cheekbones. Isaac himself is pressed tight against the thin line of Peter’s body, dark hair concealing most of his face, but his knuckles are white where they’re clenched in Peter’s t-shirt.
This is madness.
Isaac stumbles back, looking around for something he can destroy the picture with. Slash it into tiny pieces, burn it, it doesn’t matter how. He can’t keep this painting, himself and Peter Petrelli. It cannot be the future because Isaac won’t let it be. But even as he finds a Stanley knife, blade sharp and so very perfect for the job in mind, Isaac falters. Something in him is stopping himself from ripping the canvas into tiny pieces. He throws the knife away, where it clatters dejectedly on the floor.
Immortalised in drying paint, Peter leans back in willing submission under Isaac’s determination. Want and lust in every damn brushstroke on the canvas.
The real Isaac shoves the painting into a dark corner of the studio, drapes a sheet over it, and pretends that it doesn’t exist.
[]
The real Peter Petrelli sorted through the paintings, muttering about a cheerleader in a way that sounded faintly schizo to Isaac, but then Isaac himself is falling into an entertainingly dark pit of withdrawal, so he’s not in a position to judge.
He’s glad, now, that he hid that one particular painting. He can’t imagine what Peter would say when faced with the image (“Is that you? And me? What the fuck?”), and it’s not going to help Peter’s little God-complex quest anyway.
But Isaac is worried nonetheless, watching Peter paint frantically, finishing the image Isaac couldn’t, suddenly-pale eyes staring into nothingness, a strange little smirk on his face. He’s not confident with the brushes, it’s not as aesthetically pleasing as when Isaac does it, but it’s not half bad. And Peter claims that, sometimes, he can draw the future.
One image has been haunting Isaac for months, drawing itself out in as many mediums as it could manage, as though utterly determined to break through and imprint itself on the future.
Isaac can’t see Peter’s sudden ability escaping it.
This cannot end well.